Robert de Niro and Val Kilmer in Heat (1995). Photo: Warner Bros.
Michael Mann has spent decades of his life reflecting on his 1995 crime epic Heat. In particular, the dynamic between his two protagonists, LAPD detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and professional thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), had intrigued him as early as the 1970s when Chicago detective Chuck Adamson planted the seed for a movie idea in the director’s mind. Adamson told Mann about the time he had coffee with the real McCauley and how he and the thief developed a mutual respect for one another, before Adamson’s team later killed McCauley on the street. Mann began writing and eventually used this basic premise for his 1989 TV movie LA Takedown before expanding on it six years later in Heat, a ridiculously ambitious nearly three-hour film that uses Hanna and McCauley’s intertwined fates as the narrative backbone of a sprawling LA -crime saga.
In the nearly three decades since its release, Heat has garnered an obsessive fan base and never seems to stray too far from Mann’s thoughts. In early 2020, the director embarked on his version of a quarantine project by delving into work on his first novel, Heat 2, a 466-page tome that doubles as both a prequel and sequel to Heat, with the plot twisting between a plot back and forth here jumps set in 1988 and another describing the aftermath of events in the film. Working with his co-writer, thriller writer Meg Gardiner, Mann spent many hours meticulously researching and writing a book that he hoped would read like “a really good screenplay in narrative form.” It’s a pulpy, sprawling crime novel that feels like a play on Mann’s filmography, from its hyper-competent, ambitious characters to the intricately detailed underworlds in which they operate. Oh, and it includes the phrase “Sky Daddy shit.” (Warning: some spoilers ahead.)
Heat has no shortage of compelling supporting characters, but Mann’s enduring obsession with the world he created still seems to revolve primarily around the idea that Hanna and McCauley are perfect opponents — just two damaged guys fighting each other committed to their jobs at the expense of everything else, and who understand that only one of them will survive their inevitable clash. (I’m sure some hot fan fiction exists out there somewhere.) Heat 2 deepens this entanglement, revealing that McCauley and Hanna unknowingly circled each other in Chicago in 1988, when the former was conducting at least one major heist and the latter was functioning as a detective before moving to LA in the post-Heat timeline, Hanna discovers some of the more redeeming elements of McCauley’s past and realizes he can’t quite shake his obsession with McCauley and his crew, even after their deadly showdown at the end of Heat.
Photo: HarperCollins Publishers
As in all of his films, Mann developed detailed backstories for each of Heat’s main characters during the preparation of the film. (“Even before I made it, I knew what Neil was doing when he was 11,” he told the Times.) While some of those details made it to the screen in Heat, Heat 2 gives Mann a chance to show more of the footwork , which gives a glimpse into McCauley and Hanna’s childhoods, the ins and outs of their deployments in Vietnam, and a little more about how McCauley and Chris Shiherlis (played by Val Kilmer in the film) became each other’s closest confidants. For those curious if McCauley reads anything other than books about metals, Heat 2 explains that his personal philosophy was shaped by his time spent reading Camus in the prison library.
While these details are occasionally revealed in exhibition filing, they are more commonly used to lay the groundwork for the set piece the book next dashes toward, such as when McCauley plots a raid near the Mexican border and articulates the attack plan in terms of Viet Cong- Strategies he witnessed in battle. Sometimes Mann and Gardiner use the prequel portion of the book to directly explain the origins of iconic moments from the film (e.g., McCauley’s “30-second” mantra), but even these instances seem more story-motivated than cheap tricks to get around getting readers to do the leo show meme.
Over the course of his long career, Mann has amassed countless research findings on various niche topics, from the psychology of serial killers to cybercrime and 18th-century hunting techniques. The world of Heat gives him a canvas big enough to contain almost all of those obsessions, and part of the fun of Heat 2 is watching its writers pull ideas and tiny details from Mann’s entire filmography. A thief-like vault heist early in the book brings to the fore the kind of process-oriented details that Mann fans get excited about, like which particular drill bit is best at cutting through poured concrete and how to bypass the re-lock mechanism on a locker. In the post-Heat timeline, a malware subplot is reminiscent of Blackhat, while a segment set in Ciudad del Este, a free trade zone in Paraguay, allows Mann to use a setting originally intended for the ending of Miami Vice (2006).
Kevin Gage in heat. Photo: Warner Bros.
While the game of cat-and-mouse between Hanna and McCauley anchors the film, it can be difficult to keep track of Heat’s many subplots. There’s the part about a teenage Natalie Portman’s attempted suicide (a confusing character arc that the book acknowledges before cleverly avoiding) and the thread about a serial killer named Waingro (Kevin Gage) who murders sex workers in his spare time. Part of Heat’s enduring magic is that it keeps audiences equally invested in both Hanna and McCauley, and it’s partly because they both go up against Waingro, who embodies pure evil and proclaims himself the “Grim Reaper” in the film.
Heat 2 finds a replacement for Waingro in Otis Wardell, a thief who commits a number of home robberies and also enjoys raping and murdering his victims. Where McCauley is a professional criminal whose only endgame is the next hit, Wardell is a chaos agent who thrives on violence. He becomes a problem for both Hanna and McCauley at various points, and his arc helps tie the book’s disparate timelines together (arguably a little too neatly).
In his films, Mann repeatedly subjects his self-serious, male protagonists to operatic intrigues. He pushes them to emotional extremes so that when they fall in love – usually with a beautiful woman – they have a hard time. (“The sun rises and sets with her to me, man,” as Chris says of Charlene in Heat.) For all their displays of borderline masculinity, Mann’s films are seriously romantic, including Heat, which is punctuated by long interludes in which Neil and Eady (Amy Brenneman) spill their guts at each other while the synthesizers of Terje Rypdal’s soundtrack blare in the background.
The same romantic impetus is present in Heat 2, but it doesn’t translate to the page as naturally as the action bits, allowing Mann to resort to a visceral, muddy prose style (more than once a bullet hits someone with the force of a “giant blow”). Instead, he sometimes resorts to clunky metaphors – one describing a woman wanting to have sex for the second time in one night as “a fighter pilot who has landed on an F-18 carrier deck. With the engines running at maximum power, she’s ready to accelerate and take to the skies again.” Hopefully, the potential film adaptation will ditch the jet fighter metaphors and let an Audioslave song set the mood instead.
What is Heat without its movie stars? Much of the film’s iconography is tied to its actors — even someone who doesn’t worship Mann’s altar can probably recall that Heat is De Niro and Pacino’s first time acting opposite, and just watching the film will inevitably burn a couple of Pacino’s line readings into your frontal cortex. However, Heat 2 draws sufficiently complete portraits of its characters that you can imagine them separately from the stars who played them, making it easier to imagine a film adaptation with new actors. Mann – who turned 79 earlier this year and is currently working on his Enzo Ferrari biopic – has teased that a Heat 2 adaptation is already on the way and that it will be a “very big movie”. As for who will fill in as Hanna and McCauley, Pacino has a few ideas.
Heat 2 hits bookstores on August 9th.