In Michael Mann’s Ferrari, Penelope Cruz plays a businesswoman, wife and grieving mother who must stand up for her rights.
For Penelope Cruz, the key to understanding Laura Ferrari was, of all things, her wallpaper. During Michael Mann’s 20-year course of researching Ferrari — a film that pushes in close on Laura’s troubled relationship with her husband, motor-sports magnate Enzo (Adam Driver) — the director had come to earn the trust and respect of the Ferrari family to the extent that he and Cruz were granted access to Laura’s apartment in Modena, Italy and the room in which she died in 1978, which has not been redecorated since.
“It was a lot of information for me, to see the real apartment,” says Cruz, speaking from her home in Spain. “When I walked into the [bed]room, I realised how depressed she was. It was that wallpaper, for me.”
Precisely recreated in the movie, it is a busy, verdant design, all flowers and ribbons, brimming with the energy of long-lost youth. “It has a lot of meaning,” Cruz says. “I felt kind of sick when I left. Just from feeling the atmosphere of the place.”
This was one of many stops on what Cruz describes as a journey of “great discovery” in playing Laura, a woman about whom she knew little, before realising how beset by misconceptions — and obfuscation — her memory was. “Even people who knew her and spent time with her in Modena were happy that she was hiding most of her life,” says Cruz. “She was treated like this crazy woman who was very unpredictable. And she wasn’t.”
As Cruz plunged into her research — which included the love letters Laura and Enzo wrote to each other — she realised Laura was simply someone suffering “so much pain” from the death of their son Dino (aged 24, from muscular dystrophy). As framed by Mann’s tight three-month narrative, set in 1957, it was a fresh grief compounded by a commercial crisis for Ferrari racing division Scuderia Ferrari and Laura’s discovery that her husband had secreted away a younger mistress (Shailene Woodley’s Lina Lardi), with whom he had another son.
It was also important to Cruz that Laura gain recognition for her business acumen — something Mann’s film highlights. “Laura was the person taking care of the business side of the company, and she had an incredible eye for people’s bullshit,” Cruz explains. “But a woman in those times, in that place — actually in most places around the world, even today — isn’t given credit.
“I think a lot of people that knew her and Enzo, or knew about their story, would be very surprised Michael took [the film] in that direction. But it was the truth, and for me it’s emotional that he gave me a character who embodies and represents all these [unappreciated] women.”
Master of detail
Ferrari — released by Neon on December 25 in North America, and scheduled for December 26 in the UK before reaching Sky Cinema in 2024 — marks the first time Cruz and Mann have worked together. Yet she speaks of the 80-year-old filmmaker with an admiration and appreciation you might more expect to hear about her seven-time collaborator Pedro Almodóvar, who directed Cruz in two of her four Oscar-nominated roles and four of her 14 Goya-nominated ones.
Indeed, she is quick to compare the two directors. “Michael is so much into details,” she says, “and I respect that. He was very particular in the process of choosing things, such as Laura’s sweaters — seeing how the material looked under different lights or with different buttons. He reminds me a lot of Almodóvar in that way, and I’m very used to that way of working because of Pedro.”
Cruz and Mann’s relationship became remarkably simpatico, often arriving separately at the exact same conclusions. “We would both think about very specific things, and then at the rehearsals one of us would say something about the character, and the other would have had the exact same dream,” Cruz recalls.
She gives the example of Laura’s distinctive walk: a kind of hunched, stomping waddle, as if she were both oppressed by the world and determined to stamp her tracks onto it.
“I started walking in a certain way, and he said, ‘This is very interesting, because I actually thought you could have orthopaedic shoes.’
“It is like being connected on the frequency of where the character is. We were very, very connected that way — and when that happens, it’s a beautiful thing to experience.”
Encounters like this have kept Cruz enthusiastic and engaged throughout her three-decade career. She started out on Spanish TV in 1989, aged 15, and has been working consistently ever since — mainly in Spain, Italy and Hollywood, on movies both intimate (such as last year’s L’immensità) and immense (Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides).
“I always feel like a student,” she says. “I’m making a movie next spring, and I’m feeling like I have to get back to study. I feel so lucky to have a job that allows me to feel new every time, and scared every time. I can always keep getting surprised and challenged, and always learn something new.”
This upcoming film is Days Of Abandonment, based on the 2002 novel by Italian writer Elena Ferrante and directed by Isabel Coixet. Not only does she star, but Cruz produces through her company Moonlyon, founded four years ago with Laura Fernandez Espeso under the umbrella of Spain’s Mediapro Studio.
“We have total creative freedom,” Cruz says, “and we are at the moment developing two films [including Days Of Abandonment], a Spanish TV show and a documentary.” This latter project will be directed by Cruz, though she feels it is too soon to discuss it in detail. “I’ve been working on it for a couple of years,” she says, “and I need, like, two more years. It’s not an easy thing but it is a passion project.”
Speaking of passion, are there any plans for an eighth collaboration with Almodóvar?
“Not for any time soon,” says Cruz. “But any time he calls, I’m here. He is like a family member, and a total genius who has been so important in my life and career. I hope we work together many more times.”
In the meantime, Cruz’s journey of discovery shows no sign of slowing. “Human behaviour is so confusing and mysterious and incredible to study,” she says. “It’s so complex. It’s never-ending.”
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