‘Heat’ at 20: Michael Mann on Making a Crime-Drama Classic
Michael Mann has been a driving creative force behind plenty of groundbreaking cops-and-robbers tales over the past 40 years, from TV’s “MTV cops” show Miami Vice to this year’s bleeding-edge cybercrime thriller Blackhat. And while the 72-year-old writer/producer/director has done his share of tense true-story recreations and tough-guy classics, it’s a certain steely crime drama starring two Seventies-cinema icons for which he might be best known.
Released 20 years ago today, Heat originated from the story of an obsessive detective’s quest to take down a disciplined career criminal in the early 1980s, based on a real-life encounter that Mann’s friend, Chicago detective Charlie Adamson, had with an ex-Alcatraz inmate he was trailing (and eventually killed). The filmmaker started writing a script about these two men on the opposite sides of the law in the early 1980s, but claims that something was not working with the structure, and eventually put it aside. “When something’s not ready, it’s like not ready,” he says.
After one false start as the 1989 television pilot-turned-movie L.A. Takedown, Mann eventually realized that he had the ending of the movie all wrong. Once he figured out how to solve his last-act problem, he says it took “probably three weeks for me to get the screenplay in shape.” A green-light from Warner Bros. quickly followed, and the end result turned into one of the most elegant heist films ever crafted, in addition to giving stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino the single greatest alpha-male exchange in a diner ever. On the occasion of Heat‘s anniversary, Rolling Stone asked the director to take us back to the scene of the crime and share the experience of pairing two great screen-acting powerhouses.