It’s been announced that British actor Christian Bale has been cast in a long-awaited biopic of Italian car mogul Enzo Ferrari, to be directed by American filmmaker Michael Mann. This will be the duo’s second collaboration after 2009’s John Dillinger film Public Enemies, in which Bale played Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent who brought the thief down.
Set to shoot next summer, the film will be the product of over 15 years work by Mann, who at one point was in partnership with the late filmmaker Sydney Pollock. It is to be set in 1957, a year where failure, success, life and death all came together. Ferrari is the man who redefined the Italian sports car and was partly responsible for spearheading Formula 1 racing. He died in 1988.
Mann has reportedly blended together two existing scripts for the film, one by The Italian Job’s (1969) Troy Kennedy Martin and another by David Rayfield, who penned Out of Africa (1985). Both are based on Brock Yates’ 1991 book ‘Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races’.
Mann’s most recent film was the crime thriller Blackhat (2015), which starred Chris Hemsworth as a convict on furlough from prison enlisted to hunt a high-level cybercrime network operating across the globe. Though generally well received, the film has so far failed to recoup its $70 million budget, currently sitting on a total domestic gross of just under $8 million.
Sources: Deadline, Empire, Box Office Mojo