For the restaurant sequence where McCauley and Hanna finally meet, Michael Mann ran two cameras simultaneously in order to generate a greater level of fluidity between both rivals. Since there were no rehearsals for the scene, this approach afforded both men a more generous margin for improvisational experimentation.

Michael Mann made the movie as tribute to a detective friend of his in Chicago, who obsessively tracked and killed a thief (named Neil McCauley) he had once met under non-violent circumstances.

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The pilot was shot in only nineteen days, atypical for Mann.
he script was abridged down to almost a third of its original length, omitting many subplots that made it into Heat. The network was unhappy with Plank as the lead actor, and asked Mann to recast Hanna’s role.