“It’s the Same Life”: James Mangold on His Journey from Heavy to Indiana Jones (Web Exclusive)
by Ian Scott and Terence McSweeney

Despite being one of the most critically and commercially successful filmmakers working in the American film industry today, James Mangold has never quite become the household name that several of his contemporaries have. Whether that is because his films have moved seamlessly between genres, from Westerns to biopics, cop dramas to superhero films, or the fact that they do not seem, on the surface at least, to have the explicit signs of authorship that audiences and critics expect in prominent auteurs, is hard to discern. As a result, Mangold’s body of work has not been talked about or dissected as much as it should have been, in both the popular and academic press, and his co-writer on the Marvel adaptations The Wolverine (2013) and Logan (2017), Scott Frank, told us why that might be. “Jim is an incredible filmmaker, but he’s underappreciated because he keeps zigzagging. He does different things. He’s always doing something distinct.” 

Zigzagging or not, Mangold’s profile is set to change in 2023 when, thirty-five years after his first screen credit as the co-writer of the animated feature, Oliver & Company (1988), he returns to Disney to write and direct the fifth entry in the revered Indiana Jones series, which will see him step into the rather large shoes of Steven Spielberg. Yet, it shouldn’t take his newfound association with Indiana Jones to prompt a consideration of Mangold’s compelling filmography and looking below the surface there is in fact rather a lot that audiences have come to expect from “a James Mangold film” in the years since his directorial debut Heavy in 1994. It’s not just his desire to embrace the traditions of classical Hollywood storytelling and old-school craftmanship in an era when audiences seem to demand spectacle more than character or narrative, although that is a significant measure of his oeuvre. As Frank added, Mangold sees himself as a storyteller first and foremost: “If you think about it, it’s not the genre [he’s working in that’s important], it’s the character and storytelling…he directs as a storyteller.” Indeed, there are very real thematic and visual threads which provide the connective tissue in the ten films and twenty-five years between Heavy and Mangold’s most recently released film, Ford v Ferrari (2019), a movie that was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture in 2020. It’s just that those threads are not quite as obvious as the ones used by many of his contemporaries who are more frequently associated with that heavily loaded term auteur. Much of the same team that worked with Mangold on Ford v Ferrari are back on board for Indy; from cinematographer Phedon Papamichael to co-writers Jez and John Henry Butterworth. And it’s no exaggeration to say that the director who helped a Marvel movie to its first major Academy Award nomination might yet pull off the same feat with a certain aging archaeologist.

The twists and turns in Mangold’s career that have led to this moment are perhaps even worthy of their own movie, and the fifty-eight-year-old sat down to talk to us recently about that fascinating journey in a series of conversations while deep in postproduction on Indy. Mangold is great company—articulate, knowledgeable, quick with a one-liner, and surprisingly forthcoming about the vicissitudes of Hollywood filmmaking and his strive to retain independence while working very much within the modern studio system. Yet, he is also very attuned to the conversation about who the auteur directors are, and how and why those in the industry and outside lean toward such labels.

Hollywood, the critics, and even some film scholars have continued to laud the notion of auteurism almost above everything else, that categorization of movie-making that began at Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s and was carried through into the Hollywood system by the writings of Andrew Sarris and others. Authorship was, to use Sarris’s classic triple meaning, the technical competence, distinguishable personality, and interior meaning that a film director brought to their work. You could recognize an auteur a mile off from what appeared on the screen, and you began to understand who this pantheon of artists was because they were recited in hushed tones everywhere in the late 1960s and early ’70s from the lecture hall, through the pages of movie reviews to the canteens on the studio backlots. In critical circles authorship took a pounding in the decades that followed, as many a structural and semiotic film theory appeared, and countless other critics without PhDs made the not unreasonable point that filmmaking was a collaborative process rather than the province of one singular visionary. Yet, authorship has never died. Indeed, if anything, its star has risen still further and brighter in the twenty-first century, an era coined by the rise of the blockbuster auteurs (Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, et al.), and been reaffirmed as the distinguishable mode of recognition for succeeding generations, whether raised on a diet of independent film or brought up on the multiplex movies of, well, Steven Spielberg for one.

For every auteur, however, there has also always been a series of filmmakers who have never quite attained the spotlight of colleagues around them, even though films from their body of work might have been just as successful critically or commercially and resonated just as profoundly with audiences. Mangold might belong in this category for some; indeed, he might even welcome joining the esteemed company of directors as important as Michael Curtiz or Walter Hill. That is because his movies have been an object lesson in how to make a series of classical—and vastly different—genre pictures for cinemagoers looking for something more than just an entertaining couple of hours at the local cinema. For Mangold, the variation in his subject matter is not a question of counterintuitively anticipating his audience, but a desire to tell the stories that inspire him, preserving his own artistic identity and contributing to the medium that he clearly loves so much. The path to this state of grace, however, has been neither smooth nor simple.

Signed straight out of the Cal Arts film school in the late 1980s to a deal at Disney where he came into contact almost immediately with studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Michael Eisner, it seemed like the big break all film school graduates dream of. Nevertheless, Mangold quickly became disillusioned with the corporate environment, later comparing his experiences, with tongue only somewhat in cheek, to Robert Altman’s The Player (1992). This experience was more than a bruising one and, as he tells it, made him question whether he ever wanted to make films again.  He returned to New York and enrolled at Columbia University’s film school, where he found himself in the strange position of being the only student there who had written a $30 million Disney film. During this time, he found a new mentor in Miloš Forman, while continuing to be inspired by his old tutor at Cal Arts, Alexander Mackendrick, and made the short film Victor (1991), which won the Silver Award at the Chicago International Film Festival. Three years later, he adapted it into his feature debut, Heavy, on a budget of just $250,000. In the film Pruitt Taylor Vince plays Victor, a painfully shy aspiring chef who becomes attracted to an enigmatic waitress, Callie, played by Liv Tyler on the cusp of superstardom. Heavy was set in upstate New York and was thus familiar terrain for Mangold who grew up in and around the Hudson Valley, the rural location and provincial feel providing an evocative backdrop for the human emotions that run deep and thick throughout the picture.

Heavy established Mangold as a very different voice in the indie world, especially after it won Special Jury Recognition for Directing at the Sundance Film Festival and got screened at Cannes, the latter enabling the movie to secure a worldwide distribution deal. Signaling the profound influence of silent film on his approach, particularly the work of Yasujirō Ozu, Mangold opted for long stretches in the picture without dialogue, relying instead on the palpable connections between sensitively drawn characters that would become a hallmark of his style even after he moved to big-budget fare in the 2000s.

Heavy is certainly far removed from the fast-talking, self-consciously hip films which defined the “Indiewood” scene emerging in the 1990s. Emotionally, viscerally, and even intellectually, Mangold got what the cool hip indie moment represented, he just didn’t feel he was a part of that world. “I was very conscious that what was starting to happen at that moment in independent film was exciting,” he says. “But I just thought I would always be kind of mediocre at playing in Quentin Tarantino’s ball field, if you will, the kind of postmodern, super media aware, references galore to other movies, world. Nothing against this, I just didn’t feel comfortable. If you spend any time in Quentin’s presence, it’s authentic to him, it’s who he is, the librarian of film clips and scores, and it’s really fruitful for him and for us as an audience. But what was happening at that moment, not only with Quentin, was a whole scene where first-time alternative voices were getting heard in movies. More movies from different perspectives and directed at all sorts of groups. And here I am, a white male growing up in the Hudson Valley. I didn’t feel like I could compete, but also, I didn’t feel personally inspired, like I would do great work in that arena.”

If the independently funded Heavy had shown him a roadmap for his cinematic vision, Mangold’s follow-up Cop Land (1997) charted the direction for his career to come, a balance between classical Hollywood and the more intimate sensibilities of the Indie scene. The script—which sparked a bidding war among studios—was a novelistic tale of a small-town New Jersey sheriff, Freddy Heflin (Sylvester Stallone), torn between his allegiance to the corrupt cops he calls his friends and neighbors, and his own code of ethics which he belatedly realizes he’s neglected for far too long.

Equal parts High Noon (1952) and Serpico (1973), Mangold refused to sell the script unless he was able to direct it, finally agreeing to make the film at the now defunct Miramax as the first of a three-picture deal. The project soon spiraled beyond his initial conception of a low-budget feature with unknown actors, however, into something much bigger. One can only imagine how the thirty-something director felt, making only his second film, walking onto set in the presence of screen icons such as Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, and Stallone.

Cop Land, while sympathetically reviewed and profitable to a point, turned out to be much more of a struggle to complete and release in the way Mangold envisioned it. He recalled changes he was forced to make because of test screenings, “I actually think that market testing is the end of the world. The reality is that every filmmaker needs to be aware that they have an audience to honor, but there is also an awareness that if you just serve your audience with what they are comfortable with, they just like the last thing. So, the bottom line is that [market-testing can be] a terribly destructive force in movies. And I was shocked by what the expectation was with Cop Land that they wanted me to convince upwards of eighty to ninety percent of the audience that this film was excellent.” It was a harsh lesson in marketability for Mangold, but he took it to heart. Twenty-five years on, Cop Land is now being significantly reappraised, hailed by some as not only excellent, but also a “lost classic” of the 1990s.

After Cop Land, Mangold moved on again, fluidly shifting from genre to genre, more often than not on his own terms and in a way which meant critics and fans, as Scott Frank suggests, found it hard to pigeonhole him—a worthy adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir of the same name, Girl, Interrupted (1999), saw Angelina Jolie win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress; a fun if lightweight time-travel-inspired romantic comedy, Kate & Leopold (2001), paired Mangold with Hugh Jackman for the first time; and a pseudo-Hitchcockian thriller in Identity (2003) completed a set of turn-of-the-millennium pieces that at the very least confirmed his versatility. After five films and over a decade in the industry, however, it still wasn’t clear what might define a “James Mangold film,” for audiences or critics.   

It wasn’t until 2005’s Walk the Line that an answer finally began to emerge. With this multi-award-winning biopic of Johnny Cash, Mangold established himself as a filmmaker to whom both audiences and critics paid attention. A movie with those indie credentials he cultivated on Heavy, but which also provided ageless mainstream entertainment, it remains for many his defining film and he himself admits that something just clicked. He’s quick to maintain, though, that the movie didn’t automatically afford him the status of a director who could pick and choose his projects. Nevertheless, the film is a richly textured character study, a rumination on artistic creation, fame, and the complexities of a musical iconoclast. With two career-defining performances by Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix at its heart, Walk the Line suddenly encapsulated why audiences might come to see James Mangold movies—character driven drama with a rich awareness of genre, and a fusion of classical Hollywood traditions with a looser even grittier 1970s vibe. It might have been a template for all that was to follow, but Mangold has always chafed at the prospect of providing audiences with exactly what they want or expect from him.

“The second everyone tells you that you look good in red, you just start wearing red and you’re not sure why,” he explains. “And it changes something organic at the very center of you. Which is that when you start out, you’re doing this thing for yourself. But once it gets labeled and identified and presented back to you in a very flattering form, it’s no longer for you…it’s now for your brand, your little piece of real estate in the internal dialogue of film history and suddenly you’re not in your movie.”

Later in one of our conversations, Mangold puts it even more succinctly, “I don’t set out to make a box-set.” By which he means a series of movies that have a resonant “Mangold touch,” related in theme if not character and sequence to previous movies and which can be neatly tied up and packaged by the distributors for the benefit of those who want to own the “James Mangold collection.” Mangold may reject being artistically pigeonholed in such a manner, but he also understands how it happens, and how easy it is to get caught up in that straitjacket. Referring to his old mentor, he relayed Mackendrick’s experience of the same dilemma: “Sandy Mackendrick told his students at Cal Arts of an interview he gave to Philip Kemp while Kemp was writing a biography of him.  Philip said, “What do you think about the theme that runs through all your work of lethal innocence?” And Sandy goes, “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.” And Kemp explained, “Well, in The Ladykillers, the little old lady brings down a ring of burglars. In Sweet Smell of Success, it’s J. J. Hunsucker’s naive daughter who brings down this whole ring. And in The Man in the White Suit, it’s this bumbling inventor who causes the shockwaves to run through the entire British apparel industry.” He went on and on, and Sandy said, “You know, I was not really aware that I had [a theme].” A working director at the time, after that interview Mackendrick could never consider another project without thinking whether it fit the [theme] that had been assigned him and whether he was either refuting or supporting that theme.”

As if living up to that testament, Mangold followed the success of Walk the Line by first making a Western, and a remake at that, of Delmer Daves’s much lauded 1957 adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s short story 3:10 to Yuma (2007), and then transitioning into the arena of blockbuster filmmaking, working with Tom Cruise on Knight and Day (2010). Mangold’s 3:10 demonstrated how adept he was at conceiving a classic genre in a modern guise. And in a period where several Westerns were vying for critical attention—Seraphim Falls (2006), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), and Appaloosa (2008)—none of the above got anywhere near 3:10’s $71 million box-office take, a testimony to Mangold’s ability to deliver for an audience with practically the oldest—and arguably most old-fashioned—genre in the Hollywood playbook.

Knight and Day by contrast was a $117 million plus juggernaut that Mangold noted was “definitely twice the cost of anything I had made before.” The film did well enough on its release, but not nearly as well as he and the studio had hoped for when they might have expected it to be a slam dunk Tom Cruise star vehicle. Returning to the film in 2022, like Cop Land it has found something of an afterlife in the way many of Mangold’s films seem to, and plays much better as a self-reflexive action film and an intriguing deconstruction of the Cruise persona that has only been solidified in recent years by the global success of the long-running Mission Impossible franchise (1996- ) and then the much anticipated sequel, Top Gun: Maverick (2022).

It was not such a leap from Knight and Day therefore, for Mangold to enter the culturally impactful and commercially successful superhero genre. Teaming up once more with Hugh Jackman, firstly with The Wolverine and then the follow-up Logan, the latter earned Mangold and co-writers Scott Frank and Michael Green an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, not only his first but the first for any film from the genre. Despite his initiation into that arena, Mangold has remained skeptical, even of the genre’s existence. “I don’t think there is such a genre as a superhero film, that is just shorthand for critics. Whether it’s Hercules or it’s cowboy movies and Westerns, they’re all the same genre, they really are. It is just the fact that they cost a lot of money and people wear spandex and they come mainly from one comic book company. That’s not a genre, that’s just a rights package that someone purchased.”

Which is perhaps one of the reasons why both films, especially Logan, are so fascinating. Mangold secured an R rating (15 in the U.K.) for Logan, and it meant, according to him, that, “I knew that if Hugh and I could get an R, then we’ll have the freedom to make an adult film…Because the second the marketing arm of a studio realizes it cannot market to children, five or six creative things happen. The scenes can go deeper and can be written for adults. Not just language, not just [violence]…but the themes can be more interesting, the words you’re using can be more complicated. The ideas can be more complicated.” This is a good description of Logan’s claims to being that rare beast, a “revisionist” superhero film, one that again in Mangold’s presence prioritizes character and theme over spectacle and style. Yet, Mangold doesn’t follow the old studio adage of “one for me, one for them” because his films have managed to maintain a personal connection to the subject matter combined with an awareness of what works for audiences who will attend his movies.

“I am acutely aware of the politics of film: one cannot work without an audience, one cannot work without financing, but one also can’t continue to work in the way I want to if you are kowtowing to commercial demands, which are generally whatever worked last year. So, I’m always trying to find projects in which I have the political leverage to do what I think is best. As time has gone by, this has become a bit easier than it was in the Cop Land days, as financiers, studios, producers tend to see me as someone who is aware and sympathetic to the needs of an audience, and they trust me to do what I want to do.” Given all that, who does he think continues to turn up to all his films that have ranged from indie introspection to Marvel mercurialness? Just who are the James Mangold aficionados? His reply is typically understated.

“I very often think of my audience as someone who doesn’t like the kind of movie I’m making and therefore was dragged to it and I’m trying to shut them up. My essential goal would be to have them go ‘maybe this is going to be okay.’”

One might be forgiven for thinking that grudging approval was Mangold’s rationale with 2019’s Ford v Ferrari. As critics noted, a racing car movie in the high-octane tradition of past notables such as John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966), Le Mans (1971) with Steve McQueen, or even more recently Ron Howard’s Rush (2013), would have passed muster just fine for this tale of the upstart Ford racing arm’s attempts to topple the might of Ferrari at the prestigious twenty-four-hour Le Mans race during the 1960s. But in Mangold’s hands, former racer turned designer and entrepreneur Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), and down-on-his luck British mechanic and driver for hire Ken Miles (Christian Bale) become the Butch and Sundance of the ’60s motor-racing circuit. Forever prefiguring and outwitting the establishment figures residing in Ford’s boardroom, Shelby and Miles set the pace for a film that might have been solidly traditional in any other director’s hands, but which is here not just a tale of the underdogs coming out on top, but also one where work ethic and dedication are set up in competition to glamour and spectacle.    

“A lot of people knock Ford v Ferrari for being slow, and it wasn’t short, it was a two-and-a-half-hour film. But I just judge it by whether I’m bored. The directors I admire work with narrative and drama successfully, and spectacle is an additional tool in their chest. Films, I mean, at the level where a film is living or holding you on sheer spectacle alone, it’s inert to me. Slow or fast is not the way I think necessarily.”

Mangold’s way was to deliver a 152-minute movie that gives considerable aesthetic pull to the iconic Ford GT40 sports car featured, but which never drowns the audience solely in the sound of an exhaust with 485 brake horsepower tearing down the Mulsanne Straight. Indeed, after opening scenes where Mangold deliberately got the audience low on the tarmac experiencing racing speed courtesy of Phedon Papamichael’s extraordinary photography, long spells of the film are not about racing at all, more the valorization of ambition and the pursuit of perfection as a life’s work.  

Which may or may not be the apt description of Mangold’s career to date, but which most certainly brings us to his latest, biggest, and most celebratory of projects in reviving one of Hollywood’s defining franchises. This picture is not just a return of “the man with the hat” fifteen years on from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), but a return also for Mangold to the studio where he began straight after leaving Cal Arts. So, how much have things changed for him from the $250,000 budget for Heavy to the reputedly $250 million one for Indiana Jones 5? Not as much as you might think, according to Mangold:

“My experience making my student films at Cal Arts or Columbia University, making Heavy or making an Indiana Jones film, it’s the same life. I wake up agonized with anxiety about what could go wrong today, I have to remember what’s most important about the scene, I have to think about how to stage the actors in relation to the lens, I have to negotiate the personalities…So, the point is that nothing changes. Nothing for a director. You may have a driver to set, there may be creature comforts that change, but you walk in the room there’s one hundred people looking at you. They want to know what to do and where the camera goes and what the scene is about, and it’s exactly the same every time.”

It’s not hard to guess that Mangold has been inundated with requests asking to discuss such an eagerly anticipated project. On this matter he was slightly more guarded, understandable given that the film is still several months away from its release in June 2023, and so little is known about the storyline, with only a brief teaser shown at Disney’s D23 Expo in Anaheim in September. But when we asked, “What can audiences expect from a James Mangold Indy film?” he paused for a moment, and then confided: “What is not hard to guess is that with Indiana Jones, we’re making a movie about being old. All I ever argued with the movie, which I resisted doing initially, was that I was not interested in making a picture that’s saying, look how this near eighty-year-old actor is just as potent and powerful as he was when he was thirty-five.” While he didn’t want this to be a mere tribute movie, it also didn’t mean Harrison Ford would discard the fedora and fail to pull out the bullwhip one more time and play “Indiana Jones.” “I did want him to pull out the whip,” said Mangold. “And he does!” 

Once more, he understands that there are certain audience expectations that have to be sated in given situations. But Mangold has never played his career solely upon that intention, even when the temptation has surely been there to do so. Our conversation concluded with him reflecting on that running theme again, the reluctance to become branded, to be pigeonholed as “the guy who makes that type of film.”

“The idea to me that filmmakers are chasing branding like so many in music and elsewhere, that we’re part of this cycle, chasing your categorization of us as “the new Spielberg” or “the new Scorsese” or whatever it is, it becomes trying to get anointed as quickly as possible because, partly growing up as a film fan, we’re reading academic works and critical works, and we’re jealous of these people who are getting anointed and it seems like “I want to get anointed.”  So, what’s the easiest, quickest route to getting anointed? That would be dropping these obvious breadcrumbs for intellectuals to follow, easy breadcrumbs for audiences to connect the dots to on auteurship, as it were.”

Mangold clearly loves the freedom that his bold choices have brought, even if he’s had to be diplomatic about their costs at the time. And at this moment in his career, he’s beginning to feel the benefit of that liberal creative impulse that has served him so well for more than twenty-five years. “Part of the reason I feel like I’m enjoying my moment now in my fifties making movies is because, unlike a lot of my peers, I could make anything. I have every choice. And I don’t have any financier or audience that would necessarily reject seeing it from me, for the very reason that it might have been harder for me in the first three or four movies, because I’m not “the master of horror,” etc. I have not been buttonholed in a way that I think doesn’t allow you to really explore what you can do.”

Exploring what he can do is in its own way Mangold’s authorship. He doesn’t want to be the “master of horror” or whatever it might be, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t consider himself an auteur with lineage and latitude to write his own cinematic ticket. Mangold is already exploring his next filmmaking options beyond Indiana Jones and two intriguing projects have already been announced to the public: one on Bob Dylan starring Timothée Chalamet that would return him to the genre he helped revivify with Walk the Line; the other an adaptation of Marion Meade’s Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase that will shine a light on one of Hollywood’s earliest screen legends and perhaps act as a coda to the late, great Peter Bogdanovich’s terrific documentary, The Great Buster (2018). Either way, the Dylan and Keaton projects suggest there is little chance that Mangold will settle for comfortable choices any time soon nor neglect the authorial philosophy that has brought him so far. It’s an attitude and work ethic he learned from his old tutor. As Sandy Mackendrick once told the student Mangold, “Good. You finished the script. Now write another.”

Ian Scott is Professor of American Film and History at Manchester University in the U.K., author of Robert Riskin: The Life and Times of a Hollywood Screenwriter (University Press of Kentucky, 2021) and with co-author Terence McSweeney is currently working on a book about James Mangold and Hollywood in the 21st Century. 

Dr. Terence McSweeney is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Solent University and has held research positions at the Rothermere American Institute, UCL, and the London School of Economics. His recent book, Black Panther: Interrogating a Cultural Phenomenon, won the Congrès Interdisciplinaire d’Etudes Africaines (COAFRO) Award for Best Book on African Studies (2021), a Non-Fiction Authors Association Gold Award (2022), a National Indie Excellence Award (2022), and has been nominated for an American Book Fest Award.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 1