“If you get into one of my cars, you get in to win,” says race car driver turned car mogul Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) in the first footage from Ferrari. Based on Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine by author Brock Yates and directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Michael Mann (Heat, The Insider), Ferrari also stars Penélope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) as Enzo’s wife and CFO, Laura Ferrari; Shailene Woodley (Dumb Money) as his mistress, Lina Lardi; real-life racing driver Patrick Dempsey (Grey’s Anatomy) as Italian Formula One racer Piero Taruffi; and Gabriel Leone (Dom) as ill-fated Spanish Formula 1 driver Alfonso de Portago.
The official description reads: “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.”
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Mann has described Ferrari, in theaters this Christmas, as an “operatic melodrama” with all roads leading to the fateful final race of the Mille Miglia.
Everything he’s been collides with what he might become, andthe company has gone bust,” Mann told Variety of Driver’s Grand Old Man. “His wife findsout about the other woman. It’s a spectacularly operatic melodrama inreal life.”
STX Films and distributor Neon — the independent production company behind the Oscar-winning Parasite and Oscar-nominated Triangle of Sadness — are in the driver’s seat for Ferrari, coming 30 years after Mann first planned to adapt Yates’ Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine, the definitive biography of the engineer whose motor-sports empire defined the world of high-performance cars.
“The origins of the movie and the content of the screenplay and themovie that you saw do not fit into the kind of film that would beembraced by the conventional studio system,” Mann said. “It’s trulyappropriate that it is an independent film being distributed by Neon, avery independent distributor.”
Ferrari races into theaters on December 25th.
