30 years ago, Heat brought De Niro and Pacino together in unexpected ways

Heat didn't necessarily surpass expectations at the time, but it's become a Godfather-level classic

At the start of Michael Man’s thriller, Detective Vincent Hanna (Pacino) is on the Robbery Homicide beat for the LAPD, investigating a series of deadly heists perpetrated by Neil McCauley (De Niro) and his crew. That means for the first hour-plus of the movie, Hanna is showing up at crime scenes well after McCauley has left. Then, about halfway through the 170-minute film, the two men (and their various associates) are in the same place at the same time: Hanna and his fellow cops wait to catch McCauley and his crew robbing a precious metals depository.

When one of the cops makes a noise from their concealed vantage, McCauley pauses, considering whether to abort the mission. Hanna, in turn, waits for the criminals to make a move. Mann cuts between De Niro’s face in the center of the frame, staring into shadows, and Pacino’s, similarly positioned and staring back. As in Godfather II, their images are juxtaposed without interacting directly.

A little while later, it happens again. McCauley and his crew pretend to scout a heist-related location, with the cops observing them from a distance. Exploring the space after McCauley leaves, Hanna figures it out: The criminals weren’t scouting anything; they’re using the opportunity to get a look at their pursuers. “This crew is good,” Hanna says with rueful admiration. As he shouts a profane hello to his unseen watchers, Mann again cuts from Pacino’s face to De Niro’s, barely suppressing a smile at Pacino’s antics.

Hanna and McCauley do eventually meet, well before the movie’s explosive climax. And another 30 years after Heat’s release, it’s arguably become a next-generation Godfather, certainly more beloved than the official Godfather Part III that came out five years earlier — albeit with a different set of priorities. Coppola’s films form an epic American moral tragedy, spanning much of the 20th century. Mann’s movie has plenty of smaller tragedies, but stays in the 1995 version of the here and now, taking place over the course of about a week. (The novel Heat 2, the basis for a planned film sequel, follows the Godfather Part II pattern of interwoven stories set before and after the events of the original.) Mann does this less to capture that mid-’90s moment in time than to portray an archetypal criss-crossing of the career cop and career criminal. He seems fascinated by the consuming nature of this work on both sides of the law, and his stars do, too.

Heat finds both De Niro and Pacino in middle age, so it only makes sense that their performances lean on familiar elements of their respective personas. For Pacino, it’s the rumble-to-holler vocal dynamic — his exultation of a “GREAT ASS!” is most internet-famous, but he also spouts off a rococo “GIMMEALLYAGOT!” among other outbursts — and his accompanying toggling between weariness and hopped-up showboating. For De Niro, it’s his no-nonsense, borderline chilly minimalism dotted with brusque brutality. (It might have been especially familiar to faithful crime-movie attendees, as he was still in theaters as the even less soulful Ace Rothstein in Scorsese’s Casino at the time of Heat’s initial release.) In a sense, the characters themselves are performing these roles, too — not because they’re posturing, but because they’ve polished their professional routines.

Halfway through the picture, though, the two characters let their guard down long enough to sit down together. On a mid-investigation whim, knowing the crew is planning something but having nothing on them, Hanna tracks down his quarry, pulls McCauley over, and asks him out to a cup of coffee. They go to a diner, and we see five minutes of conversation unfold. The actors don’t take the opportunity for a fiery rage-off. Pacino’s voice doesn’t rise, and De Niro never looks as if he’s going to indulge a violent outburst. They sit and talk.

Mann filmed this scene in a way that some critics found disappointing or negligible at the time. The two legends don’t fully share the frame; they’re mostly captured in alternating over-the-shoulder shots where they’re technically both visible, but only one face at a time. A movie shot with similar techniques today might prompt questions from savvy viewers about whether the actors were both really on-set together. There’s no question, however, that De Niro and Pacino are both fully present in Heat, because Mann focuses so intently on how they listen to each other. As McCauley and Hanna take turns discussing their lives, Mann doesn’t always keep the camera on the speaker’s face. He’s attuned to the actors’ micro-reactions — De Niro’s smile half-emerges again — and allows so much of that scene’s performance to come from eyes, posture, and other quiet stuff, though he also gives them some wonderfully evocative shorthand with which to explain themselves.

The hushed majesty of this low-key scene is not a criticism of Pacino and De Niro during the rest of the film. As with the Godfather series, enough pulpy joy of performance emerges to make a heavy, lengthy movie endlessly rewatchable and — sorry to put this in the base terms of nostalgia — quotable. “I’m talking to an empty telephone.” “For me, the action is the juice.” “Life is short. Whatever time you get is luck.” (De Niro gets a lot of the best lines, maybe because Pacino can turn normal ones into their own set pieces.)

Just as viewers can project themselves into the shadowy glamor of The Godfather even knowing that it represents Michael’s fall from grace, they can imagine themselves immersed in the terse professionalism of Hanna and/or McCauley. (For one thing, it apparently means never saying “goodbye” before hanging up the phone.) In a way, Heat is more seductive, or at least more relatable at a time when so many jobs are a grind, and workers are expected to take solace in their own skills rather than spiritual or monetary reward. It’s subtly telling in the diner conversation that McCauley talks about how “taking down scores” is what he does best, and the only thing he knows how to do well — then, just a few minutes later, admits that it’s not really what he wants to be doing.

“That’s the discipline,” as McCauley says explaining the movie’s titular concept. (“Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.”) Plenty of Mann’s films could be classified as procedurals; their distinctions come from what’s going on in between the procedures at hand, and how they’re depicted. Heat is more straightforward than the later-period abstractions like Public Enemies and Blackhat, but it sprawls out with greater detail than the intentionally lopsided duel of Collateral. Though he couldn’t have known this at the time, this would be Mann’s penultimate movie shot only on celluloid; after The Insider in 1999, he started working with digital video. Much of his work has an elegiac quality; Heat, stripping itself down to a tense yet melancholy two-hander climax, may be the fullest expression of the feeling. It’s a feeling beneath the movie’s surface pleasures that something has been lost while our work, whatever it is, continues on.

De Niro and Pacino certainly continued on; they even made two more movies together, one insultingly forgettable (Righteous Kill), and one masterfully mournful (The Irishman). The worst of their four shared credits is also the one where they share the frame most frequently. Though they might have seemed past-prime in 1995, 30 years on it feels more like Mann caught them at precisely the right time to make the perfect anti-team-up. By giving their fans less than they might have hoped for, Heat actually provided much more.