Mike Fleming

In a pretty cool interview that Michael Mann gave to Financial Times’ Matthew Garrahan about his experience directing and exec producing the David Milch-created HBO series Luck, Mann dropped on Garrahan that he’s close on two features. Now, I’ve heard that the collision of alpha males Mann and Milch (not to mention Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte) on the set of Luck had the kinds of macho exchanges that could have been scripted by David Mamet, but hopefully the result will be another memorable HBO series. As for the features, FT reports that Mann is mulling a medieval European tale about the build-up to the 15th century battle of Agincourt between England and France. The other is a Chicago crime tale, Big Tuna, the story of Tony Accardo and his successor, Sam Giancana. I’ve spoken to Mann about the former project, which is based on Bernard Cornwell’s Agincourt, a bestselling novel that focuses on a young man with a death sentence on his head who is saved when his skills with the bow catch the attention of king Henry V. The archer develops into a warrior and falls in love with a young woman whose virtue he saved from a lecherous priest, and he becomes the portal to the bloody Battle of Agincourt, made famous by Shakespeare’s Henry V. Last time Mann tried this kind of historical stuff, the result was the classic The Last of the Mohicans. And the last time he plied organized crime in Chicago, it was in the TV series Crime Story. Feels like Mann fans can’t lose, either way.