In Reunited, Awards Insider hosts a conversation between two Oscar contenders who have collaborated on a previous project. Today, we speak with Michael Mann, who directed Ferrari, and Eric Roth, who cowrote Killers of the Flower Moon. The longtime collaborators previously worked together on The Insider, Ali, and the TV series Luck.

Eric Roth wasn’t sure he was the right guy to write The Insider; Michael Mann, the director, was confident he was. It was the first time the writer of Forrest Gump and the director of Heat had met each other, but as Roth remembers that meeting, “some kind of kinship” was born. “We both come from tough backgrounds, and we just figured we could battle this out together.”

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1999’s The Insider, the compelling thriller about a whistleblower in the tobacco industry starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe, would go on to be nominated for seven Oscars. For Mann and Roth, it was the foundation of their creative friendship that would continue on with 2001’s Ali, starring Will Smith, and the HBO series Luck. They would both go on to do plenty of projects without the other—Roth's many credits include Munich, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, A Star Is Born, and Dune, while Mann helmed Collateral and Public Enemies. But they remain friends, and their desire to collaborate together again has never waned. “We both have the same sense of humor, I think, a skepticism and cynical humor,” says Mann.

With their current projects—Roth cowrote with Martin Scorsese the epic Killers of the Flower Moon, and Mann directed Ferrari, starring Adam Driver—they both use their passion for delving into true stories to bring to life captivating films about unique characters in history. In this wide-ranging conversation, the pair reminisce about being heavy smokers while making The Insider, reveal why they love the research part of their job, and the reason their artistic partnership is so unique. “Look, it’s a collaborative medium, but the truth is, at the end of the day, the director's boss, and so you need to find some common ground,” says Roth. “And Michael’s just a unique bird. He’s annoying, but he’s unique.”

Vanity Fair: What is your strongest memory of working on The Insider together?

Michael Mann: When we were doing Insider, we would write every morning at the Broadway Deli. And the reason was that we’re both heavy smokers and they had just started anti-smoking legislation in restaurants, but you could still smoke in bars. So the Broadway Deli happened to have a bar in the morning, so we’d be sitting there in the morning for three hours smoking and all this stuff. And then about three or four weeks before we started shooting, I said, ‘I’ve really got to stop, because what I’ll do is, once I start shooting I’ll get up to three packs a day.” So we both decided that we would stop.

Eric Roth: Well, the only thing I disagree with is, this is kind of after the movie, because we were during the movie smoking in the biggest anti-tobacco lawyers’ offices in America.

Mann: Right, everything was about the evils of big tobacco and corporate manipulation and legal manipulation and ruining people’s lives all because of cigarettes which were addictive and destroyed your health. That was the subject matter.

Roth: We decided we better stop this because we were dying. We decided to go to a hypnotist. And so Michael went in first for, I don’t know, an hour and a half, whatever it was, and then I followed. And then we agreed to meet afterwards, I think at a Starbucks. And Michael said, “It worked. I’m done.” I said, “I hated the guy’s voice.”

Mann: Eric goes in, and I’m sitting on the park bench. And so he comes out and I said, “How was it?” He said, “It was okay. I kind of dozed off. I was kind of in this kind of meditative state."

Roth: He got in my head. But the guy was really good, and it worked for Michael. And I had been to a hypnotist earlier—which has a weirder story where the guy turned out to be a murderer, but that’s a different conversation. He had killed his paramour, found her body in the trunk of his car. But it took a couple more years for me to sign a contract with my doctor and I did quit.

But I think the key was that we were real partners and we have been on everything we worked on. The things that didn’t get done, great respect. We argue the way people should creatively, over imaginative things. And Michael’s, I think, one of the rare unique talents that I’ve ever worked with. And we’re friends. So it’s a wonderful long-term relationship that only gets longer.

There were other films along the way that you talked about working together, one in particular called Comanche.

Roth: Comanche is a great source of sadness to me because this is arrogance, but I think we wrote a truly great Western piece very early in understanding of Native Americana, indigenous people, and for various reasons at various times we just never could get it on the boards. And I still think it’s recognized as one of the really class screenplays of something of great value. Michael, I know, feels the same way and he will tell you why he thinks sometimes it never happened. It is a sadness to me.

Michael, why do you think it never made it?

Mann: It is a source of frustration. It happened to be that particular subject matter, in its best manifest form, happens to be a very large scale production. It’d be great if it was a movie you could make for $35 million and $40 million, but it’s not. It’s something that you make it for a hundred million or you don’t make it. There’s no way to compress it. But great material has a way of showing up one way or another. So sometime when he and I are in wheelchairs, maybe…

Your current work, Killers of the Flower Moon and Ferrari, are both based on real stories, real people, which I think you both have a real knack for bringing those stories to life. And I’ve heard about your meticulous research when telling true stories. Has the way you prepare to tell a story like that has changed over the years?

Roth: From the moment I begin to write anything, I always felt God was in the details. I still have sheds filled with research books before the internet came around. And obviously, all hail [author] David Grann, who did the legwork and provided material for this particular piece. And all hail Marty Scorsese for his vision. And then it was to get the right movie saying the right thing. And it went through a number of reincarnations, but it's just proud of, alongside Insider, I’d say proud of anything I’ve been involved with.

Mann: For me, I started with just curiosity. And it took me into doing some very early documentaries which wasn't so much about making the documentaries as I was just fascinated with immersing myself into cultures or subcultures. Some of the problems with the research is you get so seduced that you forget you’re supposed to be writing a screenplay, making a movie out the other end of it. The thing with Ferrari was really unusual in that I’ve known Piero Ferrari for 20 years and I liked the cars very much, but you could drive or own a car, you don't have to make a motion picture about a car. So we didn't make it about the car, but the contradictions inherent in Enzo Ferrari and this wild relationship with his wife.

Roth: On Killers, when Leonardo decided to switch parts to the husband [he was previously cast as head investigator Tom White, which Jesse Plemons plays in the final version], one of the things that was most interesting when one did research—just to show the power of research—that it seemed to us that he was a man who was in love with this woman and yet trying to kill her. And we thought of three examples that were even close: Desdemona and Othello, Talented Mr. Ripley and a little bit A Place in the Sun. But my point being that that was something we had to create. Part of it was just from research knowing that at the end of the day, this man, when he had cancer, he came out of jail, wanted his ashes spread by his son named Cowboy over the Osage Hills. But we tried to then bridge that, his tenderness, and yet, giving her poison every day. So anyway, that's research, in that sense.

Mann: Research sounds like it’s dry—it’s not, it's an adventure. And if you’re going to do Italy in 1957, of course, it’s the set decoration and what the streets look like and everything. We shot everything in Modena, which is basically unchanged. But the real adventure is researching into period attitude, period psychology. And that kind of research which drives Eric and also drives me, is really into the attitudes and the value systems. And that’s not work, that’s an adventure to the point where why would you do it any other way?

Roth: Yeah, absolutely, why would you do it any other way?

One of the versions of the Killers of the Flower Moon script was like 200ish pages from the FBI’s perspective?

Roth: I will say they were all long. I always say though that, whatever I write, I tend to write too much because I write a lot of prose, or at least I used to. But I always said the movie was as long or as short as the director wanted to make it because I can write in one sentence, less than a sentence: “And World War I breaks out.” And they can do that either in a line of dialogue or they can do 20 minutes or a whole movie. But anyway, the point being that I’m not sure page count matters. Marty was generous enough to say, “Write whatever you think reflects what's going on in our material.” I think there were versions of 200-something, but I’ve had that before. It’s not that I’m proud or not, it's just that I also like to show off. That's the strength of our relationship. Michael’s far more brief.

Mann: But when you’re reading [your scripts], you’re totally seduced.

Roth: I got a call one day during The Insider from Al Pacino saying I had given him a page and a half monologue, and he said, “I can do this with one look.” I said, “I think I better call Michael.” He ended up actually shooting both of them, and using the one look. The point is, he’s so smart and also, usually right. Occasionally not so.

Michael, you’ve wanted to make Ferrari for decades. Is this one of the longest gestating projects for you?

Mann: It is. The late Troy Kennedy Martin wrote the screenplay and Sidney Pollard, myself and Troy started with this in the 1990 and went to various incarnations. And I acquired the component elements to control the project at various times. And you’re always faced with a shy option, the underlying rights again and the book again, and so I said, “I really should let this go,” because no car racing movie has ever made money in the history of cinema until Ford v. Ferrari. And then I would open the screenplay, I get to about page 2 and I’d be totally engaged again because of the characters being so unique, so unusual.

Michael, you mentioned movies making money. How much did the two of you pay attention or care about box office in the current movie ecosystem?

Mann: We absolutely do in the sense that we make these movies with partners who finance it. Of course, you want the movie to do well. You want everybody to come out well. These are movies that we want to be an independent vision, have artistic ambition, and we want people to see them. It's not some form of onanism—Eric and I aren’t just making films for ourselves. So sure we want it to do well and it’s a struggle. It’s a struggle with marketing. It’s a struggle with exhibition and distribution. It is a different configuration today with a generic situation where streaming comes in after a limited theatrical run.

Roth: I care stupidly what even critics say. Everything matters. And of course, you want your work to get out there, that the work is seen, and you want people to appreciate it and want to go see it. And it’s a part of your DNA. In other words, it’s not just for our own edification. We love the process of doing it, but you want to be able to share that joy and experience with as many people as possible.

Mann: There’s a certain model for this. I saw Dr. Strangelove in 1963. It was the first movie I really started paying attention to—I didn’t have much ambition about cinema before then. And then I realized later on it became a model where it’s an absolutely individualized work of art and it is public and a lot of people see it and it has impact. And I thought about this discovery later, that it was very formative. Eric, do you have something that affected you, your attitude?

Roth: I had two things: On a primal level, I was sitting at eight years old at the Brooklyn Paramount in the balcony, seeing Invaders From Mars—scared the shit out of me and I said, “Wow, this is an experience I want to have again.” And then I’d say probably 2001: [A Space Odyssey] meant a lot to me—the imagination, the intellect of it. It was the great art form of its time.

A few directors, Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan among them, have been talking about the effects of superhero and franchise films on the ecosystem. As two storytellers who make original films that I think are the most endangered species, what's your take on the way things are now?

Mann: I think you have to trust the system to continue to replicate itself until the public gets totally bored. So they’ll make superhero movies until we’re out and then everything will change again. So I don’t get too excited about it.

Roth: I also have the ego, I guess, to say, let’s assume I was offered one—I’m not sure I want to do one—but I would want to write the best one ever. So that’s what I did with Dune. I said, “Why am I doing Dune?” Because I really wrestled with doing it and I did it, but the same rules apply. In other words, no different than The Insider, in that sense, you want to make the best characters, tell the best story, do it in the best way, do it in a way that’s suspenseful and surprising, and all those things. There’s always something better.

One of my great aims is to say something more important, more eloquently. And I know Michael does, he has so many things he wants to do. I mean, it’s just that time is running out here. I’ve just been so blessed to have Michael in my life. I wish I could do more movies with him. If we got another 15 years, wait till you see what we could do.

Mann: Yeah, I feel the same way. We keep working together. And we’re close friends, and I wish we could have made more movies together than we have.

Well, there’s still time.

Roth: But everything takes a long time. Michael’s about to embark on another adventure for himself. That’s going to take two or three years. So as a writer, certainly now at my age, I want to make sure that these things have some chance of seeing the light of day. So unless I was to work with him right now, which I would love to, but otherwise it’s going to be three years before he’d be available to go look into something else. So we’ll see. Maybe we’ll live to 140.

Mann: The danger of working with Eric is that we would start in, whether we were doing Insider together at the Broadway Deli Bar, or when we were working together on an HBO series called Luck, is that we start talking, and then three hours would go by, we’d be laughing about something. So the days got to be very, very long days. But working with him is way too much fun.

Roth: It is too much fun. It is way too much fun.