At 79 years young, the action is still the juice for director Michael Mann.
The director of such masterpieces as Miami Vice, Thief, and The Insider is back after a seven-year absence from feature filmmaking. And with his long-gestating passion project Ferrari about to enter production and the upcoming August release of his novel, Heat 2, on the horizon, the director is starting work on a very large movie, an adaptation of his novel Heat 2, entitled Heat 2.
In a wonderful interview with Marc Maron on WTF, in which Mann refers to 60 Minutes as “ding dong school” and describes in great detail how they lit LA for Collateral (seriously, it’s a must-listen), Mann said that Heat 2 is underway.
Promoting his upcoming novelized sequel, Mann said, “This is a book, but it’s also going to be a very large movie.”
“Oh, yeah,” he continued.
Mann contended that this was always the plan. However, when Maron said that he assumed Mann wrote the book instead of making Heat 2 a movie, the director responded, “No.”
“I always wanted to explore the early lives of these guys,” Mann said. “Also, to find a way to bring the past into the present. The present being about 2002, seven years after the events of Heat the movie.”
Of course, the tricky part is casting. Heat has an iconic cast, all of whom are doing career-best work, so obviously, Maron was wondering how you recast Pacino, De Niro, and Kilmer. “In very large ways,” Mann responded, perhaps alluding to some sort of Al Pacino mech suit for Timothée Chalamet (Pacino’s pick for the young Vincent Hannah), so he can terrorize the city as a cocaine-addicted vice cop, stomping around LA, screaming about a “big ass that you’ve got your head all the way up.”
But even before we get to Heat 2, Mann’s revving his engine for another season of Tokyo Vice and Ferrari, the Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz vehicle about the legendary car maker. He describes it as:
Three months in the summer of 1957 in Enzo Ferrari’s life. It’s an opera. It’s melodramatic. Everything he’s been collides with what he may become. It’s a spectacular melodrama in real life.
To that, all we can say is, “Vroom. Vroom.”