Michael Mann has confirmed he is getting close to completing his screenplay for Heat 2 and that it will be his next movie, in a conversation at Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival on Monday.
“We have to have it finished very soon,” he said, suggesting jokingly he would be doing that on “The plane ride back to Los Angeles.”
The director said Heat 2, he wanted to make his previously mooted movie about the 1968 Battle of Hué, one of the bloodiest chapters of the Vietnam War in which the forces of South Vietnam and U.S troops recaptured the city of Hué over one month of brutal urban fighting.
Mann is among a raft of stars attending the fourth edition of the Red Sea Film Festival this year, alongside Michael Douglas, Michelle Yeoh, Catherine Zeta Jones, Eva Longoria, Andrew Garfield, Ranbir Kapoor, Cynthia Erivo, Sarah Jessica Parker and Jeremy Renner.
He opened the conversation with a demonstration of his new interactive website Ferrari Expanded, going behind the scenes of the development and shooting of his recent Enzo Ferrari biopic Ferrari, starring Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz.
Mann credited one of his daughters with helping him to make the archival website come together.
“The great English poet John Milton had two daughters, who later on, when he was blind helped him a lot. I fortunately have four daughters, and one of them is a fantastic archivist and that’s where the idea of this came from,” he said of the site.
The site organized over six different episodes, each with 20 videos, accompanied by 400 documents, including Mann’s notes as well as archival research, gives a fascinating insight into the depth of the director’s intricate and expansive process when he is developing a film.
“The idea behind it was to take people into the adventure of what directors do when you build a film like Ferrari. It’s unusual. There’s never been a website quite like this. We knew we were going to do it when we were shooting the movie, so we accumulated a lot of material,” he said.
Quizzed on whether he would do a similar deep dive into any of his other films, Mann suggested Heat would be a good candidate.
He also noted that he would love to see similar initiatives dissecting the work of filmmakers such as Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón.
