Heat

Christopher Nolan has named Michael Mann's Heat as a model for The Dark Knight: a crime epic about a city, with a daylight bank robbery staged with a crew in masks, and a relationship between hunter and hunted at its centre. The Dark Knight's opening heist is the clearest instance.

Huston's film established the crew heist as a form, and Heat is its fullest version. The template: a job assembled by specialists who are introduced by what they can do, the planning given as much screen time as the execution, a crew whose private lives are the weak point, and an ending in which the plan works and the people do not survive it. Mann adds the other half, a detective given exactly as much interiority as the thief, and the map already records the same source reaching Rififi, Topkapi, The Italian Job and Ocean's Eleven. Filed MEDIUM: a genre debt, and Mann's own stated source for the plot is a Chicago detective's account of a real crew.