ANATOMY
OF A CONTENDERAWARDS SEASON
2019THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 83 NOVEMBER 13, 2019
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previously on the 2007 Western 3:10 to Yuma,
which helped immensely in convincing Bale
to sign on. That made Damon, who joined the
project shortly after Bale, the new guy in the
group. “I read the script at the beginning of
2018 and loved it,” Damon recalls. “I’ve been
wanting to work with both Jim and Christian,
so it seemed too good to be true.”
After 10 long years, Ford v Ferrari was a go.
But there was a hitch: Bale would need eight
months to lose 70 pounds before principal
photography could begin. The actor had
gained much of the weight to play Dick Cheney
in 2018’s Vice, a role that earned him an Oscar
nomination. That pushed the start date to
June 2018. When they finally gathered on set,
Damon — whose own weight has also yo-yo’d
for his various roles — asked Bale which diet
he had relied on.
“I thought he was going to say, ‘the keto
diet’ or ‘intermittent fasting plus running.’
Instead, he just looked at me and said, ‘I didn’t
eat,’ ” Damon recalls. Hearing him describe
the exchange, Bale laughs. “Not eating is the
essence, right?” he says.
While starving himself to drop weight, Bale
was also learning how to drive Formula One
race cars. His trainer was Hollywood stunt
driver Robert Nagle, and the two spent a weekof ‘Let’s go out with a bang!’ ” he says. “That’s
what finally got this movie made. It had been
around for a while.”
Jason Keller, who grew up watching the
Indianapolis 500, wrote the first draft of the
script back in 2009. Along the way, it attracted
and lost two directors (Michael Mann and
Joseph Kosinski) and two A-list stars (Tom
Cruise and Brad Pitt). Originally, the story
focused equally on the Ford and Ferrari
teams, an unwieldy and expensive proposi-
tion. (The current iteration centers on Ford.)
In 2011, Mann asked screenwriting brothers
Jez and John-Henry Butterworth to take a
pass. Meanwhile, with each passing year, the
appetite for racing movies seemed to dimin-
ish. (Hollywood’s last major attempt came in
2013 with Ron Howard’s Rush. It crashed at
the box office.) There was also chatter about a
rival Ferrari project at another studio. So Ford
v Ferrari made an extended pit stop.
Mangold’s moment to climb into the
driver’s seat came in 2017. Fresh off the box
office success of Logan, he was riding high at
the studio along with its longtime president
of production, Emma Watts, with whom
he’d successfully collaborated since the
2005 Oscar-winning Walk the Line.
His pitch was eager but honest, andincluded the admission that he wasn’t a “car
guy” but wanted to explore a world he didn’t
know. Ultimately, he was most captivated
by the dynamic between Miles and Shelby.
“You have an aging, great driver with a smart
mouth — Miles — who can’t get along with
authority,” Mangold explains. “And then you
have Shelby, who is a great race car driver who
can’t drive anymore because of a heart condi-
tion, but who is very good at politics. I found
their yin-yang relationship interesting.”
In February 2018, the studio gave the
greenlight, on one condition: Mangold had to
keep the budget under $100 million. Chernin
Entertainment also agreed to produce.
Mangold radically pared down the script and
called up the Butterworth brothers for advice.
“Every time we worked on it, it was like meet-
ing an old friend,” says Jez. “He wanted to
reshape to make it much more about the two
central characters, Shelby and Miles.” If the
script feels authentic, that’s because some of
the actual people depicted in the film weighed
in. On their first pass, the Butterworths, who
share script credit with Keller, met with Shelby
just before his death in 2012; Bale, meanwhile,
sat for hours with Shelby’s son, Peter, who
appears as a young boy (Noah Jupe) in the film.
Mangold and Bale had worked together1 “I grew up a fan of
racing. I went to Brands
Hatch [in England]
with my dad and watched
Niki Lauda. But you
don’t need to know a
damn thing about racing
to enjoy this story of
misfits triumphing,” says
Christian Bale, who
plays rebellious racer
Ken Miles.
2 James Mangold
(center) decided to focus
the story on the unlikely
friendship between Miles
and Carroll Shelby (Matt
Damon, left), rather than
a straight racing movie.
“In fact, the whole racing
genre has had a hard time
at the box office. I think
that’s why it took so long
for this movie to get
made,” says Mangold.
3 The racing scenes
were shot in parts of
California and Georgia that
were edited together to
resemble the famous Le
Mans course in France.
4 Ford v Ferrari garnered
serious awards buzz
when it premiered at
Telluride, with both Bale
and Damon mentioned
as possible best actor
nominees. Its box office
prospects are also
looking strong out of
the gate. Early tracking
suggests the film will
open in the $25 million
to $30 million range
domestically. Overseas,
its title in many markets
is Le Mans ’66.
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