Shimmering neon reflected on the spotless bonnets of expensive sports cars. Sleek speedboats piloted across ice-blue water by Armani-clad criminals with strict moral codes. Bone-weary cops who view their underworld adversaries with professional respect. That’s far from the totality of Michael Mann’s career, but it sums up the stylish world with which his name is synonymous. For over three decades, the director has painted both small and large screens with beautifully lit pictures that dwell on the violent lives of terse, tough men. Men the calibre of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Heat, James Caan in Thief, Tom Cruise in Collateral, and even Don Johnson, who may have sported pastels in Miami Vice, but was a man with a guarded exterior who weighed his words.

Chris Hemsworth, who plays the hacker at the centre of Mann’s latest film, Blackhat, may use codes and viruses rather than glass-cutters and sub-machine guns, but he fits perfectly into the director’s archetype of a male lead: stoic, unsentimental and dispassionate. Yet real-life events suggest that maybe this archetype isn’t as reliable as it used to be. In the US, Blackhat debuted a week after North Korea temporarily crippled Sony Pictures, an action of massive consequence without a steel-jawed hero anywhere near it. I ask Mann whether he watched what happened to The Interview and experienced a degree of trepidation for his own release. The 71-year-old director waves away the question like a mosquito buzzing around his face.

“On a scale of one to 10 of intrusion, what happened at Sony was about a four,” he says, his Chicago accent still broad. “You have one country’s fighter jets that are being stolen from another country’s defence contractors. There’s malware called Shamoon that overwrites on the actual disc so there’s no way to recover data.” Mann, who showed up to our meeting bearing a stack of official-looking folders, reaches into the pile and pulls out some photocopied documents that delve even deeper into the intricacies of Shamoon. He directs my attention to the document with a steely gaze that implies: “Don’t bother me with Seth Rogen, when Shamoon’s out there”.

Where Mann’s heroes tend towards the mythic – Will Smith in Ali, Daniel Day-Lewis, in The Last Of The Mohicans - his villains are cut from a different, albeit, beautifully tailored, cloth. From the titular character in 1981’s Thief to De Niro in Heat and Johnny Depp’s John Dillinger in Public Enemies, these characters are bonded by a common motive. They are meticulous in their criminality. They take pride in their jobs, striving to get in and out with the least amount of bloodshed. But the villains of cyberspace exist in a different world with different motives. Some crave profit but others thrive on chaos. They’re not cool criminals with expensive eyewear.

“A lot of American hackers, probably east European hackers, are 14-, 15-year-old kids, who have the skills and they also have that testosterone splashing about in them,” he says. “They hear: ‘You can’t go in there’, and they think: ‘Wanna bet?’”

I bring up the hacking of Xbox and PlayStation consoles over Christmas as an example. Again, Mann regards the interruption as a mosquito. He casts a reverent glance at his stack of documents and unleashes a torrent of information.

“What you’ve done is interconnect everybody,” he continues. “You’ve democratised the access. It’s the ability of a third-world country that is deficient in infrastructure to leap over industrialisation, electric grids and manufacturing, and just use smartphones that are connected to the world. There are six- and seven-year-olds who are coding in Estonia. There are criminal sub-classes that come from the [former] Soviet bloc. They have a great, advanced education system there. Putin wouldn’t be Putin in any other country. When those folk in the 90s started emigrating, particularly to New York, the level of education they brought with them was astonishing and made it very difficult for law enforcement.”

Mann spent three years researching cyber-terrorism for Blackhat, consulting with private security firms, many of whom employ reformed hackers. This is evident in the breathless tumble of information he strives to impart. It’s obvious that he’s experienced an epiphany about the world he thought he lived in, one he has attributed to his discovery of the Stuxnet worm, which in 2010 impaired Iran’s nuclear capability.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest On set with Chris Hemsworth. Photograph: Frank Connor

“My perspective changed”, he says. “The veil lifted. This is the way the world is. There’s a total interconnectedness of data and the world is a totally different place because of it. It’s like a fish talking about the water it swims in. It’s all around us, this kind of cocoon second-net atmosphere that surrounds us.”

Shunned by the US multiplex audience, Blackhat – about an incarcerated hacker promised his freedom by the FBI if he can take down the elusive mastermind behind a series of ever-escalating cyber attacks – nonetheless became something of a cause célèbre. “It isn’t a failed action movie, it’s a big-budget avant garde film,” was a typical comment. For me, the passion which the subject obviously ignited in the director is almost entirely absent on screen. Hemsworth, Mann’s latest terse, tough hero, affects a Stallone mumble and spends the merest flicker of time flapping his fingers on the computer keyboard. More than anything else, Blackhat marks my first time sitting through a Michael Mann film and not emerging thinking: “This is a world I want to live in.”

Look at the seductive way he portrays the hidden corners of Los Angeles in Heat and Collateral. Look at the underrated big-screen version of Miami Vice with its darkness and almost palpable paranoia. Look at the The Last Of The Mohicans! These are all heady visions from a man who sees his worlds in a singular way. I could have asked him about those films: about directing the iconic De Niro-Pacino face-off in Heat. I could have asked about working with Will Smith in Ali or Russell Crowe in The Insider. I could have asked about the Miami Vice series, a TV show so influential it changed the way the world shaved.

I could have asked about all that, but instead I used the remainder of our time to ask about Crime Story, his post-Miami Vice TV show which debuted in 1986 and lasted two seasons. Crime Story was typical Mann in its subject matter and eye for detail, but wildly untypical in its overheated emotions and shocking – for US network television in the 80s – bursts of violence. No Mann heroes were ever tougher than the cops in Crime Story; none of his subsequent villains were ever more diabolical. Set in 1963 Chicago, it starred real-life detective Dennis Farina as the hardest of a squad of hard-nosed cops; and, in a supporting role, John Santucci a real-life jewel thief who’d been arrested by Farina on numerous occasions. I want to know how that worked.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Knight of cops: Dennis Farina with co-stars Hanna Cox and Julia Roberts in Crime Story. Photograph: Getty Images

“Farina would kid around with John but he would also disapprove of him,” recalls Mann. “They were different ethically and morally. John was an informant and when he ratted out an organised crime figure, Dennis knew for a long time he wouldn’t talk to him after that.”

Clearly happy to talk about something not directly related to cyber crime, Mann continues: “The people who Crime Story is about are all people I knew. I went to high school with Tony Spilotro, who was portrayed by Joe Pesci in Casino. When I was shooting the pilot, Spilotro heard about it and he hired a private detective and said: ‘Go find out what that guy Michael Mann is doing.’ He hired a guy called Anthony Pellicano [latterly a notorious Hollywood detective, beloved and feared by celebrities]. Pellicano made an amateur call to me, like: ‘I’m the manager of an actress and I want you to give me your script.’”

Mann adopts a tough-guy pose and snarls “fuck off” in response to the memory of Pellicano. It’s easy to see why he has devoted the majority of his career to chronicling the criminal element: he is enthralled by it. Warming to his theme, his conversational pace quickens. “Then, when we were shooting in Chicago, a guy came on set and is talking to Dennis Farina, who was still a major detective in the crime unit and a very rough guy, and he came over to me and said: ‘Someone wants to say something to you.’ This guy leaned over to me, shook my hand – his hands were huge – he was a major organised-crime guy from Chicago, and he said to me: ‘You’re not going to have any more trouble from the little guy.’ I didn’t know what he meant. Two days later, they found Spilotro and his brother dead in a cornfield. It was an interesting time.” Glad I asked!

Blackhat is in cinemas from Friday