Is Ferrari Based on a True Story?
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Ferrari the name might be familiar, but Ferrari the man is a bit more of a mystery. In Ferrari, the new film by Michael Mann starring Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz, the story of Enzo Ferrari, a former race car driver turned auto mogul, is front and center. We see how he lived (with both his wife and his lover), how he worked, and crucially what happened around the catastrophic 1957 Mille Miglia race, where one of his cars crashed into a group of spectators, killing 11 people and launching a years-long legal entanglement.
While Troy Kennedy Martin’s screenplay for the film is based on Brock Yates’ book Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Car, The Races, The Machine, not everything you see on screen is precisely as it was in real life.
“The movie is not a historical document,” says Gabriele Lalli, an advisor on the film and Ferrari expert working at Ferrari Classiche. “What I can tell you is that it gives you a portrait of the situation that Ferrari himself was in.You’re left with the right impression of what was happening in the period, even if it isn’t always exactly accurate. You understand what was going on.”
Part of that ability to understand the essence of the story came from Mann and Driver’s meetings with Piero Ferrari, who was president of the company his father founded until 2015, while part of it came from meticulous attention to detail—about the cars themselves as well as the people in and around them. “I read thousands of documents related to the crash to understand exactly what happened,” Lalli explains. “We went deep into the paperwork and documents related to the accident. We had to study the whole trial that happened after the crash, so we looked at police inspection documents and all of the evidence regarding the behavior of the driver, the decisions made by other people, technical aspects of the car—I didn’t know so many of these things until I read the documents.”
The crash of the car driven by Alfonso de Portago (played on screen by Gabriel Leone) wasn’t the only aspect of Ferrari’s life that required close attention, however. To develop the character of Laura Ferrari, Enzo’s wife, Mann and Cruz visited the couple’s former apartment and saw Laura’s bedroom—covered, of course, in patterned silk—that they’d recreate for the film. “That room felt very heavy, and I felt like choosing that pattern was a choice somebody would make if she was really in mental pain,” Cruz explains. “I never heard about why she chose that, or maybe it was Enzo. But it was very heavy, the energy, and we were both saying, ‘What is it about this wallpaper? What is going on with this?’ It was very powerful, and it gave us a lot of answers that we didn’t need to put into words.”
It wasn’t the only location whose history informed the film. “There’s a huge amount of archival photography of the [Ferrari] factory, so we knew what it looked like,” production designer Maria Djurkovic says. “I had ground plans, and we found a factory that was not of the same period, but had a courtyard that was covered in cobblestones, which was absolutely right for the Ferrari factory. Then we built the office and the entranceway.”
The actors also went through various transformations to better resemble their characters. Driver spent hours in hair and makeup on shooting days in order to portray the 59-year-old Ferrari. “Film prosthetics now seem to almost be so extreme that you almost miss the performer, the person underneath—there’s often an emotional connection missing, and Michael didn’t want that at all,” he says. “It’s an exhaustive process, but it was helpful in trying to find the weariness in Enzo. He’s not spry at this moment in his life, but he’s also not weak by any means. There’s a heaviness, I think. I had a strong impulse about it from the first day. He was someone who had grown up in a factory, and I imagined that he hunched over when he got in cars. He’s someone who uses his mass and size, who doesn’t have to move much for other people.”
It's all to say that while Ferrari is a work of fiction, it never loses site of the true story that inspired it or the real people who experienced what it depicts. “In the end, the story lets you feel exactly what life and racing in Italy were like in 1957,” Lalli explains. “More over, it tells you the story of a Enzo Ferrari’s life in a beautiful manner.”
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