It ends the only way it can end, with two of the toughest men in Los Angeles holding hands as one of them bleeds out on the periphery of LAX’s tarmac. For the greater part of two and a half hours, we’ve watched Neil McCauley — mastermind of heists and bank robberies — and Vincent Hanna — lieutenant in the LAPD’s Major Crimes Unit — circle one another, chase each other, and calmly converse over a cup of coffee. These apex predators have now reached their endgame and this cop and criminal share one last moment together before McCauley leaves this mortal coil. It’s only fair that Robert De Niro & Al Pacino play them.
We leave here the anti-heroes and their twins. Heat, Michael Mann’s epic 1995 crime thriller, right before the final credits roll. It’s the perfect fade-out of a film devoted to the sort of game-recognizes-game professionalism and Zen machismo that the writer-director traffics in, taken from a true story (told to Mann by Chicago detective Chuck Adamson, who took down the real McCauley) and steeped in a sense of authenticity regarding what these men do and who they are — as if, in Mann’s universe, there is any difference between the two. “McCauley is passing out of existence, [while] in contact with the only other person who truly understands him,”The filmmaker nods to himself, as he recalls the image via Zoom. “And ironically, that’s also the person who killed him.
“It’s the last moment of Heat,” Mann adds. “But it’s really the first moment of Heat. It’s when that ending occurred to me that I thought, ‘Ok, I could make this movie.’”
The rest is … well, you know. Yet, neither. Heat‘s canonization as a modern crime-cinema classic nor the rabid cult fandom that still revolves around the film suggested that a sequel would ever be a consideration. Where do you go when one of your main players is permanently knocked off the chessboard? Still, the characters and their blue-hued SoCal netherworld never completely exited Mann’His imagination. He was an avid reader of back stories about Vincent and Neil, and knew all the details. “Action.”He could detail their lives, including where they were born, what prisons they served time in, how and when they met, as well as how they got married, and the places they went to for high-stakes theft or law enforcement apprenticeships. Even after the director left to tell stories about stoic murderers on the streets of Los Angeles,Collateral) or about law-enforcement officers pushed to the brink (Miami Vice), he never fully gave up on the idea of possibly returning to Heat‘s cops and robbers one day. He might look back on their beginnings, long before their bank job made downtown L.A. warzone. He could also fast-forward to the events after Neil and Vincent said their final goodbyes.
Or maybe, he’d simply do both. Heat 2 the long-awaited follow-up to Mann’s most popular movie, picks up right after that fatal encounter next to the airport’s runway, following Vincent Hanna as he ties up loose ends and Val Kilmer’s character — Chris Shiherlis, the last surviving member of McCauley’s tight-knit gang — as he tries to stay one step ahead of the law. But it also rewinds back to 1988, when Chris first met his future wife Charlene (played by Ashley Judd in the original) and Neil & Co. crossed paths with aNother gang of crooks in Chicago, led by a psychopathic rapist being pursued by a Windy City detective who happens to be — wait for it — Hanna. And, just for good measure, it takes us into the dawn of the 21st century, at the exact moment that crime is morphing from regional scores into something more complicated and trans-national.
It’s a genuinely exhilarating expansion of the movie’s world, complete with detours through Mexico, Paraguay, Vietnam and Las Vegas, and some truly jaw-dropping, bullet-filled set pieces, notably a siege on a cartel-run motel south of the border. It’s also notMann cowrote the script for “A Movie” Heat 2As a novel with Meg Gardiner, a veteran crime writer. It is now available to buy online and hit book shelves on August 9th. Asked if there was something that suddenly sparked him returning to these characters almost 30 years after the film’s release, his reply is: “No. Because they I never really left them, and they really never left me.”
As for Heat 2Being a novelist? “I started out as an English lit major [in college],” Mann explains. “I thought I wanted to be a writer at one point, before I discovered I wanted to make films. But really, what I do…it’s all writing. Whether I’m writing with a camera, or with the performances of actors, or words, or whatever — it’s all authoring. And a novel presented a big canvas for me to do this.”
The page enabled him to write and go wherever he wanted. “a massive firefight breaks out”You don’t have to worry about how much it will cost to film it. “Exactly. With a movie, you only have two hours to make it engaging and impact an audience. With a book, you can go into certain tangents that have to do with developing the characters, and move forward and backward in time in different ways. It was, ‘Why be modest?’ I didn’t have to be modest this way. And the scale and ambition of it was what was so valuable to me about it.”
Indeed, Heat 2It is ambitious and contains almost 500 pages of interconnected narratives, three timelines, locations from all over the world, and a large cast. Mann knew the story — or rather, stories, plural — he wanted to tell, but felt like he needed a collaborator on this. Shane Salerno was his literary agent and introduced him to Meg Gardiner. Meg Gardiner is a highly-regarded novelist. “Evan Delaney” series. Mann had read her 2017 book Unsub,This story is about a female detective who chases a serial murderer; she was a huge admirer of his work. HeatParticularly. “And I’d always wanted to write a heist novel,”Gardiner said, calling from Austin, Texas, her home. “What better chance to do that then with these characters, in that world?!”
Mann and Gardiner had a long conversation over the phone. Mann wanted to talk about where Neil, Vincent, Chris and why he thought it important to have a prequel and sequel. Also, how they could help expand the world of Heat. “It goes without saying that Michael is a very accomplished writer,”Gardiner notes. “All his work until now had been screenplays and teleplays, however, so he was moving into a new arena, and I think he wanted to work with an experienced novelist on this — specifically, a crime novelist. He already had the arc of the story, though. I think he’d been thinking about this for decades.”
Once she was on board, Mann began sending Gardiner much of the research he had gathered when he’d started putting together the original 1995 film. “I wanted to bring her into the Heat universe — because it really is a universe,”He said. “I had saved everything, so all the materials I had gathered on Neil McCauley, that I’d given Bobby [De Niro] to bring him into character, and all the stuff on Vincent I had for Al, and the Chris stuff I had for Val Kilmer, all of that work we did … a lot of it was transcribed or on video. So I kind of dropped Meg into the deep end of the pool with that stuff.”
Gardiner began deep-dive into older material while Mann began to gather information for what would be the year 2000 section. This is where Chris and Ana Liu (his literal partner in crime), set up an independent network that moved international contraband via strictly digital means. After that, they began to discuss different parts of the book and communicate by email. Tokyo ViceGardiner was in Austin. Mann says it’s like the way Eric Roth, his friend and screenwriter, worked on projects such as The Insider Ali.
“It’s complimentary,”He said. “It’s not like, ‘You write the even-numbered words and I’ll write the odd-numbered words.’ I do a lot of the heavy structural work in terms of the story and how we ‘re going to tell it strategically, then we’d write up alternating chapters and trade them. I’d be stuck on something and say, ‘Look, I’ve been on these three pages for two days now. Can you take a crack at this?’ And vice versa.”
“By the time we were finishing up, we weren’t just alternating chapters,” Gardiner says. “We were on the phone several times a day, going, ‘Hey, can you take this scene? And can you take that scene? Here are two paragraphs, what do you think?’ There were also times when he’d be like, ‘I wanna finish this passage I’m working on today — can you look up major thoracic injuries and what the recovery time is for that?’ Or, you know: ‘How does a Marine platoon carry out an ambush?’ ‘Who can we talk to about GPS spoofing?’
“Also, let’s just say Michael is known for the amount of research he does, and that legend is accurate,”She laughs. “I spent a couple of hours on the phone with a bank robber, to find out how one would legitimately pull off a ‘tunnel job.’ There’s a scene in the book where a character is climbing up a rope ladder on the side of a ship that’s at sea. I said to Michael, ‘I want this to feel real when I’m writing it, and having some trouble getting it right…’ And his reply was, ‘Hold on, I’ll send you some photos of me actually doing it.’”
After working remotely for a year, Gardiner finally got to go to Los Angeles to meet Mann in the summer 2021. “I got my face-to-face meeting,”She says. “I got my own Vincent-Neil coffee-shop scene with him!” While they were there, Mann introduced Gardiner up to a professional criminal who’d been an advisor on his 2009 Dillinger film Public enemiesWe arranged for her late-night ride-alongs along with two LAPD sergeants “through some of not-so-shiny neighborhoods.” That experience greatly informed their revisions, she says, especially the novel’s final section, which brings many of the main characters back to the City of Angels for one last climactic shoot-out. It’s a great reminder that, like the movie, this a story about those who live and die in L.A.
Und noch Heat 2Mann is very clear in describing it as “a global version of Heat,” and expands that original two-sides-of-the-same-coin notion into something far wider in scope while still keeping that sense of meticulous detail. “If you asked Chris Shiherlis, ‘What were you doing with Neil McCauley in 1995,” he’d tell you they were the best at what they did — which was really just being 19th century bandidos,” Mann says. “By the end of the book, he’s in an entirely new world. And he’s proven he can be an innovator in that world.”
This begs the obvious question: Will we ever see that world onscreen? Mann chuckles, then gestures around the room he’s Zooming in from. “I’m concentrating on this right now,” referencing his apartment in Modena, Italy, where he’s about to start shooting Ferrari,Penelope Cruz and Adam Driver star in a drama about Enzo Ferrari the sports-car magnate. “But I’d love to make a Heat 2 movie, definitely.”
There you have it! These areAre there plans to make a movie from the book?
Mann pauses and thinks about what he wants. “There are plans … but I can’t talk about them,”He finally admits. “But if we do it, we’re going to do it big.“