During the summer of ’57, Enzo Ferrari was in crisis as bankruptcy loomed while he and his wife Laura were struggling in their marriage while mourning the loss of their son. His drivers were lusting to win as Ferrari pushed them to the edge to beat out the competition. He put everything on the line in an attempt to win the treacherous 1,000-mile race across Italy.
Rather than do a more traditional biopic chronicling the person’s whole life, Mann opts to focus on a very specific moment in his life. It helps to narrow the focus while also painting a picture of the man in question. The filmmaker and his team put in a lot of work to do their research and get it right. To that end, years of research were put into the crash alone. As he said:
“There were many different accounts of what happened in that crash. 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.”
Mann also added, “You encounter these things when you do the research. And I was just emotionally moved to create that scene.” Brutal though it may be, the scene is a carefully constructed recreation of a real-life event, one that is very much a part of Enzo Ferrari’s story.
“Ferrari” is in theaters now.