Few movies this year loom like Ferrari, the long-awaited and much-delayed return of Michael Mann. Ahead of its Venice premiere, New York Film Festival showing, and––to perfectly dovetail with telling your aunt and uncle about the levels of unreality Mann conjured with digital images in Miami Vice, Public Enemies, and Blackhat––Christmas release, Neon have shared a first teaser for the Adam Driver-led biopic of the automotive innovator.
There’s all the stuff we might say about how long Michael Mann’s hoped to make this film, how long we’ve waited for any new film (the Tokyo Vice pilot is nice but doesn’t count), or how great it is having Adam Driver get Ferrari (ahem) over the finish line. I’d rather defer to cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt telling us the goal was to have audiences “feeling like they’re in this machine. This machine is rattling around and smells like gasoline and there’s oil and rocks kicking up on the faces. A lot of what we were trying to do was bring the frenzied energy of racing––what these drivers experienced––onto the screen and bring the audience right into the car with them.” Start your engines.
See below a teaser for the film also starring Penélope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, Sarah Gordon, Gabriel Leone, Jack O’Connell, Patrick Dempsey:
It is the summer of 1957. Behind the spectacle of Formula 1, ex-racer Enzo Ferrari is in crisis. Bankruptcy threatens the factory he and his wife, Laura built from nothing ten years earlier. Their volatile marriage has been battered by the loss of their son, Dino a year earlier. Ferrari struggles to acknowledge his son Piero with Lina Lardi. Meanwhile, his drivers’ passion to win pushes them to the edge as they launch into the treacherous 1,000-mile race across Italy, the Mille Miglia.