Michael Mann’s Ferrari starring Adam Driver may have been the subject of debate among fans, and more so on why Christian Bale, the original actor for the lead role, dropped out of production. In his stead, the Star Wars villain actor portrays Enzo Ferrari.
The early stages of filming actually began in 2015, where the story rolls back to the summer of 1957 and bankruptcy looms over the company that the protagonist built with his wife. The movie is largely set in Modena, a town just an hour outside Bologna.
Adam Driver’s Ferrari Takes Inspiration From The Renaissance Period
Erik Messerschmidt served as Ferrari’s cinematographer where he captured the life of Enzo Ferrari like a Renaissance painting. Director Michael Mann has an obsession with light in the art of 16th-century Italian painters like Caravaggio, which Messerschmidt tried to reproduce in the film.
As a passion project churning for 30 years, Mann made sure that Ferrari would perfectly captivate the personal life of Adam Driver’s character as well as the ferocity of the races. Enzo Ferrari’s life scenes were painstakingly shot in the style of Renaissance artwork.
The car racing scenes, on the other hand, had experimental cameras mounted on real automobiles that truly experienced real road crashes. In an interview with IndieWire, Messerschmidt explained:
“There’s no green screen. There’s no video wall. Michael was not interested in shooting the car at 50 miles an hour and then playing all the camera tricks to make it look like it’s going a hundred. He was interested in shooting the cars at 100 miles an hour.”
He also noted that the cameras were strategically positioned, though they avoided using typical tricks that would make the cars appear as if they were moving faster than they actually were.
“There are safety challenges and camera rigging concerns. We had to build the cars and the camera rigs so that they could sustain G forces and vibration.”
The cars depicted in the Ferrari film are quite expensive collector’s items that amount to tens of millions of dollars, and the director’s job is to create replicas that look exactly like them.
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Why Did Christian Bale Leave Ferrari Production?
With regard to Christian Bale’s departure from the project in 2016, the actor reasoned that his body transformation had something to do with it. He is known for undergoing dramatic weight gain and loss over the years for different roles, one thing that Bale has finally sworn off.
Interestingly, the movie did not start production until 2022, which means Bale had more than enough time to gain the required weight he needed for the role. In 2018, Bale gained 40 pounds for the role of Dick Cheney in Vice. A year after that, he starred in James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari. As to why he never went back to filming Ferrari remains a controversy.
Nonetheless, Michael Mann is proud of his work even though Bale did not return for the role. He noted that the content of the movie is unlike anything that conventional studio systems would embrace. It is also appropriate that Ferrari is an indie project that is not attached to any major studios, with Neon stepping up as the distributor.
Ferrari is now showing in theaters worldwide.
