Michael Mann Archives -

McG DIRECTING HEAT 2

HOLLYWOOD – Several weeks ago Michael Mann announced he has co-written and will be publishing the sequel / prequel novel to his 90s smash hit crime thriller, Heat. Today Mann announced that Charlie’s Angels and Terminator: Salvation director, McG is directing Heat 2. With McG directing Heat 2, we caught up with the controversial director to talk about this surprise announcement.

So, McG Directing Heat 2. How Did You Get That Gig?

Honestly, I have no f**king idea. I was settled in directing shitty TV episodes of whatever, which suited me fine. Then from nowhere, Micky Mann calls me and Badda-bing! I got the gig. Go figure?

What Are Your Plans For Casting?

As I’m sure you know, the book follows Val Kilmer’s character Chris after the events from the original. It also tells the stories of Al’s and Bobby’s characters before we met them in Heat. I’m gonna stick with the same actors for continuity. Marty Scorsese perfected the de-ageing techniques in The Irishman, so I’m just gonna piggy-back on what he did. Easy.

Are You Sure About That? Not Everybody Was Convinced.

F**k them! If it’s good enough for Marty, it’s sure as shit good enough for me. I’m also casting Sam Worthington in it. Not sure who he’s gonna play yet. But I just think he’s one of the most compelling performers we have.

What Else Can You Tell Us About The Movie?

Where the first movie fell down was in the lack of action sequences. Yeah, it had a decent gun battle, but where was all the bullet time? Where were all the hunter-killer robots? That’s what the Heat universe needs. Hey, hang on just one goddam minute. That gives me an idea. We can make this not only a Heat sequel and prequel, but also a prequel to Terminator: Salvation. Sam can reprise his role of Robby The Robot, or whatever the f**k he was in that movie. Maybe we could even get Christian Bale back as John Connor. He had so much fun playing that role.

Are You Sure That Will Fit In With What’s Gone Before?

You have seen my work before, right? Do you think I give a shit about any of that? This is gonna be awesome, baby. YEAH!

Heat 2: Turn Up The Temperature Is Slated For A 2024 Release

JOHNNY DEPP RETIRES FROM ACTING: “I WANT TO BE A CHILDREN’S ENTERTAINER!”

HOLLYWOOD – Johnny Depp to retire.

Johnny Depp announced his retirement from movie acting in order to devote himself full time to being a children’s entertainer, by the name of ‘Mr Gangley’.

A friend close to Johnny Depp told Studio Exec, “Johnny didn’t like the reaction to The Rum Diary and Transcendence. Both of which he had hoped would repair some of the damage The Tourist had done, which he did as a way of getting away from the snore machine that was Public Enemies.”

Film historian and self-confessed ‘Depp-spert’, Felix Dripping argues:

Depp has actually been a children’s entertainer for some time now. First, The Mad Hatter, Jack Sparrow, Tonto, that other shit he did with Burton, none of that was actually acting. He was just putting on makeup and pulling faces and shit. Perhaps, he simply forgot how to act.

Michael Mann also had harsh words for the former Freddy Kreuger victim number 4. “For Public Enemies I gave him John Dillinger, one of the most exciting roles you can imagine. And he made him boring.”

There have long been rumours that Mr Depp was not happy with his current profession. Comments he made during an appearance on Letterman to the effect that he never watched his own films now seem to have been a warning sign. While filming Pirates 4 he took time off to visit a local school and entertain the kids, telling the director Rob Marshall to “go fuck yourself.”

From now on, he will go by the name of Mr Gangley and is declaring himself available for children’s parties. He is offering magic tricks, balloon animals, improv character pieces (no pirates) and ventriloquism with his new monkey friend, Jimmy Spangles.

Johnny Depp’s last film will be Pirates of the Caribbean 5.

MICHAEL MANN PLOTS HEAT PREQUEL

HOLLYWOOD – Director Michael Mann talks about his plans for a prequel to his masterpiece Heat.

A Heat Prequel has been a dream for many years. But now it looks like it might actually become a reality. We caught up with Michael Mann on his return from Tokyo where he’d been shooting Tokyo Vice.

Hey Mike so this Heat Prequel is really going to happen.

Don’t call me Mike, asshole. And yeah. I’m really excited about it. Obviously when i work on a film I prefer to concentrate on what I’m doing. But having to stop in the middle of the production one of the only benefits is that it does give you an opportunity to take a look at your career. You sort out your priorities. And so the question of Heat came up once more and I said, why not?

That’s great Mikey. So as a prequel do you have any ideas on casting?

Did you just f*ckin’ call me Mikey? Call me Michael. Have some goddamn respect.

Okay. But casting?

Well, I’m using Robert de Niro to play the Robert de Niro role and Al Pacino to play the Al Pacino role. It’s really that simple.

But M&M, surely if this is a prequel they’ll be too old for those roles.

That’s what we thought as well and then I saw what marty did in The Irishman and I’ve always been passionate about using digital technology to ruin perfectly good movies – did you see Public Enemies? – so I guessed why not do it again. We’ll deage them both and they’ll be perfect. The only problem is trying to get a story that can involve them, but they won’t meet. They have to meet in that very first encounter in the diner otherwise it doesn’t make sense. Did you call me M&M?

Like Michael Mann. M&M.

That doesn’t even make sense. It sounds like Eminem.

So Manfred, will the rest of the cast remain the same?

What’s so f*ckin difficult about calling me Michael?

The cast Mickey, Mikey, Michelangelo, Mr M. The Mann Show, Mannequin, The Mann from UNCLE?

Yes. No I mean. Yes for some of them. We want to get Tom Sizemore back and we tested him with the deaging and it looks okay. But Val Kilmer… we tried but smoke came out of the machine and something went pop!

You da Mann.

Okay, I’m f*ckin out here!

The Heat Prequel will begin filming in 2021.

RUSSELL CROWE TO PLAY STEVE BANNON

HOLLYWOOD – Russell Crowe is to play Steve Bannon in Single White Douche.

Gladiator star Russell Crowe plays former Breitbart editor in a new Michael Mann film, Single White Douche. Mann told the Studio Exec:

It was easy really. Steve’s a douche and Russell certainly has his inner douche. It’s going to be a comedy. We’re shooting in Moscow and Washington. It’s very exciting.

Russell Crowe has already begun preparations, eating a diet consisting only of KFC buckets. Not the chicken, just the buckets. Crowe told us:

I’m reading a lot of his writing as well as his influences. Ayn Rand, Neitszche, Mein Kampf. Steve is a fascinatingly complex guy. Sean Penn introduced us once. But I’m happy to say I was so drunk I don’t remember much. I’ve worked with Michael before with The Insider, so I know that his instincts are sound. He described the film to me as an Adam Sandler comedy, if Adam Sandler comedies were actually funny.

Single White Douche will be released in 2019.

‘CHRIS HEMSWORTH SMELLS OF BASKETS’, SAYS RON HOWARD

HOLLYWOOD – Shocking news just in today that Thor the God of Thunder and James Hunt the star of Rush, Chris Hemsworth smells of baskets. And not good ones.

Chris Hemsworth is the elder member of a family of beefcake, that also includes Lawrence bait, Liam Hemsworth, who are currently plying their trade in the motion picture industry. Young Hemsworth has made something of a name for himself with performances as Thor in Thor and racing car driver James Rush in Rush as well as the eponymous Hat in the Michael Mann film no one went to see Black Hat. But today it was revealed to the world via an anonymous source that the hunky star with the ability to play it for laughs has a very distinct odor.

Ron Howard dropped by the Studio Exec bungalow to lay the lowdown on us wearing a heavy disguise as an old Richie Cunningham.

He smells of baskets. And not good fresh baskets either. Flower baskets, or baskets full of toys. No. The kind of baskets that have been used to catch crabs for generations and then have been left in the corner of the dockyard warehouse for like three years, until they’re covered in a strange black algae.

Urgh!

Exactly. And on the set everyone is going ‘Phew! Who cut the cheese?’ But then someone else, I think it was Cillian Murphy, said, ‘It doesn’t smell like cheese, or farts. It smells like baskets.’

How was it directing him In The Heart of the Sea?

I don’t know what you are talking about. I’m not Ron Howard. Ron Howard is the director of In the Heart of The Sea. I’m not he.

By the way you’re making a film about events that inspired Moby Dick.

Yes. That’s to say, Ron Howard is.

Why not just make a version of Moby Dick?

Chris Hemsworth smells of baskets, baskets, baskets.

In the Heart of the Sea will be in cinemas next month.

47 FILMS: 19. THIEF

In our continuing series of ‘47 Films to see before you’re murdered in your dreams‘, we look at Michael Mann’s glorious Thief.

Before the Mohicans were all but one and Miami was Vice ridden, Michael Mann made his feature film debut – and possibly his best film to date – with the 1981 James Caan crime flick Thief.

The tale is familiar enough: a super-professional criminal begins to feel the need for something resembling a normal life, a wife (Tuesday Weld), a family, a home. Of course his criminal associates and corrupt cops want to control or destroy him and ruin his plans. However, the film is lifted from its relatively ordinary story by the amazing performances. James Caan has rarely been better. His diner scene with Tuesday Weld is a professed favorite of the actor’s and you can see why. Caan – who also produced the film – is at his wired best, suggesting a vulnerability of a man ready to fall apart or fly off the handle. Weld is more than capable of standing up to him, and add to the leads debuts by James Belushi and Dennis Farina and some excellent moments with Willie Nelson and Nick Nickeas.

The film looks gorgeous, rain slicked streets of incredible beauty. Mann hasn’t gone kitsch yet. His cops are grubby, there are workplaces and the whole thing is taken seriously. The safe cracking scenes are exciting and at the same time almost humdrum. Caan’s thief – who will appear again in De Niro’s role in Heat – is a man who gets the job done and doesn’t want any part of the glamour or the myth of what he does.

This is the kind of American movie Jean Paul Melville was trying to reproduce, but which probably didn’t exist until after Melville. Tangerine Dream provide an overbearing score, but with this material it works.

For more 47 Films Click Here.

CHRISTIAN BALE TO PLAY CLIVE SINCLAIR

LONDON – News just came in that Batman star Christian Bale is to play British home computing mogul and revolutionary vehicle designer, Clive Sinclair.

Speaking exclusively to the Studio Exec, Christian Bale discussed the appeal of the project:

Clive Sinclair was a true revolutionary. Before Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates, Clive Sinclair brought into millions of homes the personal computer, the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum. He was a driven man and one that I will be proud to play.

Is it going to rival the Steve Jobs film?

A bit. But that isn’t the reason I’m doing. I’m very much looking forward to seeing what Michael Fassbender can do with the role I ended up turning down. But the key to our film is that we are looking at the latter part of his career when he tried to move into motor vehicles and specifically the Sinclair C5 Car which was a revolutionary way of getting rid of cars altogether. If it hadn’t been for the combined dirty tricks of Ford and other motor car companies then we really could have had that future that we used to read about in comic books. With the backpack helicopters things and the food in pills.

Heat and Last of the Mohicans director Michael Mann will be behind the camera and the screenplay is by Frank Cotrell Boyce. We asked Christian what Michael brought to the project.

I think he’ll add a surprising element of action. Many people today unfairly remember Sinclair as a kind of sad, boring, slightly weird character. But when they see the gunfight in a multi-story car park in Norwich and the C5 chase down the A595 towards Barrow-in-Furness, they’re going to have to do a lot of reassessing.

Sinclair is due to be released in 2018.

BORN FREE REMAKE ‘WILL FEATURE MONKEYS’

NAIROBI – Plans to remake Born Free – the 1966 film about the raising of lion cub Elsa by Joy and George Adamson in a Kenya reservation – have been in the pipeline for well over forty years, but it looks that Michael Mann is the … well … man for the job. But he is introducing differences which might upset fans of the original.
The LA Takedown director said:

Jesus Christ, I love animals. Big ones, small ones. I love ’em. I was in line to direct Noah and then that asshole Aronofsky got in ahead of me.

The first film was based on a book and a true story that featured the actual protagonists, now sadly no longer with us, how do you plan to recreate the story?

What I want to do is be true to the spirit of the original, so the first thing that has to go is the lions. They’re too dangerous. They scare fifty shades of living color out of me. So we’re going to change them to monkeys. I mean, who doesn’t love a monkey?

But won’t that… doesn’t that change everything?

Does it? Yeah, I suppose. What? Everyone loves monkeys. We’re going to put them in glasses and make them really funny.

MICHAEL MANN MOHICANS SEQUEL: YES!

What are we looking at?

HOLLYWOOD – Twenty years since the release of Michael Mann’s rip-roaring bodice busting scalp scalping run around fest The Last of the Mohicans, Michael Mann has revealed he intends to start filming a sequel early next year, provisionally entitled, Actually We’ve Found Some More Mohicans. The film will star Daniel Day-Lewis, who will have won another Oscar by then, as Hawkeye, not the hilarious army doctor who spent the Korean war quipping and lusting after Hot Lips, but someone totally different.

Speaking from his loft in New York, Mann screeched like an American eagle: ‘I was always really down on the end of our film, because it was such a bummer you know. The last of the Mohicans, sounds so final, but that was like the Fenimore Cooper novel. But then I got to thinking what if there were some other Mohicans who – I don’t know – had been hiding? What then?’
The film will also star Madeline Stowe who has already quit her job at JC Penneys in order to prepare for the role.
‘I am always looking for new challenges, to do something totally new and original,’ said the Miami Vice director. The plot will involve Curly, Moe and ChingaChuck, the three remaining Mohicans and the scrapes they get into when they are mistaken for drug smugglers by the mafia. Only with the help of Hawkeye and a lot of luck are they going to get out of this scrape.

Actually We’ve Found Some More Mohicans will be released in 2014.