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[title]Michael Mann’s plan to make a film about the legendary car magnate Enzo Ferrari was set in motion over a quarter century ago. While the original script has morphed and changed over the decades, shooting the film in Ferrari’s northern Italian hometown of Modena was always a surety.
‘I first went to Modena in 1995,’ Mann says. ‘So when I see location photography shot back then, I have brown hair – I get 25 years younger.’
While most successful entrepreneurs bolt from their hometown in pursuit of bigger, shinier surroundings, Ferrari was a local through and through. He was born in Modena in 1898, died there in 1988 and never really strayed too far from the place during his life. He picked yellow – Modena’s official colour – as the background of the Ferrari emblem so the city would always feel like the business’s home.
‘Modena is a really unique place in that people don’t emigrate,’ says Mann. ‘Ferrari had this attitude, and in the middle of the fifties, he decided not to go to foreign countries to go to the races. Instead, on Saturdays, he would go to Sergio Scaglietti [Ferrari’s bodywork designer] and they would build a fire in a 50 gallon oil drum, roast chicken and listen to the races on the radio.’
Modena today isn’t dissimilar from when Mann first visited all those years ago, or from when Ferrari called it home. It’s ornate and peaceful, with a sense of timelessness about it. As I walk through town on an autumnal day, the streets smoulder from the afternoon sun hitting rows of buildings painted in egg-yolk yellow the colour of fresh tortellini. Groups meander around grand Romanesque squares. A monk – one of two who live in the city’s monastery – stops to chat to his parishioners. People sip espressos on street-side tables and prod fruit in the beautiful Art Nouveau covered market in the same way they have done for decades.
It‘s hard to believe I’m in the epicentre of the thundering, full-throttle world of luxury sports cars, which once roared through these ancient streets in the now defunct Mille Miglia, at one point among the deadliest motor races in the world.
Modena is nestled in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, which has a startling number of claims to fame. It’s known for its gastronomic excellence, producing some of the country’s most iconic foods and housing some of the world’s best restaurants. The opera singer Luciano Pavarotti was born here. Its nickname, however, is ‘Motor City’, thanks to the fact Lamborghini, Pagani, De Tomaso and Bugatti all make their glossy supercars here. But in Modena, it’s Ferrari that’s woven itself into the city’s psyche.
It’s clear there are two religions here: God and Ferrari.
Set during three months in 1957, Mann’s new film, Ferrari, introduces us to the car magnate (played by Adam Driver) as things are starting to implode in his professional and personal life. His business is strapped for cash and there is mounting pressure on Ferrari to win the Mille Miglia to improve his fortunes. Meanwhile, he is grieving the recent death of his eldest son. His marriage to Laura (Penélope Cruz) is in tatters, and he is messily juggling a second home with his mistress, Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), and their son, Piero.
Among the chaos, Modena’s earthen-hued cityscape is an ever-present backdrop. Mann involved Piero, now vice president of the car company, in the filming, drawing on his memories to colour in details of his father to help portray the closeness of his everyday world.
‘Everything in Modena is hermetically sealed and closed,’ Mann says. ‘Ferrari’s house, that we use, really is right next door to the opera. The other way is the barbershop Enzo went to every morning. When Adam was sitting in the chair and getting shaved, that's the chair that Enzo was in and the guy shaving him was the son of the barber who shaved Enzo. Everything has this compression. So you pick up this resonance there.’
There are many touches like this in the film. The former chief mechanics of pro-racing drivers Niki Lauda and Michael Schumacher appear as extras. If props like engine blocks were needed, they would simply go to the Ferrari factory 30 minutes away in Maranello to get one. Lots of driving took place on the roads where Ferrari tests cars today. ‘The history is way, way deep,’ Mann says. ‘Modena is a wonderfully, organically authentic place. I could have shot part of the movie in Cinecittà in Rome and there wouldn't have been anything like this.’
Little nods to Ferrari are dotted subtly across the city today. Gleaming machines stamped with a rearing horse pepper the parked cars. The Da Antonio barbershop – barely changed since the days when Ferrari frequented for a shave – has a black-and-white photograph of its famous customer on the wall and a collection of tiny toy cars on display. Even my tour guide says she remembers seeing Ferrari walking the streets as a child: ‘We would walk to the park and have to stop when Mr Ferarri came out and we would say hello.’
‘No matter where you went in Modena, you’re always intertwined with Ferrari’s world,’ says Janice Polley, the film’s location manager, who has worked with Mann since his 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans. Whether it was hearing the grumble of Ferrari engines – or “music” as Mann describes it – in the air while scouting for locations, or driving down seemingly unassuming rural roads which revealed themselves to be supercar test routes, Ferrari’s legacy seeps into every pore of Modena.
Polley even stumbled across someone closely connected to the deadly 1957 Mille Miglia crash, which killed the Ferrari driver Alfonso de Portago, nine spectators – including four children – and marked the end of the race. It’s a sobering central scene in Mann’s film. ‘It was a difficult location to find because Michael wanted to have the real road. He wants everything to be historically accurate,‘ Polley says. When she arrived at the original location and knocked on the door of the farmhouse there, it was answered by the brother of one of the children killed in the accident.
‘It was a sad moment,’ Polley says. ‘I hadn’t been expecting it. But there were a lot of people with connections to the Mille Migle and Ferrari. There was always a story when I would scout in different houses. People who lived there would ask me to come in and show me photos and some of them had unbelievable car collections. Everyone's tied into Ferrari in some way; their family worked there or they were part of it.‘
Ferrari was filmed quickly in 2022, beginning in the intense heat of August and finishing in October. In this short time, it seems Mann’s world became just as concentrated around Modena as Ferrari’s had been 60 years before. During the filming, Mann lived on Via Emilia, a city centre street the colour of Lambrusco lined with pretty arcades, and the fabulous wrought-iron Mercato Albinelli became his local supermarket. ‘Everybody there came to know my family,’ he says. ‘I became known as Mrs Mann’s husband, because she would go there every day.’
‘People sincerely appreciated us being there, making this story. It was heartwarming,‘ Mann adds. ‘Ferrari… it’s one of those car brands that the people who love it almost have a kind of spiritual connection to it.’
Nowhere in Modena does the deity of Ferrari come alive more than in the Enzo Ferrari Museum, located a short walk from the city centre. Here, the glistening engines are displayed like relics in his old farmhouse family home, and the guides talk about a car brand whose law is sacrosanct: one unnamed famous Canadian rapper was blacklisted for daring to change the colour of his newly bought car.
In one memorable scene in the film, we see Ferarri and his fellow carmarkers sitting in church listening to the sound of a starting gun as their competitors at Maserati race their cars around a nearby test track. The group gaze at stopwatches ticking away in their hands as the congregation begin taking communion, the clicking blending with the priest’s sonorous voice. It’s clear there are two religions here: God and Ferrari. It’s a sacred connection that’s still palpable today.
‘I got the impression it was almost an honour that the movie was being made in Modena where Ferrari was from,‘ Polley says. ‘He’s a God to everybody.’
‘Ferrari’ is in cinemas Dec 26 and on Sky Cinema in 2024.