Michael Mann video greeted guests at a retrospective screening of Heat and said he had tested positive for Covid and needed to stay away. Producer Art Linson and stars Al Pacino and Robert De Niro took the stage at the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights without the writer/director of the legendary crime drama.
But not without a few words: “I’m incredibly disappointed not to be with you all tonight,” Mann said in a recorded message. “At the Broadway Deli in 1994, I said to Art, let’s produce my screenplay and find a director, because I might not be directing. He told me I was crazy – so it’s all his fault,” he joked. “I tested positive for Covid two days ago. I’m feeling great and will be out of isolation in a few days. I was so looking forward to sitting down with good friends, family and fans of the film to experience Heat’s 4K Ultra High Definition recreation.”
Mann is quarantined in Italy where he is working on his next film, the biopic Ferrari starring Adam Driver.
However, NYC has seen early copies of Heat 2, the novel Mann co-wrote with Edgar Prize winner Meg Gardiner, which is due out in August. The book is billed as both a sequel and a prequel to the events of Heat, where Pacino plays obsessive police lieutenant Vincent Hanna, who tracks down De Niro’s main criminal Neil McCauley and his gang. It marks Mann’s debut as a novelist and Michael Mann Books in a deal with HarperCollins imprint William Morrow.
“It’s always been my intention to do the rest of Heat’s stories,” Mann said in a story to Deadline earlier this year. “There was always a rich story or backstory about the events in these people’s lives prior to 1995 in Heat and projections of where their lives would take them later.” The publisher’s reps had a table high, handing out advance copies to guests at the screening on Friday Night, which was part of the Tribeca Festival Retrospective. De Niro is a co-founder of Tribeca along with Jane Rosenthal.
Heat 2 begins shortly after the events of the film have ended. The first film was so successful that it is not difficult to imagine a second. When asked which of the younger actors he would have cast to play Vincent Hanna, he was quick to reply, “Timothée Chalamet… He’s a wonderful actor.”
During the Q&A, Linson noted that Mann didn’t lack the confidence to direct, “but it was difficult to make films … and he thought maybe another director could pull that off. But he got these two geniuses,” he said, gesturing toward Pacino and De Niro, and the rest is history. The script: “When you read it, it kind of sounds like Bob and it sounds like Al. It was almost designed for actors of that extraordinary level, and they picked the whole thing up.”
The Warner Bros. film marked the first time De Niro and Pacino appeared on screen together.
Linson said Mann fought risky to hold on to his vision of gritty realism. “Michael endured a lot of anger [from studio executives] because he put a lot of effort into getting it right… You’re not welcome after that unless a movie works, and this one did.
“There was a scene we were shooting with William Fichtner in the Hollywood Hills where Bob threw a chair through a glass window, and that night the studio came down to visit the set to basically say, ‘Do it more quickly.’ Michael said, ‘Hey, if you keep me here longer, it’ll go even slower.'”
The film also starred Val Kilmer, Natalie Portman, Danny Treho, Ashley Judd, Jon Voight, Tom Sizemore, Diane Venora and Amy Brenneman.