Michael Mann has confirmed he is getting close to completing his screenplay for Heat 2 and that it will be his next movie, in a conversation at Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival on Monday.
“We have to have it finished very soon,” he said, suggesting jokingly he would be doing that on “The plane ride back to Los Angeles.”
The director said after Heat 2, he wanted to make his previously mooted movie about the 1968 Battle of Hué, one of the bloodiest chapters of the Vietnam War in which the forces of South Vietnam and U.S troops recaptured the city of Hué over one month of brutal urban fighting.
Questioned on the continuing cult status of the original Heat movie as the 30th anniversary of its release approaches, Mann said he was not surprised by its success and longevity.
“It’s all in the writing. It’s a very, very architected, very complex screenplay. It’s not supposed to affect you as complex. It’s supposed to affect you by taking you on this ride. But the structure has buried within it a feud… you’re 100% invested in Neil McCauley/Robert De Niro escaping. You’re 100% invested in Al Pacino [Vincent Hanna] apprehending Neil McCauley at the same time. That contradiction helps sustain the memory,” he said.
“But we knew, to be honest, we knew the movie we were making, by the way I say myself, but also Bob, Al, Val Kilmer, Jon Voight, we knew what this movie was, and then the movie comes out, and it has some impact… then it’s sustained in memory, and it was in the top 10 or 20 films in the Warner Brothers catalogue for years.”
Mann is among a raft of stars attending the fourth edition of the Red Sea Film Festival this year, alongside Michael Douglas, Michelle Yeoh, Catherine Zeta Jones, Eva Longoria, Andrew Garfield, Ranbir Kapoor, Cynthia Erivo, Sarah Jessica Parker and Jeremy Renner.
He opened the conversation with a demonstration of his new interactive website Ferrari Expanded, going behind the scenes of the development and shooting of his recent Enzo Ferrari biopic Ferrari, starring Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz.
Mann credited one of his daughters with helping him to make the archival website come together.
“The great English poet John Milton had two daughters, who later on, when he was blind helped him a lot. I fortunately have four daughters, and one of them is a fantastic archivist and that’s where the idea of this came from,” he said of the site.
The site organized over six different episodes, each with 20 videos, accompanied by 400 documents, including Mann’s notes as well as archival research, gives a fascinating insight into the depth of the director’s intricate and expansive process when he is developing a film.
“The idea behind it was to take people into the adventure of what directors do when you build a film like Ferrari. It’s unusual. There’s never been a website quite like this. We knew we were going to do it when we were shooting the movie, so we accumulated a lot of material,” he said.
Quizzed on whether he would do a similar deep dive into any of his other films, Mann suggested Heat would be a good candidate.
He also noted that he would love to see similar initiatives dissecting the work of filmmakers such as Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón.
English (US) ·