Here, the master filmmaker discusses what changedand why.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: The true story that inspiredHeatlargely took place in Chicago.
What led you to set the film in Los Angeles?
Al Pacino and Michael Mann on the set of ‘Heat’.Credit: Warner Bros./Everett Collection
MICHAEL MANN:L.A. is more balkanized than Chicago.
There’s a unity to Chicago.
It’s got north and south streets.
It’s all in a grid.
It has a downtown area.
Then you have residential neighborhoods.
Then it goes on to suburbs.
L.A. is all these little cities put together.
If you think of L.A. as the County of Los Angeles, it’s bigger than most countries.
Those kind of landscapes are all available here because this place is just so irrigated.
It just felt like this is the real domain that this movie should happen within.
All of the Los Angeles locations in this film feel so iconic.
How did you go about finding them?
Because everybody’s dimensional.
Who’s their mommy?
Who’s their daddy?
Didn’t know L.A.
There’d be a homicide in Pacoima.
We’d wind up in the middle of an armed robbery in progress.
So you’d run into these absurd situations.
I would just pop these people into the movie.
And you discover things.
When it came to remastering the film for the Blu-ray, were there specific sequences you focused on?
Yeah, the whole film!
When you go into Blu-ray, and you go to 4K, you’re in a different color space.
Meaning that what was magenta doesn’t translate exactly.
That was really it.
So we went into every shot.
Your style in your more recent films has evolved from when you madeHeat.
Did that affect how you looked at this film?
Let me put this rather precisely.
When you see an emotion on a human’s face, how much of the face do you see?
Yes, I evolved, but also, audience perception evolves, andmediaevolves, year to year.
If I shot this film two or three years ago, this particular film would be less chromatic.
All that is a lot darker.
Primary reds are stripped out.
The reflections in the metaleverythingis substantially darker, if I showed you the before and after.
They’re big steps, they’re not subtleties.
It was recently reported that you hired Reed Farrel Coleman to co-write aHeatprequel novel.
Can you talk about that project?
It’s the entire pivotal battle during the Tet Offensive.
It’s gonna be a limited series, either 8 or 10 hours.
