Michael Mann returns to save the movies: “People are getting tired of superheroes”

Mark out 2023 as the year of the octogenarian filmmaker. Think Ridley Scott with Napoleon, Martin Scorsese with Killers Of The Flower Moon and now Michael Mann. The director of such confirmed classics as Manhunter, Heat and The Insider is back with Ferrari, a powerful portrait of automobile pioneer Enzo Ferrari. Eight years since his last film, the commercially disappointing cyber-thriller Blackhat, that number pales next to the three decades that Mann has toiled to bring Ferrari to the big screen.

“I’m looking forward to having people see it,” he says, with typical understatement when NME meets him at this summer’s Venice Film Festival. Sitting in the ballroom of the Hotel Cipriani, dressed in a pale shirt and slacks, the 80-year-old filmmaker is still as fiery as ever. “A fascination with cars?” he grunts when his passion for automobiles in movies is raised. “That doesn’t mean you make a movie about it. I have a fascination with motorcycles too. But there’s no motorcycle movie.”

Nevertheless, he can still remember the day, back in 1967, when he was living in the UK, studying at the London Film School. Emerging from an underground station one day, a sleek Ferrari 275 GTB four-cam rolled past him. He was only 24, still a dozen years away from making his first movie, the prison yard drama The Jericho Mile, which came after a spell working in advertising. But he was immediately smitten with the beauty and elegance of the Italian sports car.

In the same year, he went to Brands Hatch to make a student film with Mike Hailwood, a world champion motorcycle racer. Maybe there is “no motorcycle movie”, but Mann is a born petrolhead. He’s raced too, at an amateur level, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “It’s not so gentlemanly,” he grins, calling it “risky amateur racing”. Every time he got behind the wheel again, he was “interrupted” by the lure of filmmaking. “You go make a movie. And then you forget everything you knew and you have to start over at the bottom.”

Mann has been involved in the Ferrari project since the early 1990s, when Brock Yates published Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races, the true-life account that would become the basis of the script. As a director, Mann helped shape the late ’80s, culturally at any rate, with his pastel-hued TV cop show Miami Vice, following on from his acclaimed, era-defining, Tangerine Dream-scored films Thief and Manhunter, the first ever movie to bring Thomas Harris’ serial killer Hannibal Lecter to screens. Ferrari, however, would send him back to the ’50s.

The film takes place in 1957 over three crucial months in the life of Ferrari (played by Adam Driver), as his automobile business is heading out of business, with drivers even dying on the track. Meanwhile his personal life is about to implode. A year earlier, his 24-year-old son Dino died of muscular dystrophy. His marriage to Laura (Penélope Cruz), his company’s chief financial officer, is on the rocks. And hidden away, he has a son with his mistress, Lina (Shailene Woodley), his true love.

“Enzo Ferrari made for a very human character”

What was it about Ferrari that so intrigued Mann? “I don’t want to say duality, because there’s more than two sides to him, but it’s the complexity,” muses the director. “There’s so many active components to who he is and his personality, which bare no relation to other parts of him that made for a very human character – who happens to be in a three-month period that’s critical. And that’s where the drama comes in. But, I mean, some of his thinking has the precision of an engineer. It’s there in his penmanship.”

Mann read through his diaries and poured over the ledgers Ferrari used to keep. “Everything is so precise and rational,” he says. But then he speaks of the character’s cantankerousness and his unchecked libido and his penchant for the dramatic, as demonstrated by the title of his autobiography, My Terrible Joy. “Which is typically Enzo,” says Mann. “He can’t just say ‘I’m a happy guy, I’m filled with joy.’ It’s got to be dramatic, it’s very operatic – this is terrible!”

For Driver, the acclaimed American actor who has already worked with those other 80-something legends Scorsese (on Silence) and Scott (House Of Gucci, The Last Duel), was a huge Mann fan going into the project. “His films, they just get, for me, more and more rich, the more I understand filmmaking. And the time that they were made in, it just seems like they’re rare.” Driver did his part, from adopting Ferrari’s slicked-back grey hair look to working on an accent suitable for Italy’s Modena region. He even test-drove contemporary Ferraris to prepare and experience the rush of the track.

“You just accept the character when you see the film, but what it took Adam to build himself into – what we did together, but, primarily, what he did – is extraordinary,” says Mann. “Adam is a fantastic athlete, but the awkwardness… when you’re heavy like that, you breathe differently, you move differently, you pick something up differently. There is a pointedness to his gestures. So every aspect of it. Adam did three-and-a-half hours every morning, to be in preparation for the character.”

Naturally, the biggest thrill was watching Mann work. “He’s so prepared, years in advance, and in this [case] 30 years in advance, off and on. There isn’t a question that you’re going to ask him that he won’t know a historical reference. But at the same time as technically proficient as he is with sound and where you put the camera and colour… he’s very much about the abstract. It’s not something I always thought about when I watched his movies. I would rewatch Heat when I was older and you see that he’s someone who is centred around character and performance.”

With Ferrari entering his team into the Mille Miglia, a deadly thousand-mile endurance race across Italy, in the hope that it’ll save his business, the film saw Mann go the extra mile to shoot the race scenes. The Ferraris and Maseratis were built especially for the production, capable of speeds of around 140mph. “I felt like I had to drive it fast,” says Driver, “just to kind get the sense of ‘Oh, if we flip it, that’s it.’ So that permeated everything, how we played it.” Despite recreating the vehicles, using accurate 3D scans, Mann did borrow one car, a Maserati. “That’s Nick Mason’s car – the Pink Floyd drummer,” he reveals. “So that one’s not a replica, that’s historical.” Such is its pedigree, Mason’s Maserati 250F has even been driven by racing legend Stirling Moss.

“We borrowed a car from Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason”

So through all the crashes and the heartache, did Mann come to a conclusion about Ferrari? Was he – like his peers – obsessed with racing at all costs? “It’s less than obsession. Obsession sounds irrational,” he replies. “I think the best understanding I got from that came from Jean Behra, who drives the Maserati in the beginning [of the film, played by Derek Hill]. And he wrote a paragraph about how our addiction to the ecstasy is so foolish and insane. But we are. We have this addiction. We make life miserable for our wives and our children. It takes our lives.”

Mann, who has been married to wife Summer since 1974 and has four children, including director Ami Canaan Mann, must surely appreciate this. He’s known for his exacting behaviour on set, his precision and his control freakery. Even today, as he does with every interview, he puts a digital recorder on the table, capturing every word he says to ensure there are no disputes or inaccuracies down the line. In fact, you could almost feel as if Mann is a character from one of his own movies: committed to their line of work above all else.

“I don’t think I’ve had a leading character who’s not aware of life, his own life and what’s around him,” he says. “I’ve never done a film where the lead character is just kind of stumbling through and things happen, whether it’s [boxer Muhammad] Ali, or Hawkeye in Last Of The Mohicans, or Neil McCauley and Vincent Hanna in Heat or Lowell Bergman [from The Insider]. They know what’s happening in their life. They’re conscious of it. They’re know the struggle that they’re in and they question themselves. They’re aware of their condition, their human condition.”

Talking of Heat, Mann is aiming to adapt Heat 2, the best-selling novel he co-wrote with Meg Gardiner and published last year that acts as both prequel and sequel to his 1995 crime epic. So will it definitely happen? “Heat’s a huge brand,” he nods. “And there’s some studies that I’ve done within the industry… people are kind of getting tired of superhero movies and are becoming more interested in pictures like Heat, if you like. But it’s been a huge brand in Warner Brothers home video for the last 20 years in terms of rentals. So we found that out when I wrote Heat 2, the novel… it was the first week out, it was instantly a number one New York Times bestseller.”

Driver confirms that he’s already spoken to Mann about potentially playing the young McCauley, the character played by Robert De Niro in the original. “I would do it in a second,” the actor says. For Mann, it represents another high-stakes environment to plunge into, with his characters pushed to extremes. Fans wouldn’t want it any other way. “I’m really not interested in a guy who’s ambition in life is to kick back in a Bronco lounger and watch daytime TV,” he laughs. “I mean who would be?”

‘Ferrari’ is in UK cinemas from December 26 and comes to Sky Cinema in 2024

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