Michael Mann knew he wanted to cast Adam Driver in the lead of his long-gesticulating drama Ferrari from their first meeting.
In the director’s latest, Star Wars actor Driver plays Enzo Ferrari, the founder of the eponymous car company. Set over one summer in 1957, it follows him as he navigates his deteriorating relationship with his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz) while his company verges on bankruptcy.
It’s a complicated biopic that navigates a small window of Ferrari’s life, but it was Driver’s real-life "ferocity" in their early meeting that Mann says made him sure he was the right man to cast.
"The decision I made that Adam should be Enzo came from having drinks at Chateau Marmont in Sunset Boulevard," Mann tells the Inside Total Film podcast. "There was something about how he’s lived life. He has a raw ambition, an artistic ambition, and real ferocity behind that drive to really do this work, do it really well, and really get it. You see it all over, it’s a transformational performance in how he moves, how he walks, the weight, how he breathes."
He adds: "The way he captured all the cultural gestures, it’s all intentional, there is no, 'I’ll just show up and be spontaneous.' This is all preparation, and it's all work. I think I sensed that ferocity is based on real-life, real-world experience, and I thought this guy is Enzo Ferrari on the inside. The outside, you fix with craftwork – it's what's on the inside."
Mann also laughs when he shares how similar his and Driver’s working attitude is, admitting they both have impossibly high standards they hold themselves to. "We discovered that we're very similar, which is part of why we got along so well. If there was a scene that wasn't working, Adam would be angry and I'd say, 'Well, what's going on?' and he’d be angry at himself. I have the same characteristics, I placed a lot of demands on myself, Adam places tremendous demands on himself."
In Ferrari, Enzo’s solution to his company’s ailing financials is to risk it all by entering his racing team in the notoriously dangerous Mille Miglia. A large chunk of Mann’s film is set on that race, as the audience is taken into the driving seat to experience both the thrills and harrowing brutality of the course.
"That decision for me is, 'What do I want you to feel, what do I want you as the audience to experience?,'" Mann explains of the choice to film it this way. "I could shoot it with long lenses and it'd be very beautiful and everything else, but that removed the audience into being observers. That’s just exactly what I did not want. I want the audience to be in that driving seat within the envelope of experience of what it is."
He wanted to capture, too, the feeling of racing, based on his own experiences behind the wheel. Mann was an amateur racer for a few years, although he admits he was never very good because he "kept interrupting it to go make another movie".
"I've got that experience of what that was really like where you and the car are one unit, you become organically unified and harmonic," he adds. "You're just thinking and it's happening at great speed, but it doesn't feel fast, it just feels smooth.
"I wanted you to have that experience so you're not aware of what's happening to you in the millisecond it’s happening, and that’s agitation. It’s a zen focus on what’s coming next, and that is where it has to be."
Ferrari arrives in cinemas on December 26 and on Sky Cinema next year. For more, check out the latest episode of Inside Total Film, available on:
Check out our list of 2024 movie release dates too for all the upcoming movies you need to know about.
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