When the director Michael Mann began work on his new film, “Blackhat,” an international thriller about good and wicked hackers, he wanted to start by researching some technological basics. Really, really elemental stuff. Like: “What’s electricity?”

洛杉矶——导演迈克尔·曼(Michael Mann)的新片《骇客交锋》(Blackhat)是一部国际背景下的惊悚剧，讲述亦正亦邪的黑客们的故事，着手准备时，他想先研究点技术方面的基础知识。就是最最基本的东西，比如：“电力是什么？”
“How does it flow?” he wondered. “It’s not linear.”
“它是怎么流动的？”他想，“它可不是线性的。”
Also, “how does a single transistor work?” he asked. “How do these chips work?”
还有，“单晶体管是怎么工作的？”他问道。“芯片呢？”

Investigating these and other “dopey fundamentals,” as he put it, was his way into a turbocharged story that stars Chris Hemsworth, Viola Davis and Wang Leehom, and aims to bring authentic depictions of cyberterrorism to the multiplex.
他借由研究诸如此类他所谓“傻瓜基本知识”，来深入这个高速运转的故事。这部影片由克里斯·海姆斯沃斯(Chris Hemsworth)、维奥拉·戴维斯(Viola Davis)和王力宏等人主演，希望能在多厅影院里真实地再现网络恐怖主义。
“The way my mind works, I have to understand the basic building blocks, then I can generate up,” Mr. Mann said in an interview in his quiet production office here. Given the resources, learning the rudiments of technology “is simple,” he added. “Everything else is terribly complex.”
“我的想法是，我得理解最基本的元素，然后才能去构建它们，”曼在自己安静的制片办公室里接受了采访。以他的资源，学习这些技术基础知识“很简单”。他补充说，“其他东西才是复杂得可怕。”
For Mr. Mann, the writer, director and producer best known for muscular films like “Heat,” “The Insider” “Ali” and “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Blackhat,” which is due Jan. 16, posed challenges unlike anything he’d ever tackled, including how to depict the tedium of coding in dramatic fashion. But at 71, with four Oscar nominations and much critical adulation to his credit, Mr. Mann remains undimmed. Surrounded by Muhammad Ali memorabilia in his office, his footnotable conversation hurtled from Eero Saarinen to Brancusi to the mechanics of a municipal storm drain; at one point, he diagramed how computer bits work.
曼是作家、导演和制作人，以执导《盗火线》(Heat)、《惊爆内幕》(The Insider)、《拳王阿里》(Ali)、《最后的莫西干人》(The Last of the Mohicans)等强悍的男人片闻名。将在1月16日上映的《骇客交锋》对于他来说是种挑战，要处理各种之前从未处理过的东西，比如怎样用激动人心的方式来展现枯燥的编程过程。但71岁的曼曾四获奥斯卡提名，在评论界赢得好评无数，他的思路一直都很清晰。他的办公室里到处都是拳王阿里的纪念品，他的谈话亮点不断，从伊洛·沙里宁(Eero Saarinen)到布兰诺西(Brancusi)，再到暴雨排水道市政工程的结构；甚至还画图示意电脑零件是怎么工作的。
With “Blackhat,” he even attended Comic Con for the first time. And as a filmmaker well-versed in black markets, corruption, the criminal underbelly and the law (Mr. Mann’s credits include “Miami Vice” and numerous prison dramas), the film’s unexpected resonance in the aftermath of the recent cyberattack on Sony served only to highlight his belief that the premise was ripe for exploration.
为了推广《骇客交锋》，他甚至第一次参加了Comic Con动漫大会。作为电影人，他擅长拍摄黑市、腐败、地下犯罪和法律（曼还拍过《迈阿密风云》[Miami Vice]等众多监狱影片），《骇客交锋》意外地与最近索尼公司遭黑客攻击的事件相呼应，这更加凸显出他的信念：对这类电影进行探索的时机已经成熟。
“It’s almost like there’s an invisible kind of exoskeleton above the layer in which we think our lives take place on planet Earth, that’s made up of interconnectedness and data,” he said. “We’re swimming around in it, and everything is totally porous, vulnerable and accessible. And if it hasn’t been targeted, that’s only because somebody hasn’t bothered to yet.”
“我们在地球中生活的区域之上，仿佛覆盖着一层隐形的外骨骼，由互联的数据构成，”他说，“我们就在其中游泳，一切都是可渗透的、脆弱的、可进入的。如果这个题材还没有被拍摄过，或许只是因为还没人愿意费这个力气吧。”
The idea for the film — which, he recalled in his implacably precise manner, he first had on Aug. 8, 2011 — was inspired by Stuxnet, the computer worm that was identified in 2010, after it had struck an Iranian nuclear facility. “Blackhat,” the term for a vicious hacker (“white hat” is a good guy), starts with a malware attack on a Chinese nuclear reactor. Mr. Wang plays the M.I.T.-trained Chinese military official tasked with finding the culprit; Mr. Hemsworth plays his old programming-whiz college roommate, now incarcerated, whose prison sentence is commuted in exchange for helping solve the puzzle. This being a Michael Mann movie, that means using fists as well as keyboards. Car chases, too.
他极为精确地回忆，这部影片的创意是在2011年8月8日产生的，灵感来自2010年发现的电脑蠕虫Stuxnet，当时它攻击了伊朗的核设施。《骇客交锋》的英文名字“Blackhat”既“黑帽”是指邪恶的黑客，（“白帽”是指好黑客）。在片中，一个“黑帽”用恶意软件攻击了中国的核反应堆，王力宏饰演一个麻省理工学院培养的中国军官，负责找出肇事者，海姆斯沃斯饰演他大学期间的室友，是编程高手，因犯罪入狱，为了获得减刑来帮助王解决这个难题。既然这是一部迈克尔·曼的电影，所以除了键盘，拳头也是必不可少的，当然还有追车场面。
Mr. Mann said he had long wanted to make a movie in Asia, bolstered by a recent visit to Indonesia for another project. “Blackhat” is set in Hong Kong, Jakarta and Malaysia. “There’s an explosive energy,” he said of Jakarta, reeling off stats about its population and architecture. He likened Kuala Lumpur to “Islamic Brentwood,” the wealthy Los Angeles enclave. And he was eager to shoot in Hong Kong, partly because of the neon. “I wanted it to be an atmosphere of just intense visual, chromatic, busyness and liveliness,” he said. (He prized his cinematographer, Stuart Dryburgh, a new partner, because of his soft use of light as a counterweight.)
曼说，他早就想在亚洲拍一部电影，近期他又为另一个计划去了一趟印度尼西亚。《骇客交锋》的背景发生在香港、雅加达和马来西亚。“那里有一种爆炸般的能量，”他这样描述雅加达，还一口气报出那里的人口和建筑统计数据。他把吉隆坡比作“伊斯兰世界的布伦特伍德”——后者是洛杉矶一块富庶的城中城。他热切地希望在香港拍摄，部分是因为那里的霓虹灯。“我希望它形成一种氛围，非常视觉化、五光十色，有繁忙和生机勃勃的感觉，”他说。他还夸赞了自己的摄影师，新搭档斯图尔特·德里布(Stuart Dryburgh)，因为他温和地处理光线，将之作为一种平衡力量。
The movie starts with a nearly five-minute dramatization of code speeding through a network, shooting lights and grids, and a reverse internal shot of a keystroke. Mr. Mann wanted to make it as true as possible; he got a 3-D computer model from Qualcomm, the semiconductor maker, to help visualize it. “So the geography is real,” he said. But “if a conductive metal has a surfeit of electrons or no electrons, it does not change color — that’s fiction. I had to present it some way; I didn’t want to do motorcycles on a 3-D grid like ‘Tron.’ ”
影片开头用仅五分钟的时间以戏剧化的形式呈现了电脑编码在网络上的快速传播，有光线、网格以及键盘背面内部的画面。曼希望这这一幕尽可能真实，他使用半导体制造商高通公司(Qualcomm)制作的3-D电脑模型来将这一幕变得更加形象。“这些布局都是真的，”他说。但是“如果一块传导金属过量负载了电子，或上面没有电子，它就不会变色——这是虚构的。我得把它用某些方式表现出来，我不想像《创战纪》(Tron)里那样，用3-D网格呈现摩托车。”
Capturing the flow of data has bedeviled every filmmaker who’s ever made a movie about programming, said Steve F. Anderson, a film professor at the University of Southern California who studies depictions of technology on screen. “3-D fly-throughs, psychedelic explosions of 1’s and 0’s, an array of monitors and techno music” are all part of what Mr. Anderson calls “Hollywood technological-anxiety films.”
如何捕捉信息流，这令所有拍摄与编程有关的导演都感到头疼。南加州大学电影教授史蒂夫·F·安德森(Steve F. Anderson)专门研究如何电影中如何呈现技术。“飞过银幕的3-D效果，数字‘1’与‘0’迷幻地爆炸开来，一系列显示屏，以及电脑风格的音乐”，这些都是安德森所谓的“好莱坞技术焦虑电影”的组成部分。
“They’re almost universally dystopian, and whenever there’s some great new technology that’s going to solve all our problems, it will invariably go awry and create drama and chaos,” Mr. Anderson explained. Hollywood, he added, “has a love-hate relationship with technology, because it also wants to fetishize it.”
“他们大都是反乌托邦主义者，只要出现什么伟大的、能解决所有问题的新技术，就总会出错，造成戏剧性情节和混乱，”安德森解释。他补充说，好莱坞“对技术有种爱恨交织的态度，因为好莱坞也想崇拜技术。”
Enter what he calls the superhacker, “someone who can seamlessly traverse the digital world and real world.” (This is in contrast to the other stereotype, “the pudgy, sexually repressed, sedentary, overweight geek.”) Though “The Matrix” set the superhacker standard, a prime example Mr. Anderson noted was Hugh Jackman in the 2001 movie “Swordfish.” In an online archive of hacker clips that Mr. Anderson maintains, there’s Mr. Jackman, sexy in a loose shirt, pounding red wine as he types awkwardly, shouting “Oh yeah!” at his seven oversize monitors.
安德森所谓的超级骇客是指“一个可以无缝隙穿越数码世界与真实世界的人”（这种人和电影中的另一种老套模式正好相反——也就是那种“矮墩墩、性压抑、总是坐着、体重超重的书呆子极客”）。《黑客帝国》(The Matrix)为超级黑客树立了标准，不过安德森指出，最好的例子还要算休·杰克曼(Hugh Jackman)在2001年的电影《剑鱼行动》(Swordfish)里饰演的角色。安德森维护着一个在线档案馆，里面都是各种电影中的黑客形象片段，在这个网站上，可以看到杰克曼在该片中饰演的角色，穿着松松垮垮的衬衣，样子非常性感，边喝红酒边笨拙地打字，对着七台超大的显示器喊“欧耶！”
In “Blackhat,” Mr. Hemsworth, the muscle-bound Australian star of “Thor,” is superhacker incarnate. In real life, he told a Comic Con audience in July, he had to have one of Mr. Mann’s tech experts teach him how to type with more than two fingers.
海姆斯沃斯是一位肌肉发达的澳大利亚演员，曾主演电影《雷神》(Thor)，在《骇客交锋》里，他就是一位超级黑客。7月份，他在Comic Con漫展上告诉观众们说，现实生活里，他得让曼请来的技术专家教他怎么用十个手指打字，而不是用两个食指。
To the grumble that few hackers look like Mr. Hemsworth, Mr. Mann invoked another consultant, Stephen Watt, a 7-foot blond weight lifter turned cybercriminal. “They look like everything,” Mr. Mann said. He choose stars who are unfamiliar to American audiences, like Mr. Wang, an American-born pop star in China, and the Chinese actress Tang Wei, who plays his sister, a systems engineer who becomes Mr. Hemsworth’s love interest.
有人抱怨说很少有黑客会长成海姆斯沃斯这个样子，曼提起自己的一位顾问——斯蒂芬·瓦特(Stephen Watt)，他身高七英尺，是一位金发的举重运动员，后来成了网络犯罪分子。“他们长什么样的都有，”曼说。他挑选的都是美国观众不熟悉的演员，比如王力宏，他是一个出生在美国的中国流行歌手，还有中国女演员汤唯，在片中饰演王力宏的姊妹，一个系统工程师，海姆斯沃斯爱上了她。
The story was so closely guarded that when Mr. Wang auditioned, he used a “Miami Vice” script, he said. But once he understood the part, its appeal was its atypical “portrayal of the Asian male.” His character speaks Mandarin and perfect English. “That is the exact opposite of every other script I’ve read for an Asian role,” he said.
故事情节被严格保密，王力宏说，自己试镜时，用的还是《迈阿密风云》的剧本。在搞清楚自己的角色后，这个非典型的“亚洲男性形象”引起了他的兴趣。他饰演的角色说普通话，也说一口完美的英语，“这和我看到过的所有亚洲角色的剧本都不同，”他说。
Mr. Mann has his stars read together — “a sneaky way to be rewriting dialogue,” he said. His process, honed early in his career as a TV writer in the 1970s and ’80s, begins with a longhand outline. Once the story takes shape, “I just dictate up the screenplay,” he said, as though channeling different characters and conceiving their lines extemporaneously was no big deal. “I discovered a long time ago, I cannot get it down fast enough,” he added. (For a while, he employed court stenographers.)
曼让所有演员聚在一起读剧本——“一种重写对话的狡猾方式，”他说。他的工作方式是先手写一份大纲——这是他在事业生涯早期，也就是20世纪70到80年代期间担任电视剧编剧时形成的。一旦故事成型，“我就口述剧本，”他说，好像刻画不同角色并为他们即兴创造台词根本算不上什么大事。“很早以前，我发现我没法足够快地把它们写下来，”他补充说（有段时间他还雇用过速记员）。
Mr. Wang, 38, who called for an interview from Taiwan at 3:30 a.m. local time while finishing an album, was impressed with Mr. Mann’s vitality. In their 66-day shoot on 74 locations, “there was not one day that he slept more than four hours,” Mr. Wang said. “He had to have two assistants on rotation to keep up with him.”
38岁的王力宏于当地时间凌晨3：30在台湾接受了电话采访，当时他刚刚录完一张专辑。曼的活力令王力宏印象深刻。在为期66天的拍片过程中，他们在74个地点进行拍摄，“他每天睡觉从没超过四小时，”王力宏说，“他得请两个助理轮班倒，才能跟上他的进度。”
From the start, Mr. Mann has been confident of his instincts. A Chicago native — his favorite time of the year there is January, he said, “because it’s crystal; you see forever” — he moved to London to study film after discovering Stanley Kubrick as an undergraduate. Returning to the United States, he soon developed a crisp visual style. In the interview, he wore a gray shirt that set off his gray-blue eyes in his gray-carpeted office, and spoke in ecstatic detail about the volume of contrasting colors and patterns in Indonesia. (His wife, Summer Mann, is a painter.)
从一开始，曼就很信任自己的直觉。一年中他最喜欢的时间是一月，他说“因为它清澈透明，你永远都能看见”。他是芝加哥人，大学时看过斯坦利·库布里克(Stanley Kubrick)的电影后就来到伦敦学电影。回到美国后，他发展出一种干脆爽快的视觉风格。在采访中，他穿着一件灰色衬衫，衬托他灰蓝色的双眼，他的办公室里也铺着灰色的地毯，他入迷地详细描述着印度尼西亚的大量对比色和花纹（他的妻子萨莫·曼[Summer Mann]是画家）。
Mr. Mann’s other hallmark is a fascination with criminals. Asked if he had ever been arrested, he declined to answer, eventually allowing only that he had never been incarcerated “like the people in my movies.” (Let the record show: Michael Mann has never killed a guy.) But he recounted his first time inside a maximum-security prison, where he was working as an uncredited writer on Dustin Hoffman’s 1978 movie “Straight Time,” with awe.
曼的另一个重要特点是对罪犯的迷恋。被问到是否有过遭到逮捕的经历时，他拒绝回答，最后终于承认，他从未“像我电影里的那些人那样”遭到监禁（纪录显示，迈克尔·曼从来没杀过人）。但他回忆自己自己第一次走进一座最高安全级别监狱时的情形，当时他为达斯汀·霍夫曼(Dustin Hoffman)1978年的电影《暗夜心声》(Straight Time)担任不署名编剧，满心敬畏地到那座监狱里参观。
“Folsom was a revelation,” Mr. Mann said. “I thought there’d be draconian guards, gray men.” Instead, “the convicts had a kind of brio and an aggression,” a vibrancy, and they were tuned in to life outside. “The territorial compression of the human spirit,” he said, makes for an intense and unlimited palette.
“福尔松监狱对于我来说是一种启示，”曼说。“我本来觉得那里肯定会有严厉的警卫，都是身穿灰衣的人们。”相反，“罪犯们有一种生机勃勃，有种侵略性，”他们有活力，和外界生活保持着一致。他说“将人类灵魂限制在一个地域之内”，只是造就了一个浓烈丰富的调色板。
The emotions translated to the canvas of cybercrime and code breaking. “I understand,” he said, “because I was a young male, that challenge of, ‘You telling me I can’t get in here?’ You wanna bet?’ ”
这些情感也被绘制在网络犯罪与破解代码的画布之上。“我理解，”他说，“因为我曾是个年轻的男人，总在挑战，‘你说我干不了这个？你想打赌吗？’”
Though Mr. Mann was eager to make an of-the-moment movie, hacker films typically don’t age well, Mr. Anderson said. (See: that clip of Mr. Jackman.) He suggested that perhaps Hollywood’s narrow, dweebs-or-supermen portrayal may even damage technological literacy. “It doesn’t leave much room for ordinary people who just want to learn to write code,” he said.
尽管曼很渴望拍一部反映当下的电影，但安德森说，黑客电影一般并不成熟（参见杰克曼的电影片段）。他说，好莱坞对黑客的塑造非常狭窄，不是怪人就超级英雄，这甚至也损害到了技术领域。“它没有为想学代码的正常人留下什么空间，”他说。
For Mr. Mann, who is known to re-edit his movies for DVD and has had final cut for his entire career — “I think it’s a moral right,” he said — concerns like that may come second to auteurism. Asked if he made the film as an entree into the lucrative Asian market, he said no. “I don’t think of the audience; I just think of what’s interesting to me,” he said. His creative blueprint, he added, is “absolutely intuitive and visceral.”
众所周知，曼在自己的电影推出DVD版的时候，还要再剪辑一次，作为最终版本，他在整个事业生涯期间都是如此——“我觉得这是理所当然的权利，”他说。对于他来说，上面的种种问题和导演主创论相比都是第二位的。被问到他是否把这部电影当做敲门砖，以图打入利润丰厚的亚洲市场，他说并非如此。“我不去考虑观众，我只想拍自己感兴趣的东西，”他说。他补充说，他的创意蓝图“完全是出于直觉，发自内心的”。
“The way in is usually through the amygdala,” he said, “not the cerebral cortex.”
“通向内心的道路经过扁桃体，而不是经过大脑皮层，”他说。