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Behind the scenes of ''Miami Vice'' | jul282006_888_lg

The studio wasn't thrilled. Universal — which had the rights to the original series — saw no reason to make an expensive potential franchise with an audience-limiting R rating. (This was before Foxx won his Oscar for Ray and Mann's R-rated Collateral had been twice nominated.) But after prolonged discussions with then president Stacey Snider, Universal greenlit the picture at $120 million and slated production to start in April 2005. Even though they had never met, Foxx and Farrell hopped aboard. Their first drink was brokered by Mann at The Buffalo Club in Santa Monica, a joint owned by Anthony Yerkovich, the guy who'd created the original series. The two would end up spending more time together than they could have possibly imagined.

The difficulties started in Cuba. That's when Colin Farrell began feeling serious pain that got worse and worse and worse, coursing through his chest, shoulders, and back. Farrell had been pushing hard, lifting ungodly amounts of weight to turn himself into the machine Mann said he needed to be to play Sonny Crockett. There had been months of morning workouts, afternoons on the shooting range, and nights doing mock drug runs — complete with bricks of fake dope and stacks of phony money — five miles off the coast of Miami. (The director was kind enough to give the Coast Guard a heads-up.)

But while out one night researching Cuban dance with Mann and costar Gong Li at a Havana nightclub, Farrell suddenly staggered. It turned out that during a weight-lifting session, his rib had broken away from his sternum — yeah, you read that right — and two discs in his back had herniated. ''I was feeling like a big girl's blouse because I was complaining so much,'' says Farrell. ''I went back to the doctor and said, 'There's really something wrong.' They did the MRI and the doctor said, 'Oh, Lord!' I was like, 'MOTHERF---ER! I told you!' ''

Mann's prep work is undeniably intense, and actors usually groove to his relentless work ethic, but this time it proved disastrous. Farrell's injury resulted in over six weeks of delays that pushed the production start back to June…landing it smack in the middle of the worst hurricane season in modern history. ''I think they were in the Greek alphabet by the time we were out of Miami,'' snorts cinematographer Dion Beebe. ''They had run out of letters to name [the storms].''

Once the shoot started, the problems ranged from the big (when gale-force winds shattered a skyscraper window, the shards almost hit the two stars in a convertible Ferrari) to the small (Farrell's personal dresser claims she got whacked in the face with a chunk of stray speedboat) to the bizarre and self-created. (Mann banned the color red from the entire movie. Seriously.)

''He always tells you why, and from there, he talks in detail,'' says first assistant director Michael Waxman, who has worked with the director since 1986's Manhunter. ''[He'll say], 'I want to put a tarp over these wires and it should be a blue tarp and it should be tattered on the left side with five threads hanging down, four inches each. Except for the one on the left, which is six inches.' '' And according to almost everyone involved, he'd notice if you got it wrong.

The list of difficulties ballooned to the point of absurdity. Phobias? Check. Tubbs was supposed to be an ace pilot, and Foxx — as he nervously told everyone around him — was terrified of flying. Technical mishaps? Oh yeah. The finicky hi-def digital cameras seemed to fall apart with even the slightest change in barometric pressure. Linguistic hassles? Shi! Chinese superstar Gong Li (Memoirs of a Geisha) struggled with speaking Spanish and English. And with each successive mini-disaster, the crew grew wearier. By the end of the 105-day shoot, more than 100 people had resigned. Not an outrageous number for a production of Miami Vice's size, but certainly not insignificant either.

''Michael is brilliant, but [people started to] view him as Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, out there in Miami with severed heads on stakes,'' says Barry Shabaka Henley, a Mann veteran who plays Crockett and Tubbs' police chief. ''I couldn't believe the stories I heard when I got back to Los Angeles. Mann had shot someone. The AD had shot someone. Foxx had crashed a plane. I was on [break from the movie] and ran into someone who worked on it and I said, ''What the hell is going on [down there]?' He's like, 'It's getting out of control.' ''

In late October, it all blew up. The production had just finished filming in one of the worst ghettos in Santo Domingo, a gang-controlled marketplace Mann describes as like ''the City of God in Rio.'' Shooting in the tough part of town had gone off without a hiccup: It was only when they moved into the tourist-choked Colonial District, just minutes from the best hotel in the city, that filming was interrupted with six sickening sharp bangs. ''I knew straight away they were gunshots,'' remembers Farrell. ''I'm thinking that there's 20 people down there to kidnap us and I'm going to be in a basement somewhere with a hood over my head, eating porridge and water for the next week.''

For a moment, chaos reigned. Production managers scrambled to pull cast and crew away from the windows. The security team locked down the location. Farrell grabbed Gong Li and his visiting father and huddled in a corner. An older crew member from Florida was found shivering in the back of a nearby truck. And no one seemed to know what would happen next.


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