Michael Mann and Penelope Cruz break down the ending of “Ferrari”

The director and star discuss filming that gruesome crash and the romantic side of that final exchange.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Ferrari.

That’s what we call ending with a bang. Though most of Michael Mann’s new film Ferrari is set behind the scenes of the titular Italian car company as Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) navigates problems both personal and professional, there are also several thrilling racing scenes — and the final one is quite fatal.

Ferrari climaxes with a recreation of the 1957 Mille Miglia, which involved one of Ferrari’s drivers losing control of his car and crashing into spectators. The scene is absolutely horrific in the film, including shots of severed corpses lying dead in the street afterward.

“I toned down one or two pieces of what happened,” Mann tells EW. “Out of respect, I wanted to shoot it very factually, as if we were a newsreel camera who saw this coming and just followed it. No multiple cuts, which I thought would’ve been gratuitous.”

Even if he “toned down” the gruesome nature of the crash, Mann knew all the technical details of what happened. A stickler for accuracy, whether he’s portraying the tools of jewel theft in Thief or recreating the 60 Minutes office for The Insider, Mann went to the source for the truth of what happened in ‘57.

“There were many different accounts of what happened in that crash,” Mann says. “A gentleman at the Ferrari factory named Gabriele Lolli, who's one of the people who run their restoration division, went to the prefecture and dug up all the police reports. He investigated the accident for three years. It's the most detailed forensic examination you can imagine, and that's how we knew exactly what happened: that the tire got punctured, that it hit a mile marker that launched the car in the air, that it was doing between 140 and 160 when it hit a telephone pole.”

As for driver Alfonso de Portago (portrayed by Gabriel Leone in the film), Mann says, “The wires may have severed his body. We're not sure how that happened, but they found his body in three pieces. That’s also typically what happens to the human anatomy in an airplane disaster because there's not that much connecting your thorax to your pelvis.”

That explains the physical horror of the scene, but the emotional gut punch comes from elsewhere: the young boy who runs to see the cars because he’s so excited by the race, only to be caught up in the crash. That story came firsthand, thanks to Mann filming Ferrari in the Italian locations where the real events happened.

“When I went to the site at Guidizzolo where it actually happened, there’s a long straight road and a farmhouse. An elderly gentleman came out of the house and asked what we were doing, in Italian. Through translators, he told us that he was there at the crash,” Mann says. “He said that he was three years old. They were having a typical Italian Sunday dinner at about 4 o’clock. His older brother, who was faster than him, ran out because the cars were coming and got killed. That’s when I decided I wanted to have the scene with the family and the three-year-old toddler. He would’ve been the three-year-old.”

Mann continues, “You encounter these things when you do the research. And I was just emotionally moved to create that scene.”

In the wake of the crash, the film finds Enzo staring down a police investigation and media scandal. He suddenly finds relief in the form of his estranged wife, Laura Ferrari (Penelope Cruz), who comes to him with a clear plan of action — in exchange for certain guarantees that she had been seeking for much of the movie. It’s both a business transaction and a gesture of love.

“I like that scene very much because, when I read it and then saw the direction that Michael was giving me, I feel like at the end of the day, he's a romantic,” Cruz tells EW. “He talked to me over email about this subterranean community of women that keep living in the shadows of men. It is not an old subject, it's not a problem that is solved. I realized what a love letter he was writing to all the women in similar positions, and I felt very honored that he had chosen me to give this woman that voice.”

Ferrari is in theaters now.

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Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.