Michael Mann is one of the top directors in Hollywood, long used to calling his own shots. When Joe Roth was running Disney Motion Pictures, he asked Mann if his “60 Minutes” expose “The Insider” with Russell Crowe and Al Pacino (1999) would make money. “Probably not,” Mann said. Roth made it anyway. It wasn’t a hit ($60 million worldwide), but it scored seven Oscar nominations, including Picture, Director, Actor, and Adapted Screenplay. Like many of Mann’s movies, it also gained stature over time.
It wasn’t about achieving massive success. “It’s not just the market that asks, ‘Will this make $100 million?’ Mann said. You need other people to see your movie. I make movies for the public.
Mann, who turned 80 in February, has long been drawn to the high-stakes gamble of generating big-budget Hollywood movies about other people looking to triumph over what’s at stake. “Two things are certain,” he said. First of all, yes, I’m attracted to other people who are looking to do something complicated and ordinary. And secondly, doing complicated and ordinary things, if it’s the right thing to do, very adventurous, why would you need to do anything else?
And how did “Ferrari” (Dec. 25, Neon), the first film directed by Mann since 2015’s “Blackhat,” come about?Well, Mann was busy preparing the HBO series “Tokyo Vice” and directing the pilot, which was interrupted by Covid. He also wrote “Heat 2,” the best-selling novel that served as a sequel to the movie “Heat. “
“Filming the ‘Tokyo Vice’ pilot in Japan was fantastic,” Mann said. “It was a wonderful adventure. I like Japan. I had no idea what it would be like to direct Japanese actors who don’t speak English, and I don’t speak Japanese. And it was awesome when I ran with Hconceptki Ito or Ken Watanabe. And Ansel [Elgort] is very committed to the cause and he is a committed actor. So they are all adventures. Look, I filmed a Nike Commercial, it was a one-day shoot, but it is just as adventurous or ambitious.
And then he set out to direct “Ferrari,” adapted by Troy Kennedy Martin from Brock Yates’ 1991 biography “Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine. “The film has gone through several stars (Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman) and studios (Paramount, STX) since Mann began creating it in 2000, before landing in the existing iteration led by Adam Driver as Ferrari, Penelope Cruz as his wife, and Shailene Woodley as his lover.
Mann and his editor Pietro Scalia deftly balance the film’s disparate elements: the collapse of the marriage, the pressures of the failing mistress and society, and the intense careers. “It’s hard to execute,” Mann said. But making plans is simply being guilty of the content and the action. There is in my mind an express conception of narrative, which is a story focused on characters and discussion. And I wanted it to be majestic and monochromatic, not black and white. , but with a dark, burnt tone, like the room Ferrari enters, and static, because passionate and dramatic questions come to be raised in all those discussion scenes that go on to be resolved in a race. When I move on to racing, I seek to counteract the exact opposite, which is the wild red cars that circulate through the landscape not only with movement, but also with intense agitation.
For Mann, it was about how he wanted the audience to experience the racing, as everything rides on Ferrari’s team winning the 1957 Mille Miglia. “I do not want them to experience as observers looking at very beautiful images,” he said, “with a long lens of a car snaking through a hilly landscape. I want the opposite, I want to put them in the driver’s seat. I want them to experience it, to be in there moving, having agitation happening to you while your focus is in Zen concentration, one and two turns ahead. That’s the experience of racing.”
We see Patrick Dempsey driving his car because he’s a skilled professional — he’s had a few podium finishes at Le Mans and drives for Porsche. The other actors all trained in racing, so that they would understand it, but didn’t actually drive the cars that much, especially if they were going fast.
It is not an exaggeration to recommend that Mann is a very closed director or a difficult taskmaster: his cast and crew work for him at all costs. Where does this perfectionism come from? “It’s internal,” he says. “It is an artistic ambition. What does that mean? It means you imagined something, you dream about it, you can see it, you can move through it, it is so tangible in your imagination. And you need to realize this imaginary experience, the truth of being Frank in Chicago in “The Thief,” at the moment when Muhammad Ali goes off the road and gets out safely and runs to this favela, and sees those iconic photographs in the wall, which then speaks “This is how other people around the planet see you. ” So you are seeking to achieve the purity of emotional fulfillment in your imagination. For me, very personally and subjectively, that is this impulse. It does not come from external inspiration. There are other people along the way who tell you: “well, watch Murnau’s film, watch Kubrick. ” I’ve worked with actors who were also motivated in the same way, especially recently with Adam. This means that when we fail, our biggest critics are ourselves. »
Mann was very nervous when he showed the film to some two hundred Ferrari executives, mechanics and drivers in Modena. (Michael Schumacher, Ferrari’s former mechanical leader, and Niki Lauda’s former mechanical leader play two of the mechanics you see in the film. )”I’m from Chicago to Modena,” Mann said. Showing this to those other people is the world they live in. It’s very airtight. Everyone was very complimentary about it. In fact, at one point, someone baked me a cake! »
Next: After writing the best-selling novel “Heat 2,” Mann is now writing a screenplay for the book.
Neon will release “Ferrari” in theaters on Dec. 25.