Leonardo DiCaprio Talks About the Sequel HEAT 2 and How It's "Very Much Its Own Movie" and a "Unique Entity"
After the success of Leonardo DiCaprio’s highly buzzed-about drama One Battle After Another, the actor has a lot of projects on the horizon, as usual.
But one is slightly out of his wheelhouse, only because he typically doesn’t do sequels. Michael Mann, who has made some great films in his career, like The Last of the Mohicans, Ali, and Collateral, is returning to one of his best films, Heat (1995), to write and direct a sequel, and DiCaprio is set to star alongside Christian Bale, Adam Driver, Austin Butler, and Bradley Cooper, all in undisclosed roles.
When asked about Heat 2 in an interview about his career with Deadline, DiCaprio said of the film:
“This is very much its own movie. We’re still working on it, we’re a ways away from production. It tips its hat to Heat, but it’s an homage, and it picks up the story from there. The book is already out there, so there are no big secrets that I’m divulging.
It’s set in the future, and the past, from that pivotal moment in what I think is the great crime noir film of my lifetime. It’s one of those films that just keeps resonating, that we keep talking about, that has been imitated so many times and influenced so many different movies.
So, we’re working on it. But it’s certainly exciting, and I think I look at it as its own silo, in a sense. We can’t duplicate what Heat was, so it’s paying homage to that film, but giving it its own unique entity.”
DiCaprio almost worked with Michael Mann on a film about James Dean in the early ‘90s, but it never came to be. The pair did meet up again to develop the 2004 Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator, but DiCaprio has been waiting for decades to be in a movie with Mann behind the camera, and he’s finally making that happen. He went on to gush about working with the filmmaker, and delved into their history a bit, saying:
“What I love about Michael Mann as an artist and as a person — and I’ve heard this from other actors along the way — is that he is extraordinary to work with, because there’s nothing that he hasn’t thought of.
He’s thought of every single nuance and detail of the character, of the world, and he’s going to have an answer for any questions you might have. When we did the James Dean screen test, I remember it was at Warner Bros.
They put a top hat on me. I did my best. I think we had two days to shoot a screen test. I was probably just a little too young at that time. Then we moved on to developing The Aviator together.
That was the Howard Hughes book I remember carrying around in my backpack for almost 10 years, while I was voraciously reading about who that man was. I had a huge passion to play him. Michael developed that entire screenplay with John Logan, and it was just masterful.
He had just done Ali, and after doing one major biopic, he didn’t want to do another, he said, ‘It’s yours, kid.’ I said, ‘OK, thank you.’”
It’s cool that this has been in the works for such a long time, and it’s finally coming to fruition. Heat 2 is currently in pre-production. Stay tuned for updates as the film moves forward.