Oscar nominee Michael Mann (The Insider) is agnostic when it comes to AI, which he will likely use in Heat 2.

“I don’t experiment with technology gratuitously,” Mann said about using AI in his movies at a press conference hosted at the Lumiere Film Festival in Lyon, where he received the award from French actor Isabelle Huppert last night. “When I have dramatic need or esthetic need, then I go deep into what I need.”

Unlike Ferrari, his movie starring Adam Driver, which was sold to Amazon after being produced independently and didn’t get released theatrically in many international territories, “Heat 2” will have a different fate.

“We moved from Warner Bros. to Amazon and United Artists, but it will be absolutely released theatrically, in the United States, probably in about 4,000 cinemas and for at least 45 days,” Mann said.

The plot of Heat 2 would move back and forth in time, before and after the events of the original film. The story will pick up one day after the movie ends, “only Val Kilmer’s alive, and he has to flee the US.”

“The characters of ‘Heat’ are alive to me. An idea occurred to me, based on the rapport between two lethal adversaries, Pacino’s Hannah and De Niro’s McCauley, about how to do both before the events of ‘Heat’ and after.” Hannah and McCauley were changed by events that occurred in 1988, when Hannah was a cop in Chicago and McCauley had “a wife, a stepdaughter, a nuclear family that he’s very attached to.”

The film will be based on a book by Mark Bowden, the helmer of “Black Hawk Down.” “It’s a very human, a very powerful piece, and I spent a lot of time and talked with a lot of survivors of that battle,” Mann said. The book had also inspired Pacino’s character from Heat — “Al Pacino’s history, that he was Marine in the Battle of Hue in 1968 and in 1988 he’s still suffering from PTSD.”

That movie will be “like “Rashōmon” with several perspectives, several points of both the American side and on the Vietnamese side,” Mann teased.

Mann also said that he’ll produce a Western titled “Comanche” which will be directed by Scott Cooper, whose latest film “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” played this week at Lumiere Festival.

Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon

Mann concluded his visit to Lyon with a Lumiere Festival tradition. Mann set off to reimagine “Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon,” the 1895 French short written and directed by Louis Lumière, believed to be the first picture ever made.

Mann did six takes, many of which had slightly different set-ups and angles, and used several cameras, including his iPhone’s. Famous French actors, including Isabelle Huppert, Laurent Lafitte, Marina Fois and Michelle Laroque, took part in the experiment.