Michael Mann has written Heat 2 as a novel, but rest assured that he also wants to make it into a movie.
During an interview with Empire, the 79-year-old filmmaker revealed that he wants to bring his upcoming book to the big screen.
“It’s totally planned to be a movie,” he revealed. “Is it a modest movie? No. Is it a very expensive series? No. It’s going to be one large movie.”
Heat 2 has been in the works for some time – appearing on shelves this August as a novel. Although pegged as a sequel, it’s actually more of a prequel, covering the early years of Detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) as well as Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), and Nate (Jon Voight) among others.
Unfortunately, its status as a prequel means that Robert DeNiro and Val Kilmer won’t be back: “I love those guys,” he said. “But they’d have to be six years younger than they were in Heat.”
Why did Mann turn to literature for a sequel? Well, it looks as though he wanted to follow up Heat with a closer look at the film’s characters, getting to grips with their internal struggles as well as the ones we see on screen.
“The ability to which you can deep-dive into the internal world is fascinating, and you can do that best in a novel,” he said. “I try to evoke that experience in the films I make, to locate the audience within the internal world of a character. The novel form allows me an even greater arena.”
Heat is often celebrated among film fans and is considered one of Mann’s best films. It’s for those reasons that Mann believes a sequel is worth making, and why he thinks studios will jump on the prospect of making another film with those characters.
“It’s sustained in culture,” he explained. “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 vid for over 20 years, this thing really has legs. 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.”
Meanwhile, Mann will next be seen bringing Ferrari to the big screen, with Hugh Jackman joining the upcoming biopic as Enzo Ferrari following Christian Bale’s earlier exit.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.