CUSTOM BUILT
TWO DECADES IN THE MAKING, MICHAEL MANN’S RACING DRAMA FERRARI IS AS PRECISION-ENGINEERED AS THE CARS THEMSELVES. WE TALK TO HIM, ADAM DRIVER AND PENÉLOPE CRUZ ABOUT LEAVING NOTHING TO CHANCE
WORDS HAYLEY CAMPBELL TONY STELLA
The iconic Ferrari 335S Spider, numbered 534, as driven by Peter Collins (Jack O’Connell) in the 1957 Mille Miglia race;
Adam Driver (foreground) as Ferrari founder Enzo;
Penélope Cruz as the grief-stricken Laura.
MICHAEL MANN WANTS TO make you feel something. “I wanted to put you in that car,” he says.
“I wanted you to experience it as if you were driving the car.”
When you’re watching Ferrari, it is you gripping the wheel to take those tight turns, shaving milliseconds off the timed lap. It is your gloved hand on the gearstick when it jams, and you feel it like it’s your own body about to bear the consequences of the car’s sickening slide around that bend in the track. As a viewer, it’s a sweaty experience. “Always, the objective was to get that sense of agitation,” says Mann. Mission very accomplished.
A Michael Mann film is traditionally a restless one — visually beautiful but kinetic at its heart. Ferrari does not stick to the conventions of a standard biopic, following a guy from cradle to grave, casting moral judgements on his wins and losses. “I would have had zero interest in some biopic summary of ten years of anybody’s life,” says Mann, waving it away. “I mean, I’d be fascinated to see that on the History channel, but [that’s] a documentary, it’s not drama.”
It’s October, and we’re in a hotel by the Thames. Mann’s in town to present Ferrari to the London Film Festival — a surprise appearance that, later today, will make the crowd lose their minds. This is a white-knuckle speed race through three intense months of being alive as Enzo Ferrari, the 59-year-old Italian founder of the car manufacturer, played by Adam Driver. In those three months in 1957, discrete parts of Ferrari’s life converged: the first anniversary of his son Dino’s death from muscular dystrophy at the age of 24, Ferrari’s fractured relationship with his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz), her discovery of his secret family with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), potential bankruptcy, and the company’s preparation for the infamous Mille Miglia — a one-thousand-mile, famously brutal open-road race from Brescia to Rome and back. It’s… a lot. Mann describes it as “operatic”. But also: it’s true. He laughs. “That’s just what happened in those three months!”