Almost two weeks ago, the 2024 Golden Globe nominations were announced. While Barbie, and Bradley Cooper, did pretty well, Michael Mann’s Ferrari got a blackball.
The Man, The Cars, The Races, The Machine
It wasn’t just Ferrari, other notable films like Ridley Scott’s Napoleon and Origin, Ava DuVernay’s Venice Film Festival knockout (remember the nine-minute standing O?) also got snubbed for Globes nominations.
It’s rather unfortunate, don’t you think? The 80 year-old director, screenwriter, author and producer Michael Mann has had his name on some great films like Heat, The Insider and Ali. He’s had a lifetime total of ten Golden Globes nominations and zero wins. He’s also spent quite a while working on this project which is a film adaptation of Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races, The Machine by Brock Yates.
He first became enmeshed with the biopic back in the early ’90s. He was set to direct alongside producer, the late Sydney Pollack. However, the task became too difficult. While Mann saw the beauty of the story – the reality of Ferrari’s personal struggles, the backdrop of a Catholic nation, his “aspiration to rationality and perfectionism” — he knew critics and audiences would simply see a race car movie.
“It’s [about] this icon with impenetrable, stoic presentation. And all that mystique representing something so sensuous and Italian. It was frustrating to be categorized in a subgenre of films that didn’t perform.” he said an interview earlier this week with screendaily.com.
A lot of time passed. Pollack died in 2008. Mann tried again in 2015 but ran into issues with his tentative star, Christian Bale who ran into health issues in pre-production. In 2016, he started raising the money to make the film on his own. At one point, Hugh Jackman stepped in but then he was out too. Pre-production finally began in April 2022 and filming followed in August 2022.
“Ferrari is one of those very expensive independent movies that are almost impossible to get made, and the level of difficulty is extremely high,” said producer John Lesher in the film’s production notes.
When someone in the audience says the crash scenes in Ferrari “looked pretty harsh, drastic and I must say cheesy for me” and asked Adam what he thought pic.twitter.com/mXaF1LlTuf
— Adam Driver Central (@adamdrivercentl) November 12, 2023
Mann has assembled a killer cast with Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari, Penelope Cruz as his wife Laura, Shailene Woodley as his mistress and baby mama, Lina Lardi, and real life race car driver Patrick Dempsey as Piero Taruffi, a Ferrari team driver.
“I’ve been aware of this film project for, like, 15 years,” Dempsey said in the production notes. “This period in racing and Italian culture was like an opera. The highs and the lows, the emotion, the death, the sexuality — all of it was just so amazing.”
Behind the scenes, Mann worked with cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (Mank, Devotion) and editor Pietro Scalia (Gladiator, Black Hawk Down). Both are Oscar winners. Production designer Maria Djurkovic (The Hours, Billy Elliot) and costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini (Pinocchio, Cyrano) were Oscar nominees.
The story takes place in 1957 when Enzo Ferrari was 59 years old. He and Laura were mourning the loss of their only son while trying to navigate the flailing Ferrari business. Laura also learns of Enzo’s infidelities and his 12 year-old son at the same time. It seems the only way out of the mess is to win the Mille Miglia, the 1,000-mile road race across Italy.
“The cars are kinetic, they’re full of agitation,” Mann says. “It’s not beautiful and static with
shots of cars driving on the road. I wanted the experience of what it is to drive one of those cars and to be in a tense race, trying to master the forces. It is, by design, a counterpoint to the formality of the dramatic, dialogue-filled scenes.”
“Along the way, we routinely had major disruptions getting Ferrari to the starting line, but it
really had a momentum,” said producer P.J. van Sandwijk. (Mann, Driver, Cruz, Woodley, van Sandwijk, and Lesher all took pay cuts to make the finished product.)
We already know that Ferrari will not be nominated in the Visual Effects category but it’s possible that on January 23, Mann’s magnum opus could make a showing in another category. If nothing else, it has already been named one of the top 10 films of 2023 by the National Board of Review.
Ferrari opens nationwide on Christmas Day.
