“People are either down for what this movie is or they’re not.”
Half an hour into our conversation, Michael Mann answered his phone. His postproduction team was on the other end of the line, working on the final color corrections to his new film, Ferrari, and they began speaking in what might as well have been an alien language, for how little I understood. When the director hung up, I asked him to explain the gist of it, and he launched into a rhapsodic description of the visual perfection he’s trying to achieve by shooting on digital—what all movies shot on digital are supposed to look like, but so few do.
As Mann explained while clutching a binder filled with technical paperwork, the challenge is to properly adjust a movie’s black levels so that the lighting fills in the faces of its actors just right. When done correctly, their faces take on a new depth, and the creases in their skin are properly accentuated. With lesser films, “everything is kind of grayed out … as opposed to, Man, I am there. And they’re coming off the screen at me,” Mann said. “The difference is huge.”
In Ferrari, Mann’s biographical film about the car magnate Enzo Ferrari (played by Adam Driver) and his pivotal 1957 summer, the audience will feel like they are there. Not just on the straightaways and chicanes of the racetracks that Ferrari’s automobiles zip down, but in Ferrari’s factory at Maranello, Italy; his home in next-door Modena; the mausoleum where his son Dino was buried; and indeed, even in the crooked wrinkles lining his face as he navigates countless stressors. The film follows Ferrari as he negotiates the potential collapse of both his business and his marriage to his business partner Laura (Penélope Cruz), all while trying to win a long-distance race called the Mille Miglia that, that year, ended in shocking tragedy.
It’s a film that Mann has been trying to make, in some form, since the mid-1990s, when his career as a filmmaker first started to skyrocket with hits such as The Last of the Mohicans and Heat. Over the decades, he’s been sidetracked by other projects or blocked by wary studios; more frustrating, he hasn’t made a feature at all since 2015, when his robust cyber thriller Blackhat disappointed at the box office (though he did direct the pilot of the HBO drama Tokyo Vice in between). But he hasn’t missed a step in these intervening years, and the first few minutes of Ferrari make clear that Mann has achieved what he’s aiming for: a deep sense of technical verisimilitude that goes beyond historical accuracy.
Modena is a city that’s somewhat trapped in amber, Mann explained, and forever intertwined with both the car company and Enzo’s life story. As such, he was able to shoot at Ferrari’s actual home and the real family mausoleum. He could consult with Enzo’s real-life son Piero, portrayed in the film as his 12-year-old self, and talk with mechanics who had worked alongside the larger-than-life figure best known as Il Commendatore. In doing so, Mann created a movie that feels firmly planted in the past—both a romantic notion and a terrifying one, as Ferrari explores Enzo’s efforts to break free of his personal grief and escape a financial quagmire without sacrificing the business he built.
Ferrari has been gestating for so long that its credited screenwriter, Troy Kennedy Martin, died in 2009. When Mann first read the script, in the ’90s, he was drawn to its whirlwind of competing emotions, within its 1957 setting: “This tempestuous period where these torrid relationships and irresolvable conflicts all collide,” he said. The year before, Enzo and Laura had lost their son Dino, who had muscular dystrophy and died at the age of 24. “They’re both in grief, and it’s not ... a contemporary grief with some cloying, terrible notion of healing. There’s no healing. They’re stuck in these silos. And meanwhile, the company’s going broke.”
The project struggled to move ahead, continually frustrated by Hollywood studios’ trepidation over what they perceived as its limited commercial appeal. “No racing movie had ever made money,” Mann told me. “But all those movies didn’t have good stories. Le Mans doesn’t have a story; Grand Prix doesn’t have a story.” Every time Mann returned to the Ferrari script, his passion would be rekindled. “I’d consider abandoning it, read the screenplay again, get all the way to maybe page two … The integrity and the authenticity of the drama, I’d be totally reengaged.”
Various other Ferrari projects have popped up over the years, but Mann was never interested in what he called “a linear biopic” charting the creation and success of the company, the story that “belongs on the History Channel.” He did come close to taking on one competing project, Ford v Ferrari, which was eventually directed by James Mangold (Mann was an executive producer). Its success, including a solid box office and a Best Picture nomination, likely helped move things along. “It’s a good piece of material; I would have made it somewhat differently, as any other director would, but if I’d made that, I wouldn’t have made Ferrari,” Mann said, smiling. “I’d rather have made Ferrari.”
It’s easy to see why. Ford v Ferrari is a clever movie about the politics behind racing, set more in boardrooms than on the racetrack; Ferrari is about Enzo, the ultimate frustrated artist, trying to build his beautiful cars while the creditors breathe down his neck. In filmmaking terms, if Ford v Ferrari is about the studios, Ferrari is about the director. “There’s a similarity,” Mann allowed when I brought up that analogy. “He needs a bunch of money from someone else” to build his cars. To Enzo, the only thing that mattered was Ferrari’s racing program; the business of selling cars was of secondary importance, even though it helped keep the company afloat.
Though Mann’s films are more challenging than the average blockbuster, they are always pitched widely and given robust budgets to match. “The movie’s not for people who want to see Fast & Furious,” he granted, but he pointed to Formula 1’s recent rise in popularity in America, driven by Netflix’s hit documentary series Formula 1: Drive to Survive, as finally giving Ferrari the commercial clout it needed to get funding: “You want people to see your film ... you want the people who invested in it to get their money back. But it just doesn’t involve compromise. People are either down for what this movie is or they’re not.”
The closest relation in Mann’s filmography is probably The Insider, which dramatized a 60 Minutes interview with a whistleblower from the tobacco industry, turning the nuts-and-bolts work of journalism into a grand contest between colossal, roaring personalities. “The Insider is just two hours of—I think it’s a suspenseful drama—but two hours and 45 minutes of talking heads,” Mann said. “I told myself it would only work if I managed to immerse the audience so intensely and intimately inside these characters.” The approach in Ferrari is the same—though the driving scenes authentically rattle everyone’s seats, the quiet moments of conversation are what truly hum with realism. Both Enzo and his wife are surrounded by death wherever they go, particularly Enzo, who has seen many drivers perish while driving his prized creations around the track.
“Death is present in Modena,” Mann said. Down the road from the family mausoleum are the graves of two drivers, both friends of Enzo’s who died on the same day “in metal he made,” as Mann puts it. “How do you live with that? Your friends dying? [Enzo] says that he ‘built a wall.’ Well, it’s a very imperfect wall, emotionally.” In Ferrari, that wall is threatening to come down, not only because Enzo’s business is under siege but also because Laura has learned that he has fathered a child with another woman, Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley). Cruz plays Laura’s brewing mix of rage and sorrow with fiery bravado, while Woodley is every part her opposite, a calm port in a storm for Enzo as he tries to navigate a way forward.
Read: The eerie intensity of Adam Driver on Saturday Night Live
Driver is maybe the most surprising casting choice, given that he’s some 20 years younger than Enzo was in 1957. But to Mann, “he was the choice … To have the weight, the age, the cultural habits, the psychology of Enzo, is a real undertaking.” Driver’s on-screen intensity immediately overcomes any of these issues; he communicates so much of the character’s turmoil in just his posture, a few grunts and sighs, and his eternally furrowed brow. Like so many of Mann’s tortured protagonists—say, the emotionally locked-down Neil McCauley of Heat, or James Caan’s nervy safecracker, Frank, in Thief—Enzo and the drivers around him seem bafflingly obliged to do something dangerous and destructive, the kind of compulsive personality the director has long understood better than anyone. “I’ve heard an explanation which is very interesting: that all of these young men were frustrated because they were too young to be fighter pilots in World War II,” Mann said, musing on the postwar boom of race-car driving despite its immense risk.
“Here’s why I don’t think that’s really it,” he continued. “I’ve done enough amateur racing and spent time on motorcycles to experience a little bit of that feeling where you’re totally integrated with the machine. And it’s your perception that’s moving. It’s not you driving a car. You are moving … It’s like a dream of flying when you’re 11 … And it’s addictive.” In Ferrari, the viewer is totally integrated with everything—the machine, the wild emotion, the inescapable grief. It’s frightening and bewildering at first, but, as in all of Mann’s films, it’s hopelessly addictive.
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