Michael Mann Confirms That “Heat 2” is His Next Movie & Adam Driver Could Star
When Michael Mann’s Heat hit theaters in December of 1995, it gifted us with the first time that Robert De Niro and Al Pacino acted in a scene together. The stars of Godfather 2 had never actually gotten a chance to play off one another, and in Mann’s Heat, while they had an entire movie to enact a brilliant, brutal cat-and-mouse game as Pacino’s Lt. Vincent Hanna tracked De Niro’s criminal Neil McCauley in one of the decade’s most satisfying crime sagas, they finally got to sit down and share a scene in a diner that has now become the stuff of movie history. Now, after writing the novel “Heat 2” alongside co-writer Meg Gardiner, which detailed the lives of Heat‘s protagonists when they were young men, Mann has confirmed that adapting that novel will be his next film project. He also teased the possibility that Adam Driver, the star of his current film, Ferrari, could have a major role.
Speaking at Deadline’s Contenders event in London this past weekend, this is how Mann replied to a question about whether he’d adapt “Heat 2” for the big screen:
“Yes. Meg Gardiner and myself wrote the novel Heat 2, which came out right when we were shooting Ferrari. It did very well. I plan to shoot that next.”
Deadline scooped earlier in the year that Adam Driver was in talks to play De Niro’s character Neil McCauley as a younger man. Although Mann was careful about the potential when asked if Driver was his man for Heat 2, he certainly wasn’t denying it.
“Perhaps,” Mann said at the Contenders event. “We don’t talk about that yet. Let me put it this way: Adam and I got along like a house on fire [on Ferrari]. We have the same work ethic – which is pretty intense. We like each other, and we had a great time working together artistically.”
Mann and Gardiner’s “Heat 2” isn’t just a prequel; it also functions as a sequel to the original Heat. The story follows McCauley, Vincent Hanna (Pacino’s character), and Chris Shiherlis (played by Val Kilmer) in the years before the events in Heat, as well as what happens to the survivors of the events in that film after the dust has settled. “Heat 2” follows a younger McCauley and Shiherlis as their crew racks up scores along the U.S./Mexico border, the West Coast, and in Chicago, where Hanna is rising in the ranks in the Chicago Police Department, going after a brutal gang of home invaders.
Heat has become one of the most well-regarded crime thrillers ever made. Recently, Ava DuVernay’s One Perfect Shot featured Mann re-creating the particulars of a thrilling heist sequence in that film, one of the most thrilling set pieces of any movie that decade.
It’ll be a while before we know more about where Heat 2 stands, but for now, we’ve got Mann’s Ferrari zooming into theaters this Christmas. Driver stars as Enzo Ferrari as he prepares his team to race in the notorious Mille Miglia, the grueling, deadly 1,000-mile race across Italy. Penelope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, and Patrick Dempsey co-star.
Featured image: VENICE, ITALY – AUGUST 31: Adam Driver and director Michael Mann attend a photocall for the movie “Ferrari” at the 80th Venice International Film Festival on August 31, 2023 in Venice, Italy. (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)
