From its inception in 1927 to its final roar three decades later, the original Mille Miglia was the most prestigious open-road race in Italy. Starting in the north-western city of Brescia, the route stretched south down the calf of the peninsula along the coast of the Adriatic, twisting east over the Apennines to Rome, then north again, back over the mountains before returning to Brescia via Florence and Bologna. At 1000 miles long (hence the name) and staged in early spring, its drivers and navigators often had to contend with snow in the loftier passes, while tearing through town centres, farmland and small villages where, insanely, spectators were known to teem into the roads and scatter as the cars approached.

It was a tempting and often deadly challenge for any competitor – not least a certain Enzo Ferrari – and also Italian motor sport’s most epic and torturous route. Perfect set-piece material, then, for veteran filmmaker Michael Mann’s biographical drama Ferrari. And the ideal analogy for his own long, torturous journey in bringing that drama to the big screen.

Mann first read the script for Ferrari in the early 1990s, around the time he released his blockbusting historical romance The Last of the Mohicans. It was based on a book he’d loved – 1991’s Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine by Brock Yates (who also, interestingly, wrote the screenplays for Burt Reynolds car-comedies Smokey and the Bandit II and The Cannonball Run) – and adapted by British screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin (who had previously sent Minis careening around the streets of Turin in The Italian Job). The screenplay impressed Mann by not simply being a cradle-to-crypt biopic, but a rich character piece tightly focused on a few crucial months in Ferrari’s life. Specifically, four months in 1957, when his company’s ailing fortunes coincided with a domestic meltdown following the death of his 24-year-old son Dino, and his wife Laura’s realisation that he had, for years, been concealing the existence of another child, Piero, born to his mistress Lina Lardi.

“All of the many dynamic conflicts that are going on in his life collide into this particular period of time,” explains Mann in late August during a press conference at the Venice Film Festival, where the movie is receiving its world premiere. “Everything about his history and what his future is going to be is all pivoting right now at this moment.”

The story, Mann outlines in his director’s statement, was precision engineered to emphasise “Enzo’s strafing wit, the devastation of losing a child, operatic tirades, emotional sanctuary, tragedy, a monumental wager on one race [the last-ever Mille Miglia in 1957] and a struggle to survive.”

It’s not hard to see why Martin’s script appealed to this director. All his movies, from his 1981 debut Thief, through to 1995’s Pacino-vs-De Niro crime masterpiece Heat and boxing biopic Ali, deal with driven professionals whose obsessive nature cuts both ways, defining their flaws as sharply as their virtues.

“Enzo’s story is profoundly human,” says Mann. “When you encounter a character as dynamic as he is, the deeper you dive, the more universal it becomes. So many parts of him were in opposition that, for me, his life resonated with the way life is.”

The Chicago-born Mann is also something of a Ferrarista, since first witnessing one of Enzo’s beautiful machines glide along a London street while studying film in the city in 1967. “It was a Ferrari 275 GTB four-cam,” he related in an interview with film-industry paper Variety. “It was such a gorgeous, sensual sculpture… This integration of performance, speed and beauty.”

Fifty-five years later, Mann – now 80 – has his own Ferrari, and even raced the cars as an amateur during the ’90s and early 2000s. “I got good enough to experience something about it that’s key to this movie,” he told The New York Times, describing the feeling while driving at speed as “a unifying sense of individuality”, whereby he becomes “totally integrated”.

However, Mann’s unbridled enthusiasm for the subject matter was not enough to get the project rolling in the ’90s. It clearly required a big budget (in the end the film cost around $110m), and Formula 1 didn’t at the time have a sufficiently high profile in the NASCAR-fixated United States. In 1993, Mann travelled to Modena, Ferrari’s northern Italian hometown and still the company’s base, to plunge into his research. Yet it took another 12 years before the project entered pre-production, at Hollywood studio Paramount Pictures.

“All of the many dynamic conflicts that are going on in his life collide in this particular period of time. Everything about his history and what his future is going to be is pivoting right now at this moment”

Christian Bale, who’d worked with Mann on his high-def gangster drama Public Enemies, was cast as Enzo, but the film ground to a halt when the former Dark Knight exited, apparently because health concerns prevented him committing to the necessary weight gain. (Bale later hit the cinematic track as Ken Miles in 2019’s Ford v Ferrari, executive produced by Mann.)

Almost two years later, the movie appeared to be revived, this time with Hugh ‘Wolverine’ Jackman in the lead role, and original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Noomi Rapace as Laura. However, the project went dormant due to lack of funding, and Jackman had to depart after faithfully hanging on for three years. Eventually, with the necessary money raised independently, Mann was ready to shoot in the summer of 2022, with a new cast. After almost 30 years, Ferrari was finally moving.

To fill the Enzo-shaped gap left by Jackman, Mann turned to the appropriately named Adam Driver, an actor whose range and nuance were evident from dramas like BlacKkKlansman and Marriage Story (each of which earned him an Oscar nomination), and whose blockbuster credentials were sealed by the last three Star Wars movies, in which he played smouldering Sith Kylo Ren.

Driver had also recently essayed another troubled Italian icon, the ill-fated Maurizio Gucci, in Ridley Scott’s 2021 melodrama The House of Gucci, so he was familiar with the accent, at least.

Speaking at Venice, Driver reveals that the appeal of playing il Commendatore was the chance it offered to climb inside the man’s head, rather than his cars.

“His internal engine was very much driven by grief, and the difference with his relationship with Laura [brilliantly played by Penelope Cruz] versus Lina Lardi [Shailene Woodley] versus his mother [Daniela Piperno],” Driver says. “It was a subject I didn’t know much about, and it seemed daunting and exciting. And with Michael being the person you’re doing it for, it seemed like a no-brainer to me.”

Despite the film’s emphasis on Ferrari’s personal entanglements, it also explores his tenacity and toughness as the grey-maned taskmaster of Scuderia Ferrari, his fierce rivalry with Maserati, and his problematic position as a leader who sent others to their deaths “in the metal I made”.

Among the actors playing the ’57 Mille Miglia drivers (including Derby-born actor Jack O’Connell as Peter Collins), Mann cast a bona-fide auto racer: Patrick Dempsey. Though he’s best known in Hollywood as ‘McDreamy’ from hit TV hospital show Grey’s Anatomy, Dempsey has been competing in pro-am events since 2004. As such, he was the ideal candidate to portray silver-fox chain smoker Piero Taruffi, who (spoiler alert) won the fateful cross-country race in 1957.

Unlike Driver, who “for insurance reasons” wasn’t allowed to race for real during the shoot, Dempsey got to experience how it felt to don the goggles and get behind the wheel of Taruffi’s Ferrari 315 S. “It was quite terrifying,” he relates in Venice, “because in a modern car you have a rollcage. There was no rollcage in this car. But doing the racing sequences – certainly the beginning part of the Mille Miglia at night – was really quite exhilarating, because we kept going faster and faster and faster, and visibility was terrible. I thought, ‘What am I doing here? There’s no rollcage. This is really frightening!’ But it gives you a much better perspective of what the drivers in that particular era were going through, and the risks they were taking.”

Both Dempsey and Driver were struck by the fact that even seatbelts weren’t used during this time, let alone the security of roll cages. “It wasn’t an act of negligence,” notes Driver. “It just wasn’t part of the culture. The goal was to be thrown from the car as a safer way of crashing than staying with it.”

“I thought, ‘What am I doing here? This is really frightening!’ But it gives you a better perspective of what the drivers of that particular era were going through”

Taruffi’s 315 S, and all the other ‘hero’ cars in the movie, were built from scratch by Mann’s production-design team. “We started by taking a three-dimensional LiDAR scan of the actual cars,” explains Mann, “and put it in a CAD computer program, then custom-designed a chassis and had a KTM four-cylinder twin-cam engine driving it. So the cars are absolute perfect replicas of the real Ferraris and Maseratis.”

The director was as attentive to the sound of the engines as he was the look of the vehicles. He gives the example of French driver Jean Behra’s Maserati single-seater, for which he found an original model owned by Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason. “We loaded that car up with seven or eight microphones and recorded it in every situation,” Mann says. These recordings were then used to overdub the sound of the replica cars. “We did the same with competition V12 Ferraris. Not just V12s of the period – they’re actual competition V12s. So the sound is authentic. There’s nothing quite like it: beautiful and threatening and savage and very emotional.”

These are adjectives which could describe the Mille Miglia, too. As Brock Yates writes in Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine, most open-road races had been banned by 1957, considered far too dangerous “by most civilised nations”. Yates relates how the immensely popular event (which is estimated to have drawn a crowd of 10 million people in ’57) saw close to 300 cars surging along its mountain hairpin bends and slim city streets. It would regularly involve “strutting young men” showing off by “attempting to touch the fenders of the speeding cars”, while bloody-minded farmers would pootle along in their tractors against the roaring flow.

Mann is a director so mindful of veracity that he insisted his production designer precisely recreate the wallpaper in Laura’s bedroom, and find chairs that would exactly match the wood of those in Enzo’s Modena barbershop. So when it came to the race on which Ferrari bet it all, he was no less meticulous. “I’m obsessed with getting important things right,” Mann says.

This included the nightmare crash that prevented the Mille Miglia from ever happening again in its original form. On May 12, 28-year-old Alfonso de Portago (played in the film by Gabriel Leone) lost control of his Ferrari 335 S outside the village of Guidizzolo, after its front-left tyre burst. It caught a stone kilometre marker at 150mph and spun into a crowd. Nine spectators were killed, including five children, as well as navigator Edmund Nelson and Portago himself, his body bisected by the Ferrari’s vermilion bonnet.

Ferrari presents this tragic incident – for which Enzo himself was publicly blamed – in horrifyingly vivid detail, and the scene is viscerally distressing. To recreate it, Mann visited Guidizzolo during pre-production, he told Variety. While there, he interviewed a septuagenarian resident who’d been among that crowd, along with his brother – one of those children obliterated by Enzo’s metal. As a result, Mann framed the event largely from the boy’s perspective, intensifying the terrifying immediacy. Such tragedies were sadly all too common during this era. The Le Mans disaster, in which 82 spectators died, was only two years earlier. But while recognising this, Ferrari, its makers insist, is as much about the ecstasy of racing as it is the agony. Why else would men like Ferrari, Taruffi and Portago devote, risk and lose their lives to it?

“There is a high from the experience,” says Dempsey. “You’re aware of everything that’s happening in front of you, beside you and behind you. And with that level of intensity, especially in an endurance race, it’s transcendent.”

It comes back to that mindset Mann understood so well from his own experience racing in the ’90s. “Jean Behra referred to it as this ridiculous euphoria that we’re all addicted to,” he says. “And that is central to Enzo, and to Adam’s portrayal of Enzo’s character: that character: that drive.”