It was only a matter of seconds before Chicago stole the show. Having been introduced as a visionary and a master of lurid cinema, Michael Mann took the stage at the BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn earlier this month for the keynote of the career retrospective Heat and Vice, which launched on the Humboldt Park native’s 73rd birthday. (The series wrapped last week.) Asked off the top by moderator Bilge Ebiri why he became a filmmaker, Mann looked homeward. “I had a visual appreciation for scenes in Chicago,” he said. “A steel bridge on a rainy night, the spaces, the way snow fell on the prairie outside Chicago. But I didn’t put that together with film. I wasn’t doing anything with a visual medium. I was an English major caught in the anguish of not having any idea what I wanted to do with my life.” After a screening of G.W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925) during a film-history course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he strolled down Bascom Hill. “It was a freezing, crystal-clear night—you could see every star in the sky—and it suddenly struck me: you’re going to make films. It’s one of the only two or three times in my life where I was assaulted with total knowingness. That was it, I was going to be a filmmaker.”

As Mann explained to a full house in Brooklyn, he saw his hometown with fresh eyes after returning to Chicago from film school in London in the late 1960s. To grapple with the changes then taking place in American society, he made the documentary 17 Days Down the Line. “It was a road trip from Chicago to LA, through what was happening in America in 1970, with myself and a friend from Chicago who had been a Newsweek journalist.” (Though the film remains largely unseen, Mann noted that riot footage he filmed in Albuquerque can be glimpsed in his 2001 film Ali.)

Mann’s trademark meticulousness was in high gear throughout the Heat and Vice series, particularly in the planning stages. Reached by phone, Schawn Belston, head of archival and restoration work for 20th Century Fox—whom Mann first connected with while restoring The Last of the Mohicans in the 90s—detailed the process. Mann’s own vault prints were exhumed. A new cut of his most recent film, Blackhat, was prepared and customized exclusively for the retrospective. Belston himself was dispatched to Brooklyn to personally inspect the projectors and monitor light levels. “Michael is demanding about exactly how he wants everything to be,” he said.