‘THE BIG, CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE – THERE’S NOTHING LIKE IT’
MICHAEL MANN
Sitting in his office in Los Angeles, Michael Mann is positioned in the bottom left-hand corner of the Zoom frame, a widescreen window looming behind him. Even for interviews, it seems, he masterfully maps out the image, just as the characters in his movies are backdropped by vast spaces and towering structures, and never more so than in Heat.
Set in a Los Angeles of shimmering steel and twinkling lights, Mann’s operatic tale of obsessed LA cop Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) tracking master thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) is the filmmaker’s magnum opus – no mean feat given he has Thief, Manhunter, The Last Of The Mohicans, The Insider, Ali, Miami Vice (film and TV show) and Collateral on his CV. Heat is more than just a crime picture. It takes in love and death, life and work… the whole shebang.
What’s more, its characters have consumed 79-year-old Mann for most of his adult life, ever since Charles ‘Chuck’ Adamson, a former Chicago detective who acted as technical adviser on the director’s theatrical debut Thief (1981), told him about the real-life McCauley. That’s right, he existed: Adamson staked out his crew only to witness them walk away from a heist they’d been planning for weeks when McCauley spotted a rogue vehicle in the parking lot; hunter and quarry later sat down for coffee, comparing lives; and finally, during another robbery, Adamson shot and killed his man.
In 1989, Mann turned the stranger-than-fiction story into TV movie LA Takedown. In ’95, he expanded and elevated it into Heat. And now, in 2022, Mann and award-winning author Meg Gardiner have co-written Heat 2, an epic crime novel in which the complex plot does a The Godfather: Part II by unfurling both forwards and backwards. In the prequel segments, set in Chicago ’88, a ruthless young Hanna’s pursuit of a crew propels him unknowingly into the orbit of McCauley – a very different McCauley to the controlled, calculating crim we meet in Heat. And in the sequel sections, set primarily in 2000, the action migrates to Paraguay and Mexico before returning to the mean streets of LA.
“The characters never ceased to be alive,” says Mann, shuffling papers and tapping at a keyboard as he talks. In a week’s time he starts shooting long-cherished biopic his first feature since 2015’s underrated cybercrime thriller Every minute counts. “The only reason not to go further with the characters was because Neil McCauley was dead [ Heat]. At one point, it occurred to me how to finesse that in having a prequel in which events occur that Hanna is also involved in – although him and McCauley have no contact. And in some of those events six or seven years prior to the movie, Chris Shiherlis Heat] is involved. But then events occur well after the motion picture, and that event unwittingly means Hanna can become an agent, almost acting on Neil McCauley’s behalf, in a way.”
