Everyone’s favorite line from Heat comes from one of Pacino’s patented “wild” takes

Nine out of 10 Heat viewers agree: The funniest part of Michael Mann’s artful crime masterpiece is when Al Pacino shouts, “She has a great ass, and you’ve got your head all the way up it!” The scene is something of a minor miracle. It should disrupt the severity and intensity of the film’s climax, but thanks to Pacino’s gonzo performance as Vincent Hanna, the abusive, obsessive, maniac cop from Heat, the actor’s line reading fits right in with the rest of the actor’s delectable scenery chewing. Director Michael Mann agrees, and in a new interview with Variety, he doesn’t contest how surprising and strange the delivery is. It’s all part of the Pacino process.

Mann, who laughs at the scene like any channel surfer lucky enough to catch the movie on TNT on Saturday afternoon, says that Pacino’s “best takes are always five, six or seven.” The first two, he explains, are all experimental. By the time he hits six, “maybe it’s a small change.” After that, though, it’s all fireworks, and Pacino would “deliver a take that was fantastic.” In this case, though, as viewers can attest, Pacino goes a little off-script. After Mann had a solid take locked, the actor asked if he could try “a wild one.” Mann always obliged, Variety reports, because they were “often hilarious” and occasionally brilliant and/or terrible. Unfortunately, no one told Pacino’s co-star Hank Azaria.

“I neglected to tell [Azaria] that we had a habit of doing this,” says Mann. “Al just flipped this guy up and down and cut loose, and that look of shock and amazement on Azaria’s face is because we’re going completely off the script into something totally wild.”

But Mann wasn’t through with the Heat anecdotes. Like many, Pacino thought the only way to make his character whole was to give him a cocaine addiction. Mann and Pacino even shot a scene of Hanna doing coke off a dagger that he carried “in the small of his back,” an incredible detail that is now canon. Ultimately, Mann thought making the obviously coke-addled cop a full-on coke addict was “too strong a message.” So we settle for Diet Coke and must assume he’s got a crippling problem, because how else can anyone explain Vincent Hanna’s actions?

The whole interview is worth sharing with the Manniac in your life. Particularly when the director takes the blame for the failure of Blackhat, his 2015 hacker thriller starring Chris Hemsworth that bombed hard at the box office. “It’s my responsibility,” he said. “The script was not ready to shoot.” However, Mann won’t hear any grumbling about the film’s authenticity. “The subject may have been ahead of the curve because there were a number of people who thought this was all fantasy. Wrong. Everything is stone-cold accurate.”