Michael Mann To Helm Enzo Ferrari Grand Prix Biopic, Production Slated For 2016

Esteemed filmmaker Michael Mann is finalizing talks with Cecchi Gori Media to helm the long-in-development Enzo Ferrari biopic, focusing on the life of the Italian racing driver and entrepreneur. First picked up by Variety, it’s understood that both parties want to get the cameras rolling on the Grand Prix drama in 2016.

According to the report, Mann has merged two early scripts for the Ferrari-centric production, with the vast majority of research centering around Brock Yates’ Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, which hit bookshelves back in ’91. The Heat director is working alongside Troy Kennedy Martin (The Italian Job) and David Rayfield (Out of Africa), on the screenplay, and to gain an indication of the events that the final product will likely encompass, you can check out the detailed description of Yates’ novel below.

As for the Enzo Ferrari biopic itself, the project has flirted with the silver screen numerous times in the past, with Al Pacino and Sydney Pollock attached around a decade ago. Now, with Mann at the helm and clutching the megaphone, we can expect to learn much more about the project over the coming months — including who will play the coveted role of the famed Italian.

Mann’s Enzo Ferrari is still very much in its nascent stages, though you can share your impressions of the project down below. Will it enthral the same audience as Senna and Rush? Time will tell.

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.