Nearly 30 years after the original crime-saga hit theatres, writer-director Michael Mann is eyeing a sequel to Heat with Adam Driver in discussions to star in the movie.
Based on the bestselling follow-up novel Mann released last summer with co-author Meg Gardiner, Heat 2 is a prequel and a sequel that follows the lives of the characters from the 1995 film. One section of the book centres on Chris Shiherlis (who was played in the original by Val Kilmer) after he escapes LA and Detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) following a violent bank robbery that leaves his pal Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) dead. Living a life abroad, Shiherlis builds a new criminal life for himself before being drawn back to the City of Angels.
The other part of the novel is set in 1998 and explores McCauley’s early criminal life in Chicago and his bid to take down a large score along the U.S.-Mexico border. In the section, Hanna is a rookie cop tracking a violent group of home invaders with ties to McCauley’s gang.
According to Deadline, Driver, who recently worked with Mann on Ferrari, is in talks to play a young McCauley with Warner Bros. again set to produce.
The 1995 original followed Hanna as he tracked a group of professional thieves targeting a bank in Los Angeles.
In a 2015 interview with the Sun, De Niro said the experience making the movie — which included a riveting coffee-shop showdown with Pacino and an epic shootout in downtown L.A. — a memorable one.
“I enjoyed working on Heat,” De Niro said. “Michael Mann is very intense. That intensity rubbed off on the actors and that carried into everyone’s performance and the whole feeling of the movie. Everything, the way we trained for it with these guys for those heist scenes. It was a good movie, for me.”
Ana De Armas is rumoured to play McCauley’s love interest in the 1988 storyline, with Austin Butler’s name being mentioned to play Shiherlis.
Last year, Pacino said he wanted Timothée Chalamet to play the younger version of his obsessive cop character.
“I mean, he’s a wonderful actor. Great looks,” Pacino said.
In an interview with Empire, Mann said the sequel would “be one large movie” because the original has only grown in stature over the last three decades.
“It’s sustained in culture. It’s known. I could delude myself into thinking that the whole world is familiar with it, but when you check out its prominence in home video for over 20 years, this thing really has legs,” the 80-year-old filmmaker said.
“People are still watching it, people are still talking about it. It’s a brand. It’s kind of a Heat universe, in a way. And that certainly justifies a very large ambitious movie.”
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