MICHAEL MANN

The director of moody, evocative films like Miami Vice and Heat on his inspiration rooms, clubbing with cocaine importers, and the decades of obsessive research that went into his new movie. Ferrari

- BILGE EBIRI

I DON'T LIKE BEING in the same place for a long time," Michael Mann tells me as we sit down for lunch in Modena, Italy. The director has lived in Los Angeles for the past five decades with his wife, Summer, an artist. But in 2022, as he worked on his new film, Ferrari, the city where car manufacturer Enzo Ferrari lived and died became a second home. Ferrari might be the closest thing Mann has had to a dream project, which might also be why he seems so happy nowadays. I've interviewed the director maybe a dozen times over the past decade, and I've rarely seen him so animated. He has been trying to get the biographical racing drama-which follows Enzo's (Adam Driver) marital and professional turmoil during a year in which he nearly lost just about everything he had-made since the mid-1990s. As Mann talks about his new film and his whole career, one begins to see why he was so drawn to this man. "Who shall I be in this world?" Enzo asked himself as a teenager. At the time, he had no job prospects, and his father and brother had just died. That theme of self-actualization runs through Mann's films. It also runs through his own life. This is a man who went from having nothing to owning a Ferrari over the course of his early career, going on to make classic '80s and '90s films including Heat and Manhunter. "It's a human universal imperative to push beyond what the current limits are," Mann says of racing cars. He could also be talking about his own filmmaking philosophy.

What was it about Adam Driver that made you look at this strapping 39-year-old American and think, He could play a pudgy 59-year-old Italian?