Val Kilmer’s bizarre pitch for a ‘Heat’ sequel: “I’m going to torture and then kill him”
The neo-noir genre has many great contributors who have aided its evolution into one of the most prominent stylistic frameworks in modern cinema, and Michael Mann definitely towers over many of them. Whether it be the seminal 1981 flick Thief, starring none other than James Caan, or his contribution to the 2022 series Tokyo Vice, Mann has continued to develop his artistic vision into a coherent aesthetic statement.
However, even amongst all the lauded entries in his acclaimed filmography, the movie that always emerges in every conversation about Mann’s work is Heat. One can argue that Thief has more focused and stylised neo-noir imagery than Heat, but the latter is the culmination of what Mann and the genre as a whole have to say.
Starring Robert De Niro as a career criminal who enters into mortal combat against an obsessed but highly intelligent detective played by Al Pacino, Heat blurs conventional divisions of morality and the binary concepts of “good” and “evil”. Everything merges in a haze of violence, loneliness, ambition and despair, and the only common denominator holding all of it together is death.
Since the film’s release in 1995, Mann has been hounded by questions about a sequel, but nothing ever really stuck until he announced that there was a prequel novel on the horizon in 2016. Divided into distinct chronological phases, the director is currently in the process of adapting that novel as both a prequel and a sequel to the original movie, but even before he had started work on it, the cast had their own ideas about what would work.
During an interview, Val Kilmer once opened up about his version of a potential sequel, and it’s quite bizarre, to say the least, not to mention violent right from the bat. Kilmer, who tragically passed away earlier this year, won’t be a part of the sequel, but he will always be a part of its legacy, and not just because he was fantastic in the first film.
According to Kilmer, “It wouldn’t be that difficult to maintain the spirit of it… Here’s my pitch. You remember Natalie Portman in it? She’s Pacino’s adopted daughter, so she comes home and says, ‘Daddy, daddy, I want you to meet my fiancé.’ And it’s me. He’s retired, and I come to Chicago, where he’s retired back to, and I’m going to torture him, and then I’m going to kill him.”
In a conversation with Vulture a few months ago, Mann confirmed that he has already finalised the script, so there’s little chance that Kilmer’s crazy idea will feature in Heat 2. The director said, “I just finished the screenplay and handed in the first draft. When asked who he submitted the script to, Mann replied, “In this case, it was Warner Brothers. Any more than that, I can’t talk about. But it’s an exciting project.”
Many prominent actors, ranging from Adam Driver to Ana de Armas, have been linked to the sequel, which Mann said that he hopes to shoot on celluloid, but no concrete details about the production have surfaced yet.
