Mann stated that the first film he watched was This Is Cinerama, a documentary. He considers A Hard Day's Night his favourite film and stated that it "really changed my life" as it made him choose to become a filmmaker rather than a musician.[5]
Mann met Elia Kazan at the Cannes Film Festival and asked if he should go to film school. Kazan told him not to study film, but to make them instead.[6] Mann did not attend film school; instead, he learned filmmaking first-hand and using his own funds.[9] In an interview with Now, he described this process:
Every film was my last movie, I would go into debt, make another film to get myself out of debt. That's how I actually needed to keep going.[9]
Mann attempted to make a documentary about the new wave music concert Heat Wave, but licensing issues prevented him. After the success of The Only Game in Town he met Emile de Antonio, who agreed to become the film's executive producer. However, five days before filming started Mann was told that they did not have enough money. Mann decided to instead make a film about avant-garde jazz, Imagine the Sound.[10][9] The film, released in 1981, deals with the once-controversial genre of free jazz.[12][13][14] Critic and film historian Jonathan Rosenbaum has said that Imagine the Sound "may be the best documentary on free jazz that we have."[15]
Mann met Joe Medjuck while attending the University of Toronto and Medjuck hired him in 1984, for Listen to the City, his only fiction film. Mann received a three-picture contract with Ivan Reitman Productions.[6][9] Mann wrote a comedy for Bill Murray, Hoods in the Woods, and made a behind-the-scenes documentary for Legal Eagles.[17]
Mann has also made numerous short films, including Echoes Without Saying (1983), about the publishing and printing company Coach House Press and its founder Stan Bevington, and Marcia Resnick's Bad Boys (1985), about the New York based photographer.[9]
Mann found success with his 1988 documentary Comic Book Confidential.[18] The film is a survey of the history of the comic book medium in the United States from the 1930s to the 1980s, as an art form and in social context.[19]Confidential was first released theatrically in Canada in 1988, and in the United States on April 27, 1989.[20] The film received the 1989 Genie Award for Best Feature Length Documentary from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television.[21] Caryn James of The New York Times found the film deft and intelligent—it "takes off when it abandons the archives and focuses on the creators," but "it plays to the converted," and its attempt to relate comics to social context is "fleeting."[22]
In 2003, Mann co-founded a film distribution company called FilmsWeLike with Gary Topp.[27] FilmWeLike's curation has been described by Vice as a "veritable auteur smorgasbord."[28]
