Michael Mann assumes the failure of Hacker: "The script was not ready"

Released in 2015, this cyber-thriller starring Chris Hemsworth was a critical and commercial flop.

A few days before the world premiere of his new film, Ferrariat the Venice Film Festival, Michael Mann kicked off his promotional tour by making the cover of the professional weekly variety. Between two infos on the genesis of his twelfth feature film, dedicated to Enzo Ferrari and interpreted by Adam Driverthe director returns to the failure of his latest film, hacker (black hat in VO), painful critical and commercial flop of 2015, which had grossed 19.7 million dollars worldwide for a budget of 70 million. A failure which contributed to the exile of the filmmaker far from the film sets – Mann had since been content to sign the direction of the pilot of the series tokyo viceand the fan club was chomping at the bit.

The director of Heat does not procrastinate and today assumes the failure of hacker : “It is my responsibility. The script was not ready to be shot.” But he suggests in passing that the film may have initially suffered from its visionary dimension: “Maybe the topic was too early, because a lot of people thought it was pure fiction. Fake. Everything was based on facts.”

Michael Mann looks back on 30 years of making Ferrari

hacker tells the fight of a computer virtuoso (Chris Hemsworth) against a cybercriminal who sabotaged a nuclear power plant via a computer virus. An attempt, for the author of the Lonely and of Public Enemies, to take his traditional portraits of outlaws to a more virtual, more abstract world. The film has since been re-edited by Mann, in a “revised cut” shown for the first time in 2016 during an event screening in New York, then broadcast on American TV. If there are certain movies that he says he doesn’t want to change any plans (Heat, Revelations, Collateral), the filmmaker is sometimes a fan of these retrospective tweaks, as was the case for the video editing of miami vice. “I also modified The Last of the Mohicans thricehe says in the article by variety, and now it’s shorter than the original !”