Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Michael Mann’s Heat. Photo: PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy Stock Photo While Michael Mann’s Heat was well reviewed and solid at the box office on its release in 1995, the film’s reputation has only grown over the past several decades — so much so that it’s now considered one of American cinema’s greatest masterpieces. I’ve written about Heat multiple times over the years , and each time I rewatch Mann’s picture, I discover something new.
Mann had made L.A. Takedown by carving out a big chunk of a massive script that he’d been working on throughout the 1970s and which would eventually become Heat. As Mann told me a few years ago, he’d had difficulty licking the ending of that longer, more ambitious story — and he wouldn’t until the 1990s, when he finally came on the unforgettable closing moments of Heat. L.A.
We often talk about characters having inner lives. It’s not enough just to look great, read your lines well, or give good reaction shots. We need to be able to simply watch you. We need to be able to look at you, even when you’re not doing much of anything, and wonder what’s going on inside your head. This, for example, is what makes Pacino so compelling in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, in which his character’s reserve gradually builds to something terrifying.
The energies of the two men are quite different at the start, but they gradually and subtly come together over the course of their conversation. Their eyes keep drifting around but always end up locking onto the other’s. Hanna blurts out his emotions: “My life’s a disaster zone … I got a wife. We’re passing each other on the downslope of a marriage , because I spend all my time chasing guys like you around the block.
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