THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 82 NOVEMBER 13, 2019
FORD V FERRARI
O
n a warm summer day in 2018, Ford v
Ferrari director James Mangold and
stars Christian Bale and Matt Damon
gathered around a monitor in the
Highland Park area of Los Angeles to watch
a fight — the awkward and hilarious rumble
they had just enacted in front of the cameras.
(Spoiler alert: A loaf of Wonder Bread is used
as a weapon.)
“Christian played Batman for a decade,
and I played Jason Bourne for about the same
amount of time,” says Damon, 49. “We had to
take fights in those films so seriously. This
was exactly the opposite. It was completely
silly and goofy. They basically stop fighting
because they run out of breath.”
Rest assured, the two action-movie vets
find their second winds in Ferrari, Mangold’s
high-octane re-creation of the 1966 Le MansFrom crash diets to crashed cars (and a disappearing studio),
the decade-long journey to the screen for this racing epic was a bumpy one:
‘It’s far more taxing than people realize’ By Pamela McClintockstands are mostly computer-generated, and
locations in California and Georgia stood in
for Le Mans, France, where the actual race
took place.)
The $97 million film, which opens Nov. 15,
was one of the last movies made entirely
by 20th Century Fox before the studio was
absorbed by Disney in March. It’s the sort of
adult-aimed, mid-budgeted period piece that
many (like Martin Scorsese in his recent New
York T imes op-ed) worry is going the way of
the dinosaur. “Obviously, movies like this are
scary to studios,” Mangold says. Its material
has no inherent IP or audience base other than
perhaps the auto-racing world. Bale thinks
the chaos and uncertainty that surrounded
the Fox acquisition was probably fortuitous.
“The unknown of what was about to happen
and who would have a job invoked an attitudeTHE MAKING OF
car race and its historic showdown between
teams dispatched by rival moguls Henry Ford
II and Enzo Ferrari.
With the project in various stages of devel-
opment for more than a decade, Mangold
tweaked the story to focus on the relation-
ship between former Le Mans winner Carroll
Shelby (played by Damon) and Ken Miles, an
eccentric British race car driver (played by
the 45-year-old Bale). In the movie, Shelby
recruits Miles to help Ford (Tracy Letts) run
Ferrari (Remo Girone) off the road and claim
the title for a U.S. automaker once and for all.
Coming off his last film, 2017’s effects-
heavy Logan, Mangold was determined to
bring a far more practical approach to Ferrari,
forgoing CGI shortcuts in favor of full-scale
sets and real stunt driving. (Of course, some
movie magic came into play: The spectator4