REVEALED: THE SECRETS OF WORKING WITH ROBERT DE NIRO AND AL PACINO

Cinema legends Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have never acted together on the big screen before - until now. GRAHAM YOUNG meets the director who made their mouthwatering confrontation possible.

EVEN superstars don't get it right straight away. Well, not for director Michael Mann anyway.
When he finally got Robert De Niro and Al Pacino face to face in front of a camera for the first time, it took ELEVEN takes before he was able to shout 'Cut!' feeling happy. . . and even then he re-shot the scene twice more for good measure.
It's a pivotal moment not just in Mann's utterly sensational new film Heat - which opens in the Midlands next Friday - but in movie history, too.
Between them, Pacino and De Niro have dominated contemporary cinema for a quarter of a century and the prospect of seeing them together face to face for the first time is a wonderful thought for film fans.
'Yeah, everybody looked forward to that scene,' smiles Michael as we chat at London's posh Dorchester Hotel.
'By the time we shot it, it was like 'Hey, we've finally got to do this scene!'
'Given that crews are crews, directors are directors and actors are actors, you would expect there not to be much of a reaction.
'But there was a little bit of a reaction - not that many people were around at the time.
'By take nine I knew this was the one. I felt an elation that we had just nailed the scene.
'We then on to do takes ten to 13 and it was scene 11 which had some nuances the others didn't have, some harmonics in the voices so most of what you see is from take 11.
'I shot both sides simultaneously, which is very difficult to do in the cinema, and everything is in their faces since it's a deliberately low key scene almost in black and white. . .'
It would be madness to give anything away about this film that would spoil the poetry of watching it for the first time, suffice to say that De Niro is the bad guy and Pacino is the LA cop on his heels.
What makes Heat so memorable is that it is well written - by Mann himself, brilliantly directed and, of course, impeccably acted. And De Niro certainly has never looked better.
'That's because he really immerses himself into the character,' says Mann, who really made his name with the TV series Miami Vice, but who has only made five previous films - The Jericho Mile (for TV); Thief; The Keep, Manhunter and The Last Of The Mohicans.
'Both actors prepare completely differently. Al proceeds from the subconscious whereas Bob finds the building blocks of a character.
'But they both go very deeply into character and acquire their skills before they start filming and that's terribly exciting.
'These guys would know what their characters were doing when they were 12 or 15. It might not be necessary for the film, but it gives them a very deep character.
'In terms of preparation for a specific scene, Al would be word perfect three weeks before and never need to look at his script again.
'He goes to sleep with them and the rest is then fairly unpredictable - a suspension of disbelief.
'With Bob, how his collar was starched would make him feel a certain way. He'd want to know how his character should have his shirt. How his hair is cut.
'We would go and spend some time with a guy who was a fairly notorious bank robber out on parole.
'Everything in his flat was immaculate with a feeling of compulsive order yet here was a man who had been in heavy duty prisons for a very long time.
'Bob accumulates things like this like a sedimentary rock.'
De Niro and Pacino both starred in The Godfather II together, but never shared a scene. Indeed, De Niro pipped his fellow star for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
Surprisingly, despite a sackful of nominations between them, each star only has one Oscar for best actor to his name - Raging Bull for De Niro and Scent of a Woman for Pacino.
So how hard was it to get them paired up?
'It was actually fairly easy,' says Michael relaxing further into his open necked shirt and casual jacket.
'I'd known Al for many years and my co-producer Art Linson was spending Christmas with Bob (they'd worked on three previous films together).
'In a couple of weeks we had it together. I couldn't imagine anybody being able to play Vincent Hanna other than Al Pacino, and I can't imagine anybody playing Neil McCauley other than Bob de Niro.
'Al Pacino's school of acting is Al Pacino's school of acting. Same with Bob.
'They are two great, great actors who are in their prime and the work they do in this film is some of the best work of the past 20 or 30 years.
'They have a spontaneity that makes you simply believe that you are there and that this is happening and it's real.
'I don't think Bob has been on the slide like some people say. He does work that interests him to do. Some of his performances have may be been as characters which the public might not see as auspicious, but they interested him from his point of view.'
What makes Heat particularly memorable is an incredible shoot out that pits you right in among the bullets. How did Michael film that scene?
'Well, we thought what exactly is it about? What do I want to be doing. What significance does it have in the story?
'It has to be dramatic, but you can't just decay into objective action. You have to be subjective to the players the whole time.
'In both sides of the conflict you have an emotional attachment to all of the people because the thing you engage the audience with is character.
'On top of that, everybody had to be extensively trained in the use of all of the weapons. That whole scene was a ten-day shoot done just at weekends, so we had to hope that the weather didn't change too much.'
At 15 minutes short of three hours, Heat is a heavyweight film in every sense of the word, and Michael knew the length would trim its gross by 30 per cent since it cuts out one screening per day.
'I wanted to make it 15 pages shorter but I just couldn't find the pages to take out,' he says.
'Having Bob and Al working together was a unique experience for everybody. There were only two times when the whole cast was together - and the second time was at the first screening of the finished film.'