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.

Chemistry, Conflict, and Character Depth

Cruz and Driver play the husband and wife drama brilliantly. Showing how volatile their marriage suffered because of 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 Mille Miglia race across Italy.

The True Story Behind Ferrari’s 1957 Crisis

Based on Brock Yates’ 1991 book Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Car, The Races, The Machine, with a screenplay by Troy Kennedy Martin, Michael Mann directed Ferrari as a character study unlike anything else the director has done on the big screen.

Michael Mann’s Vision: Precision Meets Emotion

Discovering what the director of the movie helps understand the carmaker’s life, “… Enzo Ferrari, one of the most famous yet inscrutable and complex men of the 20th century. For Mann, that was a perfect hook. “There is no equilibrium in his life, and that’s the whole point of Enzo Ferrari,” says Mann. “That fascinated me because that’s more like the way life actually is,” Mann continues. “Life is asymmetrical. Life is messy. Life is filled with chaos. Ferrari was precise and logical, rational in everything to do with his factory and race team. In the rest of his life, he was impulsive, defensive, libidinous and chaotic. This asymmetry and wonderful contradiction are what made him and the other characters in this unique story so human to me.”