Michael Mann recently spoke with an audience during a masterclass at the Lumière Festival in Lyon. The director was asked about a couple of Westerns that he had been in development for a great while. According to Deadline, Mann confirmed that Scott Cooper, who helmed the upcoming music biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, will be directing one of his scripts. Mann explained,
I want to do a western. I have two screenplays, one of which I’m not going to do, I’m going to produce and Scott Cooper is going to do… it’s called Comanche.”
Mann had written Comanche in the early 2000s with Eric Roth, but after years of development, it never truly took off. Per Deadline, Comanche is “inspired by the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, a white woman who was kidnapped by Comanches as a child and later lived as a Comanche woman.”
Cooper’s film Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (which opens next week) is getting good early buzz with the transformation of Jeremy Allen White as the Boss. Bruce Springsteen would make it a priority to be on the set of Deliver Me from Nowhere whenever possible and whenever Cooper would allow. A number of nights were spent at the Stone Pony, the New Jersey venue where Springsteen frequently played. White explained, “Bruce was there, like he was a lot of days, and he came out, and he kind of introduced me to the audience, so he gave them to me all warmed up. They made me feel like a star for three-and-a-half minutes. And then the first A.D. would say ‘Cut,’ and they would go silent. And I remembered, I am not Bruce Springsteen, I am just an actor.”
Meanwhile, Mann says he hopes to begin shooting Heat 2 next year. Reports are that Leonardo DiCaprio is being eyed to star in the role of Chris Shiherlis, initially played by Val Kilmer in the 1995 film. Heat 2 takes place one day after the events of the original movie, as it follows a wounded Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) desperately trying to escape Los Angeles. The story flashes back and forth to events years before the heist and the years immediately following. I can’t imagine anyone else taking on the iconic roles of the original movie. Still, Michael Mann has said that audiences are ready for a new story in the Heat universe. “It’s sustained in culture. It’s known,” Mann said. “I could delude myself into thinking that the whole world is familiar with it, but when you check out its prominence in home video for over 20 years, this thing really has legs. People are still watching it, people are still talking about it. It’s a brand. It’s kind of a Heat universe, in a way. And that certainly justifies a very large ambitious movie.”
