Michael Mann’s latest film, Ferrari, based on the titular luxurious Italian car company, has its fair share of thrilling racing sequences. However, nothing quite compares to the film’s final moments, which depicted the dreadful true story of the 1957 Mille Miglia crash. While the ending was already horrifying in and of itself, the director explains that they actually tried to tone it down a little bit.
The film, starring Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari, ended with one of Ferrari’s drivers losing control of his car, which resulted in a number of corpses lying on the street. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Mann shared that he wanted to depict the 1957 Mille Miglia crash as factually as possible while trying to reduce the intensity of the scenes.
“I toned down one or two pieces of what happened. Out of respect, I wanted to shoot it very factually, as if we were a newsreel camera who saw this coming and just followed it. No multiple cuts, which I thought would’ve been gratuitous,” Mann told EW.
He continued, “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.”
On the driver Alfonso de Portago’s severed body, which Gabriel Leone played in the movie, Mann added: “The wires may have severed his body. We’re not sure how that happened, but they found his body in three pieces. That’s also typically what happens to the human anatomy in an airplane disaster because there’s not that much connecting your thorax to your pelvis.”
Ferrari tells the true story of Enzo’s personal and professional life
As Enzo Ferrari navigates both his personal and professional life, Ferrari also features the death of his son Dino Ferrari, his deteriorating relationship with his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz), his struggles to acknowledge his son with his mistress Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), and the imminent bankruptcy of his company.
The official synopsis for Ferrari 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.”
The rest of the Ferrari cast includes Patrick Dempsey as Piero Taruffi, Sarah Gadon as Linda Christian, Jack O’Connell as Peter Collins, Michele Savoia as Carlo Chiti, and Ben Collins as Stirling Moss.
Ferrari is now in theaters.
