How Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt Revved Up Michael Mann’s ‘Ferrari’ Without Green Screen
Michael Mann and David Fincher are often considered the directors who held our delicate little hands as we shouted about how digital was going to ruin celluloid, answering film lovers’ fears by creating movies such as “Collateral” and “Zodiac” that showcased the silvery-rich possibilities of the new medium. Oscar-winning cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt worked with both filmmakers this year, serving as the DP on Fincher’s “The Killer” and Mann’s “Ferrari.” And luckily for Mann, Messerschmidt also happened to be a self-professed “car fanatic and motorsports fan.”
“Ferrari,” a throwback-style anti-biopic about controversial Italian entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari, follows but one footnote in the car manufacturer’s tumultuous life from the summer of 1957. Enzo (Adam Driver) is juggling his headstrong wife (Penélope Cruz) and mistress (Shailene Woodley) while struggling to assemble the perfect lineup in the legendary Mille Miglia race after a series of mishaps. And one of the chief concerns for Messerschmidt and his crew was to not duplicate the frightening trial-and-error the film depicts.
“The testing process is about figuring out the balance of the car and how the suspension of the car handles, particularly how it handles when there’s a heavy camera mounted to it,” said Messerschmidt, who won an Academy Award for Fincher’s 2020’s black-and-white “Citizen Kane” riff “Mank.” (There’s even a sly black-and-white opener here with Driver in newsreel-type racing footage that could have come right out of Fincher’s fever dream.) “It changes the performance of the car, and that’s important for the drivers to understand. So there was a large testing period. When it came time to shoot, I think we were all very confident.”
There are many sports you can appropriately fake onscreen, but car racing is not among them given its velocity. Messerschmidt stressed that Mann and crew opted for tactile representation whenever possible. “All the racing in the movie is real, there’s no green screen,” he said. “One of the things that was very important to Michael was that the cars should go the speeds that they are prescribed.”
The film’s accident sequence, a horrifying recreation of a crash that claimed several lives, including children, was shot in a continuous take over the course of a few days. It adhered to the timeline and environs of the 1957 event. “We had timed the crash itself to a very specific time of day,” he said.
Messerschmidt’s two 2023 movies about obsessed men, “Ferrari” and “The Killer,” had very different release patterns: The former received a wide Christmas release in cinemas from Neon, while the latter streamed to large audience numbers after a brief theatrical release from Netflix. But he isn’t bound to one release model over the other.
“I love the cinema experience,” Messerschmidt said. “I think it’s worth preserving and important and vital, culturally, to our society. But I didn’t see ‘Star Wars’ projected until I was probably 19 years old, and I had seen the film 50 times. It’s one of the movies that made me want to make movies, so I don’t know that I can stand on the soapbox and say it’s the only way to appreciate a film. Because it’s just not the case in my life.”
A version of this story first appeared in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
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