Michael Mann Got His First Ferrari After Getting a ‘Decent Paycheck’

“It was a 308 GTB, and I bought a European version, complied it, and took all the compliance off.”

Michael Mann has been a Ferrari fan for a long, long time — even longer than the several decades it took to make the upcoming movie starring Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz. At the Ferrari Los Angeles film premiere at the Directors Guild of America, Mann told Vulture about buying his first Ferrari and how he ensured the car was fast enough to his liking, even if it meant it wasn’t legal to drive in the states. “The first time I got a decent paycheck was when I made Thief in 1981,” explained Mann. “It was a 308 GTB, and I bought a European version, complied it, and took all the compliance off. ’Cause in those years, Ferrari just bolted on a bunch of parts … You had to get a European one, not an American one. They were much slower.” The desire to drive fast never left Mann; he later casually raced Ferraris as a hobby in the ’90s and 2000s, preparing him as he began the long road ahead of making Ferrari. But it was the story of the man behind the fast cars that was really driving him to bring it to the finish line: “The real dramatic, passionate, tumultuous life that’s behind [Enzo Ferrari’s] façade; he always had this façade with the sunglasses on, you couldn’t see what he was thinking. Behind that is a completely tempestuous life … A lot of opera, a lot of drama, a lot of tragedy, a lot of triumphs all rolled together in this four-month period in 1957.”

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