We’ve been hearing about Ferrari films for years, and now it seems there is another one vying to get made.
-Back in April, Robert De Niro confirmed he was set to portray Enzo Ferrari in a forthcoming biopic about Il Commendatore. Shortly afterward, Michael Mann announced a competing and as-yet untitled Ferrari film reportedly based on Brock Yates’s book Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races.
-Now we’ve learned that there is a third Enzo Ferrari film in the pipeline, this one written by Manish Pandey, the man who did the script for 2010’s Senna—and who has exclusively given Car and Driver some more details about it.
-The film is called Ferrari and is set in the 1950s, covering the era when Juan Manuel Fangio drove for the team and when Enzo’s son Dino died at the age of just 24. Pandey says the film will be made only with Ferrari’s cooperation and that the script has recently been submitted to Ferrari’s vice chairman Piero Ferrari, Enzo’s son by his long-term mistress, for his approval.
-“We have no film without Ferrari,” confesses Pandey. “That’s why we can’t announce this project at all. It’s in development until Ferrari gets onboard, and that’s something that Piero Ferrari has got to support. For me it’s like what we did with the Senna family: we have to have his support—it’s his life, his father, his history. He’s a wonderful man and I had lunch with him a few weeks ago.”
-Pandey has been working on the project since July 2008 and acknowledges it has come close to being an obsession. “It’s important to surround yourself with genuine experts, not just people who mouth off. We’ve been working with Richard Williams, who wrote what in my opinion is the finest English book on Enzo Ferrari,” explains Pandey. “I’ve also spent a good deal of time with Sir Stirling Moss talking about that era and looking through some of his scrapbooks. He was there and he remembers so much about it, and he has a beautiful sense of context, too. He has thoughts on why Enzo didn’t go to races and why he hired drivers.”
-Pandey believes Piero Ferrari’s approval will be vital to getting Ferrari SpA onboard: “It’s a historic project so we’re not talking about current Ferrari, but it’s an incredible brand and this really is the era when so much of what it is now was defined. I don’t know how you even go to approach the brand without having the son of the founder onboard first—that’s how we will do it. And if he feels that this project is worthy of his support then we’ll move to the next stage, which is getting a director, and then with that director we will go and get a cast. There are no shortcuts here.”
-So why not merge some of these competing projects—could we see Robert De Niro cast in this one?
-“A role like this is so iconic it will attract many actors, and you would be a fool to exclude somebody as talented as Robert De Niro,” he says. “But there are other actors out there of that age, perhaps a little younger.”
-It’s a good point. Enzo Ferrari was between 52 and 60 during the period the film is set in, and De Niro is currently 71. He’s made it clear this is a role he really wants to play, though—and it’s certainly a performance that many of us would love to see.
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“We’re nowhere near the casting stage yet,” says Pandey. “We’ve sought Piero Ferrari’s blessing. Once we’ve got that—and if corporate Ferrari feels it’s the right thing to do—we will gently approach the right director and then once they are onboard they will assemble the cast and find the chemistry.”
-We look forward to watching whichever Ferrari film—or films—gets made.
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via Agya
