directors cut u KNOW im askin abt some weird sin baybee! tell me all abt it
What an insane undertaking that was! I remember when the premise occurred to me, I was walking down Michigan Avenue back in September of 2022 and it just fell out of the sky: "What if Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley actually met each other right here in Chicago instead of passing each other like ships in the night? And what if Vincent thought Neil was an undercover cop, and Neil thought Vincent was a fellow thief?" It's the closest I've ever come to writing something approaching a film script, and looking back over it the amount of plot engineering and dialogue involved was bananas. It is still at its core a romance, but it required me to dip my toes in other forms of genre writing that were totally foreign to me until I committed to seeing it through. I still have no idea how I managed!
Writing a brand-new diner scene from scratch was by far the most intimidating thing I've ever done in the fandom. It's such a perfect scene the way Mann has it in the original, so how the hell was I gonna replicate that chemistry under such radically different circumstances? I took a purely symbolic tack with respect to their domestic failures (hence the dollhouse story), and since Vincent was not surveilling/pursuing Neil on the job what was a tense pseudo-interrogation became a game of omission between the two of them. That scene at Lake Michigan with the sun rising was meant to mirror/invert the one where Neil returns home at twilight and sets his gun on the table, because I can't write a Mann fic and not insert a large body of water for the protagonist(s) to contemplate.
But my favorite chapter is actually the one where they reunite at the bar, because there are three levels of conversation happening simultaneously: the one Neil thinks he is having with Vincent, the one Vincent pretends to be having with Neil, and the one Vincent is actually having with Neil (known only to himself). Every line has multiple layers of meaning, because at that moment Vincent has figured out who and what Neil actually is, and Neil still thinks he's dealing with one of his own. Vincent goes from flirting to speaking in grim jokes and double-entendres, hinting at his fear that Neil will go ballistic on him once he realizes that Vincent is actually a cop:
“I don’t know if I’m supposed to say ‘thank you’ to that.” “Oh. Please. Don’t thank me. But it is a compliment.” “That’s right. I forgot. Yours are the kind should come with a manual.” “Wouldn’t want you getting the wrong idea.” “That’s new.” “I just get the feeling you’re not the kind of guy who’s real comfortable with ambiguities, you know? Uncertainty. Spontaneity. Shit gets weird, life throws you curve balls, you walk across the field, beat the umpire to death with the bat.”
But the best part of "Some Weird Sin" for me as a writer and Heat obsessive was the excuse it gave me to play around with Nate as a supporting character. I will now look for any excuse to shoehorn him into a fic. He's the Mr. Deadpan Straight Man to Neil's infatuated romantic/gangster entrepreneur, and the conversations they have were some of my favorites to write:
Neil stops reading. He knows the rest. “We could frame it,” he says, pointing to where an assortment of commissioned lithographs presides over rows of gleaming bottles, portraits of outlaw blues legends and romantic Hollywood renegades. “Put it up behind the bar.” “You’re a comedian now, too.” Nate’s expression is unchanged. “A Renaissance man.” “Tough crowd in here.”
I never knew I could have so much fun writing something so challenging. And because I can't resist putting myself through the wringer a second time, I am already halfway done with a two-part epilogue. Coming soon to an AO3 theater near you!