Calling all mojito fiends: Michael Mann has officially ed Letterboxd. Not only that, he’s launched Michael Mann Archives — Directing Ferrari, a monumental resource offering insight into his pinpoint-precise creative process. Access includes his annotated script of Ferrari, topsheets of intricate character backstories, twenty mini-documentaries about the biopic’s production (including one about that horrific Mille Miglia crash), storyboards and more invaluable nuggets of knowledge for aspiring filmmakers and/or Mann stans (Michael Mann Facts, this one’s for you).

“I wanted to tell the story of everything that goes into the making of the film,” the director tells me during our conversation at the American Cinematheque’s historic Aero Theatre. “Mistakes I’ve made or problems or issues that I’ve had, that I’ve solved—how I go about doing what I do. I think there’s kind of an obligation to that on. I know I’m the beneficiary of exactly that—I witnessed other people directing very infrequently and picked things up.”

In addition to the Archives, Mann has gifted us a list of his favorite films, including some classics that have informed his own work, some contemporaries that impressed his high standards and one snail-centric story that he enjoyed with his eight-year-old granddaughter. After chatting with him about his selections—as well as his own filmography—I gleaned the following eight life lessons.

1. Don’t judge a snail by its shell

In a lengthy list full of classic heavy hitters, there’s one in particular that immediately stands out: Turbo. Yes, the 2013 animated racing snail movie. Higher in quality than its 2.5-star Letterboxd rating suggests, Turbo shares several parallels with Mann’s own Ferrari: immersive and high-octane racing sequences, a climactic crash and dynamic characters (Paul Giamatti’s voice performance as Turbo’s neurotic brother Chet is a major highlight).

“I’ve got a precocious eight-year-old granddaughter, that’s why Turbo,” Mann says with a laugh. “We were having pizza and she got to pick whatever she wanted to watch, and she picked Turbo, so we saw this. I was blown away by the animation. It’s got Ryan Reynolds in the voice of the snail. The writing is fantastic… It’s not because I’m a fiend about racing, but I know a lot about it, and they happen to get all the racing really right. But putting aside the racing, I thought it was hilarious and just really, really good quality animation.”

In regards to Dr. Strangelove, Mann comments, “They must’ve had a ball making that movie,” and he wonders aloud “how Kubrick could have made it without people just breaking down and cracking up,” before itting that, while making Heat, this “happened to me a couple of times, working with Al Pacino particularly. In one particular scene I was operating, I had to walk away from the camera.” (Sorry, De Niro—looks like Pacino is the true king of comedy).

The moment in question is when Pacino’s character, Detective Vincent Hanna, goes into the chop shop and talks with Ricky Harris’s character Albert, who says his brother will meet him. Mann recalls, “And he looks under the table to see if [he’s there]: ‘He’s not here right now, is he?’ ‘No, he is in Philadelphia.’ Then [Pacino] started breaking into a song. Some of which was improvised.”

This made me want to know: aside from Pacino’s improvisation, what other films or performances make Michael Mann laugh? “Listen, there are a couple of lines in Sweet Smell of Success which are devastatingly funny,” he answers. “Jonathan Winters kills me all the time. Another example of that is Robin Williams. When Robin Williams gets into one of these stream-of-consciousness things. He was friendly with Jonathan Winters—on YouTube, there are some sessions between the two of them together that are just wild, too.”

3. Dialectics: the key to directing

In an Billy Friedkin or myself, we do not make comedies.” This explains his propensity for serious-minded opuses, such as the first film on his list: Battleship Potemkin.

“It’s probably informed what I do in a lot of different ways,” he explains of Sergei Eisenstein’s seminal 1925 Russian war drama. “One of the things that Eisenstein talked about was dialectical montage. They started building the dialectics that also show up in baroque music, whether you’re talking about Bach or, maybe even earlier, Thomas Tallis.”

Heat heads, listen up: “If you think about the relationship of the dynamic forces that are in Heat, it’s a very good example,” Mann continues. “Because you are emotionally invested in Neil McCauley, Robert De Niro’s character. You are equally a hundred percent invested in Vincent Hanna, Al Pacino’s character. And when you’re with Neil McCauley, you want him to break free, to escape, to have a life with Amy Brenneman. And when you’re with Al, you want him to get Neil McCauley and to succeed. There’s an inevitable vectoring into a conclusion which is exactly a Hegelian kind of dialectic.”

4. Look to classic cinema for inspiration

In addition to Battleship Potemkin, Mann includes another silent picture on his list: 1928’s The ion of Joan of Arc, following the canonized religious figure’s brutal martyrdom. Both Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film and Mann’s work are recognizable by their trademark facial close-ups, and I wondered if he looked to the French patron saint as a source of inspiration. The answer was yes, but not in the way I expected.

Mann goes on to say that the dramatic stakes of the film’s events—which cover a news producer’s efforts to expose the deadly secrets of Big Tobacco—were high, so he asked himself questions like, “How do I create that connection to the circumstances and conditions for Lowell Bergman, whose career never recovered, by the way, and for Jeffrey Wigand, putting so much on the line?”

5. Trust your killer instincts

From The Insider to Thief to Ferrari, Mann’s movies often center around highly intelligent men unable to untangle the intense demands of their work from their personal lives. This motif is also exhibited in Manhunter, his adaptation of the novel Red Dragon, starring William Peterson as FBI agent Will Graham and Brian Cox as the infamous Hannibal Lecter (spelled “Lecktor” in this film).

In addition to the change of Hannibal’s surname, Mann took other creative liberties: “The serial killer, Dollarhyde, in Manhunter is not based on Dollarhyde,” he reveals. “It’s instead based on somebody I met named Dennis Wayne Wallace, who, when I met him, was a serial killer in Vacaville, who killed about three or four people. There’s a whole long story about how I wound up crossing paths with this guy, but we struck up a relationship. This man was exactly where he belonged, which was in prison for the rest of his life. There’s no doubt about any of this.”

He continues, “But there’s a theme in Manhunter. It’s that duality that is not a contradiction. It’s there when Billy Peterson as Graham says to Dennis Farina as Jack Crawford, ‘As a child, my heart goes out to the killer,’ because he knows that someone like Dollarhyde, and in the case of Dennis Wayne Wallace, had been a battered infant, not just a battered child. Horrendous things had been done to him as an infant and as a child, and that produced this killer. So, ‘My heart goes out to him as a child. As an adult, I’d blow the sick fuck out of his socks without thinking twice about it.’ And then he turns to Farina, almost as if he’s channeling Hannibal Lecktor, and says, ‘Does that upset you, Jack?’ with this kind of flattened, affected tone to his voice, which is very threatening. So, that contradiction… that is the true complex nature of the reality.”

6. your contemporaries

While Memories of Murder and I Saw the Devil—two Korean films about serial killers—both came out years after Manhunter, they made enough of an indelible impression on Mann that they notched spots on his list. The director says he makes it a habit to reach out to his contemporaries when their work impresses him: “I seeing Incendies by Denis Villeneuve, and I thought I could, at that point, write exactly where his career was going to go,” he re. “I thought it was a brilliant, brilliant piece of work, and I made an effort to him.”

He continues, “Then he’s back in civilian life, can’t tolerate it, and then he signs up for another tour. That addiction to the adrenaline, almost to the pathology of a cyclic event is something I’ve observed. It’s common. You find it among war photographers, too, where there’s an addiction to the adrenaline of it and the escape of it, even though you’re putting yourself in harm’s way. I thought her work was so incisive and quite brilliant. She’s really a formidable director.”

7. Don’t be ashamed of your blindspots

At this point in the conversation, it’s starting to seem like Mann has maybe seen every war film ever made. But even the greats have their blindspots, and he reveals that he’d only recently gotten around to watching 1953 Best Picture winner From Here to Eternity. It instantly became a new (old) favorite. “I had never seen the film until about four or five weeks ago,” he tells me. “It’s special. I was born in 1943. My father was a combat veteran in the Second World War in Europe with the Battle of the Bulge. I have memories of being ten-years-old in the ’50s, and [everyone] started looking at these films, From Here to Eternity, or, I don’t know, reading John O’Hara or The Asphalt Jungle.” [Of note, the film adaptation of The Asphalt Jungle (featuring a first-time Marilyn Monroe) also made Mann’s list.]

The ’50s were a formative time for mini Mann, and he recalls how the era harbored “an unsentimental, dark understanding of human nature and relationships,” which was laid bare in Burt Lancaster’s army sergeant character. “He’s complex,” Mann says. “He has major deficits in his understanding of the relationship between Deborah Kerr and her husband. Those are very interesting, complex relationships that you wouldn’t expect in American Hollywood cinema in the 1950s if you were looking at American Hollywood cinema from the point of view of the 1930s. That’s what was stunning to me.”

“What I loved about From Here to Eternity,” he explains, “is there’s a subconscious awareness of everybody making these films that we’ve just come from this horrendous world-shattering event. It’s affected everybody’s lives. Whether it’s a war film or not a war film, it means a couple of things: one is that there’s usually a drive into tough political questions, hence neorealism in Italian cinema and neorealism in American cinema. In , it became the hopelessness after the revelation of the Holocaust, particularly the caving of the French armies… It was the origin of existentialism, which influenced cinema.”

He goes on to say that “the whole point is that all those calibrations, everything that’s going on behind the curtain, that’s what the Archive is designed to deliver. All of it is for that massive impact.” Mann concludes on a ionate note: “It’s not that I want audiences to be there and ively hear this story that’s being told; it’s that I want them projected in the film… That’s the ambition.”