Michael Mann appropriately puts Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz behind the wheel of stalled passion project, Ferrari

Seizing on the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cast a guy named Driver and a woman named Cruz in a movie about cars, Michael Mann has inked a deal for his long-gestating passion project, Ferrari. Per Deadline, Ferrari will star Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari. Meanwhile, Oscar nominee Penélope Cruz
and Emmy nominee Shailene Woodley will cram into the backseat of one of those impractical racing machines and co-star. The movie will begin shooting in Italy this May.

Mann has been trying to get Ferrari off the lot for the last two decades. The director began working the script in 1997 with late filmmaker Sydney Pollack, who, according to Mann, “brought great sophistication about men and women and emotions that are authentic and more interesting because they are atypical.” At the time, Mann combined two scripts, one from Troy Kennedy Martin (1969’s The Italian Job) and another by David Rayfield (Out Of Africa). However, the director told Deadline in 2015 that it was still missing something.

After a rewrite, “which did nothing but deliver in full power what Troy Kennedy Martin had put there in the first place,” said Mann, the project moved forward with Christian Bale in 2015. However, after putting on some weight for the role, as he is wont to do, Bale exited the project over health concerns. Bale was later replaced by Hugh Jackman and starred in another Ferrari-based movie, James Mangold’s Ford V. Ferrari, on which Mann was an executive producer. The Mann knows how to get paid.

Following the success of Mangold’s Oscar-nominated, watchable-as-hell dad movie, it was fair to assume that Mann’s project was dead. Well, it’s not, so back off.

Based on Brock Yates’ book Enzo Ferrari–The Man And The Machine, Ferrari catches up with its namesake in the summer of 1957. At the time, Enzo Ferrari and his wife, Laura, are dealing with the collapse of the car company and grieving their son, Dino.

Elsewhere in the MCU (Mann Cinematic Universe), we will be blessed with his new series for Tokyo Vice, which this writer realizes now is a play on Mann’s groundbreaking TV show and film, Miami Vice. The series stars Ken Watanabe and Ansel Elgort, both executive producers. The show was set up in 2019 before the sexual assault allegations against Elgort were made.