Earlier this week, I wrote:

Stanley Kubrick never directed a crime drama after his classic The Killing in 1956. (The thinking man's Tarantino movie!) But the look and feel of the new Miami Vice, with its surreal documentary atmosphere and moral ambiguity, seems a bit like what the Barry Lyndon through Full Metal Jacket-era Kubrick would have directed had he been handed the original script for the Vice episode "Smuggler's Blues".

Movies came later, when the Madison campus began offering its first courses in film history and film theory. [Michael Mann] signed up and liked what he saw. But his real inspiration came with the 1963 release of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. “It said to my whole generation of filmmakers that you could make an individual statement of high integrity and have that film be successfully seen by a mass audience all at the same time,” he says. “In other words, you didn’t have to be making Seven Brides for Seven Brothers if you wanted to be a part of the commercial film industry, or be reduced to niche filmmaking if you wanted to be serious about cinema. So that’s what Kubrick meant, aside from the fact that I loved Kubrick and he was a big influence.”