COMMENTARY: This is the, uh, Blue Line of the Los Angeles MTA...
...and it wasn't open when we shot this shot.
It was two weeks before the line would open.
It's a really interesting station shot with a very long lens...
...because, in fact, it's the end of the line.
Quite coincidentally, it became the last stop in Collateral.
So when Jamie Foxx, in Collateral, and Jada, would get off the train...
...they're actually getting off the train at this stop.
One of the terrific things about being able to work with Robert De Niro...
...which was something I've wanted to do since I'd first seen him in Mean Streets...
...was the deep core kind of understanding he has of character.
And it's so total that it's seemingly effortless.
And I see it in just the way his eyes scan who's on the platform...
...as he's getting off the train.
All the subtle, detailed moves, every little piece of attitude, the way he's looking.
You also see it as he's moving through this emergency ward to some purpose--
We don't know what it is yet.
It's gonna be to score an ambulance. --that he won't be leaving a fingerprint.
That when he opens the door, it'll be with his elbow.
DOCTOR: Yeah, you can leave her in the hallway for now.
NURSE 1: Stabilizing here. NURSE 2: Where's the portable x-ray?
COMMENTARY: It was a particular way the story tells itself...
...that I very much wanted to try and achieve...
...which is that you drop into the process...
...of what these men are doing.
Simulating, dropping into a life almost at random...
...so that there is no preamble.
You don't know why Chris Shiherlis is on a construction supply depo.
That's the Val Kilmer character. You don't know why...
...De Niro moved through a place and got into an ambulance.
For all we know, he's an ambulance driver going to work.
Except there's a certain inconsistency to it, because he arrived by public transportation...
...moved through the hospital, and gets into an ambulance.
So it doesn't quite fit. But the idea is that there's a stream...
...of the events of their lives, the happenings of their lives, moving...
...and we just happen to fall into it...
...at, say, 7:15 at night into De Niro's...
...and then, say, 2:30 in the afternoon...
...or 2:37 in the afternoon at Tucson, Arizona.
And then it's the next day, and again, we enter mid-process.
Mid-marriage, in bed, mid-making love.
Vincent Hanna and Justine.
And we're gonna learn very rapidly, and this is the design of the relationship...
...and how this relationship is going to counterpose itself...
...to the other relationships in the movie, between Neil McCauley and Eady...
...between Chris Shiherlis and Charlene Shiherlis...
...between Breedan and his wife.
And we're gonna realize this is a high-maintenance marriage that Hanna is in.
And it's a marriage that he would like to work. Justine would like it to work.
But from the opening moments of it, we feel a certain tension in the air.
It's probably his third marriage. It's probably her third marriage.
The child is from another marriage.
A child played by Natalie Portman.
Hanna is somebody who will allow himself to be swept away into his work...
...because it's the elevator experience of his life.
And so when he comes home, it's with-- It's exhausted.
An empty vessel walks in the door. He is spent.
And he happens to be married to a woman now...
...who is very alert, very bright, very intelligent...
...and psychologically very aware...
...and is focused in detail on the qualities of life together.
And that's why it's a high-maintenance relationship.
JUSTINE: I saw them on the kitchen table. - They're not there. I already checked.
- Want me to make coffee? - No school today?
My dad's taking me to the new building and then to lunch.
Try under the cushions on the sofa.
He's already a half an hour late.
He gonna show? Or that son of a bitch gonna stand her up like last time?
- I'll make coffee. - I'm out of time, babe.
COMMENTARY: I wanted to try and induce, in the very beginning of it--
Right here, she reaches for a bottle of pills before she goes downstairs.
--The subtlest, subtlest suggestion that this is edgy.
I'd note that the two photographs on the wall behind Natalie Portman...
...were shot by my daughter Jessie.
And we meet the stepdaughter...
...and she has problems because there's an absent father.
And she's traumatized by the prospect that her father may not wait for her...
...that her father may forget. In fact, the father will forget.
We'll see later that when Hanna comes home, there's not much that comes home.
And perhaps this marriage, even though these two people wanna make it work...
...was not a good idea to begin with.
Even though they love each other, and even though they care about each other...
...even though there's a kinetic attraction, a magnetism between them, there's problems.
And we'll come to see how they handle it...
...and the dynamic forces that affect the tectonic plates of the two of them...
...as fortune causes everything to change.
MAN: Now he wants a refill.
COMMENTARY: This is Waingro, played by Kevin Gage.
A lot of these characters are based on real people...
...and Waingro happens to be one of them.
WAINGRO: You're Michael, huh?
You guys always work together?
All the time.
COMMENTARY: Michael Cheritto is played by a good friend of mine...
...the actor Tom Sizemore.
WAINGRO: --consider going again, you know?
Yeah. Stop talking, okay, Slick?
COMMENTARY: One of the members of the crew was disabled, and so they picked up Waingro.
- NEIL: How's he doing? - Hundred percent.
COMMENTARY: This is a neighborhood called Pico-Union...
...in Los Angeles, right near Downtown...
...a very vibrant working-class community.
[RADIO JINGLE PLAYING]
COMMENTARY: As we're tracking through the story, the ambition was that the audience...
...would not know through this point...
...what these people were doing, what the activity is.
And the first thing that connects them together...
...or even indicates that they are connected together, is Danny Trejo.
And we realize they're all on radio communication.
When hockey masks start to go on, we realize they're involved in something.
TREJO: Here we go.
[SIREN WAILING]
COMMENTARY: I called the tow truck that they stole that runs into the armored van--
Gave it a name, a company called Raja, R-A-J-A...
...which happens to be the first initials of my four girls.
And only now, when we see this armored oar, do we get it, that this is what it's all about.
Now, it's very difficult to turn an armored truck like this over.
And we did two sets of experiments to figure out how to do this.
And it required us putting a lot of extra weight...
...in the roof of it to get the center of gravity higher...
...so that when it got T-boned by the tow truck, it would, in fact, fall over.
And the pieces we saw, fragments, at the beginning of the film, are coming together.
The rods that he bought are now revealed to be shape charges.
The idea here is that this is a crew of guys who were cold and skilled...
...but mostly are definite high-line pros.
They are on the clock. They've measured the police response time.
They know how much time they have before cops are likely to show up.
And the way they position, they're after something specific.
They wouldn't waste their time on loose cash. The one wild card is Waingro.
That means that there's a lot of preparation that went into the score. We don't know--
This is called a caltrop. They don't know what that is at the moment, what it's for.
WAINGRO: Get back.
Get back!
[GUARD GRUNTS]
Hey, Slick, you see that shit coming out of their ears?
COMMENTARY: Because Neil McCauley calculated that the response time...
...to a 2-11 or an armed robbery at the site is two minutes...
...then he would've given everybody 90 seconds.
And they have to be into the escape route at that point.
CHRIS: I got it.
Got it.
You had to fuck with me.
You wanna fuck with me?
COMMENTARY: Everything they're doing here and why they're doing it...
...is gonna be analyzed by Al Pacino when he gets to the crime scene.
And he has to work backwards as to what the motivation was...
...and analyze their crime scene.
And that's done very realistically.
He will say later on, once it turned into a murder beef for all of them...
...why leave a living witness?
And that's exactly why De Niro indicated...
...that Sizemore cold-bloodedly killed the third cop.
[SIRENS WAILING]
COMMENTARY: Another piece of preparation, they destroyed the ambulance they left...
...so that any clothes fiber or fingerprint...
...or anything that might link them to it is destroyed.
And layer by layer, they're removing themself...
...and any physical evidence they may have left behind to the commission of the crime.
Now, this is a guy that we ran across when we were doing our location scouting...
...and various merchants in the Pica-Union area...
...would leave an extension cord out their door for him...
...because he was a neighborhood regular...
...and he would come by at night with his TV set and plug it in...
...throw a blanket over him, and spend the night...
...sleeping outside, watching his console TV set in a shopping cart.
So along with a number of other people that we encountered doing location scouting...
...we recruited him and put him in the film.
Now here's Jon Voight as Nate.
We named the guy Nate because in some of the early research I did...
...for a picture I directed called Thief...
...there was guy named Nate Grossman, who introduced me to Chuck Adamson.
And this is kind of an homage to Nate, who died a long time ago.
In terms of his physical appearance, there's a debt in the character of Nate...
...as Jon plays him to Eddie Bunker.
Eddie Bunker was a West Coast armed robber-- He was a bank robber, specialized in banks.
He was quite good, wound up doing a lot of time in Folsom.
And during that period there were a number of writer's workshops...
...and things like that in the prison system.
And Eddie began writing and became quite a spectacular writer...
...and wrote one of the all-time great prison novels, called No Beast So Fierce...
...which Dustin Hoffman made into a film called Straight Time.
I'm an uncredited writer on Straight Time. I wrote for about three months on it...
...with Dustin when Dustin was gonna direct it.
And then after he started shooting it, he decided...
...that to really do justice to the material...
...that he would be better off just acting in it and brought somebody else in to direct.
And he had a different perspective on the material...
...and went in a different direction.
But during that time, I worked closely with Eddie...
...and I spent the first good deal of time in Folsom prison...
...and later went back there in 1979 to direct a picture called Jericho Mile...
...which was a Movie of the Week...
...and started to get a real understanding of the culture, West Coast prison culture...
...which is very different to, say, the Midwest or the East Coast.
And it's from that prison culture...
...that concepts of the origins of Neil McCauley...
...Bob De Niro's character, start to emerge.
And also an understanding of the rite of passage...
...that, say, Chris Shiherlis' character would've gone through...
...if he'd been, you know, in juvenile homes and then got out of juvenile homes...
...maybe stole a couple of cars, got busted back.
By this point, he may have been 17...
...and sent to what on the West Coast is called gladiator academies.
There would've been prisons like Chino or Tracy...
...where he would have acquired more skills...
...and emerged from that, in the way the system works...
...as a more skilled thief, and then probably did time in San Quentin...
...which is a rougher place to do time than Folsom.
That was because Folsom was the end of the line...
...meaning that the convicts who were in Folsom...
...were a more homogeneous group of convicts...
...doing multiple life sentences.
It was a heavier-duty place.
Because it was heavier-duty, it was actually more structured.
People knew what was gonna happen.
If something happened, it happened for a reason.
So there tended to not be people who would act out out of threat...
...or act out of-- Because something unpredictable had happened.
If there was a transgression in Folsom, it was on purpose.
If somebody sat down where you sit on the bleachers...
...they were doing it intentionally, and you were being challenged.
And that meant that they were gonna kill you or you were gonna kill them.
So the violence in Folsom is--
Both these places are very violent, but there was a--
This sounds strange, but there was an orderliness, though...
...to the violence in Folsom.
If a killing happened, it was there for a reason.
It was because of a long-standing dispute between EME, the Mexican mafia...
...and the Black Guerrilla Family, or somebody had violated...
...some commerce going on with the illicit distribution of pruno.
It was manufactured there. So it was a society outside of normal society...
...but it had all the characteristics of normal society.
Meaning there was commerce, there was sexuality, gang structures.
So in that sense, it was, uh, kind of like a dangerous high school...
...ratcheted up to the point where it's lethal.
VINCENT: The shape charge.
The shape charge indicates that they are technically proficient.
Proficient enough to go in on the prowl.
So let's start looking for recent high-line burglaries that have mystified us.
COMMENTARY: Hanna is reading what kind of crew this is...
...trying to identify them by their MO, by their method...
...because the physical evidence dictates certain things.
If there was a shaped charge, that means that the likelihood is that this crew can go--
It's a very unusual crew. They can go in on the prowl...
...meaning they could do high-line burglaries as well as doing armed robberies.
VINCENT: Get your hand out of that man's pocket, Rachel.
COMMENTARY: All the technicians that are working this crime scene are real technicians...
...who worked for either the L.A.P.D...
...or the L.A. County Sheriffs. Now we cut back to a coffee shop...
...called Johnie's Broiler. I think after I used this location in Heat...
...it became one of the most-shot locations in music videos...
...because every time I turn on MTV, it would show up again.
Waingro's based on a real guy, as are all these characters.
And the actual Waingro was, uh...
Had ratted out a crew in Chicago, and he was tracked down.
No one knows who tracked him down, but he was found-- A very gruesome death.
He was found nailed to a line shack on a ranch in Northern Mexico...
...just across the border from Texas.
WAINGRO: Look, I had to get it on, man. He was making a move. I had to get it on.
[GRUNTING]
COMMENTARY: Right here, Sizemore does something very interesting.
He had the cold look in his eye, which anybody encountering...
...communicates, without any words or histrionics, lethal potential...
...is a belief in himself...
...as his character, Cheritto, that Sizemore got from the work we did in preproduction.
You have to do the work...
...feeling you have the amplitude and the capability...
...of being that lethal, and then the moment's there.
[WAINGRO YELLS]
COMMENTARY: They don't plan to pay Waingro off at all.
What they planned to do with Waingro is to kill him and get rid of him...
...because this crew is efficient and cold-blooded--
MICHAEL: Hold it!
COMMENTARY: --and professional, and they're not gonna leave a loose end...
...or a loose cannon like Waingro wandering around...
...so that three months from now, he might get busted on something else...
...and, to cut a deal with the prosecutor, reveal things about the Neil McCauley crew.
So there wasn't a scintilla of probability...
...that Neil McCauley was gonna let Waingro walk away.
However, because of the happenstance of a black-and-white rolling by...
...that distracted them momentarily, Waingro has, in fact, gotten away.
I kind of view him as some kind of contagion...
...that is now freed into the air.
This is a location in Malibu, and there was a painting...
...that inspired me about this moment.
And that painting probably kept me interested...
...in making the motion picture of Heat longer than anything else.
And it was a painting of a table with a .45 on it...
...and a rear shot of a man standing against a background...
...and contained within it, somebody who was involved...
...in some life of aggression and action.
And yet the contrast was in the mental state...
...because here was a moment of inner loneliness.
And it didn't dictate something. Instead, it posed a question.
It didn't inform a statement. It posed a question.
What is this man thinking? What is he imagining?
And it said something about his circumstances and his condition...
...which was a condition of loneliness.
CHARLENE: Where is it? - Uh, squared the bookies, baby.
There's more in a couple days, so don't sweat it. We really are late.
COMMENTARY: Now we go to the life of Chris Shiherlis and Charlene Shiherlis...
...played by the wonderful Ashley Judd.
The background or the back-story behind Chris Shiherlis...
...which we're about to find out about, is that he's a degenerate gambler.
Chris wants the same thing that Charlene wants.
We're gonna learn later that as far as Chris is concerned...
...the sun rises and sets with this woman.
It's as if in his deep inner self, in those moments of quiet at 3 in the morning...
...when he was in some dank cell in Folsom prison, and he imagined a woman,
This is the woman that he was imagining.
This is the woman that he was spending his life with.
But he can't control his own impulses.
He's paid off gambling debts with the money.
There's nothing left because he's still gambling.
Charlene, to me, was designed to embody family values.
She's trying to build some material security, but she's got a husband...
...even though she loves him, who is a degenerate gambler.
And as she says to him in this scene that just passed...
...and it's one key line in the film:
"Honey, the risk's not worth the reward."
And so she has that same real-world, responsible attitude...
...about the actions you do and their consequence...
...that, ironically, Neil McCauley has.
Ashley Judd, myself and my daughter Ami Mann...
...who was working as an assistant producer on the picture...
...did a lot of work in finding out the real-life analogues...
...of the character that Ashley was gonna play, of Charlene Shiherlis.
And part of her back-story, we imagine that she is a woman who is self-taught.
She may have gone to a community college...
...to understand how to write checks and manage the basics of life.
One of the things we did was talk to the wives of a lot of convicts...
...and ex-convicts who were in their 30s and 40s.
Some of them who've been prostitutes when they were in their late teens and early 20s.
Meaning they were hooking on Van Nuys Boulevard.
But then they got hooked up with a guy and were truly in love...
...and it was a broken-family situation because he was in prison.
A surprising number of these women, the ones who survived...
...were, at this point, very middle-class-looking women.
Some-- One was a stockbroker, another one sold real estate.
Never in a million years would you encounter these women...
...and realize they had had this kind of a background.
And one of the key things we wanted to know is if you were Charlene Shiherlis...
...and in the back-story, she had, when Chris was in prison--
You were a prostitute, and that's how you fed your child...
...how did that relate to Chris when he got out?
If you turned 15 tricks a night, what're you thinking about when you go home...
...to your husband who just got out of prison and your child?
And one of the women said that, you know, that we didn't understand...
...that the tricks she turns are like shaking hands.
When she goes home to her husband, she's making love.
So the concept, the important part of the concept...
...was that Charlene Shiherlis is very, very streetwise.
And her commitment to making a family life, this family...
...comes from coming up through truck stops...
...and coming up the hard way.
REPORTER". --seven men in Denmark, to a key defendant here.
WOMAN: Did you find it? MAN: Not yet.
WOMAN: There it is.
It's over here, somewhere.
WOMAN: Interior design? MAN: It's on the back wall.
[CHATTERING]
COMMENTARY: McCauley, having read a book called Stress Fractures in Titanium...
...because like anybody else who's good at this...
...there's a lot of work involved, and there's a lot of research involved...
...and he drives to be technically proficient.
Eady, played by the marvelous Amy Brenneman.
I hypothesize she's coming from a very different background...
...from the background of the Blue Ridge Mountains...
...in western North Carolina, near Tennessee...
...which is a very old Scots-Irish, part-Welsh population of people...
...who were immigrants in those mountain ranges...
“probably in the latter part of the 18th century.
And there is a great tradition there of music...
...of furniture- and music-instrument-making, and a very deeply ingrained--
A very high culture that also has to do with design.
And that she got a scholarship out of Appalachia to Parsons...
...and that's where she became a graphic designer.
This is the back-story that we made up.
And classically, if she's working in graphic design...
...where she would get a job to pay the rent, would be a bookstore...
...like Hennessey and lngalls, which specializes in architecture, in art books.
NEIL: I didn't mean to be rude. I didn't recognize you.
I work in metals. I'm a salesman. My name's Neil.
COMMENTARY: He has mistaken Eady's curiosity as being idle initially.
And, uh, on guard, alert, aware of anybody who...
Because it's exposure, and exposure is risk.
And what Neil McCauley is expert at...
...what he figured out in prison, was risk management.
Meaning that it's a risk-versus-reward equation.
A score is a reward, and if you're a professional...
...if you're good at this, if you're good at what you do, the idea is you minimalize the risk.
So you live a life of anonymity.
He has gray hair, he has a gray suit, he has a white shirt.
That makes it difficult for anybody to provide the police with a useful description.
NEIL: You go to school for that?
EADY: Heh, yeah.
- Yeah, I went to Parsons. NEIL: Oh, where's that?
New York City.
How long you been out here?
About a year.
COMMENTARY: Most strikingly, he isolates himself from attachments...
...that could lead police down a track by which they might apprehend him.
If he had a girlfriend, if he had a woman he loved...
...if he tried to maintain a family and he fled to another state...
...or he fled to another country, he might weaken in 90 days or 120 days...
...and make a phone call, unaware that the phone was tapped...
...and that could lead to somebody getting a line that he's in Rio.
Now, he's about to sample a simulation of life experience.
A woman, of sensuality, of connectedness to another human being.
To a woman who has needs. He has needs.
In other words, he's about to sample kind of an emotional, normal life experience...
...and one of intimacy, and we feel when he's telling us--
When he's telling us about his family, that intimacy is not something he shares...
...but he is now, and he will...
And thinking about this scene, both in writing it, and then in directing it...
...and then talking with Bob about it...
...how Bob thought about it, how I thought about it...
...it was almost as if he were simulating normal life...
...but absolutely had no doubt that he would separate himself...
...from her, and he would never call her again.
But in the things he says...
...about his family, he's, uh...
About how he never knew his father, that's probably accurate.
EADY: You been there?
No, I'm going there someday.
Oh, yeah?
You travel a lot?
- Yeah. - Traveling makes you lonely?
L-- I'm alone. I am not lonely.
You'?
I get lonely.
COMMENTARY: This is a location in the Hills above Sunset Plaza...
...right above Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and it's a, uh...
We couldn't capture the view of night...
...with the clouds standing out against a night sky...
...even though that's exactly the view from this place.
So we got involved in shooting this on green screen with some visual effect.
Well, here is something that I saw in prisons, which is human expression manifests itself...
...in small places when the expression is denied.
And it's the origa-- Almost the folding of the napkin around the glass...
...is something that I saw in Folsom...
...where the smallest opportunity to express oneself was done...
...almost in direct proportion to which expression is denied.
This is a spectacular location that doesn't exist anymore.
We call this area Dog Town.
This is an unincorporated part of Los Angeles...
...and it was at Terminal Island.
This, uh-- Every--
All these structures are really there, including this pergola, which was, uh--
Which obviously has origins in Mexicans--
Mexican or Mexican-Americans living in the area.
This is a cock-fighting place and a pit-bull arena.
And it's all actual.
There's no police agency who actually patrol this area.
This is a chop shop. There's a guy who works at the shop...
...just running off to the left, who had no arms who had no idea what he was doing...
...cutting apart stolen Porsches.
ALBERT: You crazy? This ain't Disneyland.
You were supposed to get back to me last night, Albert. Where the fuck you been?
COMMENTARY: This is stand-up comedian Ricky Harris.
I had tremendous difficulty shooting this scene...
...because I thought that what Al does in the scene is so devastatingly funny...
...that I literally had to walk off the set, because Al would just crack me up.
ALBERT: I was cutting it real smooth. I'm generating leads and shit for you.
- I'm a dancer, man. You know. DRUCKER: Bullshit.
I paged your ass all day. I can't stand paging.
You're a speed freak, jacking methamphetamine again.
Where is your empathy, brother? It's a substance-abuse problem.
VINCENT: Empathy was yesterday.
Today you're wasting my motherfucking time.
- Vincent, man, look-- - Did you fall in love?
Come on. Did you fall in love last night and you went off somewhere?
- Vincent-- - Just tell me that. I'll settle for it.
- I'll buy that. - Vincent.
Give me all you got!
- Vincent-- - Give me all you got!
I swear, man, my brother, man-- My brother Richard's gonna talk to you.
I heard "Richard"?
- He's gonna talk to you. VINCENT: Richard?
DRUCKER: Richard. VINCENT: Richard.
ALBERT: He's gonna meet you, I swear, tonight. - He's not here, is he?
- No, he's gonna meet you tonight. - Tonight? What happened to now?
I implored him because I knew you was coming...
COMMENTARY: Al here is just great.
The level of put-on, and why he's doing this to this informant...
...these high-contrast moments of acting out of Hanna's character...
...they don't just show up in a film, and it's not just free-form.
It's there for a reason, and it has to be grounded...
...in some dramatic action, an actual action.
What is he trying to do? What's Hanna doing?
Because he gives it all up when he says, "Be there."
All detectives have informants.
All informants lie.
They lie to you some of the time.
They will inform on some people they know, and there'll be other people they know...
...they don't inform on, for example, fences.
Fences are all informants.
Except they don't inform on some of the thieves or some of the burglars...
...that they do business with. They will inform on others.
If you're Hanna, the management of your informant is a very active relationship.
And what he's doing is he's intimidating his informant...
...to keep his informant off balance.
The informant never knows when Hanna may turn on him.
Hanna may have something on him.
Hanna may have the power to bust him back.
He could be on parole. He could be on probation.
And Hanna will run that relationship in a way so that he keeps his informant off balance.
When he keeps the informants off-balanced...
...he can judge whether or not he's being told the truth.
So the intimidation through the kind of almost vaudevillian...
...aggressive, kinetic, extro--
Almost manically extroverted personality of Hanna is absolutely a device.
It is Hanna's strategy. It's Hanna's device.
Well, that's the background to it.
It's something, again, I saw Chuck Adamson do in life.
I saw Dennis Farina do when he was a detective in Chicago, on the street.
As well as Rey Verdugo and Gil Parra...
...who were both with the L.A. County Sheriff's Homicide Bureau.
And in fact, we staged a scene very similar to the Ricky Harris scene, where John Santucci--
I had him in a mock interrogation...
...in which he was being interrogated by Chuck Adamson and Rey Verdugo.
And I had ran this for the whole cast, and the dialogue and the intimidation...
...it was brutal and hilarious at the same time, and manic.
ROGER: Sure, you got a deal.
Good, because there's no percentage if everyone gets their underwear in a twist.
Yeah, so you have your man call me and we'll set the meet.
Yeah, okay.
Nice talking to you.
You gonna deal with these guys?
COMMENTARY: Henry Rollins plays a character named Hugh Benny.
Hugh Benny is another real-life character, and William Fichtner plays Roger Van Zant.
KELSO: That's not really an estimate. Those are exact figures.
I have a printout of the cash flow of the bank for the past two months.
How do you get this information?
COMMENTARY: This is an especially talented actor, Tom Noonan...
...who played Dollarhyde for me in a picture I did called Manhunter...
...which was originally titled Red Dragon.
Right now, he plays a character named Kelso...
...who makes a living by putting together scores.
Puts together a package of information...
...by which somebody could take down, in this case, a bank.
And he sold this bank score to Neil McCauley.
This location is in a neighborhood called City Terrace...
...which, if you're not from Los Angeles...
...looks like a benign, almost suburban community.
It is anything but.
At night, it resembles kind of Beirut.
It's a highly and hotly contested area between...
...two gangs.
And it's about four or five miles east of Los Angeles.
Neil Spisak, the production designer, and the art director, Margie McShirley...
...and the set decorator, Anne Ahrens, did a wonderful job converting this place.
Actually, the owners of this house actually did sell the air rights...
...to companies that install microwave antennas and repeaters for cell-phone communication.
[PHONE RINGING]
CHARLENE: Hello? NEIL [OVER PHONE]: Yeah, hello.
Chris is at my place.
- What's wrong? - Husband-and-wife stuff.
I'll let him sleep it off here.
[HANGS UP PHONE]
COMMENTARY: Neil comes home to an underfurnished house that has only in it...
...the kind of bare bones of what's required by basic utility...
...to find Chris Shiherlis, in a domestic fight...
...is sleeping on the floor.
And the idea behind how and why Neil McCauley lives his life...
...is expressed right now.
NEIL: With everything we've been doing?
Vegas and the Super Bowl cleaned me out.
- When you gonna get an old lady? - When I get around to it.
You got something else on the side?
Nothing regular.
COMMENTARY: Like, keeping yourself free of attachments...
...because they ratchet up risk of apprehension.
NEIL: I don't know what you're doing.
Remember Jimmy MacAwain on the yard used to say:
"You wanna be making moves on the street?
Have no attachments. Allow nothing to be in your life...
...that you cannot walk out on in 3O seconds flat...
...if you spot the heat around the corner."
Remember that?
COMMENTARY: "Remember that?" he says. But...
CHRIS: For me, the sun rises and sets with her, man.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Okay.
Today we take delivery of cash from Van Zant...
COMMENTARY: Shiherlis is in love with this woman.
Without saying it, it means something that Neil McCauley is gonna discover later...
...with Amy Brenneman, and when Neil McCauley expresses it...
...what he says is that nothing means anything if he can't have this woman with him.
That his plans, the substance and the material...
...substance of his life is rendered meaningless if he's not sharing it with Amy Brenneman.
And obviously, Shiherlis feels the same way.
And this segues when Neil McCauley comes home and finds Chris Shiherlis there.
And Neil McCauley expounds his system.
The modular that he applies to his life and how he lives it and why.
And then Chris Shiherlis tells him that meaningfulness...
...is only in his relationship with Charlene Shiherlis.
The sun rises and sets with her.
And we get into a domestic story, and that cascade-drops us into another story...
...that we don't know anything about yet...
...involving the very, very talented actor Dennis Haysbert...
...playing a guy named Donald Breedan, who's a driver.
SOLENKO: Give me a hard time, I'll report you loaded, drunk or stealing.
And I will violate you back so fast your head will spin.
COMMENTARY: We meet him and realize he's a parolee...
...who's been told to report by his parole officer to a restaurant...
...to work for the manager, Bud Cort, who is corrupt...
...and informs Parolee Breedan...
...that he can have a job here at the restaurant...
...but he's gotta kick back 25 percent of what he makes...
...and if he deviates from that, that Bud Cort's character will bust him back.
And Breedan has to acquiesce to this extortion.
NEIL: Yeah, Roger Van Zant. WOMAN [OVER PHONE]: Please hold.
ROGER [OVER PHONE]: Yeah, this is Roger Van Zant.
I'm supposed to collect something.
COMMENTARY: I introduced another character. Meanwhile, the domestic stories continue.
NEIL: 818-133-6089.
COMMENTARY: There's an interstitial piece in which people talk in Spanish, uh...
...in Van Zant's office.
I liked the idea of injecting it...
...into an activity that's mysterious.
We don't know what Neil McCauley is surveilling here.
But he's surveilling something...
...as he's stopping at this phone to make the arrangements...
...to drop off the bonds to Van Zant.
So the dominant activity is the surveillance...
...and then we reveal after the Van Zant phone call...
...that who he's surveilling is, in fact, Chris Shiherlis' wife.
And I wanted to believe...
...that there might be two reasons why--
Two motivations. One is that it's exposure and jeopardy to the crew...
...and that's why McCauley is doing it.
And the second is the, uh...
He's acting on behalf of his brother, basically.
NEIL: Who was that guy?
- He's nobody. - I gotta know who he is. Who is he?
- He's nobody, Neil. - Listen, you--
He's a legit liquor wholesaler from Las Vegas.
- Alan Marciano. - Chris is gonna straighten it up with you.
- It's too late. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of it! - Shut up!
Here's the deal. You'll give Chris one last shot.
After that, he fucks up, then I will finance setting you up myself...
...on my own, anywhere you want.
Dominick will go with you.
COMMENTARY: So his motivation in saying that she will give Chris one more shot...
...and that she will conform...
There's a brilliant Robert De Niro moment here...
...in the way he repeats "clean up, go home."
That is pure De Niro. It is genius.
It is the genius of Robert De Niro...
...and you can't analyze why it's there, how it's there, how it's expressed.
It's spontaneous, and it's truly in character, and it's from the small moments...
...that you see that just explode out of an actor sometimes...
...that, to me, they demark genius.
And you know it when you see it. And that's one of them.
Just that repetition of the line, exactly the way he says it. "Go home."
Koreatown.
We don't know where Pacino is going.
This guy, who has a crutch...
...because a week earlier before we shot the scene...
...he got in a fight with somebody.
He got a gunshot wound in the calf.
MAN: Yeah, got it.
[HOUSE OF PAIN'S "TOP 0' THE MORNING TO YA" PLAYING]
On a fist full a nothin', Meanwhile I'll be puffin'
On a fat blunt, run punk, You don't know the half
Tryin' to talk shit, man, Please don't make me laugh
These Irish eyes are smilin', I'm buckwildin'
The House of Pain is pumpin' Startjumpin'
Freak it, funk it, back seat junk it
If you can't get with it You'll wind up sweatin' it
Then you'll get a beatin' just like an egg
It's so hard to run When you got a broken leg
[CHATTERING]
COMMENTARY: Tone Loc playing Richard Torena.
This is modeled on an after-hours club...
...that was actually in the basement of a Payless shoe store.
Which is not there now. It used to be off La Brea.
And the guy who actually owned the quite-illegal after-hours club is in this film...
...but I won't point him out.
RICHARD: Now, the back of a trim shop on Irvine...
...if somebody was to pay a little visit this weekend...
...they might find two Turbos and a 911 Slope.
You're looking to rid yourself of your competition.
- Hmm? - I'm a good citizen.
I'm Donald Duck. So you got something to tell me or what?
COMMENTARY: I think this is, uh--
I'm prejudiced about-- I confess my prejudice.
I think this is Al and Bob doing some of their best work.
Uh, the continued manic mode of getting the stuff...
...of getting information out of an informant...
...of getting somebody to spill it in different methods...
...that are available to Hanna is part of his innate skill set as a detective.
I find really impressive that Al captured this.
There's the cold, analytical Hanna that shows up at a crime scene...
...that could read backwards from the physical evidence...
...almost having insights that are absolutely factual and empirical.
And there's the Hanna as a player, who's unintimidated...
...who will walk into an environment like an after-hours club and role-play...
RICHARD: --but he goes on and on...
...running down to me how he ain't been doing nothing...
...and nothing's been going on, and all this bullshit.
So right then and there I know this cat's got something going down.
COMMENTARY: And this look that he just had in his eye...
was he looks from, uh, Tone Loo to Ricky Harris--
VINCENT: Albert, what's wrong with you?
You drag me here, waste my time like this.
You saw a guy on the street...
COMMENTARY: --of kind of cosmic irony...
...at the uselessness of what he's just been offered...
...as a key piece of information.
So the main information is useless, but a word gets dropped.
ALBERT: Vincent-- - I'm telling you, this Slick is no joke.
You know what I'm saying?
- Say what? Say what? - What?
- You said, "Slick." What does that mean? - Slick. That's what he calls people...
COMMENTARY: And there was a discussion I had with Al about how to play the moment...
...in which he hears the word "Slick."
And my initial instinct was that he reacted...
...and I wanted to have a very concrete, definitive reaction.
And Al preferred playing it exactly the way he plays it here...
...and, uh, I was wrong, and he was right.
Which was-- It's almost like a reflex.
Someone hits the point above your elbow and your arm moves.
It should just be a reflex. He should just turn immediately and go right back.
And I learned a lot in the discussion we had about that...
...because it enriched the moment of the information.
It enriched the receipt by Hanna of the information to not play the reaction.
And there's a picture of Malcolm X behind the scenes...
...in the manager's office of this club.
Wonderfully so, Malcolm X's portrait is ubiquitous...
...in South Central.
It's certainly ironic that it would be in this place...
...because the, uh, kind of awareness that Malcolm X proposed...
...certainly would've excluded after-hours joints like this.
This is one of the remaining drive-in theaters in Los Angeles...
...which I think, sadly, is not there anymore.
Neil McCauley is to receive the payoff...
...in selling back the bonds to Van Zant.
Like every other operation that this crew does...
...these guys are good. They have countersurveillance.
They have protection. They have zones of fire figured out.
And they have been, by Van Zant, grossly underestimated.
NEIL: Now, with your right hand only, your right hand only...
...take the package and throw it in here.
COMMENTARY: Gary Jay and I were in the bucket of the crane on that last shot.
Gary Jay is a camera operator that I've been working with...
...since 1992 on Last of the Mohicans.
[MAN SCREAMS]
COMMENTARY: Shiherlis comes up with the H&K Model 91
...and lays down rounds.
The, uh, much more amateurish crew...
...who don't have any of the kind of the hard-won close-quarter combat experience...
...of the Neil McCauley crew...
...the driver abandons the shooter.
[GUNFIRE]
[PHONE RINGS]
COMMENTARY: This is Neil Spisak's production design at its the best, the combina-
And also the set decoration. The combination of this black-and-white painting...
...and these chairs with the zebra pattern, setting up a monochromatic...
...almost ghostly wall...
...in Van Zant's office is something--
I thought that Spisak did a terrific job right here.
And it, uh-- And it's--
Particularly in its ghostliness, as Van Zant is gonna receive--
ROGER: I don't understand.
--Because there is a dead man on the other end of this fucking line.
COMMENTARY: --a message he didn't expect from Neil McCauley.
And suddenly, the world as Van Zant kind of smugly and arrogantly...
The way he thought the world worked, it suddenly...
...is not working that way.
And chaos has entered into his life...
...in the form of somebody who doesn't want the money back.
[MICHAEL LAUGHING]
Did you know about this, heh? It's so beautiful.
You are insane.
Do you like it?
- It's beautiful. - Yeah, it's pretty good.
- Just don't ask him where he got it. ELAINE: Yeah, that's right. Ha-ha-ha.
MICHAEL: What do you wanna be when you grow up, honey?
COMMENTARY: And families have dinner, and families come together...
...and they have dinner in Chinese restaurants.
And that's exactly what these families have done.
And the intersection of the domestic stories...
...that dimension of reality that exists in all of our lives...
...in part what I aspire to is to make lives seem real and have the complexity in them...
...that are in all of our lives, and dramatize that intersection of the domestic life...
...or domestic issues, including Neil McCauley breaching, because he's in the--
In amongst the warmth of these families.
Breaching one of his self-imposed ideas, the modular...
...about how he's supposed to live his life, because he calls Eady.
That occurs right now. And he doesn't tell anybody he's gonna call Eady.
He goes into this phone-booth area...
...not accidentally the same blue as in the house in Malibu...
...and calls her, initiates that contact.
[CHATTERING]
ELAINE: Thank you.
Good night.
VINCENT: Goddamn convention.
- Which one's Slick? - The wide one.
COMMENTARY: And then as they leave the restaurant, we reveal that, in fact...
...Neil McCauley's crew has been out into.
And they have connections into Shiherlis.
They have connections into Cheritto.
Nobody knows who Neil is.
Because up to now, Neil's modality has kept him free of observation.
They've never seen him before.
DRUCKER: Sammy and I think that's gonna be their next score.
Who's the loner?
COMMENTARY: "Who's the loner?" Hanna says.
CASALS: First time we're seeing him. We're not on him yet.
Well, get on it.
COMMENTARY: And the loner, as it's used here in this scene and dialogue, is obviously a pun.
He is alone.
And also, it's ironic, because tonight, he's just taken that first step to not be alone...
...and has made a mistake.
VINCENT: When these guys walk out the door of whatever score they're gonna take next...
...they're gonna have the surprise of a lifetime.
COMMENTARY: And we segue to another story, another parallel storyline.
WOMAN: Hey, baby. Time to go.
WAINGRO: I showed you a good time, didn't I? - Oh, yeah.
COMMENTARY: Because here is what happened to Waingro.
WOMAN: You fly. You cool.
COMMENTARY: And Waingro is a white supremacist.
He's in a white-supremacist prison gang.
That's what the tattoos are telling us.
What he has tattooed on his stomach is a design that says "white power"...
...under a swastika, and it's a design that was tattooed on the abdomen...
...of somebody I used.
In Folsom Prison, there's a convict named Steve White.
And he had a giant swastika and "white power" tattooed on it.
And he, uh...
He didn't end well. After about three weeks after we wrapped out of Folsom...
...whether he still was in character or what happened, I don't know...
...but he was assassinated by Chicano convicts...
...in some kind of dispute. I never really got to the bottom of it.
He's the, uh-- If anybody sees Jericho Mile, he's one of the people who--
In the film, he stabbed Stiles.
WOMAN: Unh.
[CHATTERING]
BARTENDER: Where you been?
SHU at Pelican Bay.
New Folsom, B-wing.
I am a cowboy looking for anything heavy.
Billy Ricketts said come see you.
That is why I am here.
COMMENTARY: And here's Waingro, driven by an ego and small self-esteem...
...which is a prescription for this kind of virulent racism...
...as well as an image of himself, which is, uh, false...
...as a player, self-advertisement, self-promotion...
...looking to connect up to somebody somehow, and...
In the next component...
...this cascade of domestic life, we find Hanna and his detectives partying.
- BOSKO: I knew this guy in grade school. - Uh-oh.
He was named Raoul, uh...
COMMENTARY: Now, Ted Levine made this up. I don't know where this came from.
BOSKO: --fold them over, one over the other.
Then he'd turn his eyelids inside out...
I can't keep my hands off you, and that's the truth.
COMMENTARY: This is one of those goofy anecdotes that's just--
If you hang around detectives like Dennis Farina and Chuck Adamson...
...and some people in Los Angeles, Nick Nickeas, Sam Cirone...
...some of the detectives I know in Chicago...
...these whacked-out anecdotes of nonsequiturs...
...absurd speculations show up.
And I told Ted to come up with something.
And he remembered some guy from high school. That's where it came from.
DRUCKER: That's what she tells us. To Raoul.
- Raoul. MARCIA: To Raoul.
Yeah, Vincent Hanna.
COMMENTARY: Hanna's called away to a crime scene that's seemingly unrelated.
There happened to be this dead bird in the pool when we--
On the bottom left, when we scouted it on one of the location scouts.
I wanted the dead bird in it, and by the time when we came back to shooting it...
...we had to put our own dead bird in there. But it's a small detail.
I don't know if anybody picks up on these things from that.
[HELICOPTERS BUZZING]
COMMENTARY: When I shot this scene...
...there was something wonderful about the police helicopters that were in the sky.
This was a real police helicopter. It wasn't one of ours.
With downtown L.A. in the background, and, uh...
This image is something I saw...
...of a crime scene, a crime photo once that horrified me.
One of those images that burns itself into your consciousness, and you never quite forget it.
And it was of a prostitute who had been murdered...
...and draped over the garbage can as if someone threw out the garbage.
And it was a more brutal image than the one that I put into Heat...
...because this woman's hands had been cut off, so she couldn't be identified,
And the disposal of a life like that...
...had impacted itself upon me.
And I never forgot it.
And in life, the notion that whoever this girl was...
...whatever her origins were, whatever path...
...whatever causality led her to be killed in this brutal way...
...and literally disposed of, dumped in a garbage can...
...what was this girl doing when she was 7?
What relation did a father or a mother or a sister have to her...
...when she was 9, 10 or 11? How did this--?
How did this happen?
And there are detectives I know who worked these kinds of crimes...
...who couldn't work the crimes if they had any emotional connection...
...to what I just described at all.
They have to be totally removed from it.
It has to be ice-cold or they couldn't process it.
There are other detectives who I think are a higher order of detectives...
...who keep themselves aware of the human tragedy of it.
They keep meaningfulness embedded in the horror of the event of this kind of death.
They do not let themselves become calloused to it.
And that is who Hanna is.
And that is what prompted...
...the dialogue in the next scene.
And Hanna gives a utilitarian reason about why he stays sensitized...
...to the tragedy of the loss of life through violence.
The extinguishing of the simple miracle of being alive.
VINCENT: So why didn't you let Bosko take you home?
I didn't wanna ruin their night too. What was it?
You don't wanna know.
I'd like to know what's behind that grim look.
I don't do that. You know it. Let's go. Come on.
You never told me I'd be excluded.
I told you when we hooked up, baby, that you were gonna have to share me...
COMMENTARY: And yet I don't think it's strictly he doesn't keep himself alive...
...and sensitized to the loss of life.
Or to put it another way, he doesn't allow himself...
...to become so calloused that he is indifferent.
I think there's other reasons that have to do with a deep-seated sense of social justice...
...that's at the core of Hanna--
A sense of morality that's at the core of Hanna.
VINCENT: Oh, I see. What I should do is, uh, come home and say:
"Hi, honey, guess what? I walked into this house today...
...where this junkie asshole just fried his baby in a microwave...
...because it was crying too loud, so let me share that with you.
Come on, let's share that, and in sharing it...
...we'll somehow, uh, cathartically dispel all that heinous shit." Right?
Wrong. You know why?
Because you prefer the normal routine:
We fuck, then you lose the power of speech.
Because I gotta hold on to my angst.
I preserve it, because I need it. It keeps me sharp, on the edge.
Where I gotta be.
COMMENTARY: This is a process I've witnessed in a lot of detectives...
...who work in major cities, and also in rural areas...
...who worked major crimes, who are exposed to a parade...
...and a spectrum of unbelievably hideous stuff.
JUSTINE: --you read the terrain.
You search for signs of passing...
...for the scent of your prey...
...and then you hunt them down.
That's the only thing you're committed to.
The rest is the mess you leave as you pass through.
What I don't understand...
COMMENTARY: The reactions that they contain and hold within them...
...and the stress of tending to doing that is formidable.
DONALD: Hey. Miss Lillian.
Let's go, baby.
COMMENTARY: And in this cascade of the life stories, the parallel stories--
Subsets of these life stories we've taken, including this sub-story of Breedan...
...trying to make a life with his wife, trying to stay straight...
...trying to exist in a relationship in which he's acquiesced...
...to allow himself to be exploited by the venal Bud Court...
...the manager in his restaurant.
That struggle is acknowledged by his wife...
...Lillian, played by the outstanding actress named Kim Staunton.
[DONALD CHUCKLES]
- You're proud of me? LILLIAN: Mm-hm.
What the hell you proud of me for?
Come on home.
COMMENTARY: Sometimes, in casting, you just know when you know.
And when Kim walked into my office and performed this--
We worked on the scene, and I think that was the second time she tried it.
And she was just so moving, I immediately cast her in the part.
EADY: That's what people do there. You go skiing...
...and you meet people.
You try to have a good time.
- Did you have a good time? - No.
Why not?
I'm not good at meeting people.
You met me.
Well, that happened without my thinking about it.
Which is why, probably.
No, it's because you were fine.
COMMENTARY: And the cascade of domestic stories would form something like a chorus...
...in between verses, if you like, of crime story or police stories.
Neil has hooked up with Amy Brenneman and reveals something else about his life.
NEIL: --to go separate, but you could meet me there.
But my job, mY"
COMMENTARY: He proposes to her that she come away with him.
And he hasn't told her he's a thief. She has no idea what he does for real.
And that's gonna tell us something intimate...
...about how he really experiences life as a man.
NEIL: The last thing I am is married.
I'm a needle starting at zero going the other way, a double blank.
Then, all of a sudden...
...someone like you comes along.
- You don't know me, Neil. - I know enough.
Come with me.
COMMENTARY: There's a moment of hesitation--
EADY: What's wrong, baby?
Nothing's wrong. Everything's right. Will you go?
COMMENTARY: --because he's deviating from his rigid discipline.
EADY: Yeah.
Good.
- Hey, sweetie. LAUREN: Hi.
VINCENT: What happened? You forget your mom was picking you up?
No.
VINCENT: So, what's going on?
I felt like being alone.
COMMENTARY: Natalie Portman had so much soul as an actress at an early age.
And she could just nail the representation of a teenager...
...who was troubled, an early adolescent.
Vincent Hanna is like a number of men I've met.
He's based on a couple of them.
One of them is Chuck Adamson, who killed the real Neil McCauley...
...in 1963 in an armed robbery.
And Chuck and I became very close. There's quite a lot about that in the featurette.
And he became one of my closest friends.
And that coffee-shop scene that you're gonna see later on in the film...
...is something that actually occurred between Chuck and the real Neil McCauley.
But there are a couple of other detectives that I've met as well...
...one of whom was in federal law enforcement...
...who is the kind of avid hunter for whom the elevated experience of being a predator...
...and a man like Neil McCauley, the Bobby De Niro character, is the prey.
And he acknowledges and understands that that is the elevated experience of his life.
And it starts with Vincent Hanna...
...as detective in L.A.P.D.'s Robbery and Homicide Division...
...which has contained within it something that we call the Major Crime Unit...
...which is an elite group of detectives.
If you asked Hanna, "Why do you do what you do?"
Hanna is self-aware.
And Hanna would say to you, "I do what I do--"
That he doesn't really do it to serve and protect.
There is a moral pole in Hanna's world.
And not only that, but it's a pole that he makes sure stays vivid...
...and has the ability to impact upon him emotionally.
He never wants to be hardened...
...against violent crimes against women or against children or against other men.
It would be inauthentic. It would be a deviation from a very rigid accountability to--
He believes he has the experiences of life to harden himself...
...as many homicide detectives do as a defense mechanism.
To harden himself against all the heinous things...
...that he encounters.
And that is the moral pole that is there in Vincent Hanna.
But if you said, "What motivates you? What drives you?"
What drives him is not really to serve and protect.
What drives him is hunting.
The inner motivation is that he's a predator.
And he hunts.
And he's honest about it.
And what drives all of us is, in fact, ego-centered.
Not egocentric, but ego-centered.
And that's the high this guy gets when he's closing in...
...when he's able to intuit, put together two disparate events...
...a piece of physical evidence, a piece of information an informant told him...
...and see a pattern recognition, spot an MO, spot a method of operation...
...and from a method of operation and his own deductive ability...
...divine what is, in fact, the motive...
...and off of that, be able to predict behavior of a crew.
Those kinds of-- That kind of mental work which you pull from the street...
...from the most heinous of events, the leavings of crimes on the street...
...that provides for him the elevated experience of his life.
And for this character, it is a kind of an addiction.
And that inner drive, that elevated experience...
...that ego-centered strong individuality of Vincent Hanna...
...those are the same feelings that he has, that Serena Williams has...
...or Michael Jordan or a musician when you're on.
It's common. It's universal.
It's a focus of your concentration and the instincts and the intuition...
...and the raw intelligence.
And Hanna is a very bright guy, equally as bright as Neil McCauley...
...and equally self-aware as Neil McCauley, who's autodidactic...
...as a man who taught himself in prison what he knows...
...and figured out how he would operate on the street.
He is not a guy who's gonna go on a thrill score.
He's not a guy who's gonna be motivated by vengeance...
...who's gonna be swept away by some emotion...
...or carelessness or some flip idea.
BOSKO [WHISPERS]: He's heard it.
COMMENTARY: They've put in all that setup and prep time.
And on the night they want to take it down...
...if one thing was out of place, if something didn't belong...
...if there were supposed to be X number of trucks parked in the parking lot...
...of a bakery at 3 in the morning, and there was one too many that particular night...
...a crew like McCauley's would, in fact, walk away.
And that's the distinction between really disciplined high-line pros...
...and everybody else.
VINCENT: Okay, let them go.
JACKSON [OVER RADIO]: What do you mean? We can take them--
What are you gonna take them on? Breaking and entry?
They didn't steal anything. Don't you get it?
It gets knocked back to some misdemeanor...
...they do six months and they're out. No fucking way.
COMMENTARY: This was so interesting, the structure of the scene...
...because Hanna is as big a pro as McCauley is.
And he's not gonna settle for some misdemeanor bust...
...and then just move on to the next case. He wants this guy.
And just like Neil McCauley, who wants big scores and is disciplined...
...Hanna wants the big score, which is, in fact, Neil McCauley.
And he's just as disciplined.
What Neil McCauley realizes after this--
Hanna, by the way, is enraged.
This scene was shot in a very few precious minutes prior to dawn...
...which is why the light in the sky is exactly the way it is.
Later on in...
As video technologies evolved with the current cameras...
...you could shoot a sky like this and keep it this color all night long...
...depending on the cloud cover.
But in 1995, on film, you had to be there predawn for those four, five minutes...
...and grab the whole scene while the sky was in that condition.
VINCENT: Back to work.
L.A.P.D. Gee, what? Where the fuck did this heat come from?
Maybe it's the score they were onto.
The place, not us. Because it's been hit a couple of times, you know.
Assume they got our phones, assume they got our houses...
...assume they got us right here, right now as we sit.
Everything. Assume it all.
How we gonna buy the bank package from Kelso?
- I'll front that. That's not a problem. - What happens to Van Zant?
With the heat we got, do you wanna play World War ll in the streets with Van Zant?
No, I want my 750. And he gets a pass?
I got more motivation to whack Van Zant than either of you. He is a fucking luxury.
COMMENTARY: So as a director who wrote and directed the picture...
...you know, what I zero in on is just the expression as he's saying:
"He is a fucking luxury," that lack of contraction.
The clear thought comes from only a total immersion...
...into the being of Neil McCauley.
It's not performance in the sense that somebody performs.
You perform juggling. A juggler performs juggling.
An actor doesn't really perform. He becomes.
MICHAEL: I roll with you, Neil. Whatever. Whatever.
No, not on this one, Michael. On this one, you're on your own.
You figure this is the best thing to do?
This is the best thing to do?
I got plans. I'm going away after. So for me the reward is maybe worth the stretch.
But Elaine takes good care of you. You got plenty put away.
You got T-bonds, real estate.
If I were you, I would be smart. I would cut loose of this.
COMMENTARY: The powerful authenticity...
...that De Niro is capable of in those last few lines...
...ten years later, it still impresses the hell out of me.
And what's surprising is this nice family man, Cheritto, doesn't know what to do.
[MICHAEL CHUCKLES]
Well, you know, for me, the action is the juice.
I'm in.
- You too? - Yeah, sure.
- MICHAEL: Ha-ha-ha. - Let's go.
COMMENTARY: And he's building this petty bourgeois life.
And he's not sure whether he should risk it or go...
...and asks Neil for his...
...advice. And Neil gives him almost like advice from a therapist or something...
...and tells him, "Go ahead," and, "You should go away and not do the score...
...because of the risk."
Part of the risk-versus-reward equation has suddenly increased.
It's suddenly much more risky.
He doesn't know what to do, and then decided the action is the juice.
Now, right here, very talented actor Hank Azaria.
This scene was shot-- We don't shoot a motion picture in screenplay order.
We shoot it all out of order.
And this scene was shot towards the end of the schedule.
And we had-- And how you shoot a movie actually evolves in the shooting of it.
So you actually become better at shooting a movie the longer you're shooting it.
And you start communicating with each other in shorthand.
This was shot towards the end...
...and Hank Azaria had not really worked on the film before this point.
And the expression on his face in these scenes is truly astonishment...
...because none of this was written.
Extreme disorienting tactics that Hanna has from time to time...
...including being outrageous, wasn't expected in this scene.
Al and I, he just-- You know, he looked at me, I looked at him...
...and I knew what he meant, and, you know, I said, "Just go for it."
And I realized I had neglected to tell Azaria that we were gonna depart from the script...
...and things were gonna get a little more free-form all of a sudden.
So when Al got into, "She's got a great ass"...
Azaria's astonishment is not acting. It's veritable.
VINCENT: Ferocious, aren't I?
When I think of asses, a woman's ass...
...something comes out of me.
- So? VINCENT: So no big thing.
All I want is her husband and his whole fucking crew.
Now, you're gonna work with Sergeant Drucker here.
San Clemente Road and Hermosa.
That's where we cut through the fence. That's the access.
Right.
The security systems around here are a joke.
COMMENTARY: There's a commitment to being good at what you do...
...that's shared by McCauley and Hanna.
It's part of a construction in which these two characters...
...as oppositional characters, truly are counterpoints to each other...
...in a sense that they contain some of the same characteristics.
They're both avid about the work they do. And other components of their personalities...
...of who they are, are very different.
Most notably that Neil MoCauley is a complete stone sociopath, and Hanna is not.
Hanna is aware of and experiences the emotional pain of victims...
...and the consequences of his actions, the pain he causes his wife, Justine...
...the pain that violent crime causes...
...to the mother of a prostitute who was killed, to--
Those components don't exist in the psyche of Neil McCauley.
And this role reversal, this also occurred.
Neil McCauley, in real life, wanted to know who was on him.
Once he realized somebody was on him, he wanted to know who it was...
...because it was a completely different thing depending on what police agency it was.
If it was the Chicago Police Department or a suburban police department...
...if it were the feds, that meant he'd have a different reaction to it.
So he needed to know who was on him.
That also meant that he could watch out for their cars, find out when they went to work.
He could actually do a whole bunch of counterintel, countersurveillance...
...and be wary of the crew and everybody who was in it.
So he's lured Hanna into a spot.
But Hanna has an intuitive flash of pattern recognition.
VINCENT: --what they were looking at.
- You wanna know what they're looking at? - What?
I mean, is this guy something, or is he something?
This crew is good.
You know what they were looking at?
What?
Us.
The L.A.P.D.
The police department.
We just got made.
Yeah.
COMMENTARY: And just as Chuck Adamson admired...
...how good McCauley was, how professional he was...
...so, too, Hanna has the same reaction.
And it's the reaction of a big-game hunter to his prey...
...to a really challenging target he's going after.
And it's not bad news. It's good news.
Of the many scenes in the picture, this scene happens to be one of my favorites.
This and the other scene with Jon Voight, when he's in the bar and calls Neil later on...
...and gives him information on Waingro and tells him to take off.
I mean, nowhere is the hard-bitten San Quentin ex-convict...
The veracity of what Jon does with his character...
...nowhere is it stronger than it is in this scene.
NATE: Hanna's a hot dog. Graduate school. Marine Corps.
Lieutenant, Robbery-Homicide, Major Crime Unit.
He's taken down some heavy crews. Blew away Frankie Yonder in Chicago.
And he was a fucking maniac.
He was working Narcotics before that. Had some problems, divorced twice.
Current wife's Justine. He's why the extra heat.
The Vice sergeant...
...says Hanna likes you.
Thinks you're some kind of star. You do this sharp, you do that sharp.
Look how sharp this guy is to figure that.
Funny as a heart attack...
COMMENTARY: It's as funny as a heart attack.
NATE: What the fuck do you think that means? He likes staying home?
Means the man is one of those guys out there...
...prowling around all night, dedicated.
With this guy and this much heat, you should pass.
It's worth the stretch.
This guy can hit and miss. You can't miss once.
You sure?
I am sure.
COMMENTARY: When Neil says, "I am sure," he's sure because of Eady.
The way these people are doing the same activities, they're not the same people.
They're not flip sides of the same coin, but they are engaged in the same activity.
And Nate is doing-- He's reading Hanna.
He's doing psychological profiling on a guy like Hanna so that he can predict...
...his behavior.
That's what he means when he says, "A guy like this has been divorced three times.
You think that means he likes staying home at night?
No. This guy is out there prowling the streets. This guy is dedicated."
And he's predicting behavior off of kind of a thumbnail sketch...
...psychological kind of profiling...
...and he's doing exactly the same thing that a detective does.
For example, a detective will know that somebody stole furs.
Let's say a cartage theft.
A whole tractor-trailer-load of furs were stolen.
A detective knows that the motive of the thieves is money.
That means he could predict their behavior.
And they're gonna fence the furs, so the detective starts working fences.
So you're predicting behavior. That's what the whole thing is about.
And in the counterintelligence, countersurveillance...
...that's going on with Neil's crew, their method of thought is exactly the same.
VINCENT: What are you on? MAN [OVER RADIO]: TAC 9.
[MAN SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY OVER RADIO]
COMMENTARY: We had one helicopter tailing another helicopter...
...and there's nothing quite as beautiful as the night sky in Los Angeles in January.
It's crystalline...
...and the city stretches out forever as a flat plane.
VINCENT: This is Vincent Hanna in Air 18. Who have I got?
JJ [OVER RADIO]: Hey, Vincent, it's JJ. I'm in Air 40. Richard Glover's with me.
It's on the 105 eastbound approaching the 110 interchange.
VINCENT: You running a revolving tail?
M: Yeah, I got two units in front, three behind.
COMMENTARY: This is technology that's still current, which is amazing.
It was developed for Vietnam. It's called FLIR. F-L-I-R...
...for "forward-looking infrared."
This is a cue by Moby.
It's one of the two cues in the picture that he did.
The view right here of the underpass is one of the most beautiful underpasses...
...I think, in the world of beautiful freeway underpasses.
It happens to be southbound on the 110.
But we changed locations, and where Neil is pulled over by Hanna...
...the location you're looking at right now, is actually westbound on the 105...
...between the 405 heading to LAX, headed to the airport.
The circumstances facing each of these guys in this moment...
...is that Hanna knows that Neil...
...knows that Hanna is onto him.
And Neil knows that Hanna has out into him.
And it's a strange, frozen status quo, and off the alienation...
...of his, um, domestic story...
...Hanna gets an idea. We don't know what it is...
...until this moment in time when he pulls Neil over.
And they're now enacting...
...the scene similar to the scene that occurred in real life...
...which is the first story I ever heard about Neil McCauley and Chuck Adamson.
Chuck was dropping off his cleaning, they ran into each other in the parking lot...
...of, like, a small mini-mall in Chicago.
They recognized each other, and it could've turned into a gunfight...
...right then and there, and Chuck said, "Let me buy you a cup of coffee."
And they sat down and had coffee.
Chuck didn't believe that Neil McCauley was gonna give him any valuable information...
...or give up a life of crime because he sat down and had coffee...
...but what Chuck was looking for...
...Chuck's motive was to probe psychologically into Neil...
...because he knew that Neil would reveal things.
Chuck knew his own subconscious mind would absorb who this guy is.
And the more he knew about this man...
...the more Chuck would be able to possibly predict his behavior...
...in a concrete way, or just have an intuition about what Neil might do.
So for Chuck, there was a big asset in knowing the guy.
And I think that Neil probably has the same motive in mind...
...and that's why they come together.
This entire scene was shot with a--
There's three cameras. I actually only used two of them...
...and they're shooting simultaneously.
And one camera is shooting over Bobby onto Al...
...and the other camera is shooting over Al onto Bobby.
And if this camera panned to the right about an inch, you'd see the other camera.
The reason for that was because we were so tuned to do this scene--
It's the pivotal scene in the entire motion picture.
As far as I was concerned, the two most brilliant American actors working in cinema...
...facing each other, and that they would react off of each other in a very organic way...
...so that any one take would have a particular organic unity to it...
...that would be different than the organic unity of, say, the next take.
So that meant I would want the Bob side and the Al side from the same performance...
...say, take four or take seven.
In fact, all of this is from take 11.
But the degree to which the smallest reactions are occurring...
...as these two men face each other is quite extraordinary.
Because the tension level of each character...
...is torqued to the maximum.
De Niro kind of looks askance, as he just did.
When Al looks away and says "Interesting point," his eyes come back to center.
And De Niro's eyes are off-center, and they come back to center.
So they always look in one direction, and then right back into each other's eyes.
VINCENT: So then, if you spot me coming around that corner...
COMMENTARY: And he settles...
...right here and confronts Neil--
VINCENT: Not say goodbye?
That's the discipline.
COMMENTARY: --with the subject which we happen to know is Neil leaving Eady.
De Niro gets intimate without being--
Without even one iota of sentimentality.
And the dance of expression and attitude...
...on Pacino's face is extraordinary.
This is my favorite part of this whole scene. This is my favorite scene in the motion picture.
This is my favorite part of it, the dreams. Exchange of dreams.
VINCENT: You know, I have this, uh, recurring dream.
I'm sitting at this big banquet table...
...and all the victims of all the murders I ever worked are sitting at this table...
...and they're staring at me with these black eyeballs...
...because they got eight-ball hemorrhages from the head wounds.
And there they are...
COMMENTARY: Because of the way Al visualizes the figures in his dream...
...that's what causes him to say "black eyeballs" the way he says it.
There's nothing preprogrammed to him saying it that way.
The only thing that's preprogrammed is how vivid is the dream in his imagination.
VINCENT: Nothing.
- No talk? VINCENT: None.
Just". They don't have anything to say.
COMMENTARY: This line, the way he says:
"They don't have anything to say" as if it's self-evident. Like they don't say pithy morals.
And dreams, dreams aren't metaphors. Dreams are dreams.
NEIL: I have one where I'm drowning.
And I gotta wake myself up and start breathing, or I'll die in my sleep.
You know what that's about?
Yeah. Having enough time.
- Enough time to do what you wanna do? - That's right.
COMMENTARY: This is probably the closest they get.
This scene drives to this closeness between them.
And they're talking about their expectations.
The innermost, most intimate expectations each man has for his life.
VINCENT: --you and I, like a couple of regular fellows.
You do what you do, and I do what I gotta do.
And now that we've been face to face...
COMMENTARY: "And now that we've been face to face..."
And launches into the reemergence of their situation.
VINCENT: But I'll tell you...
...if it's between you and some poor bastard...
...whose wife you're gonna turn into a widow...
...brother, you are going down.
COMMENTARY: Static, mobile, self-confident, each of these guys are.
NEIL: There's a flip side to that coin.
What if you do got me boxed in and I gotta put you down?
Because no matter what, you will not get in my way.
We've been face to face, yeah...
...but I will not hesitate. Not for a second.
COMMENTARY: Each guy knows the other guy means it.
And right here, watch the back-and-forth...
...of gesture and eye and the way they're looking.
And particularly on Pacino right here.
De Niro looks to the side, looks friendly.
And Pacino kind of smiles, and it's over.
CASALS: They dumped us.
What?
- They dumped us. - What do you mean, they dumped us?
CASALS: Chris slipped his tail.
He doesn't talk about scores with Charlene...
...so there's nothing for me to get from Marciano. I tried.
- What about Cheritto? CASALS: Same.
Transponders got put on a bus to San Clemente.
- They dumped all our surveillance? - Yeah, at the same time. Nine p.m.
COMMENTARY: Mykelti Williamson worked for me in the pilot episode of Miami Vice in 1984.
We worked again together in this picture in '95.
Again in Ali in 2000, where he did a fabulous Don King.
VINCENT: Does anybody have any idea where the fuck these people are?
COMMENTARY: In '95 when I used Danny Trejo, he had--
I think he might have been in one or two B-movies, but he hadn't really done very much.
[SAW WHIRRING]
[DRILL BUZZING]
COMMENTARY: To get this shot...
...we actually duplicated a section of the ceiling and cut through it.
[ROGER WHISPERING INDISTINCTLY]
HUGH: You hear from him yet?
And more story tracks that were discrete, each out running in a separate channel--
HUGH: This guy here. We put him on. Says he knows McCauley.
COMMENTARY: --start hooking up together as Waingro winds up in Van Zant's office.
WAINGRO: Waingro. My name's Waingro.
I've been living in this office day and night.
COMMENTARY: And like a lot of ex-cons who actually know how low their stature is...
...they've got a great eye for x-raying people psychologically.
And Waingro reads Van Zant and knows how to push his buttons.
WAINGRO: He's real thorough.
- He ain't gonna forget about you. - Oh, that's reassuring.
Well, I got some moves I could make here.
Probably be a big help to you.
COMMENTARY: Henry Rollins.
Bob's Big Boy, that's the location.
Bob's Big Boy was the first kind of drive-in hamburger spot...
...in what later became a chain and became the mecca...
...for the post-World War ll Southern California hot-rod culture.
And it still is. Hot rods still cruise Ventura Boulevard...
...and end up in Bob's Big Boy on weekends.
This is the very talented Bud Cort, who was in Harold and Maude...
...playing the restaurant manager with kind of a late-'50s--
He's like a guy with arrested development.
His hair never got out of the late '50s.
NEIL: Where the hell is he?
- I wanted to check the slot for a work car. - So did I.
[PHONE RINGS]
MICHAEL: Yeah?
Hang on.
- Yeah. - Hey.
Use a landline. Call me at 103-7206.
All right.
[PHONE RINGS]
- Where are you? - There's cops all over me, man.
COMMENTARY: He's supposed to be taking the score down today...
...having dumped Hanna's tails.
(But Trey) can't.
Trejo claims he has picked up a tail.
TREJO: I can try to dump them again.
How are we gonna know if you did? If you didn't, you'll draw them to us.
Head for Ventura. Pull them out of here.
All right. Hey, I'm sorry, man. Last thing I wanna do is let you down.
MAN: Come on, man.
Pick up.
Hey, Neil.
COMMENTARY: And Neil, earlier on, had recognized Dennis Haysbert...
...who plays Donald Breedan.
NEIL: --who can handle scanners and a radio.
Right now, today. You remember the drill?
- Yeah, man, sure. - You cool?
Oh, man, now, you know I'm cool.
One answer, yes or no. Right now.
COMMENTARY: And he says to him, "What's it gonna be?
One answer, yes or no, right now."
And that's how events impose themselves upon you...
...and you have to choose.
Once you choose...
...that causes what occurs to you.
And that's how cause and effect works in this movie.
The contrivance in that, in hopefully a good way...
...is that the film takes upon itself the notion that it exists in a world...
...in which events and choices...
...can impose themselves upon you, and they are critical.
You must decide. You don't have a choice. "I'll think about it and come back tomorrow."
You must decide right now.
It's right now. What's it gonna be?
And the choice you make will affect the rest of your life.
So the idea of the heightened determinism of the choices...
...and your accountability to how you've chosen is total.
Those are the laws of cause and effect...
...and how I elected to make them operate in the world of this picture.
What's interesting about this score is that it's both a burglary and an armed robbery.
They burglarized and went in on a prowl the night before...
...and bypassed all the alarm systems.
[MICHAEL COUGHS]
COMMENTARY: And then they're gonna go in during the daytime and do an armed robbery.
And the alarm systems are-- With a timer on them...
...are timed to be bypassed at a certain moment...
...when the robbery is gonna occur.
[WOMAN SCREAMING & MAN GRUNTING]
[CROWD GASPING]
MICHAEL: Stay down. NEIL: Don't move! Don't fucking move!
Hands in the air!
COMMENTARY: They're realistically prepared and equipped to take down...
...an armed robbery in broad daylight in downtown, where they may be a, uh--
There may or may not be a police response, but if there is, they're equipped...
...to meet that response and assault and ambush.
Uh, they have sidearms.
They have long guns. These are CAR-15s.
Um...
Carbine or collapsible carbine, practical version of the M16.
They're wearing body armor.
And they're carrying on them a realistic amount of magazines.
Spare magazines.
So really, the way they're equipped...
...the way they operate tactically is military.
And it's military methods and tactics derived...
...from close-quarter combat in urban situations.
So there's a lot of tactical veracity to all the details...
...that have been, um, built into these guys, and in all the training.
In the featurettes, you'll see some of the training.
And when you do, I would ask you to pay particular attention...
...to Bobby shooting on the range, because there's targets that are falling down.
There are steel-plate targets. You hit them with a round and they fall down.
In some of them, he's shooting at 25 and 3O yards with a 9 mm and with a .45.
And anybody who's done any shooting will know how difficult it is to do...
...what he's doing and how good all these guys got.
And that informed every aspect of their movements...
...of where the ends of their weapons are pointing...
...the direction the guns are pointing, how they're moving.
How they're holding their guns.
Raising it up as he approaches Cheritto, who's a member of his crew.
Where they cover from, how they protect each other's backs.
How they handle their feet, where they place their feet...
...when they turn from the left to the right.
- HARRY: Hey, Casals. - Yeah.
HARRY: You guys working a case on a Neil McCauley?
This Cl, Hugh Benny, called in about a bank they're looking at or something.
BOSKO: Vincent.
Far East National Bank, 11:30!
COMMENTARY: And the machinations off-screen of Waingro have now resulted in tipping off...
...the police about the robbery.
And Waingro got this...
We don't know where-- Hugh Benny, who was tipped off by Waingro.
Where the information came from.
All we know is that the, uh--
We might suspect Trejo, because he's the one guy who's not there.
And we'll find out later.
They succeed in the robbery.
They're coming out.
And ex-con Breedan, who's been now recruited to replace Trejo...
...he's driving and it's all anticipated to be a walk in the park.
...because they're unaware...
...that--
VINCENT: Get clean shots. Watch your background.
COMMENTARY: --incoming is Vincent Hanna...
...who doesn't know what stage of the robbery he's likely to encounter.
So they're going to try and clear the sidewalk...
...quietly and unobtrusively...
...and move in until he can get a visual...
...and see what the status of the robbery is.
CASALS: Move it, come on. DRUCKER: L.A.P.D. Get down.
Move it. Down, down, down.
COMMENTARY: And Hanna's not a cowboy. He's not gonna act irresponsibly.
On the way in, they're gonna try to get as close as they can.
DRUCKER: Get down.
COMMENTARY: But the training would be such...
...that the reaction to shoot, it has no hesitation in it.
Val just comes outwith the weapon and lets go.
Now, they're trained, skilled.
This crew knows what it has to know, which is that they've been ambushed.
That the police are coming in, and more and more police assets...
...are gonna come in with every second that clicks by.
So, what's paramount is two things.
One is that they get out of there as fast as possible, and two, the way out--
[GUNFIRE]
COMMENTARY: --since they have superior firepower in terms of automatic weapons...
...is to assault the ambush.
DONALD: Go, go!
COMMENTARY: There was an incident in which some of the technical advisers...
...were in a vehicle in Northern Ireland when they were ambushed by Provos.
IRA Proves. And they were outnumbered and outgunned.
And they didn't hesitate. They shot right through the windshield...
...and assaulted the ambush in front of them.
And that's where this idea came from about Neil's first reaction.
And then they're gonna lay down fire while the other crew members move.
So they operate in coordination with each other as a small combat unit.
The vicious power of weapons...
...and of the damage that even a 5.5, 6 mm round does...
...and can do to a human body...
...I wanted to dramatically demonstrate in terms of the wounds, if you like, on the cars.
These are all factual wounds in the sense...
...that we took the cars out to the range and shot them full of holes...
...then Bondoed over the holes and repainted them.
So then when we set off a squib, it's the Bondo that blows out, revealing the hole.
So the holes were made from these rounds.
And since the war in Iraq, we see a lot of--
We see a lot of cars on the news being shot up.
We're now actually used to seeing the damage that these rounds do...
...and the terrible damage they actually do to a human body, flesh and bone.
[GUNFIRE]
Go!
[GRUNTS]
COMMENTARY: Sizemore's weapon is a 7.62 mm.
Casals wounds Chris, and what Neil McCauley's gonna do...
...is lay down a lot of rounds to suppress any of the police...
...who would dare venture out from behind the cover of their cars to shoot at them anyway...
...to lay down a lot of rounds to suppress the fire so that he can get Chris out.
MAN: Get him out of here.
[SIRENS WAILING]
[PEOPLE SCREAMING]
Get down! Now!
Aah!
Shit.
COMMENTARY: The distinction between Neil and Hanna is apparent right here.
Neil's a sociopath.
He cares about his friend Chris, but he doesn't care about you or your friend.
And he'll lay down a lot of rounds and fire...
...that he knows will force Hanna, who is not a sociopath...
...into protecting people and not firing through crowds...
...and Neil will indifferently shoot through people to effect his escape.
You see some of the key architecture I had in mind...
...in building the character of Cheritto.
He's a family man, and, you know, he's a loving father...
...loving husband, loves his kids, but he doesn't care about your kids.
And it's like the definition of criminality, so he has zero empathy and thinks nothing...
...of making a shield out of a little girl.
And Hanna's first thought after he shot Cheritto...
...is also indicative-- I found this an important reaction.
VINCENT: I got you. It's okay now.
COMMENTARY: And that was...
...to understand the trauma of the little girl and get her out of there.
The impact of what happened...
Here's Paul Moyer, who's an actual Los Angeles local newsman.
The impact upon what happens now impacts upon the women...
...in the parallel domestic stories that are interwoven...
...with the crime-story-police-story.
So at this point in time, everything is fused and became one...
...whereas I will digress from the crime-story-police-story...
...to bring all the different people's homes, their wives, their families...
...so that there were almost like two channels the film's operating in...
...and that's now become a dialectic, and the two channels have fused.
BOB: Hold him, hold him.
- All right. All right. - It's all right.
[CHRIS GROANING]
COMMENTARY: This is Jeremy Piven, who I think is a fabulous comedic actor.
NEIL: So? BOB: Well, he's got blood loss and shock.
I'm gonna give you quarter-grain morphine for the pain. Subcutaneous injection.
Bottom line.
BOB: It's mostly tissue damage, which is good...
COMMENTARY: And he's a veterinarian who...
...for a lot of money, is available to Neil and Neil's crew.
NEIL: Take off your shirt.
My-- Look, my daughter gave it to me for Father's Day.
NEIL: I don't give a shit who gave it to you. Take it off.
COMMENTARY: Ha, ha. This is one of my favorite De Niro lines.
He says, "I don't give a shit who gave you that shirt. Take it off."
Wonder what's in the mind of Dr. Bob...
...the friendly family veterinarian that thinks that some sentimental story...
...about the fact the shirt was given to him by his child...
...is gonna somehow appeal to Neil.
NEIL: We gotta get out of here. - I'm not going without her.
Think about that. I will meet you at Nate's.
Where are you going?
I gotta find out if our out got spilled along with every other damn thing.
COMMENTARY: Neil is not on a revenge motive.
Neil has gotta find out...
...if the way they plan to leave, if the way they plan to escape...
...their escape routes, their tickets, their safe houses...
...everything that was coming next, have been compromised or not.
And to do that, he's gotta find out--
He's gotta find who ratted him out.
Who ratted out the score to the police...
...and as he says to Chris Shiherlis:
"Who wasn't there?" And the answer is Trejo.
CHARLENE: Goddamn you, Chris. Goddamn you.
OFFICER: You're on a plane for Los Angeles.
COMMENTARY: This is Rey Verdugo on the left.
Rey Verdugo is a--
One of the leading homicide investigators...
...in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Homicide Bureau.
So Neil invades the house of Trejo, and the first thing he's going to discover...
...is a crime scene.
The remains of Trejo's wife.
Whatever hideous thing happened to her at the hands of Waingro.
And Trejo himself.
NEIL: Why'd you do it? What happened?
- They made me. - Who?
Where's Anna?
She's dead.
[GROANING]
So is Michael and Breedan, the guy who stood in for you.
- Who did it? Who did it? - They had Anna, man.
Who had her?
Waingro.
On his own?
- For someone. - Who?
The other he worked for.
Zant.
- Van Zant? - Yeah.
Van Zant.
- Are you sure? - Van Zant.
Did you say anything about how we're getting out?
- I don't think so, Neil. - Come on.
I don't remember, Neil.
- I'll call a medic. - I'm not gonna make it.
I can't feel nothing.
COMMENTARY: And Neil is still motivated by utility...
...by the practical challenge of getting this crew to safety.
TREJO: Don't leave me like this, Neil.
COMMENTARY: And Trejo asking him...
...to kill him, because life isn't worth living.
This view, this place, is City Terrace.
It's five miles east of downtown L.A.
And Neil's moving through the refineries of Wilmington...
...which is near San Pedro.
This is one of my other favorite moments with, uh-- It's two scenes, actually.
This scene and the later scene...
...when the information that Neil requests from Nate is actually delivered.
Quiet dignity of what Voight's doing.
This is so impressive to me.
NATE". 10725. 40725, Okay.
- Chris? - He's with me, at my place.
Next, Waingro, okay?
You got the time?
I'll make time, and I need a new out laid on.
How do you know it's blown?
How can I trust it?
Okay, you got it.
Stay healthy.
VINCENT: Charlene Shiherlis.
Drucker's got a safe house in Venice to stash her in.
COMMENTARY: What's happening here is a small, small detail...
...but Detective Casals, played by Wes Studi, unloads the 12-gauge.
Probably had double-aught buckshot, and instead he loads in a solid slug...
...which is sometimes used for deer hunting, and we'll see why in a moment.
There's kind of a nervous checking...
...just making sure that there's a round in the chamber...
...that Hanna does with his .45.
CASALS: --how much time we got?
Eight, 10 hours for him to set up a new out. After that, he's gone. Bye-bye. Bang.
COMMENTARY: We're about to see why Casals put a solid shot in--
And this is Mick Gould on the right who we just flipped past, who, in fact...
...is one of the two ex-British SAS trainers and technical advisers.
For a long time, this was the swiftest--
You know, minus a battering ram, this was a standard way...
...to open a door, which is to blow the hinges off.
[BOTH GRUNTING]
You ratted McCauley to us. How'd you know? Who told you?
Who told you, you rat motherfucker?
Who?
COMMENTARY: Hanna needs to know...
...what was behind their betrayal of Neil McCauley.
Because he needs to find out everything, and he needs to find it out really fast...
...because McCauley escaped.
And he's gotta track him down.
So he needs to find out...
He needs to talk to whoever has other information...
...about Neil McCauley to discover how Neil McCauley was planning to get out...
...so that he can interdict Neil McCauley.
That causes Hanna to, in fact, rough up the informant, Hugh Benny.
But the visceral energy, in kind of an ironic parallel...
...is almost as if...
...it vents the disrespect...
...that Hanna might otherwise feel for the informant...
...even though he wants the information coming from the informant.
So in a visceral way, it has Hanna and McCauley...
...having the same emotion, even though it's the opposite purpose.
CHARLENE: Well, what do we have here, hmm?
COMMENTARY: This scene is shot in Venice, right on the Boardwalk.
CHARLENE: Oh.
- You slimy piece of shit. - You told me you wanted out from under.
You're scared to death, right? You want out? This is out, Charlene.
- Yeah, what's your end? - I-- You stupid broad.
- How'd I get into this? - Hey, hey, hey. Easy.
- Huh? - You heard me.
She had a rough ride. Why don't you fix her a drink or something?
- Look in the cabinet above the sink. - Fuck her.
COMMENTARY: That's Sergeant Drucker, Mykelti Williamson.
He uses his antipathy towards the sleazy...
...Alan Marciano, played by Hank Azaria...
...to forge a kind of solidarity, an emotional solidarity...
...or attempt to forge a kind of emotional solidarity...
...with Charlene Shiherlis, because he has a very short amount of time...
...to strike up a rapport with her--
DRUCKER: Well, he's right, because you want out, this is out.
COMMENTARY: --because he has to persuade her to give up Chris.
DRUCKER: That's right. You would have to.
See, if you don't betray Chris, you victimize Dominick.
Because he becomes an orphan when you go to prison as an accessory...
...because you got no living parents to take him.
So he ends up state-raised in foster homes, juvenile facilities.
Then he steals a car.
Then he winds up in gladiator academies like Chino and Tracy.
Fucked for life.
You know what happens, because you've been there.
Dominick didn't get a chance yet to choose his life, but Chris did.
COMMENTARY: He's gotta make an argument, a persuasive argument...
...and he knows he's not gonna get an immediate reaction from her.
But he has a very short window in which to have a rapport...
...make an argument, get her to hear him...
...that she's gonna fuck up the life of her own child...
...if she doesn't give up Chris.
Dominick didn't have a choice, didn't have a chance.
Chris did. Chris elected to live the life he lives.
And that's the argument he's making.
The psychological methods, the people-to-people...
...the working of people, working of informants...
...of really good detectives fascinates me.
DRUCKER: It's me.
I want an answer. What's it gonna be?
COMMENTARY: And then again, we get the refrain...
...of the way cause and effect work in this motion picture.
"Want an answer. What it's gonna be?"
DRUCKER: We're set here. She'll make the call.
Okay, that's good. Here's the deal here.
COMMENTARY: Charlene also knows that she has a window to protect her son...
...and protect herself, or she's going to prison, and the window's right now.
She can't think about it for a day or confer with anybody.
It's right now, what's it gonna be?
VINCENT: --then he went to work for a money launderer named Van Zant.
Units are at Van Zant's house as we speak because he got shot dead earlier tonight.
Now, if Neil goes after anybody else, it's gonna be Waingro.
Waingro just got himself a suite at the airport Marquis...
...under the name "Jameson."
COMMENTARY: Now, Hanna has discovered the back-story that we already know.
And the only behavior of Neil's that he can possibly predict--
And he needs to predict Neil's behavior so that he can put himself...
...where Neil might go, and to intercept him, to interdict him.
And the only behavior that he can possibly predict is what he's discovered...
...that the man...
...who's the architect of the betrayal is Waingro.
And if Neil deviates from anything about his escape...
...it might be to go and wreak vengeance upon Waingro.
So Neil has located Waingro and has staked him out.
And he knows he has X amount of time...
...because he knows that Neil will get out of town as fast as he can.
[DOOR OPENS]
EADY: What did you do?
[COMMENTARY: And Ne“ comes home to Each]...
...who had no idea what he did until right now.
NEIL: Now we gotta go together. - Those other people were with you?
My friend, Michael...
...he knew the risks. He didn't have to be there.
COMMENTARY: Sociopath here, the rationalizations...
...and what Neil says about Michael were...
...and are hopefully...
...revealing of his thought process. Sees that Michael elected to be there.
He knew the risks. He's not gonna--
So Neil is not gonna sentimentalize over the fact Michael's dead...
...even though he is probably suppressing strong feelings about it.
This is a hillside above a street aptly named Hillside...
...in West Hollywood, in the hills over L.A.
And one of the striking things about L.A., when you live there, is the extent to which...
...even though it's been paved over...
...with rooftops and freeways and streets...
...and has almost 17 million people, there is wildness in the hills.
NEIL: There's this Camaro at this address, Level D, Slot 18.
Here's some cash.
When's it over?
Twenty-two hours from now.
- Then we get out of here clean. - When will you let me leave?
COMMENTARY: The shock of the pathology at the core of a man...
...that she fell in love with, the revelation of that to her...
...we try to imagine in the realistic way...
...it might be shocking when you think somebody is one person...
...and then it was revealed that they have a void inside them...
...and in fact they're somebody very different.
Almost analogous to being cheated on.
There's downtown in the distance.
JUSTINE: It's ready.
Vincent.
COMMENTARY: This is the house of Thom Mayne, who is an architect...
...and his firm is called Morphosis, and he's a prize-winning architect.
This is where he lives, and they built a--
He and his family live in a house of 900 square feet, which is very small.
JUSTINE: She's at Lisa-Beth's. - Look, this has nothing to do with me.
COMMENTARY: This is Xander Berkeley, who's an excellent actor...
...and was in the television version of this picture...
...which was about 40 percent of the screenplay.
VINCENT: You know, you can ball my wife if she wants you to.
You can lounge around here...
COMMENTARY: This is another scene I had a lot of problem directing...
...because what Al does next...
VINCENT: --dead-tech, post-modernistic, bullshit house, if you want to...
...but you do not get to watch my fucking television set!
JUSTINE: For God's sake.
Put the television set down.
- I never cheated on you, bitch. JUSTINE: Maybe you should have.
COMMENTARY: I have a lot of difficulty staying straight and not blowing the take...
...because of a very amateurish kind of reaction...
...of laughing behind the camera, because Al was outrageous when he was doing this.
It also is a scene-- ls an event that happened in life.
It happened to Chuck Adamson when he was in a similar situation...
...and he didn't know what to say or how to react.
And the only thing he owned in his domicile was a television set...
...and it's the thing that just, irrationally, all of his attention focused on.
JUSTINE: --grass and Prozac...
...but you've been walking through our life dead.
Now I have to demean myself with Ralph just to get closure with you.
NATE: Passports, traveler's checks, plastic.
The plane, charter terminal, LAX, Hangar 17.
Call letters are 1011 Sierra.
[TIRES SCREECH]
COMMENTARY: And Jon Voight, in addition to being an incredible actor...
...is also very close personal friend.
Playing the facilitator, Nate, has provided Neil with a new way to get out...
...because Neil couldn't trust his last set of arrangements...
...because of the wild card, who's still out there someplace, Waingro.
NEIL: Didn't you bring him here? - Yeah, I brought him here.
What happened?
It's a free country, brother.
COMMENTARY: And here, Neil learns that Chris Shiherlis has taken off after his wife.
And within the doctrinaire way of operating that Neil has...
...that Nate knows all about, they're the same.
They come from the same ethos...
...about if you're gonna do crime, here's how you do professional crime.
That Chris has just deviated from the rigid methods...
...of nonattachment of just 30 seconds flat, leave...
...because anything you're attached to will expose you to risk...
...because it may be bait, which in the case of Charlene Shiherlis, it definitely is.
NEIL: I know life is short.
Whatever time you get is luck.
COMMENTARY: And now, Neil finds himself on a clifftop in the Palisades.
And this is, to me, one of the most emotionally poignant scenes in the film.
And it's got a parallel scene, which is gonna be the scene...
...between Anna and Justine in the hospital.
NEIL: All I know is...
All I know is there's no point in me going anywhere anymore...
...if it's gonna be alone...
...without you.
COMMENTARY: And this is a pivotal moment in the character of Neil McCauley.
The plans he had suddenly are without meaning.
It's as if there's been a massive sudden devaluation...
...of the objective, of the goal, of what he was gonna do...
...because he's fallen in love with this woman.
And if she's not with him, then it doesn't mean anything.
And that's what he just said quite literally.
And it's something that, for a man who doesn't usually speak from the heart...
...he had to rip from himself, and De Niro, completely in character as Neil McCauley...
...had to do exactly that.
It was a scene where he was very--
It was terribly important to Bobby, and terribly important to myself.
And we spent a lot of time rehearsing it and a lot of time discussing it.
And I think, as with everything he did in this movie, he's brilliant.
And I believe that this woman, who's not part...
...of any kind of a criminal subculture or life of crime...
...is swayed by the emotions and the power of his confession...
...and how important she has become to his life...
...to go with him, to make this move.
And what's significant is that this is the character Neil McCauley...
...operating outside the boundaries of everything he's been lecturing Chris about...
...and everything we've become to know about him...
...and everything he said to Hanna in the coffee-shop scene.
The man of rigid detachment...
...capable of an actuarial kind of calibration of risk versus reward...
...has now thrown caution to the wind...
...and has acted spontaneously, and acting spontaneously...
...improvising with Eady...
...he's won her over.
And that's gonna change him and change him utterly from this point on.
It's as if the rigid doctrine was his navigational gear...
...and he's sailing on the open ocean with no navigation, no rudder.
[CHATTERING]
COMMENTARY: In this scene...
...I confess I'm stunned with how wonderful Ashley Judd was.
The expressions on her face as she's processing all her options...
...and what she has to do, and she waves him off.
And she's established early on in the film...
...as a woman who is practical, she is putting together--
Practical and emotionally mature...
...an adult putting together a small family.
And those are her values. They're family values.
And she knows that what--
If she cooperates--
That she ought to cooperate with the police...
...and she ought to let Chris fall, because that will protect her child...
...and no instinct is more profound and powerful...
...than that maternal instinct that she has right there.
And she's set up for us to expect that she will do exactly that...
...that even though the anguish would be intense...
...that she would give up Chris to protect the family unit that remains.
And when she goes to do that on the porch, she sees him and can't help herself.
She's in love with the guy, and you almost-- You see on her face, processing these choices...
...and a certain endearment that she feels for him.
And then she just does the irrational act and waves him off.
And in this moment right now, we see in the look on Ashley's face...
...the sense of what her future's gonna be, which is gonna be grim.
OFFICER [OVER RADIO]: --last name Bukowski, first name Gene.
Ran it to DMV. It's clean.
- Let him go. - Roger.
Thank you very much. Have a good evening.
It's a no-go, Vince.
COMMENTARY: And it's there again when she closes her eyes...
...as Drucker, Mykelti Williamson...
...tells Vincent that the guy was not Chris. We, of course, know he was.
DRUCKER: Would you like a cup of coffee while we wait, Mrs. Shiherlis?
Yeah, that'd be nice.
COMMENTARY: And this is the final moment of Ashley Judd...
...Charlene Shiherlis, in the film.
An awareness of the separation from her man...
...and an awareness of what her future holds for her.
And with Chris, there's a parallel moment of realization.
- MAN [OVER PHONE]: Yeah? - Yeah, what do you got?
Nothing's happening.
COMMENTARY: This man right here is Torn Elfmont.
Tom Elfmont was a commander in the L.A.P.D., and he plays a desk clerk.
And Tom and I spent about seven or eight months...
...prior to the beginning of shooting the film trawling through L.A...
...every Friday and Saturday night...
...in an unmarked car, and we would answer police calls...
...wherever they were, whatever they were, whether there was a homicide...
...or armed robbery in progress, or burglary or a drug bust...
...from about 9 p.m. to about 2 or 3 in the morning.
And by doing that, that's how a lot of the fabric that is Los Angeles...
...really became apparent to me.
CASALS: Come on, Vincent, how do you know?
- We still got bait. Maybe some time! - Got, got. What do we got?
What do we got?
Bon voyage, motherfucker.
You were good.
COMMENTARY: And that's acting.
That is Al Pacino, I think, at his most modulated and best.
"Bon voyage, motherfucker."
And then there's that pause, and then there's kind of an ennui...
...to his statement as that line just floats out into the kind of nothingness...
...which is all that remains of this entire chase.
This predator in the jungle, which is exactly what Hanna is.
This chase of Neil McCauley, it's over.
McCauley's gone, blown, he's out of there, which also tells us that is McCauley's potential.
[TIRES SCREECHING]
COMMENTARY: I don't recall, if in real life, Chuck Adams-on, after his marriage broke up...
...and he took the television set, if he actually threw the television away or not.
So if he did, that's inspired this moment.
If he didn't, it would've been a very dramatic thing to do.
He comes home to the hotel room.
He's right at-- Doesn't see, at first, the patch of wet carpet.
Looks out into the lonely night, see the city at night.
This is at the Holiday Inn over the 405 by Sunset.
And we're gonna learn, or my intent, hopefully...
...is to underscore the motive, the objective...
...that is behind what Hanna does...
...was always there in the man.
And that is an impulse to preserve life.
This essential passion.
Now, in my design of Hanna, he is a predator.
He is ego-centered, not -centric. He's ego-centered.
And the elevated experience of his life is the hunting...
...of people like Neil McCauley.
That's what he does. He's a hunter.
But he's not a sociopath.
And the objective, not the motor that makes him run, that in--
As it is in all of us in real life, not in make-believe...
...is a kind of ego-centered drive.
But a key component is that there is an objective there.
And the objective is to preserve life, and to the point of rage.
VINCENT: Assholes shoot themselves all fucking day.
Not you, baby. Not you.
[STAMMERS] Where would she be? Her name is Lauren, Lauren Gustafson.
I'm supposed to be here with her. But the police--
- Help me. I need somebody to help-- - It's okay.
L90ty0u.
COMMENTARY: And Lauren, child of a broken marriage...
...alienated, particularly during early adolescence...
...by a father who ignores her and doesn't show up for days...
...looking for the stability of a family unit...
...locks on to Hanna.
And when that marriage starts to break up...
...as is quite typical in these situations, she identifies with...
...and is looking for Hanna to intervene and--
This is some of the psychological motivations going on...
...that would be going on in her mind.
She'd be looking for Hanna to intervene, the drama and the emergency of the situation...
...of her own suicide to reunite the family.
These are some unconscious motivations that would have been going on inside of her.
There's a nurse here with blond hair in blue whose name is Terry.
And Terry is terrific. And she runs the ER ward of the hospital...
...in which we shot this in real life.
DOCTOR: --for post-intubation chest x-ray.
NURSE: Hi. Your daughter's out of...
COMMENTARY: It's also the same hospital that Neil McCauley moved through...
...at the very beginning-- Here's Terry again on the left.
That Neil McCauley moved through at the beginning of the film...
...when he took the ambulances in North Long Beach.
Which probably has more crime-related trauma cases...
...than any other hospital with the possible exception of Martin Luther King.
JUSTINE: Look what she did. Look what she did to herself.
[SOBBING]
There.
It's all right, honey. It's gonna be all right.
I'm here. I ain't going anywhere.
- You understand? JUSTINE: Yeah.
I ain't going anywhere.
[DIALING PHONE]
[LINE RINGING]
Yeah?
It's me.
COMMENTARY: And Nate confirms that the arrangements for Neil's exit...
...that Nate laid on are all good.
And he has another piece of information for him.
NATE: One other thing.
You asked, so I gotta tell you.
The guy you wanted checked into the Marquis under "Jameson"...
...if you still give a shit, which I figured you wouldn't.
- You figured right. - So, so long, brother.
You take it easy.
You're home free.
Take it easy.
COMMENTARY: And Nate says goodbye.
And it's as if Nate's reassuring himself that Neil won't go for Waingro.
- EADY: What is it? - Nothing.
Home free.
COMMENTARY: And we enter something-- This happened in--
This is one of those accidents that occurred.
And it's the light, the bright light in this tunnel.
And it seemed to be...
...a suggested process of thought...
...that's not rational.
It just occurs.
And there's a decision that Bob makes right here as Neil-- Bob as Neil makes right here.
And the look on his face from the end of the tunnel with white lights to the turn...
...was very, very important to Bob, and it had to be exactly right.
And we went out and shot it again and again on three separate nights...
...to just get exactly the right look that communicated a certain kind of a--
As if he's saying, "I'm about to do an irrational act...
...that breaks every precept I've had in my life."
And not only am I gonna go do it...
...but there's a certain kind of a celebratory nihilistic aggression...
...to the fact he's breaking it, almost as if he's relishing behaving spontaneously.
Letting the waves of emotion dictate his actions...
...instead of the rigid caution.
Because never in a million years should he go back to this hotel for Waingro.
He should go to the airport. He should get on a plane.
He should get out of there.
[MAIDS SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY]
WOMAN [OVER PHONE]: Registration. - Yeah, this is Room Service.
COMMENTARY: But it's like he's on a roll, like a guy at a crap table who's on a roll.
NEIL: Yeah, I know.
- 1735. - Thank you.
COMMENTARY: And he's not gonna stop when he's ahead...
...even though he knows the dice are probably gonna turn.
It's as if Eady has a sense...
...of, uh, anxiety...
...an unnamed anxiety.
McCauley has dressed himself to look like a hotel worker.
And on his way up through the back of the main desk...
...he sees the shotgun next to the clerk...
...played by Torn Elfmont.
Then he knows the guy's a cop, and rather than back away...
...what's he do? He goes anyway, because he is not acting dispassionately.
[ALARM RINGING]
COMMENTARY: And Neil's left a garbage can blocking the doors of one elevator...
...so that he can get in it when it goes to the ground floor.
- MAN: Shit. - Waingro's not moving. I'm staying here.
I'm checking the stairs. If there's smoke, I'm pulling you out.
COMMENTARY: And we cut back from Neil's assault on Waingro...
...to Al and Diane Venora in the hospital.
JUSTINE: And she chose you.
COMMENTARY: And in a way, this is the counter...
...as these two men's lives are so similar, so parallel.
This is the counter of the scene on the Palisades between Neil and Eady.
VINCENT: Ugh, okay.
COMMENTARY: Hanna is convinced that Neil's gone, it's over. He ignores the call.
I think this is a phenomenal piece of work by Al Pacino and Diane Venora.
She's proposing and they both would like to make it work if they could.
But one of the key aspects of Hanna that's so similar to McCauley...
...is that they're both totally self-aware.
VINCENT: --it's like you said:
All I am, is what I'm going after.
COMMENTARY: And in that line, "All I am is what I'm going after"...
...is a man who sees himself totally, sees himself clearly...
...deceives himself not at all.
They've both probably had three marriages each.
They both would like it to work. They both care about each other.
But when this guy comes home, when he walks in the door, there's nothing left.
And when he wakes up in the morning, before he's even fully conscious...
...he's using that subconscious zone in which pattern recognitions sometimes occur...
...about somebody he's pursuing on the street.
A general pattern recognition about a surveillance that's wrong.
That's what he's thinking about when he gets up in the morning.
So this is not gonna happen.
This marriage probably was not a good idea to begin with.
When we entered the movie, it was midway through.
There was tension in the air.
And even though they love each other, and even though they care about each other...
...it's not gonna happen, because the elevated experience of this man's life...
...which he knows he's addicted to and which...
...he will pursue and sacrifice a marriage for...
...is chasing Neil McCauley.
So as he says, "All I am is what I'm going after."
MAN: Take the stairs.
Yeah?
Security. There's a fire on 3. We have to evacuate all the floors.
I can't leave here.
COMMENTARY: And Waingro, thinking he's made moves...
...has become some kind of a shot caller...
...has parlayed his screw-up in the armed robbery...
...gets a surprise of a lifetime.
[WAINGRO GRUNTING]
He's here on 17.
Look at me. Look at me.
COMMENTARY: Neil wants his eyes.
He wants this guy to see what's coming.
[WAINGRO GASPS]
[SIRENS WAILING]
L.A.P.D. Don't move.
COMMENTARY: What Neil does right here is standard drill...
...if you are very well versed...
...in close-quarter urban combat situations.
That's more of a military Special Forces kind of training than police training.
And people fleeing the hotel are streaming past Eady's car.
She knows something's terribly wrong.
This is the Hilton Hotel up by LAX.
And this is a helicopter that Al is in on his way to the Hilton.
And we're gonna be paralleling the approach paths to the southern runways.
VINCENT: What have you got?
CASALS [OVER RADIO]: Teams are moving up the other elevators to the 17th floor elevators.
All out of commission because of the fire alarm.
COMMENTARY: So we're actually shooting our film set.
I did this shot by just lying on my back, letting the helicopter come over me...
...and then arming down as it came down.
Now here's why Hanna sought Neil.
He sought Neil because he knew from experience...
...that if he gets to know the guy, something's gonna come from it.
There's data, there's information, some of it taken in subconsciously, unconsciously...
...a slipped line or whatever.
And what does Hanna see here? He sees a woman in a car waiting.
And Neil had told him that there was somebody.
MAN: Come on, come on.
COMMENTARY: But when Neil went for Waingro...
...and breached his rigid methods...
...that he even lectured to Hanna about...
...then Hanna knows Neil's going for Waingro...
...and he knows Neil may be behaving erratically...
...and may be behaving emotionally.
And Neil lingers as he's departing, because he's looking at her...
...and he knows he's lost her forever.
Eady barely understands what's going on.
And there's a change in Elliot Goldenthal's score here.
It was a brilliant score by Elliot Goldenthal. There's a change in the score here...
...that signifies that the action is now changed.
Neil's departure from Eady is not what the story is about...
...when that chord change happens.
The music still carries the emotionality of that loss...
...but it becomes about hunting and pursuit and flight.
...even though we come back in the editing and see a little brief piece of a confused Eady.
This is the runways of LAX.
And because of the time of night we were working...
...we were able to actually film at the airport on the tarmac.
It was a challenge for us, because this was--
The week we were shooting there, is the week the Unabomber...
...threatened to blow up LAX in 1995.
But we were able to work in certain parts of the airport.
This is on the east side of the airport where a lot of cargo's loaded.
[GUNSHOT]
COMMENTARY: Neil is at a disadvantage with a handgun, but he's--
If you see Bob training in the featurette...
...you'll see how good he actually got with a .45.
And you'll see him dropping these metal targets from 25, 3O yards.
And he's-- He is that good.
So he stops and gets the stability of a corner of one of those cargo containers.
As long as Hanna has a shotgun, Neil is outgunned.
And in the micro tactics of their situation...
...and the approach before the tarmac begins...
...Neil wants to lure Hanna into a zone where he can ambush him.
And what he's doing here is listening and waiting.
And he's gonna notice something very important...
...that as the planes approach...
...the landing light turns on, and they're quite brilliant.
So Neil knows if he puts himself against the lights...
...then when the lights turn on, they'll blind Hanna.
These two men, as they said at the end of the coffee-shop scene...
...even though they've met each other and talked to each other...
...both will hesitate not for a second...
...to kill the other.
That's what this is about.
There is no hesitation.
And you'll see the briefest, the smallest glimpse...
...of Hanna passing, and here's where Neil notices the lights there behind him.
And he decides he's gonna wait for that moment to occur...
...and when the lights come on, he'll come out, and he will have a tactical advantage.
Even if you don't track exactly what he's thinking...
...I think people get his strategy...
...and that's Bobby doing it with looks...
...and understanding and what you've known about him...
...that cumulatively, is collapsed into this moment.
So we have the accumulation of all our knowledge of him.
And that's how, without even thinking about it very much, we understand...
...that something tactical is going on.
So it's waiting for the next plane to come in.
That's what Neil is doing.
Waiting for the plane and waiting for the lights.
Then we start to hear the plane before we see the plane.
Then we see the plane.
And the lights come on.
Neil comes out, but he casts a shadow.
And Hanna just snaps a shot without even looking or thinking or aiming.
Just a snap shot...
...that wounds Neil but slows him down, and then Hanna focuses in...
...and hits him twice in the chest.
And the way I thought about the ending of the picture was that the lethal combat...
...of predator versus prey after Hanna has shot McCauley...
...the lethal combat is actually over, it's ended.
Not ended partially. It's ended totally.
And then these men are free to resume...
...the sense of each other that they had in the coffee shop.
VINCENT: Yeah.
COMMENTARY: And my privately held idea of what is going on in the picture...
...between these two men is that these are the only two guys...
...like each other in the universe.
Meaning the universe of this motion picture.
The universe of the stories and the lives we've just seen.
In my privately held idea of what's happening here at the very end picture...
...is that Neil McCauley and Vincent Hanna...
...are the only two people on the planet quite like each other...
...that in the world of this picture, they--
Only the two of them are fully aware...
...and conscious of who they are.
And that understanding, when I had it during the writing...
...of the last image of the picture is what made the whole rest of the picture come together...
...and that's when I decided to make Heat.
And I rewrote everything from that last moment...
...that, in fact, is the last frame of the movie.
Working backwards, that everything led...
...to that moment of connection between the two of them.
And the duality of both sets-- Both circumstances are true...
...the circumstance of predator and prey and guys who were hunting each other...
...and intend to kill each other in lethal combat.
And at one and the same time, the rapport, because, not always...
...but in some ways, they're so similar in the sense that both men...
...are totally conscious of their life with no self-deception.
They're the only two like each other.