Michael Mann and Eric Roth Love the “Adventure” of Research

In Reunited, Awards Insider hosts a conversation between two Oscar contenders who have collaborated on a previous project. Today, we speak with Michael Mann, who directed Ferrari, and Eric Roth, who cowrote Killers of the Flower Moon. The longtime collaborators previously worked together on The Insider, Ali, and the TV series Luck.

Eric Roth wasn’t sure he was the right guy to write The Insider; Michael Mann, the director, was confident he was. It was the first time the writer of Forrest Gump and the director of Heat had met each other, but as Roth remembers that meeting, “some kind of kinship” was born. “We both come from tough backgrounds, and we just figured we could battle this out together.”

1999’s The Insider, the compelling thriller about a whistleblower in the tobacco industry starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe, would go on to be nominated for seven Oscars. For Mann and Roth, it was the foundation of their creative friendship that would continue on with 2001’s Ali, starring Will Smith, and the HBO series Luck. They would both go on to do plenty of projects without the other—Roth’s many credits include Munich, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, A Star Is Born, and Dune, while Mann helmed Collateral and Public Enemies. But they remain friends, and their desire to collaborate together again has never waned. “We both have the same sense of humor, I think, a skepticism and cynical humor,” says Mann.

With their current projects—Roth cowrote with Martin Scorsese the epic Killers of the Flower Moon, and Roth directed Ferrari, starring Adam Driver—they both use their passion for delving into true stories to bring to life captivating films about unique characters in history. In this wide-ranging conversation, the pair reminisce about being heavy smokers while making The Insider, reveal why they love the research part of their job, and the reason their artistic partnership is so unique. “Look, it’s a collaborative medium, but the truth is, at the end of the day, the director’s boss, and so you need to find some common ground,” says Roth. “And Michael’s just a unique bird. He’s annoying, but he’s unique.”

Vanity Fair: What is your strongest memory of working on The Insider together?

Michael Mann: When we were doing Insider, we would write every morning at the Broadway Deli. And the reason was that we’re both heavy smokers and they had just started anti-smoking legislation in restaurants, but you could still smoke in bars. So the Broadway Deli happened to have a bar in the morning, so we’d be sitting there in the morning for three hours smoking and all this stuff. And then about three or four weeks before we started shooting, I said, ‘I’ve really got to stop, because what I’ll do is, once I start shooting I’ll get up to three packs a day.” So we both decided that we would stop.

Eric Roth: Well, the only thing I disagree with is, this is kind of after the movie, because we were during the movie smoking in the biggest anti-tobacco lawyers’ offices in America.