How The Heat Diner Scene Came Together, According To Director Michael Mann

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This year marks the 30th anniversary of Michael Mann’s classic crime thriller “Heat,” which famously saw legendary actors Al Pacino and Robert De Niro appear in the same scene together for the first time despite having previously co-starred in “The Godfather Part II.” The “Heat” diner scene, in which Pacino’s world-weary cop, Vincent Hanna, sits down across from De Niro’s stoic thief, Neil McCauley, has been an obsession for a certain type of cinephile for years, and has been the subject of homages from across the film and TV spectrum, including most recently in “Daredevil: Born Again.” Before the closing night screening of “Heat” at the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival, Pacino and writer/director Michael Mann participated in a Q&A where they spoke about that moment and how it felt on set at the time.

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Pacino spoke about how comfortable he felt working with De Niro, whom he’d known for decades before production began, thanks to Mann’s competence behind the camera and the way the director created a feeling of safety for his actors. But when moderator Ben Mankiewicz asked Mann if he felt an extra sense of importance while shooting that scene because of what it meant in the grand scheme of film history, Mann responded as cooly as one of his characters: “Not at all.”

“By that point, we had a very thorough pre-production, we had been shooting for five to six weeks,” Mann explained. “When I schedule a film, I work very hard on the scheduling, and I take a scene like that that’s terribly important and I usually put it in the middle of the schedule. Because when you’re making a film, everybody gets better at making that film as you’re making it. So you’d never do something like that first, you’d never do it at the end. So it was very carefully orchestrated about where it would land. By that point […] we were concerned about our characters. About Neil McCauley, Vincent Hanna, and the significance of them coming together. So nobody’s thinking outside the context of the story of the film, these characters, and this collision which is carefully brought together by all the events that precede it.”

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One of my favorite parts of the Q&A was Mann talking about the nature of Neil and Vincent, the two twin pillars of this narrative. “It’s a very complex scene,” he said. “I can’t imagine anybody else doing this except Al and Bob. These two men are truly antithetical to each other. They have some components of their personalities that are totally opposite each other, and two that are exactly the same. They’re the only two people in the film that are totally self-aware. There’s no self-deception. They are aware of themselves. They sometimes stimulate themselves in certain ways to be sharp and be on the edge […] It really is a very careful moment.”

I’d also never heard him explain a key factor that went into choosing the location to film this scene, and why he chose to have three cameras running at the same time when shooting the scene:

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“That’s why I picked Kate Mantilini’s, because it was a black and white interior. I wanted nothing to intrude in what these two actors were going to do […] I wanted it to so that all your attention was focused on what’s going on. Because when Bob shifted like this [he moves slightly in his chair], and puts his hand closer to where he probably has a concealed weapon, [during] the dialogue, you’d see Al do some other move that was counter. There was kind of an organic unity to the take. So I wanted to capture the two, their work, simultaneously. Meaning, there’s an organic unity to take 10 that’s different than take 11 and different than take 12. So that’s why I was using three cameras. Most of the scene is take 11.”

Seeing this well-researched movie in the TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood, one of the best movie theaters in the world, was transcendent. Pacino and De Niro do some of the best work of their spectacular careers, they’re surrounded by a who’s who of terrific characters (including Dennis Haysbert, who once told me what it was like to work with De Niro), and there’s not a frame of Dante Spinotti’s cinematography that feels out of place. Even the controlled chaos of the movie’s famous gunfight worked better for me on a big screen than it ever has before, with its ear-splitting sound effects blasting through the theater in all their glory. 

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You can hear me talk about my experience at this year’s TCM Film Festival, where I also saw “Suspicion,” “Back to the Future,” “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” and “The Talk of the Town,” on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast:

You can subscribe to /Film Daily on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and send your feedback, questions, comments, concerns, and mailbag topics to us at bpearson@slashfilm.com. Please leave your name and general geographic location in case we mention your e-mail on the air.

“Heat” is available on 4K here.