Michael Mann eyeing 2016 production start date for his Enzo Ferrari biopic

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

There's been some movement on Cecchi Gori Media's long-in-development biopic about Italian driver and Scuderia Ferrari Grand Prix motor racing team founder Enzo Ferrari. Michael Mann will helm the movie, and Variety is reporting that Mann and Cecchi Gori Media are considering shooting it sometime in 2016. As to where CGM is currently at with the project, chief executive Niels Juul says, "We are talking to financiers and have some early commitments."

Mann has combined two scripts for FERRARI, and although one is by Troy Kennedy Martin (THE ITALIAN JOB) and the other is by David Rayfield (OUT OF AFRICA), both are based on the 1991 Brock Yates book “Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races."

Book description from 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.

A Ferrari biopic from Cecchi Gori Media was originally set to happen back in 2004 with Sydney Pollack behind the camera and Al Pacino as Enzo Ferrari, but things fell through, and Pollack passed away in 2008. There's a different Ferrari pic in the works with Robert De Niro reportedly attached to star, and I kind of wish the two projects would merge together so De Niro can team up again with his HEAT director.

Michael Mann has always been one of my favorite filmmakers, and even though I thought BLACKHAT was an underwhelming effort from the director, I am interested in seeing what he does with FERRARI.