Mann’s Best Friend: L.A. : This TV-Turned-Movie Director Sends the City a Big Valentine With ‘Heat’

Late one evening, Michael Mann realized that the airplanes were getting on his nerves.

The director and his camera crew were camped on the edge of a runway at LAX, struggling to film a climactic scene in the cop drama “Heat� as jets roared 75 feet overhead every minute and a half.

“There were periods when it got kind of surreal,� he recalled. “You’re breathing hard, your heart’s going, you feel like you’re working hard. But then I would have this realization that none of us had done a thing for 20 minutes. All we were doing was standing there, enduring noise.

“Whatever I was saying to an actor or cameraman or grip, I would have to stop, cover my ears and wait for this thing to go over. I’d get about another 35 seconds of direction in and then I’d have to stop again.�

One suspects that Mann, if given a chance, would have tried directing the air traffic too. Mann is known for preparing his movies down to the smallest details and halting cameras if even one extra is out of place. A studio executive associated with his 1993 adaptation of “The Last of the Mohicans� candidly noted that the 52-year-old writer-producer-director is “generally perceived as a pain in the ass� on the set.

Yet Mann’s controlling side may have proved a virtue. “Heat,� starring Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Val Kilmer, has earned strong reviews, with critics praising its unconventional take on the well-worked cop genre. Photographed at 85 locations throughout Los Angeles County, from the airport to Pacific Palisades to downtown, the film is also something of a valentine to a city that’s experienced racial uneasiness and tabloid-style criminal trials.

Pacino plays Vincent Hanna, a hard-bitten Los Angeles Police Department detective chasing a team of crackerjack thieves led by the eerily calm Neil McCauley (De Niro). McCauley’s gang specializes in precision heists; the film opens with an armored truck robbery so exquisitely planned that the crooks literally work with a stopwatch so they can escape before the police arrive.

But Mann added another dimension to the action. The story delves into Hanna’s crumbling third marriage (Diane Venora plays his long-suffering wife) and confirmed bachelor McCauley’s attenuated stab at romance with a graphic designer (Amy Brenneman).

“I think of ‘Heat’ as a drama, not a genre picture,� Mann said in his Santa Monica production suite. On a coffee table was stacked an eclectic array of magazines--Auto Week, Sight and Sound, Historic Preservation, Progressive Architecture. At least one obscure magazine was there because Mann believes it was something one of the minor characters in “Heat� might have read.

“This is not the kind of story that’s supposed to work,� he continued. “I have a detective who’s hunting for the perpetrator of a crime . . . but the audience knows exactly who that perpetrator is.�

Yet in writing the script, Mann discovered that character was just as relevant as plot.

“The idea of not doing two-dimensional character archetypes, but exploring in a more natural way the lives of these people as three-dimensional, full human beings became very exciting to me,� he said.

Mann has spent years infiltrating the macho underworld of cops and criminals. Until “Mohicans,� his fame rested on a pair of ‘80s TV series he produced, “Miami Vice� and “Crime Story.�

The seed for “Heat� came from a real-life incident involving “Crime Story� co-creator Chuck Adamson, a former Chicago undercover cop and a real con named Neil McCauley.

“He was a kind of virtuoso professional criminal, and he was very careful,� Mann said. “What was different about him was that he was very disciplined, very tough and very ruthless. . . . He’d walk away from a score if there was something wrong, one thing out of place.�

Other details came from countless ride-alongs with undercover cops and the filmmaker’s own midnight rambles through South-Central and East Los Angeles and elsewhere. Around 2 o’clock one morning in the Pico Union neighborhood, he struck up a conversation with a man who had plugged a console TV set into the battery of a car parked in the middle of the street. A similar character crops up as a crime witness in “Heat.�

Mann said he prepared the large cast (which includes Jon Voigt, Tom Sizemore and Ashley Judd) by arranging interviews with real-life detectives and ex-cons and encouraging actors to get into character long before the cameras rolled. But the performances by De Niro and Pacino, in particular, presented so many nuances that making choices during editing proved difficult.

In the first meeting between the De Niro and Brenneman characters in Santa Monica’s Broadway Deli, for instance, “you could look at every single little gesture and every expression on Bob’s face: It’s a masterpiece of performance in a very mundane scene,� Mann said.

In many ways, though, the real star of the film is Los Angeles, whose ocean and mountain vistas have rarely been captured to better effect. A Chicago native, Mann said he chose the city as a setting “because it’s alive.�

“I wasn’t that hip to it at first . . . but when we began exploring L.A., we found a very vibrant culturally and economically diverse city.� For an early shootout scene, Mann scouted every drive-in theater in Los Angeles County until he settled on the abandoned Centinela in West Los Angeles, chosen for its state of decay.

The city’s “techno-industrial feel,� targeted by so many critics, became a rhapsodic theme for the director--both on the ground and in the air.

“When you’re on top of a tall building in L.A. at 11 o’clock or midnight in January or February and you’re not moved a little bit by what you’re seeing--the blinking lights and the 16 or 17 airplanes on approach to LAX--there’s some emotional deficit going on there,� Mann said with a crooked smile.