NEARLY 30 YEARS AFTER UNLEASHING HIS EPIC CRIME DRAMA HEAT, DIRECTOR MICHAEL MANN IS BACK WITH A SEQUEL - IN B0OK FORM. HE TELLS US WHY THESE CHARACTERS ARE A LIFELONG OBSESSION... AND WHY NOT EVEN DEATH CAN REEP THEM DOWN

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

Michael Mann, photographed exclusively for Empire in Los Angeles on

PORTRAITS ART STREIBER

ACOP AND A THIEF SIT DOWN FOR A CUP of coffee at a local deli. They’ve been circling each other, professionally speaking, ever since the cop saw the thief just walk away from a complex score he had been setting up because he felt something was off (he was correct). They exchange chit-chit, small talk, wary of each other yet still keen to gain the psychological upper hand. They know that this is only going to end one way: with one of them dead by the other’s hand. Yet there remains a lingering feeling: perhaps, in another life, they could have been best friends, brothers, soulmates, even. In another life.

Shortly thereafter, the thief lies dead at the hands of the cop. The year is 1963. The place is Chicago. The thief ’s name is Neil McCauley.

MICHAEL MANN STILL REMEMBERS THE first time he heard that name. As a matter of fact, he heard it from the man who killed McCauley.

Charles ‘Chuck’ Adamson was a former Chicago PD detective who Mann, in search of authenticity for his big-screen directorial debut Thief, had hired as a technical adviser/cast member (Adamson is the cop who berates James Caan during an interrogation scene). One day when they were working on the film in the dying embers of the 1970s, Mann was grilling Adamson about war stories from his days as a cop. “I said, ‘Tell me the definition of a crew that’s really professional and highline,’” remembers Mann, talking exclusively to Empire from his LA office.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Adamson dropped Neil McCauley’s name and, without knowing it, sparked in Mann an obsession that continues to flicker almost five decades on.

Alamy, Photofest

Clockwise from left: Heat’s iconic coffeeshop scene; Robert De Niro and Michael Mann between takes; Al Pacino as Lieutenant Vincent Hanna.

Adamson told Mann about how McCauley had first come to his attention, when Adamson and his men had got wind of a major upcoming score at a big department store. “‘We were inside, waiting for them to come in,’” Mann recalls Adamson saying, “‘and on the way in [McCauley’s crew] see one vehicle that didn’t belong in the parking lot, and they walked away and never came back.’” In other words, McCauley felt the heat around the corner, and walked away in 30 seconds flat.