There was, for one thing, the coronavirus. Mann was working in Japan when the pandemic hit, directing the pilot for the HBO Max series “Tokyo Vice,” about a young American crime reporter investigating the Yakuza. Shooting was barely underway when the virus halted production. At that point, it had been five years since the release of Mann’s last film, the underrated cybercrime thriller “Blackhat.” During this gap — one that “Ferrari” will finally close — he tried to bring several ambitious projects to life without success, facing the kind of disappointment all directors grow accustomed to, but perhaps especially those who make films that cost what Michael Mann films cost, and who insist on the complete creative control he insists on.

Mann’s artistic signature is to establish a core of painstaking realism, then create around it a heightened visual and emotional atmosphere that can edge, at times, into a kind of hallucinatory, macho camp. It’s an aesthetic Mann began exploring when he oversaw the epochal 1980s cop show “Miami Vice.” Since then, he has set forlorn peals of electric guitar over a parade of steely faces. He has filmed handsome men walking in slow motion in bulletproof vests, or gazing contemplatively at vast bodies of water that swirl in hypnotic abstraction, or striding beside private jets with sunglasses on. He has rigorously avoided comic relief, while allowing for moments of oblique humor, as when a hardened undercover cop announces, “I’m a fiend for mojitos.” He has scored sex scenes with the anguished rock of Audioslave. Somehow, it works: Chasms of unanswered yearning and alienation seem to roil beneath Mann’s images, and his movies lodge in the brain like fever dreams.

Mann enjoys a cultlike adoration of the kind typically reserved for directors further out on the fringes. His blockbusters have their ferocious partisans, as do his lesser-known pictures and outright bombs, which reliably come up for — and tend to reward — reappraisal. In 2014, the Criterion Collection put out a beautiful edition of his 1981 theatrical debut, “Thief,” helping to spark a broader re-engagement with Mann’s work that included retrospectives at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2016 and at the Museum of the Moving Image this spring. Film scholars devote books and podcast series to him. Underground clothing lines make coveted bootleg tees and caps in homage to his films. Among fellow directors, Mann’s admirers and acolytes include Alfonso Cuarón, Ava DuVernay and Christopher Nolan.

This February, Mann turned 79 and ushered in an improbably busy year. In April, his “Tokyo Vice” pilot made its debut, setting the show’s fleet feel and stark tone. Not long afterward, it was announced that the financing had materialized for “Ferrari.” And next month, in a particularly unexpected curveball, Mann will release his first-ever sequel, in the form of his first-ever novel, “Heat 2.”

In Modena, I saw firsthand how Mann’s interest in creating uncanny dream worlds rests upon a foundation of extreme nuts-and-bolts authenticity. Discussing possible shooting locales for “Ferrari,” and how they would be decorated, Mann paid special attention to the wallpaper that would hang in the bedroom of Enzo’s wife, Laura. His production designer, Maria Djurkovic, had gathered some options. “This doesn’t do it,” Mann said, dismissing them all. He tapped a photo of the original pattern: “It’s the sparseness of the ribbons that really gets at a certain heaviness. And this green.” To Mann, famously demanding, it was crucial to get it right. “We think she died in this room,” he said.

Pinned to a wall behind him were several images of vintage Ferraris painted different screaming reds. He’d tasked his crew with making full-body 3-D scans of these vehicles, crafting perfect facsimile shells and fitting these with contemporary drivetrains capable of high-performance racing. Special recordings, Mann said, would capture the engine sound of period-accurate “small-displacement V12s running very high, this shriek, driving down narrow canyons through masonry, then suddenly they’re out in an open field.” He smiled. “It’ll feel like the air is being ripped apart.”

Mann is something of a Method director, building immersive worlds by first immersing himself in their grain. “I have all this data, real people, real language,” he told me. “It’s not stuff you make up sitting in a room in L.A.” During commentary recorded for “Thief,” Mann talks with Caan about how top-of-the-line vault doors are layered with both copper (“obviously a very soft metal”) and titanium (“very hard”), “so that, when you drill it, if you have a hard bit to cut through the titanium, it hits the copper, it’s going to bind up,” Mann says, extolling “the value of this kind of detail” in making a performance feel truly lived in.

Daniel Day-Lewis, who is one of Mann’s close friends, told me about spending several days with him in the Alabama wilderness before making “Mohicans,” living off the land together in a recreated “18th-century hunter-trapper course.” There, they learned tracking techniques and methods for laying trap lines. They also did “a huge amount of weapons training — black-powder weapons, principally,” Day-Lewis said, explaining that such firsthand experience “creates for each person involved, on both sides of the camera, a belief in the authenticity of what they’re reaching for.”

I’d heard a rumor that, for a short passage in “The Insider,” which dramatizes the true story of a tobacco-industry whistleblower and the “60 Minutes” producer he confides in, Mann sneaked into Baalbek, Lebanon, making financial arrangements with political leaders so he could shoot in the neighborhood where the events depicted actually happened — acting as a middleman, in effect, between Disney and Hezbollah. When I asked Mann about this, he laughed and shook his head. “What happened is, we were going to go to Israel to shoot it,” in the majority-Arab city Umm al Fahm, “and Disney told us, No, no, it’s too dangerous, you can’t go there.” Mann called the journalist Lowell Bergman, portrayed in the movie by Pacino. He asked him, “Can you get us into Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley?” And then he notified the studio of this new plan. He received a frantic response. “They said: ‘Are you out of your [expletive] mind? Go to Israel!’”

No sequence in Mann’s filmography makes the case for the virtues of authenticity as explosively as the showstopping bank robbery in “Heat,” which spills into a broad-daylight melee in Downtown Los Angeles. De Niro and Val Kilmer, who plays his protégé, underwent urban-combat training beforehand, proving such capable students that, according to Mann, Fort Bragg instructors later screened footage of Kilmer reloading his rifle to show cadets how it was done. Before filming, dozens of cars were pummeled at a shooting range with high-caliber rounds, and the crew fitted the holes with detonatable squibs, painted over with Bondo putty. During filming, they triggered the squibs in time with the actors’ guns, ripping open the munitions-accurate damage. Nolan calls “Heat” Mann’s masterpiece, and when we spoke, he singled out a “tiny detail during the bank robbery, where the money is stacked and wrapped in plastic, and they put it into the duffel bags, then use a razor to slash the plastic and bang it, so that it comes loose and takes the shape of the bag.” This moment flies by, but it “grounds the entire robbery in a technical reality that you respect and enjoy,” Nolan said. “You feel you’re watching a film about experts made by experts.” The sequence’s most indelible aspect is its terrifying sound. Mann recorded the gunfire — “full-load” blanks, containing the same powder charge as live ammo — not on a soundstage, as is common practice, but out on the streets, as it reverberated off the sunny steel-and-glass canyons onscreen.

Mann is committed to total veracity, it seems, except when the prerogatives of compelling image-making win out. While plotting the restoration of Enzo’s neighborhood barbershop in Modena, still open, to its 1957 appearance, he indicated an archival image and said, “Even if the real chairs were darker, I want them to look the way they look in this light.” Later that day, he told me, “all these decisions — every one means something, particularly when you’re dealing with interiors, because that character picked that lamp, picked that fabric, picked that curtain, picked that cheap radio.” He recalled the home décor of the serial killer Francis Dolarhyde, in Mann’s 1986 Hannibal Lecter movie, “Manhunter.” “He’s got the vertical control on his television so he can see the subcarrier frequency, because he thinks there’s a message in there. There are so many pieces of psychopathy that are manifested in the shape of a toaster. Really! It was, ‘Find me a psychotic kitchen chair.’”

Mann has constantly evolved the look of his movies. His images have become less straightforwardly beautiful, his palettes increasingly leached of color, his framing less formal. Hand-held cameras drift, faces appear unfocused in extreme close-up and the digitally captured dark of nighttime degrades into extravagantly pixelated noise. But thematically he has remained consistent, returning continually to heroes who are peeled away from the dominant ideologies of what Mann has called “the normal range of human experience,” and, from this remove, come to see questions of selfhood, coercion and power more clearly than most of us.

‘Michael’s an unusual blend of things,’ Day-Lewis said. ‘He’s an intellectual, but he thinks like an engineer, and he has the spirit of an artist.’

Often, these characters’ worldviews are forged in prison. In a 2017 interview, Mann recalled the lasting impression of meeting convicts decades earlier who devoured philosophical texts, not with the abstract curiosity of “undergraduates,” but because they had “fundamental questions that they wanted answered, like: ‘How should I view my life in time? What’s property?’ They’ll read Kierkegaard, and Sartre and Marx and Engels. You encounter it with people that have sixth-grade educations, who become quite astute in this raw kind of way.” Frank in “Thief,” Neil in “Heat” and the hacker Nick Hathaway in “Blackhat” all share versions of this pedigree.

Mann told me about a particularly memorable encounter he had inside Folsom, making “Jericho Mile”: “I had one guy in Black Guerrilla Family, weight lifter, 6-foot-2, dangerous guy doing a life sentence. I said, ‘Hey, I’d like you to play such-and-such a role.’” The inmate rebuffed him, explaining, “ ‘I’d be allowing you to appropriate the surplus value of my bad karma,’” Mann said. “He wasn’t trying to impress me with big words. He was serious. He’d read Marx and Engels and knew about surplus value, and he was here because karma put him here.”

Like many of Mann’s protagonists, I remarked, this man seemed to have a bird’s-eye view of his position amid various superstructures. Mann nodded. “If you’re an experienced convict,” he said, “you have a systems analysis.”

The day after I visited the “Ferrari” production offices, Mann picked me up in the lobby of my hotel, and we walked down Modena’s cobblestone streets to get some lunch. He moved spryly, dodging the delivery trucks, mopeds and bicycles that whizzed around us. I’d heard that Mann keeps detailed daily journals going back decades, and at our table he set down his own voice recorder next to mine, along with a thick Mnemosyne notebook bulging with color-coded Post-it notes. “Glass of wine?” he asked.