Michael Mann’s Thief received mixed reviews and only modest box-office success when it opened in 1981, but it has since become acknowledged as a classic. This is nothing new for Mann, some of whose films have taken years, even decades, to find their audience. But the cosmic influence of Thief — which came out on 4K from the Criterion Collection earlier this month, and is among a collection of Mann films streaming on the Criterion Channel right now — was felt not long after its release. With its waves of electronica, its foregrounding of style, its pendulum swings between romanticism and alienation, the movie turned out to be one of the harbingers of what many deemed the MTV aesthetic.

But there is more to Thief’s achievement. Mann saw the film as a decidedly political work, showing how an independent, high-end thief, Frank (James Caan), was co-opted and exploited by the notorious Chicago Outfit. Frank, who has spent much of his life in prison, initially resists these mob bosses’ overtures. But he’s got a plan for his life, and it involves marrying Jessie (Tuesday Weld), a woman he’s just started dating and who agrees to start a family after an unforgettable late-night coffee-shop conversation (one of several long, iconic coffee-shop scenes that dot Mann’s oeuvre). Which means that now, all of a sudden, Frank needs more money. So, he agrees to work with the Outfit in order to get bigger scores. These men in turn try to run his life and keep most of his share, so they can invest it in new shopping mall developments. Mann has always said that Thief’s central dynamic of labor and exploitation could easily be transposed to other workplaces. Frank effectively quotes Karl Marx’s labor theory of value when he tells Leo (Robert Prosky), the alternately avuncular and demonic Outfit boss who seeks to control him, “I can see my money is still in your pocket, which is from the yield of my labor.” When I interviewed him in 2023, Mann noted that he saw that line pop up on pickets during that year’s WGA-SAG strike.

This is also why the contemporaneous criticisms of the picture as style over substance ring so hollow today. Watching Thief, yes, we’re naturally mesmerized by its nocturnal compositions, its lovely sense of melancholy, its almost abstract robbery sequences filled with sparks and flames bursting off steel vaults. But there are emotional, political, and narrative undercurrents at work here. “You’re making big profits from my work, my risk, my sweat,” Frank tells Leo. And we see Frank’s work, his risk, his sweat: The film spends an unusual amount of screen time portraying how he and his partners prepare for their scores, gathering and building the right equipment, evading alarm systems and police; then it spends even more time showing the jobs themselves, as these men lug giant pieces of equipment (all real tools used by the professional thieves Mann hired as consultants on the film) into bank vaults and exhaust themselves drilling holes in safes. Mann dwells on these scenes not just because they’re spectacular and hypnotic to watch — they are — but because he wants to convey the fact that this is all, in fact, labor. By the time Frank sits down in front of his handiwork to take a deep breath and light a cigarette, we feel his exhaustion, his relief, his sense of a hard job well done. And, of course, we feel his frustration when the yield of that labor is taken from him.

I’ve spoken to Mann a few times over the years about his work. But we’d never really gone deep on Thief specifically. The occasion of this 4K release seemed like the right time to do so. (And yes, I did ask him about Heat 2.)

Thief was such a visually arresting film for its era. Was there a lot of visual research you did for it — films, photographs, things like that?
Not affecting the visualization. The visualization of it was: How do I want you to feel about Frank relative to the city he’s operating within, the circumstances of his life? I wanted you to see and feel that city from within his perspective. For Frank, Chicago is not this flat city built on the Great Plains. It’s a three-dimensional matrix. It’s a maze that he has to operate in and also decode and pursue. So, I took advantage of what Chicago looks like when it rains. Because as the black streets get reflective and the lights reflect off them, you feel like you’re driving through a tunnel, not like you’re driving on top of a surface. We wet down the streets at night so they would be reflective, and that became the camera perspective, as well as him having that black ’71 Eldorado and seeing the lights reflected all over the car as he moved through it.

This sense of him moving through a tunnel also highlights his loneliness, which feels crucial to the fact that he then falls in love. 
I don’t know that he’s lonely as much as alone. He views life very much as an outsider, and he’s aware of it. I thought of him as a certain kind of conventional character in literature, which is the wild child. Somebody who, because of his circumstances, has grown up outside of society. In Frank’s case, he has been in prison from when he was 18 to sometime in his late 30s. He didn’t have TV. Then he’s suddenly dropped into this society and its mores, the values, the culture — this matrix of life as it is in 1980. How does he prepare himself? Who will I be? How should I conduct myself? What should my life be? So, he’s using sources like magazines and newspapers to put together that collage. Okay, I’m going to have a car. What kind of car should I have? I’m going to have a house. What kind of house should I have? Should I have a wife? Should I not have a wife?

He also, like a lot of convicts that I met, used the time in prison to read. It was reading and researching how life is for an extremely pragmatic purpose: “Why should I not commit suicide and just end this?” That goes back to experiences I had with some convicts in Folsom when I was casting The Jericho Mile. I had guys quoting Immanuel Kant to me. One guy was quoting the labor theory of value. He had become a Marxist and a Buddhist at the same time, because he needed to get an answer to the question: “What is my life to myself?” This was a guy with a sixth-grade education. They’d go into libraries and say, “I’m doing time. Give me a book on time.” I cast 28 convicts in roles in The Jericho Mile. There’s a guy I tried to cast who said, “No, man, I like what you said you’re doing here and everything, but I can’t be in your movie.” I asked him why. And he said, “Because if I allowed myself to be in your movie, I would allow you to appropriate the surplus capital of my bad karma.” And he wasn’t being cute. Inherent in that answer was the fact that he saw the time he was doing as his labor, and that the reason he was doing time was because he had bad karma in the first place, i.e., he got caught.

This idea of labor runs throughout Thief. It’s there in the opening scene: You show that the work Frank does really is work. The heavy equipment, the long hours, the patience required to stand there and drill a hole forever. I’ve seen a million heist movies, but I’ve never seen one that actually says: This is someone’s labor. 
By the way, the prep they do is kind of like how you make a movie, in a funny way. How efficiently you prepare, research, plan what you’re going to do. How are you going to bypass the alarm systems, how are you going to go in, how are you going to monitor the date, the time. If it’s something in the northwest side of Chicago, it would be great to do it during the daytime, during a Cubs game because all the cops are at Wrigley Field. What’s the composition of the safe? Because safe manufacturers are very clever in what they do. You can’t just drill a hole through a piece of metal. You have to know where the lockbox is. You have to know how this particular safe manufacturer put different layers of metals within what you want to drill through, because there’ll be some that are designed to bind the drill. There’ll be others that are very hard. There may be a glass wall on the inside that if you shatter it, it sets off a secondary alarm that you didn’t know about.

And among guys who are proficient like that, it is labor. It is work. The detectives who go after them, who are really good, are respectful of those thieves who are good. It doesn’t affect their drive and their motivation to intercept them one iota. Charlie Adamson is in the movie as a detective. He’s the guy who says to Frank, “Why you got to come on like such a stiff prick? We got ways here to round off the corners.” Charlie in real life is the guy who killed Neil McCauley in 1963, and who told me the story of his meeting with McCauley, which I used as the basis of the relationship in Heat.

John Santucci, who was a professional thief, was a source for me in Thief. All the burglary tools that we had weren’t props. They were John’s burglary tools. Later, he became a continuing character on Crime Story. But the most fundamental realization I had from my contact with Santucci was a very profound understanding that his life is just like yours and mine. He’s got domestic concerns. He’s got two kids, he’s got some marital issues with his wife. I had to liberate myself from the inherited stereotype and archetype of who thieves are. Who is he as a person? What’s he thinking? What’s he feeling? What’s his outlook on the world? All of that led to the construction of the screenplay.

Santucci and Chuck Adamson were both advisers on the film, along with other people who had been thieves and some who had been cops. What was that like, having all those people on a film set together?
It was hilarious! First of all, they all knew each other, even though they were on opposite sides of the fence. So, you know, “You pain in the ass, we were there when you were taking down the Wieboldt’s store,” and “We’ve been trying to get you for …” This is some of the dialogue that was happening in bars over drinks. It was very Chicago, if you like. It was very Brechtian in a way, because Chicago is a very Brechtian city, at least it was then.

Some of them, like the guy who played Leo’s number two, Bob Prosky’s number two, the one with red hair, Bill Brown, he was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, I don’t know, 20, 30 years after the movie. I don’t think they ever got him. And then Dennis Farina and I connected on the work in Thief, and we became very close friends the rest of our lives until he died tragically a number of years ago. He worked with Santucci when we were doing the pilot and then the Crime Story series.

What do you mean when you say Chicago was a Brechtian city?
Chicago had a kind of democratic corruption when I was growing up in the 1950s. Everybody had the inalienable right to have a $20 bill parked behind their driver’s license when they got stopped running a red light. You didn’t have to be Standard Oil of New Jersey to round off the corners, in other words. In the same way that every alderman had X number of jobs they could hand out, kind of no-show jobs — you work two days, you get paid for five. If there was a blizzard Wednesday night and your street wasn’t plowed by nine o’clock in the morning on Thursday, you called your alderman and a plow was out there in 30 minutes. There was a certain healthy, I think, urban cynicism about the systems, and yet the systems worked, in a funny way. Well, some of the systems worked. There was institutionalized racism. And Chicago was also extremely Balkanized. The only city with more Poles in it than Chicago was Warsaw. So, you had Polish bakeries and everything else. Same thing with the Ukrainians, the Irish, the southwest side and everything.

The coffee-shop conversation with Tuesday Weld is one of the greatest dialogue scenes ever. Obviously, these kinds of conversations show up in other films of yours. What’s the secret to creating a long dialogue scene like that?
I asked myself the question, Can I really tell an entire story within this scene? It’s one reel, back when filming movies used to be on reels — a ten-minute-long scene. And so right in the middle of this feature film, I stop and tell this entire origin story. There was some risk inherent in it to me. I was concerned about whether it would work. It was key to understanding who Frank is, his desperation, and these two untethered lives coming together.

That particular booth is a booth I sat in with the woman who became my wife. One time when I was driving her home, we stopped for a cup of coffee and sat there and talked for, I don’t know, probably six hours. This coffee shop on a span over the Tri-State Tollway, I don’t even know if it was a Fred Harvey’s at the time. And something about the way the cars were constantly moving, that became visually analogous to a bloodstream. Life’s moving through. People are going places. There’s motion all the time. All these myriad lives that are passing you by, coming towards you, going away from you, and you’re in a span over it. And he’s telling her in the most urgent way about this yearning that he has. And off of it, he elects to make a mistake: He drops a coin and tells Leo he’ll work with him at the end, which is the ironic twist.

There’s another thing about this scene that really strikes me now. Caan is showing Weld his vulnerability, he’s opening up in this really sincere way. And conversely, she’s showing him how tough she really is. There’s that great moment where she says, “Where were you in prison? Pass the cream, please.” The back-and-forth, the collision of these two characters, develops in a fascinating way throughout. Was that all scripted?
It’s totally scripted, absolutely. You have this recounting of one’s life. “Here’s who I’ve been, and this is why I am the way I am right now and I want you to be part of what I’m trying to construct, which is outside all the societal norms and values. But the two of us can have something.” From the point of view of writing it, when you’re faced with that, you start thinking there needs to be some other things going on for it to stay real. It can’t decay into speechifying. It has to be dramatic. So, you’re looking for those helpful impediments to the flow of the narrative so that you have not a leitmotif, but a micro motif. “You’re having coffee?” “Pass the cream.” “Pass the sugar.”

When I was writing TV, when I first began as a writer, I used to work at an all-night restaurant in Los Angeles called Canter’s. I used to sit in a booth. Sometimes, I would wind up sitting there for 24 hours drinking a lot of coffee. I became very friendly with all the waitresses. There was a fantastic waitress named Jeannie who put two sons through medical school working at Canter’s and playing poker in Gardino. She was kind of a favorite, so I brought her out from L.A., and she’s the waitress who shows up with the cream. When she says, “What’s wrong with it?” And he says, “What’s wrong with it? It’s cottage cheese.”

This scene helps develop these two characters, but it also serves a specific narrative purpose. Once he realizes that this woman is willing to start a family with him, he decides to go to Leo and accept his offer of working for the Outfit, because now he needs the big scores — and then it really becomes a story of labor exploitation. 
One of the fundamental things in Frank’s profession as a thief, particularly in Chicago and particularly in those years, is: “What should my relationship with organized crime be, with the Chicago Outfit?” That comes from my research. I talked to professional thieves about their relationship. Ideally, as a professional thief, you don’t want to be hooked up with the Chicago Outfit because you’ll have to down your merch to Outfit fences, and you’re going to get 30 cents on the dollar instead of 50 cents on the dollar. And you’ll be asked to do things you may not want to do. You don’t want to be working for the man. You don’t want to be an employee.

You’ve said in the past that American critics didn’t really get the political and ideological aspects of Thief. Why do you think that was?
I can’t explain why, but it is a cultural perspective, if you like. It wasn’t the case in Europe. In Europe, the film was perceived as, “Oh, this is about the labor theory of value.” Frank quotes it.

I wonder if in the U.S. we sometimes shy away from political readings of films, almost because we’re afraid to touch it. And in Europe, people understand the politics latent in the drama. 
Yeah. I lived in Europe. I went through graduate film school for two years in London in the late ’60s. I’m very much a product of the ’60s, so the film has an overtly left perspective. I wrote the film in the late ’70s, and here I am in 1980 doing it, so it was not very far removed from all the issues that everybody was living through in the ’60s and ’70s.

What are your memories of James Caan? You guys did the commentary on the film back when it first came out on Blu-ray, and it sounds like you really got along. 
He was terrific. He was down for the cause. He wanted to master all the skill sets that his character should have. Because he knew that it would affect his speech. He knew it would affect how he picked up a glass. It would affect everything. Most importantly, the fact that you can do all these things in real life imbues you with a confidence. For example, when you feel an inner rage and something’s about to come out, but then because of the scene, you’re supposed to repress it, but you then also have to figure out, “How am I going to get out of this office having pulled a .45?” The wariness of it. Everything about what he’s doing is informed by the fact that Jimmy could do every single thing in reality that his character could do.

Any good film, we’re connected to it and moved by it; we’re in the scene with the actors. The heart of that connection is that we’re very smart animals, and every part of our brain is believing what we’re seeing, because of the authenticity. That other human being, James Caan in this case, he is Frank. It means all the training that Jimmy did, where he was drilling safes. We did time out at a place called Gunsite, Arizona, with a guy named Jeff Cooper on training with weapons. Jimmy could really handle himself. He’d been a college football player and everything, he was very athletic. He was a very tough guy to begin with.

Your work is on the Criterion Channel right now, to coincide with the 4K release of Thief on Criterion. Is there a film of yours you wish more people would see and discover and appreciate? 
For me, it’d be The Insider. For myself, that was very challenging. It’s a tense psychological drama that takes place in two hours and 45 minutes. The ambition of it is the challenge: Can I engage and deliver the intensity that Jeffrey Wigand and Lowell Bergman lived through? In Lowell Bergman’s case, your life’s work may be trashed, and you may be excluded. In Jeffrey Wigand’s case, with the assault upon you and your family, you’re reduced to the edge of suicide. So, it’s a psychological assault by your adversaries, and it’s a mortal threat. Both in the construction of the screenplay that Eric Roth and I wrote, but also directorially and cinematically, how was I going to bring the audience into the intensity of that experience? Naturally, it was a wonderful place to push myself into. Personally, I felt that I pushed myself onto a frontier, and I always feel that those are very healthy places to be.

It seems that over the past 15 or so years, there’s been a resurgence of interest in your films — even with some that weren’t seen as successes at the time of their release. Obviously, I think the movies are great, but why do you think people are connecting with your work now?
I don’t like to speculate. I think it may have to do with what’s in the work. I’m not a journeyman director; I’d like to be, because I love shooting. But I put a lot into a film, and so I think sometimes they have layers of relating. They’re not simple. They may be totally accessible — not all my films, but some of them may be accessible just as something that’s going to flow, just going to occupy you for two hours, or two hours and 45 minutes in the case of Heat and Insider — but there’s also a lot there, because my ambition was to put a lot of depth into it. I probably shouldn’t even be answering this question to tell you the truth.

Can I ask what’s going on with Heat 2? 
I just finished the screenplay and handed in the first draft.

In a case like this, who do you hand your screenplay in to?
In this case it was Warner Brothers. Any more than that, I can’t talk about. But it’s an exciting project.