A decidedly coy Michael Mann said little about Heat 2, his follow-up film to the 1995 crime drama Heat that starred Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, while attending the Red Sea Film Festival on Sunday.
“The next (movie) I’d like to do is Heat 2,” Mann reiterated in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, during an informal conversation in Old City Al Balad after an earlier screening of Heat at the festival. He was careful to reveal little about the screenplay for the project, which Mann has reportedly set up at Warner Bros. “It has to be finished really soon.”
The Heat sequel has been on the back burner for some time now, but Mann breathed new life into the project with his 2022 crime novel Heat 2, co-written by the 81-year-old director and author Meg Gardiner, which acts as both a prequel and a sequel to Mann’s 1995 crime film classic. The book became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. More recently, there have been reports that Warner Bros., who released the first film, is on board to fund development for Heat 2 and that Adam Driver, who starred in Mann’s 2023 feature Ferrari, is in discussions to play young Neil McCauley, the brilliant thief played by Robert DeNiro in the first film.
Heat, co-starring Tom Sizemore, Jon Voight and Val Kilmer, is a cat-and-mouse actioner centering on an obsessive Los Angeles detective, played by Al Pacino, trying to track down and catch McCauley, whose crew is responsible for a series of brazen, high-stakes heists.
Mann on Sunday also talked up Ferrari Expanded, an interactive website journey he has created to take viewers inside how he directed Ferrari. The online resource, which requires a paid access pass, offers 20 mini-documentaries, a treasure chest of director’s materials, photo galleries, storyboards, annotated script pages, and other materials to give a behind-the-camera look at what went into making the movie.
“We accumulated a lot of material,” Mann recalled as he researched the story of Enzo Ferrari, the racecar impresario played by Driver, and his personal and professional struggles. The goal, said Mann, was to create a website that could “tell the story of what it is to make a film from inside the film, direct from me to the public, without any intermediary.”
Mann explained his focus in Ferrari, besides on thrilling race scenes, turned on character and key relationships, including between Enzo and Laura (Enzo’s wife, portrayed by Penélope Cruz) and Enzo and Lena (his lover, portrayed by Shailene Woodley).
Mann paid tribute to Cruz for having a firm idea of her character, Laura Ferrari, on set. “She is completely self-confident. She has a primitive, almost tribal sense of knowing a thing when she knows something you can’t shake,” the Ferrari director recalled.
Mann did a voice-over for many of the videos included in the trove of materials for Ferrari Expanded, explaining why he chose specific shots, scenes, and even an opera sequence for Ferrari. The website also has character notes from the original script, and footage of Mann on set giving direction to cast members in Modena, Italy, where filming took place.
The script and annotated notes to himself are included on the website, Mann added, saying the notes helped him as a director to stay on track and “in the groove,” as he put it, while surrounded by the tumult of daily production as he shot Ferrari over six months.
Ferrari Expanded recalls the director’s audio commentary common in traditional movie DVD releases, and which also helped cinephiles learn more about filmmaking. Such commentary has landed more on podcasts in the movie streaming era.
