Michael Mann completed his highly anticipated, long-awaited script for Heat 2 just one week before Val Kilmer's death

Dear Gossips,

It was reported just this past weekend that Michael Mann had completed and turned in his highly anticipated and long-awaited script for Heat 2 to Warner Bros. Whether or not it’ll actually get made is another story. But of course there are several reasons this is newsworthy.

Heat was released in December 1995, this year marks its 30th anniversary. The movie is a legend, considered one of the best Hollywood crime dramas of all time, starring two cinematic icons, onscreen together for the first time in a scene that people will speak about with reverence probably forever: Al Pacino sat across from Robert De Niro, together delivering an acting master class as they exchange their respective cop and robber ideologies over coffee.

I saw Heat at the theatre when it came out and watched it over and over again on PPV afterwards. Though I was young, and it was well before internet discourse, before we collectively gathered in real time to obsess over pop culture, I could feel the impact of this movie on my generation. And not just in the performances of Pacino and De Niro but that whole cast. Including Val Kilmer.

He was Iceman, he was Madmartigan and Jim Morrison, he was Bruce Wayne, and he was Chris Shiherlis. Rumour has it Val Kilmer took a paycut to be in Heat, and when Michael Mann asked him how he could show his appreciation, Val asked that he put him on the poster between Pacino and De Niro.

I don’t know if this is true, but I do know that given how the film’s mythology has grown, having Val’s face positioned alongside those two acting godfathers was not a bad decision, especially when you consider his role in one of the bank robbery shootout scenes, which also occupies fabled status among cinephiles. (This is why Heat is so celebrated – it’s not just ONE scene, there are SO many!)

People are fanatical about the way Val reloaded his gun, and videos of the sequence are all over social media, with firearms experts losing it over Val’s expertise.

For me, though, the Val Kilmer scenes in Heat that I consider the most unforgettable – and there are two – involve Chris’s softer side. Twenty-two year old me swooned over this response to De Niro’s signature mantra:

“…have no attachments, allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner.”

Chris could never. Because as he said, “For me, the sun rises and sets with her, man”.

Gangsters are romanticised – perhaps problematically – in movies all the time, often for their violence. I romanticised Val Kilmer’s gangster for how in love he was with Charlene, played by Ashley Judd. Which brings us to the second of my favourite Val scenes in Heat: when the heat is around the corner, and he doesn’t want to walk out, but she tells him to and he knows it’s the only option. Both of their faces here, when they know they’ll never see each other again – it’s too much and it’s the BEST. This is how Val Kilmer got away.