00:00 Hi, I'm Michael Mann.
00:01 No, you're supposed to say you're Adam Driver.
00:03 Hi, I'm Adam Driver.
00:04 I'm Michael Mann, and this is "Notes on a Scene,"
00:06 also known as "Michael Says Insightful Things About This Scene."
00:09 I just nod indiscriminately every once in a while.
00:12 He makes a mockery of you
00:15 in the years when our son was ill,
00:20 when he was dying.
00:21 How can you say that?
00:23 Lara, his wife,
00:24 she has discovered that Enzo has had another child
00:28 with another woman and basically has a second family.
00:31 Enzo knows that she knows,
00:33 and this is the coming together
00:35 into a scene of conflict and maybe resolution.
00:40 I find myself sharing my whole life
00:44 with a woman I have never met.
00:46 She's in a dim light, only partially lit.
00:49 Enzo is also in kind of a half light.
00:51 She rises and he rises,
00:53 and they're about to walk into
00:54 a very different kind of lighting setup
00:57 that's very direct, that's going to illuminate
01:00 the explosive argument that's about to happen.
01:02 He makes a mockery of you.
01:09 We use very direct light coming from a very defined source
01:13 rather than just kind of general illumination,
01:16 and that's why there's a highlight
01:17 on the left side of her face.
01:19 When he was dying.
01:21 How can you say that?
01:24 That boy, is he going to inherit our factory, our name?
01:28 'Cause I don't want him to.
01:30 We have a son.
01:31 One son, two sons, five sons.
01:35 I miss Dino any less.
01:36 Michael is very interested in internal life.
01:39 So as much as we're talking about all these things
01:41 about light and shadow, and I feel like that's very well
01:45 known about how specific he is
01:47 with the technical aspects of film,
01:49 I find that he's still chasing a feeling
01:51 more than something really specific.
01:53 And all technical parts are really just
01:56 to enhance the feeling of it.
01:57 It's all driven by character, it's all driven by emotion,
02:00 including what's going on in this scene.
02:03 The costume design and the palette is fairly monochromatic.
02:06 It's all brown, there's this brown, and it's warm
02:10 because what I really want you to focus on
02:12 is what's happening right here.
02:14 But what we're about to find out is the extent to which
02:17 everything that he tried to do, he failed, he did not.
02:20 So it's a revelation all in anger.
02:24 The hospital he died in is funded in his name.
02:27 A school was built in his honor.
02:29 Honor?
02:30 Who gives a shit?
02:31 You were supposed to save him!
02:33 You blame me for his death?
02:35 Yes!
02:36 Yes, because you promised me he wouldn't die!
02:38 Everything!
02:40 I did everything!
02:42 Table showing what calories he could eat,
02:44 what went in, what came out.
02:46 We all sat around and we did a table read
02:48 and we kind of talked about it loosely,
02:51 about what's at stake and what is it
02:54 that we wanted to get out of it.
02:55 And then I think two days or so before we shot,
02:57 we were in the room and we worked out blocking,
02:59 which is another example of, you know,
03:02 there's a lot of technical things going on,
03:04 but Michael doesn't tell actors to come in
03:06 and place them where he wants them to be.
03:08 We figured it out as actors and director
03:11 of where should we start,
03:13 and he's very improvisational that way.
03:16 And then we came in the next day
03:17 and we shot it and we didn't talk a lot about it.
03:20 That to me is the strength of Michael's movies,
03:23 is that he trusts cinema to also tell the story.
03:27 It's not, that character is first,
03:29 which I think again is obvious to you,
03:31 but that's not obvious to most people,
03:33 that no one's gonna give a shit if they crash a car
03:36 if you don't care about the people that are in the car.
03:38 I know more about nephritis and dystrophy than cars!
03:41 If I blame you, I blame you!
03:43 Could you let him die?
03:44 You have a character, it's gonna be inhabited
03:46 by an actor or an actress,
03:48 and then that is gonna become
03:50 what the real character truly is.
03:53 I know when I was in a Zoom with Penelope,
03:55 that's that she's, no one else could do Laura
03:58 better than Penelope.
04:00 And then this guy and I were having a drink,
04:02 in 10 minutes of the conversation,
04:04 I just knew, I sensed the integrity and artistic commitment,
04:08 and I had this feeling, this is Enzo Ferrari.
04:12 And that's because you build character from inside out.
04:14 It's not about physical resemblance,
04:16 that's all mechanical, you just do that.
04:17 That's just craft work.
04:19 It's all, you know, it starts from the inside.
04:22 The father deluded himself!
04:24 The great engineer!
04:27 I will restore my son to health!
04:30 Swiss doctors, Italian doctors, bullshit.
04:33 I could not!
04:34 I did not!
04:36 'Cause you were so consoled at Castelvetro,
04:38 you lost your attention.
04:39 You had another boy growing stronger
04:41 while Dino was getting weaker!
04:43 That's the accusation.
04:44 Their son Dino was dying, and she now realizes
04:48 there was another son that was flourishing.
04:52 But to me, the moment we've just seen in Adam's performance,
04:55 it's a moment in a scene, it never fails to rivet me.
04:59 It is so true and authentic.
05:02 There is no resolution.
05:04 And if you said to me, what's my action as a director
05:09 for how the, what's the scene supposed to deliver to you
05:12 at the end of the day, it's to maximize the irresolution,
05:17 the irreconcilability.
05:18 Everything that was in suspense before is magnified
05:22 and is amplified, and there's even more suspense.
05:25 And I want you to wonder what's gonna happen.
05:28 As opposed to something that says exactly
05:31 what everybody is feeling all the time.
05:33 What went in, what came out?
05:35 I graphed the degrees of albuminoria,
05:37 the degrees of esotemia.
05:38 And then there's just a characteristic of Modinese dialect
05:42 that is more rough and not as polished
05:45 that we tried to capture.
05:47 With this, if they're speaking to each other
05:48 in their native tongue,
05:49 that they're not making mistakes as much.
05:50 So that it wasn't watching an Italian
05:55 doing an American or a dialect.
05:57 It was, if they're speaking to each other,
05:59 then it seems more conversational.
06:01 I had more of a flow, so to speak.
06:03 - So when we say that a Modinese accident,
06:05 it's also an attitude, a certain gruff sarcasm.
06:10 - Scoglietti, who designed the,
06:13 who went for more famous designers
06:16 who designed all the race cars.
06:18 When he was interviewed for Italian television,
06:20 he spoke in a Modinese dialect that was so thick
06:22 that they subtitled him in Italian for the rest of it.
06:25 So it's that heavy duty.
06:27 - What goes on in your mind?
06:29 He got sick, dystrophy, kidneys.
06:33 They destroyed him.
06:35 It destroyed us.
06:37 - What do you care?
06:38 You have another son, you have another wife.
06:40 - She's not my wife, but he is my son.
06:43 - Move out.
06:46 - There's a primitive, irrational belief
06:50 that she holds 100% that he's responsible
06:53 for the death of Dino because of his inattentiveness,
06:58 because some of his attention was on,
07:00 which is complete nonsense,
07:01 but some of his attention is on the other wife,
07:03 the other son.
07:04 And then the scene does end here
07:06 with that irreconcilability, the irresolution.
07:10 - Move out.
07:11 - The reason I didn't give up on trying to make "Ferrari"
07:16 is I would open up that screenplay,
07:18 start to read it.
07:19 By page two, I was hearing the voices
07:22 and seeing the people,
07:23 and it's all due to the, again,
07:25 the emotional power of these lives,
07:28 and because they encompass the kind of dualities
07:33 that exist in our lives.
07:35 Things resolve in the middle of the night.
07:38 Things resolve neatly in "Door A" or "Door B,"
07:42 or conflicts resolve neatly in fiction,
07:46 the kind of fiction that we do making movies.
07:48 What's wonderful about this story
07:50 is the story resolves, the people don't.
07:52 The complexity and the duality of Enzo
07:55 between an engineer mentality
07:57 and somebody who's very passionate,
07:58 the libidinous, as much at the end
08:01 as it is at the beginning,
08:02 and that's the way our lives really work.
08:04 And so to be able to have a drama
08:06 that's dramatically powerful and resolves,
08:08 but nevertheless, characters who are so alive,
08:12 that's what kept me at it.
08:15 (silence)
08:17 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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