The cars that race, roar, and crash so memorably in Michael Mann’s Ferrari are not just gorgeous—they are also, more than 60 years after the movie is set, extremely rare, and valuable, with some selling in the eight-figure range for those devoted enough to pay.
That meant it was an in-depth process to find cars that could look and sound like these exemplars of automotive art and engineering. And it was made no less challenging by the famed automotive, and detail, obsession of its director. “Michael is a massive car lover. He knows absolutely everything about cars,” says Danny Triphook, the picture supervisor on Ferrari, responsible for sourcing the movie’s automobiles. “In some other films, I would have had the ability to say, ‘Oh, let’s do this or let’s do that because this car is better because of this.’ There was no chance I could do that because Michael knows everything.”
Triphook’s first assignment was to conduct a “massive, massive, massive research investigation,” sorting through old Italian television, documentaries, and film footage to get a sense of which cars could have been on the road, and tracks, in 1957, when the film is set. He then sat down with Mann and went through the script, “agreeing on what vehicles we needed for each character, what vehicles we needed in each location.” Then, he started looking for cars.
Courtesty of Rita Campana.
Triphook had the cooperation of additional experts. These included Gabriele Lalli, the operations manager at Ferrari Classiche, the brand’s in-house archive and restoration facility, who helped ascertain what factory vehicles may have been raced during the season depicted in the film. He also had assistance from major collectors, who agreed to loan him their vehicles.
Triphook soon discovered that this is a tight, gossipy, and competitive community. “One collector would speak to another one and say, ‘Oh, yeah. My car is going to be in the movie.’ So the other collector wanted to be in the movie as well, to the point where these guys were ringing me instead of me reaching out for it,” he says.
He ultimately sourced 393 vehicles for the movie, a hoard that required its own similarly sized transportation infrastructure. “We couldn’t drive these on the road to take them to set because of the insurance,” he says. “So we had to use 333 car carriers.”