Christian Bale will star as Enzo Ferrari in Michael Mann’s new film

Michael Mann's extraordinary film HEAT turns twenty this year, that's crazy. BLACKHAT, the directors most recent film, didn't fare nearly as well as HEAT did as it failed to generate any real commercial or critical interest. Mann isn't letting that set him back however as Deadline reports that Michael Mann is moving forward on his Enzo Ferrari biopic and that he's found himself a heck of an actor to portray the founder of Ferrari.

Christian Bale has agreed to play Enzo Ferrari in Michael Mann's new film which is being prepared for buyers at the upcoming Telluride, Toronto, and Venice Film Festivals. Michael Mann has been working on getting a Ferrari biopic off the ground for many years but it seems like the time has finally arrived. FERRARI will take place in 1957, "a year where passion, failure, success and death and life all collided," and THR says that the project will be adapting "Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Race, The Machine" written by Brock Yates.

A synopsis of the book via Amazon:

To his legion of admirers, Italian auto titan Enzo Ferrari (1898-1988) was a genius who personally created marvelous cars of advanced design. But as Car and Driver columnist Yates points out in this captivating, demythologizing biography, none of Ferrari's racing cars "was a glittering example of daring technology," and he had almost no hand in the making of the later road cars that bore his name. Revealed as a hot-tempered megalomaniac given to loud belching and countless amorous conquests, Ferrari fathered an illegitimate child and led a shadowy second life as a respite from the "simmering hatred" of his marriage. He portrayed himself as a loyal "motorized knight-errant," defending Italy's national honor, but in Yates's estimate he was interested solely in winning races and sometimes pushed his drivers to dangerous extremes. Yates deftly records the carnage of major races, business wheeling and dealing, and the political dimensions of motor racing from the pre-WW II Rome-Berlin Axis to today's ribbon-waving nationalism.

FERRARI is looking to start shooting next summer.