Mann films a scene depicting Alfonso de Portago's Ferrari in the 1957 Mille Miglia
Lorenzo Sisti
We’ve seen the movie. Now a new archive has been launched that takes us behind the scenes and unveils the making of Michael Mann’s Ferrari.
The Enzo Ferrari biopic, which is available on Sky, stars Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz and Shailene Woodley and focuses on events in the lead up to and during the final Mille Miglia in 1957. More than 30 years in the making, the project became a personal quest for influential filmmaker and car enthusiast Mann.
Now the director has chosen Ferrari to launch an archive that will eventually feature behind-the-scenes content for more of his movies. Whatever your critical view of Ferrari, and its reception was certainly mixed, Mann’s impressive and easy to navigate website certainly highlights the dedicated care, attention and genuine love for the subject that he personally invested and passed on to the team around him.
There is a maze of detail, and it represents a treasure trove for students of film and fans of movie-making. There is also plenty for us racing enthusiasts too.
Twenty mini-documentaries are available to view behind a $65 (£53) paywall, capturing the process of how (and why) Ferrari was made. They include Mann and his actors’ work on character development from rehearsals through shooting, details on set design, camera and art strategies, copies of heavily annotated scripts, notes on plot and character development, meticulous shot by shot descriptions, and – of particular interest – how the replica cars featured in the movie were made.
As Mann says in one of the videos, using real Ferraris and Maseratis for the action sequences just couldn’t be an option, because “any two of them could have financed the whole motion picture”. Others such as the Ferrari 801 Formula 1 car – in which the violent death is depicted of Eugenio Castellotti, played by a surprisingly adept Marino Franchitti – simply doesn’t exist today. The cars were made accurate by 3D scanning, research from original design drawings and even a toy model. Footage of the artisans at Campana of Modena hand-beating aluminium into body shapes shines a light on just how much effort goes into such a project. Even the cars that were crashed had to be made this way, so the damage inflicted upon them looked accurate.
When we explored the archive, the other section that drew us in was the part dedicated to the gruesome crash at Guidizzolo, less than 40 miles from the finish in Brescia, that kills Alfonso de Portago, his co-driver Ed Nelson and nine roadside spectators, some of whom are children. There is a lot of detail available here and, whether you approved of Mann’s approach to its depiction or not, again it’s hard not to be impressed in how carefully and forensically he and his team approached such a sensitive part of what is after all an event based on the lives and losses of real people.
This is a director who has rarely shied away from contextual violence during his long movie career and here he explains why and how he’s chosen an unflinching approach to the terrible brutality of the tragedy – which fully earned the movie its rating as a 15 in the UK. “It’s faithful to what happened, both out of respect and the meaning of that accident,” he maintains.
Motor Sport’s readers will be particularly drawn to the detail made available of the real events: detailed police reports, photos of the actual car and crucially the damaged tyre that caused the accident, and even the stark coroners’ reports on de Portago and Nelson. How the accident was recreated, not just with CGI but with a real car air cannoned into its horrible trajectory, was with a genuine desire for a depiction as close to reality as possible. Mann based his approach on the famous newsreel footage of the Le Mans disaster of 1955, avoiding “a complex montage of different angle that would have been theatrical and would feel artificial”.
He is clearly sincere in his motives, and the archive as a whole opens a whole new and enlightening perspective on the movie-making process. It’s fascinating.
The archive and details of its pricing are available at michaelmannarchives.com
