Ferrari director Michael Mann says lengthy biopics “belong on The History Channel”

Last Updated on December 20, 2023

Get ready to spend the holiday season with Michael Mann and Adam Driver with their new film, Ferrari. It would be a relatively shorter visit when compared to historical epics like Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon and Napoleon. Our own Chris Bumbray came away with a positive impression of Ferrari in his recent review, where he stated that it “adds up to a three-dimensional portrait of the man through one very short period in his life…This does the trick pretty well…It’s a very enjoyable, entertaining look at one of the most important names in 20th-century automobiles and an often thrilling depiction of just how dangerous a sport of auto racing can be.” You can read the full review HERE.

While Mann has dabbled in historical films in the past with movies like The Last of the Mohicans and Public Enemies, the filmmaker doesn’t necessarily share the ambition of his prestigious director peers in telling an epic-length story that flirts with a three-hour runtime. IndieWire reports that Mann never entertained the idea of making Ferrari, which stars Adam Driver, about more than his attempts to salvage his racing empire as he deals with the hardships of his personal life. Mann stated, “I wouldn’t have been interested in some lengthy biopic. Those are documentaries that belong on the History Channel. They never work. And within this four-month period, all the dynamic forces of Enzo’s life are compacted and in collision.”

The director continued to explain that Enzo Ferrari’s refusal to travel far from his hometown greatly limited the space of locations in which he had the movie would take place. He expounded, “Everything in the movie that happened, happened within 500 meters of everything else. The barber’s shop is round the corner; the hotel Enzo went to for drinks is opposite; the opera is next door. And he never wanted to go anyplace else. He even stopped going to races and never left the country. So, you have to try and build that sense of intense compression into one neighborhood, making the location that the action is going to take place in as believable and real as possible.”