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.
He was influenced by Robert Kramer's Ice, John Cassavetes's Shadows, Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert, and Norman Mailer's Maidstone.
[6] Mann began making short films while in high school and studied briefly at Vermont's Bennington College before receiving a B.A.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[23][24] Narrated by actor Woody Harrelson, it premiered at the 1999 Toronto International Film Festival and won the Genie Award for Best Feature Length Documentary.
[35] Mann has served as mentor to and worked with many filmmakers from the Toronto New Wave of the 1980s, including Atom Egoyan, Bruce McDonald, Jeremy Podeswa, and Peter Mettler.