Michael Mann Wants to Make Heat 2 a Movie with Adam Driver
Michael Mann is still threatening to lessen his greatest film (and with a résumé like his, that’s saying something). Mann recently released a sequel/prequel hybrid to Heat, called Heat 2, as a novel, and he’d like to turn it into a movie. In a video for Variety, Mann used a setup where he tried to match quotes to which of his films they came from and used it as a springboard to talk about the movies. When he gets to one from Heat 2, he says he spoke to Adam Driver, the star of his upcoming feature Ferrari, about playing the younger version of Robert De Niro’s Heat character, master thief Neil McCauley.
In the extensive Variety interview that accompanies this video (which is absolutely worth a read if you’re a Michael Mann fan… and who isn’t?), Mann says that, as much as he’d like to make a Heat 2 movie, he’ll be okay if it doesn’t happen:
“The thing is, I don’t think about mortality. I’m busy. What good would it do me? If I absolutely had to make ‘Heat 2,’ I wouldn’t have got lost in this beautiful story of Ferrari. And I took two years to write a novel… Don’t misunderstand… I want to make it. But if I don’t, I won’t be incomplete.”
Please don’t, sir. Heat is a veritable masterpiece, perfectly constructed and acted, and the characters have complete arcs. It ends in the right place, leaving everyone where they should be in terms of our understanding of their journeys. There’s no need to get into what happens next, and there’s even less of a need to tell us what happened before, which is much of what Heat 2 is/will be. At one point, Mann says that Heat 2 tells us where McCauley first heard his rule, “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the Heat around the corner.” But it doesn’t matter where he heard it; what matters is how that philosophy informs his decisions in the movie, specifically when he abides by that rule and when he breaks it, and for whom. We don’t need to know it originally came from his Uncle Charlie or whoever.
And I certainly don’t want to see Adam Driver playing McCauley when he learns it; I like him a lot as an actor, but I don’t need to see the characters from Heat revisited with someone other than Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Their performances were so meticulous and riveting that anyone else would feel like a cheap knockoff. For example, Mann produced a short-lived TV show in 2002 called Robbery Homicide Division that was very reminiscent of Heat. Tom Sizemore, another actor I really like, played the lead cop, but his performance was essentially an impression of Al Pacino’s from Heat, and the show felt like a lesser version of the film as a result. I don’t want a whole movie of that, interspersed with the hunt for Val Kilmer’s Chris Shiherless, who would have to be played by someone else as well because of Kilmer’s deteriorating health (not to mention that he’s close to thirty years older now, as is Al Pacino). Shiherless’ final moments in Heat are about his adoption of McCauley’s mantra and his wife’s continued devotion to him after the hell he put her through. That’s the button on their stories; we don’t have to know another step.
I don’t mind Heat 2 existing as a book because it’s essentially a novelty, which is the way I feel about the Star Wars Extended Universe; if you like it, it’s there, and if not, you can ignore it. I’ll probably even read it someday, if only to see how Michael Mann’s writing translates to a novel, albeit a co-written one. (I’m also going to read Quentin Tarantino’s novelization of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood one of these days; if you follow me anywhere on social media, you can probably guess I’m a fan of that film.) But turning Heat 2 into a movie is a different story; it canonizes it in a way relegating it to a different medium doesn’t. That may seem weird, and I’m not dismissing books as an art form (I love them), but because it jumps from one to another, it feels different, like it’s a “what if” lark. To continue using Star Wars as an example, you probably know plenty of people who don’t care about the EU or the cartoons like The Clone Wars and Rebels, but it’s hard to ignore the sequel trilogy, as awful as it is and as much as many of us would like to pretend it doesn’t exist. And that’s because they’re movies, like the original trilogy. If they were novels or comic books, nobody would care half as much. Even the Disney+ shows feel more removed than the films, like they’re tie-ins instead of canonical continuations, even though they technically are.
Mann seems intent on making Heat 2 a movie, and while it goes against my instincts to wish away a Michael Mann film, I hope this one falls by the wayside, and he does something new. I’m sure he’s got more great movies in him; I want to see those.
As for Neil McCauley, there’s only one instance where I’ve accepted another actor playing him:
