Yahoo Autos 5 Things They Got Right and 7 Things They Got Wrong in the Ferrari Biopic
Okay, okay, calm down, people. It’s just a movie. Trying to cram a subject as large as Enzo Ferrari into two hours and ten minutes of celluloid just isn’t going to result in a perfect, mirror reflection of reality. This ain’t Ken Burns. Some corners had to be bent, some liberties had to be taken. Accept that.
“Whenever there is a movie or TV series, it’s basically fiction,” said Luca Dal Monte, whose book, Enzo Ferrari: Power, Politics, and the Making of an Automotive Empire is perhaps the definitive tome on the great but ultimately flawed man. “Even though it’s about somebody who’s a public person, even if it’s from a true story, we should never forget when we see this kind of product that it’s fiction. I think it is normal that there may be things that did not necessarily happen like that in life. This is what Hollywood does.”
Does that mean you have to lower your standards to see Ferrari the movie? Maybe it means you just have to accept it for what it is, a movie. Yet even as such, it is still just about the most accurate reading on the life of Enzo Ferrari as you’re ever going to get in a full-blown Hollywood production.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t pick nits. So here are our favorite truths and lies presented in Michael Mann’s great Italian epic.
The Good
The cars looked fantastic. Director Michael Mann knows his great Italian sports cars, and he took meticulous care to present them here, from the Maserati 450S to the Ferrari 315 S and 335 S, just as they raced in the Mille Miglia in 1957. Some of the cars you see are real, including the Ferrari 801 Grand Prix car that Eugenio Castellotti, played by Marino Franchitti, drives around the Modena Autodromo early on in the movie, and the Maserati GP car Derek Hill, playing Jean Behra, had driven shortly before that. For many of the recreations, the crew took laser scans of the bodies of real cars and sent them to a Modenese carrozzeria to have them painstakingly recreated for the screen. The new bodies were placed over Caterham chassis and drivetrains, which were, according to Hill, “Fantastic to drive.”
“There were real cars that we rented and then there were the cars that we built which are the principal cars,” said stunt coordinator Robert Nagle. “For the Mille Miglia we had built seven of them and then the rest were real cars that we rented. But the cars that were really run hard are the ones that we built.”
The drivers—Taruffi, Von Trips, Portago, Behra—were accurately chosen and portrayed.
“That was the best job I’ve ever had in my life,” said Patrick Dempsey, who plays Taruffi. “I was in Italy, driving cars at speed, and eating great food.”
Many of the racing scenes, particularly those shot from overhead using helicopters and drones, were exciting without looking fake, for the most part.
The ultimate shot of de Portago’s crash, for instance, took up a fair amount of budget.
“It was an amazing marriage of practical, special effects and VFX,” said Nagle of that one sequence. “We spent a lot of time trying to integrate what fades into what at what point and trying to stitch all that together.”
