A new season of “The Director’s Chair” (El Rey, 9 p.m.) begins, with the director and network chief Robert Rodriguez in conversation with his favorite directors, starting with Michael Mann tonight
“Michael is truly an iconic filmmaker whose distinctive style has been a favorite of mine for decades,” Rodriguez told reporters recently at the TV Critics Association summer press tour. “He’s very popular on our network.”
As such the episode will run alongside his 1986 classic “Manhunter” (El Rey, 10 p.m.), which Rodriquez calls “one of my favorite films.
“‘Manhunter,’ as I told him in the interview, I saw multiple, multiple times in the theater on the big screen when I was in college,” Rodriquez says. “His series, ‘Miami Vice,’[El Rey, 5, 6, 7, 8 p.m.) is a show that broke new ground in television, is very cinematic television and is already airing on our network. It’s doing really well.”
Yet, as Mann also says in the session, he was spooked by a real life attack that was an obvious copycat to the one in “Manhunter.”
Rodriquez says Mann pointed out that a crime “will always find its source of inspiration no matter what, whatever it is.”
Sometimes people create things that have unintended consequences, Rodriguez says. “Like, I remember there was a time where somebody was pulled over, and he had a guitar case, and it had a gun in it, and I thought, well, he could have only gotten that from my movie.
“But that had been around in old gangster films. They would have Tommy guns in violin cases. But, you know, I try to make my movies as fantastical as possible. They’re always really over the top, so they can’t really be imitated.”
“If you really did try to carry a guitar case full of guns down the street,” he says, “it would be too heavy to carry. It really would be.
“I kind of made my things as over the top and as cartoonlike; as Bugs Bunny-like as possible.
“I always kind of shied away from very realism, but if you wanted to do realism,” he adds, “some people, they would find their source. I thought the way he answered that was so excellent, that I wanted to put that in the episode, because you do get that question sometimes.”