Decades after the release of Michael Mann’s Heat, the classic crime thriller has endured in the minds of fans, critics, peers and the director himself. He had so much left to say. “There’s always the sense of being short-changed,” Mann said during a Zoom interview from his apartment in Modena, Italy, where he is currently working on Ferrari, starring Adam Driver as the race car driver-auto magnate. “I love doing the research and building these characters out very, very completely, and rooting the actor into a whole life. … The movie is a splinter, it’s just a very narrow slice of a complete life.”. Michael Mann has finally rounded out the story from his 1995 movie. He has brought back the lethal, calculating criminal Neil McCauley, played by Robert De Niro; the swaggering detective Vincent Hanna, played by Al Pacino; and such supporting characters as Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), Michael Cheritto (Tom Sizemore) and Nate (Jon Voight). He does hope to make another Heat movie, but he has chosen to introduce his new narrative through words only, the novel Heat 2. Heat 2 permitted him to explore and digress in ways he wouldn’t attempt on screen. He makes a point of knowing everyone’s inner and outer lives. McCauley, for instance, he sees as a longtime outsider, institutionalized in his early teens. He sees him as “very intelligent,” with a “really strong ego and very little self esteem.” An ideal criminal. Heat 2 is a departure for Michael Mann, and from novels in recent years by other filmmakers, among them Werner Herzog, Brian De Palma and David Cronenberg. While Herzog’s The Twilight World and De Palma’s Are Snakes Necessary? are original stories, Mann is doing a kind of reversal, taking characters created for the screen and adapting them to the page. Instead of finding it a distraction to think of Pacino when he’s describing Hanna, he welcomes the merger of actor and character. Gardiner joined Mann at the suggestion of their mutual literary agent, Shane Salerno. Known for her Evan Delaney novels, she is a Heat fan and a partisan for Mann’s film in the many discussions she has had with fellow writers over whether Goodfellas, The Godfather or Heat is their favorite crime movie. For Heat 2, she helped Mann with the book’s structure and otherwise proved a sounding board and close collaborator, the two eventually writing alternating chapters. Their time together — she lives in Austin, Texas, he is based in Los Angeles — in some ways mirrored the belated face-off between Pacino and De Niro, who despite being co-stars only meet midway in the 170-minute picture. Heat 2 is the first of three planned novels (one of which may be related to Heat), and an ambitious literary beginning for a man who had never attempted a work of fiction before. He majored in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with thoughts of becoming a teacher, but decided that would be “really immensely boring.” Asked to cite literary influences, he mentions John le Carre, but otherwise says he doesn’t read crime fiction. Instead, he looks to “primary sources,” the various killers, crooks, law enforcers and government agents he has met and befriended and whose stories he adapted for Heat, Thief and other films. Critics and fellow directors have praised him for his complex narratives and gifts for pacing and atmosphere: Christopher Nolan has cited Heat as inspiration for his acclaimed Batman movie The Dark Knight. But some of Mann’s favorite feedback has come from those “primary sources.” He smiles when asked what some of the real-life models for his characters have said upon seeing his films.
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