Michael Mann‘s “Ferrari” is filled with bravura cinematic moments, but perhaps the most stunning is a car crash that drives home the terror and danger of racing sports cars in the 1950s, an era before many modern safety features – not to mention modern braking systems. As with everything in the movie and throughout Mann‘s filmography, verisimilitude was of paramount importance; few directors have Mann’s reputation for rigor when it comes to research and accuracy. Yet when figuring out how to stage the horrifying crash, Mann was faced with a problem. “There are many accounts of the crash that differ radically,” Mann told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “In one account we read that [the car crashed into] a wedding party, and the driver was decapitated. That’s not true.”
To find out what really happened, Mann relied on a researcher in Ferrari‘s Classiche Department, the division of the company that oversees the restoration and certification of vintage Ferraris. “He dug through and found the actual reports,” Mann said. “There had been a two- or three-year investigation, with volumes and volumes of impeccable drawings, a coroner’s report, and that’s what we found out what had actually happened.” What Mann portrayed in terms of the crash and its effect on the human body was derived from this information. “What we portray is absolutely correct, and the road is exactly as we portray it, a straight road with a farmhouse.”
In the film, residents from neighboring farmhouses approach to see the carnage, and Mann’s awareness of this aspect of the scene came from a chance encounter. “We went to the actual site and an older gentleman came out of the house and asked what we were doing,” Mann said. “We told him and he said, ‘Oh, I was there. We were having our typical Italian Sunday lunch at about three or four in the afternoon. The first cars were coming by, so that would have meant the fastest cars, because they were only 20 minutes from the end of the race. And neighbors started coming through our field, to the side of the road. My older brother, who was 9, ran out to the road. I was a 3-year-old toddler, and I ran out too, and I wasn’t as fast as he was.’ He got to the road, the accident happened, and his brother got killed. I was very, very moved to hear that story.”
When Mann wrote and staged the scene, he was determined to capture the tragedy as described to him, and the result was one of the most harrowing scenes of his career. It was also just one of many scenes informed by Mann’s relentless study of his subject, the part of filmmaking that he says he enjoys the most. “That’s the adventure of doing a project like this, that you have to build a whole world. There’s the physical research: what the streets look like, what the city looks like. But a more significant piece of research is completely cultural: what was the period psychology, what were period attitudes, what was a middle-class bourgeois family in northern Italy? What are the tropes? What was the attitude towards authority systems? It’s all those things that make for emotional reaction and psychological attitude.”
