Leonardo DiCaprio and Christian Bale are the two names currently associated with the sequel to Michael Mann's 1995 crime epic Heat. However, details as to what characters they're playing are not yet known. The news was reported by Deadline. An official casting announcement is yet to be made.
Mann, Jerry Bruckheimer, Scott Stuber, and Nick Nesbitt are involved as producers, with Shane Salerno and Eric Roth as executive producers, with Amazon the backing of Amazon MGM Studios and United Artists. The project is based on the book of the same name Mann co-wrote with Meg Gardiner. It will be both a sequel and prequel.
Recently, at the Lumiere Film Festival in Lyon, Mann said the film will oscillate between events in 1995, a day after what we saw at the end of the original, where Val Kilmer's character is the only one among the bank robbers who survives, and has to "flee the United States", and events in 1988 that revolve around Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley that would transform them to the kind of characters that they were in the 1995 film.
"It’s 1988. Hanna is a detective in Chicago, not Los Angeles… In 1988, they are not the same people as they are in 1995. It’s the events of 1988 which then turned them into the characters of 1995," said Mann, adding that Macaulay once had "a wife, he has a stepdaughter. He has a nuclear family that is very attached to him.”
Mann added that he knows every detail about these characters, beginning with their childhood. “The characters of Heat are so alive to me that I know everything about outside the boundaries of the film. I know what De Niro’s character looked like when he was basically state raised as an 11-year-old, wearing clothes that didn’t match, being ostracized, which then made them aggressive and violent, which led to juvenile facilities.”
Mann also shared that the sequel will be even more expensive. "I believe it should be made at the proper size and scale. It’s going to shoot in Chicago, Los Angeles, Paraguay, and possibly some parts in Singapore. People make dramas at a certain budget level, because of the costs, not because of anybody being greedy. If it was at a lower price, I could have made it anywhere. But it’s complex. I can’t get into all the politics of it.”
