Adam Driver suits up as Enzo Ferrari, the Italian mastermind behind the most famous automobile empire in the world, Ferrari. Michael Mann directs this stunning biopic, his first feature length film in eight years.
World Premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2022 to rave reviews, the film had its North American Premiere at Closing Night of the NYFF61 as a Main Slate film, with the entire all-star cast of Adam Driver, Penelope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, Sarah Gadon, Patrick Dempsey, Gabriel Leone and director Michael Mann on the Red Carpet. This was a rare, and unexpected occurrence at this year’s festival, which was largely bereft of any star power on the Red Carpet due to the ongoing rift between the film and TV actors and the studios.
In Michael Mann’s heart-pounding film, tragedy looms in the shadows like the coven of witches swarming in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
The film centers on the three months of the summer of 1957, makes the catastrophic decision to enter the Mille Miglia (thousand mile) Italian sports car race. The Italian sports car magnate needs a win in order to salvage his reputation and save his company from certain collapse. It is a decision that only hastens the hand of Fate.
In heart-pounding racing sequences, filmed in and around Rome and the Emiglia-Romagna region of Italy, Oscar-winning cinematographer Erik Masserschmidt (Best Cinematography David Fincher’s Mack-2020), creates a cataclysmic landscape of cars and crashes.
As actors, Adam Driver, Penelope Cruz and Shailene Woodley set up the tension of the triangular parlor drama beautifully, while Jack O’Connell (as British daredevil Peter Collins), Patrick Dempsey as veteran ace Piero Taruffi and Gabriel Leone as replacement driver Alfonso De Portaga manage the scrimmage in the field.
“What was interesting about it was t he compression of all of the dynamics of these tempestuous lives in three months,” director Mann told Festival Artistic Director Dennis Lim and the post screening audience at the films North American premiere at NYFF61.
Ferrari is based on fact, with Mann creating the film from a screenplay by the late award-winning British screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin (BBC-TVs Z-Cars, Edge of Darkness-1985).
“It was the direct opposite of a liner biopic. It’s based on a book that tells the true story,” director Mann explained. “But the film goes far beyond the book. I’ve known Piero Ferrari for 25 years and I was fortunate to know a lot of people who knew Laura Ferrari. So I tried to acculturate myself as much as possible in this whole Bolognese culture. I tried to get specifically into their culture and their psyche and the most I immersed myself into it, the more universal the whole picture became.”
Building Enzo Ferrari’s larger-than-life character was a complicated process for both the director and the actor who played him.
“It’s everything,” Mann theorized. ” from his biography; to understanding who he was at 19, bereft and abject, then turning that around after he’s turned down by Fiat. He then asks himself what he wants to do in this world and he decides to turn himself into this romantic figure of a racecar driver. We went with that germ of an idea, Adam (Driver) and I to Enzo’s study, which had been untouched since he died in Fiero’s house and looking at his diaries and his handwriting, and the watch that he preferred. So, it’s everything. It’s sensorial input from objects, its understanding the culture he’s in and having all that tactile input from all the objects around us.”
Adam Driver added more information on the detail that went into creating the character of Enzo Ferrari. ” It was important to take the things from the script that applied to you and to use them. He would sign things with purple pens, for example, because he didn’t want anyone to duplicate his signature. Which really said a lot to me, because here you have someone who is really paranoid. He would right letters to really established people, like the King of Monaco. He didn’t give a shit who they were. He’s tell them things like ‘You’ll get your car when I give it to you!’
And the fact that he built the Ferrari factory in a place like Modena (Italy, famous for its balsamic vinegars) which, I understand, was mostly known for textiles. Being in that place, you begin to understand why the light is different there than in, say, southern California.
“Reds are different. The smell of the nearby farms outside. All of that stuff you take in and all of the stuff that doesn’t apply to the scenes you ignore. Sometimes it gets absorbed subconsciously and gets abstracted into something else later on.
Michael is real big on his actor’s playing his character’s internal life. I know from the past in working with him and playing real people, he wants you to take things that open up impulses.
“This image, in the film, after his brother had died, and his father had died, leaving him alone and having to forge his own path, this was a catalyst for how he lived the rest of his life. It was an internal thing that we talked about all the time. Also, the mentality of a racecar driver, we actually drove Ferrari’s in Modena and in southern California just to get a sense of this prolonged, myopic focus and how do you duplicate that in playing him. You’re playing someone whose essential a ‘duck,’ calm on the surface, but furiously paddling underneath.
“There’s all these pitfalls that are happening around his character. There’s Lena with Laura, then their company is going under and at the same time, technology is changing the game of racing. You have him taking in all that information while still trying to do everything he has to do.”
Michael Mann said that paranoia was a driving force in Enzo Ferrari’s personality and that became a key element in the film.
“I the book, he often referred to this feeling he had of ‘terrible joy.’ That no matter how much pleasure you were getting out of something that you were experiencing, there was also something terrible that was waiting to happen just around the corner. That was a prevailing attitude in Enzo’s life and the message conveyed by his character in the film.
“Enzo often said that ‘Italy will forgive anything. It will forgive even murder. But it will never forgive success!”
Ferrari opens in theaters everywhere on Christmas Day. From Neon films. Visit neonmovies.com. For more, visit filmlinc.org.
