After confirming last week Heat 2 would be his next production, Michael Mann is once again speaking about his plans for adapting his and Meg Gardiner’s novel which they published last year. In an interview with Vulture, Mann spoke about the difficulties of recasting Heat‘s iconic characters, which were led by Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, and further teased Adam Driver’s potential involvement.
Heat 2 is both a prequel and sequel to Mann’s 1995 crime drama Heat. A portion of the novel takes place years before Heat when De Niro’s Neil McCauley was just forming his philosophy of keeping no attachments and Pacino’s Vincent Hanna was climbing his way up the police ranks in Chicago. The other half of the novel takes place immediately after the film as Val Kilmer’s Chris Shiherlis escapes LA in the aftermath of the downtown shootout and the years after he goes on the run, colliding with an old case of Hanna’s.
On whether Mann had always planned to adapt his and Gardiner’s novel into a film, he told Vulture “It wasn’t the intention, but you can’t separate the two. I don’t know how to write novels. I do know how to write and imagine screenplays, and I wanted the novel to have a cinematic pace and a story-driven structure to it. I knew everything about every one of those characters. I had imagined all of it. I keep very thorough archives. What became exciting was to have them not be the people they are in Heat, but to put them through the experiences that turned them into the people that they are in Heat.”
One of the biggest tasks in filming Heat 2 would be recasting De Niro, Pacino and Kilmer among many of the film’s other characters who were played by Danny Trejo, Tom Sizemore, Jon Voight, Wes Studi and more. For months speculation has been rampant Mann would cast Adam Driver, who will soon be seen in Mann’s biopic Ferrari, as a young McCauley, something he played coy with last week. He even compared recasting Heat to his 2006 feature film adaptation of his hit TV series Miami Vice.
“You wouldn’t want to do the same thing,” Mann said. “Look, this is a crapshoot. You want to reinvent these characters. There are certain qualifications. You have to be a great fucking actor to play McCauley. I think Adam Driver is a great actor, like De Niro. Then who’s Hanna, who’s Chris Shiherlis? Who can take it someplace fresh? This is not like the dilemma I had with the film of Miami Vice. In retrospect, you could not win that one. If I had to do it over again, I would’ve tried to command the same budget and not call it Miami Vice.”
We’ll have to wait longer until we learn if Driver will be Neil McCauley in Heat 2 and who else might be cast as the characters. For now, Heat 2 is available to buy on bookshelves.
One day after the end of Heat, Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) is holed up in Koreatown, wounded, half delirious, and desperately trying to escape LA. Hunting him is LAPD detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). Hours earlier, Hanna killed Shiherlis’s brother in arms Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) in a gunfight under the strobe lights at the foot of an LAX runway. Now Hanna’s determined to capture or kill Shiherlis, the last survivor of McCauley’s crew, before he ghosts out of the city.
In 1988, seven years earlier, McCauley, Shiherlis, and their highline crew are taking scores on the West Coast, the US-Mexican border, and now in Chicago. Driven, daring, they’re pulling in money and living vivid lives. And Chicago homicide detective Vincent Hanna—a man unreconciled with his history—is following his calling, the pursuit of armed and dangerous men into the dark and wild places, hunting an ultraviolent gang of home invaders.
Meanwhile, the fallout from McCauley’s scores and Hanna’s pursuit cause unexpected repercussions in a parallel narrative, driving through the years following Heat.
Ricky Church – Follow me on Twitter for more movie news and nerd talk.
