Before there was Massimo Bottura, another man ran Modena and his name was Enzo Ferrari. The racing driver-turned-entrepreneur has a name that's instantly recognizable thanks to the automobile company he founded to what we now know to be a great success. But prosperity was neither immediate nor constant for Enzo, and it is with such a period of turbulence in the man's life that the new film Ferrari is concerned. Set in Modena in 1957, Ferrari was filmed almost entirely in the Northern Italian city and its surroundings.
To break down the Italy of Enzo Ferrari's time—the real man rarely left a two-block radius within the city that contained his church, apartment, and barbershop in his free time—we sat down with production designer Maria Djurkovic to talk about beauty, racing past poplar trees, and repurposing dairy factories.
Where were you working on this film?
We were living and filming and working and everything in Modena. [Director Michael Mann] had visited the city quite a few times over the past 20 years, and he had photographed a lot of locations. Ferrari lived in this small northern Italian town and left. In fact, he rarely left more than this very small portion [of Modena] where he lived. Veracity was very, very important to Michael, not just in getting the historic locations. In terms of getting under the skin of the whole town, being very specific about it being set in Italy—all those little towns in northern Italy are fantastic, you have Ferrara, Verona, Bologna, Milan, they’re all a short drive. It’s very easy.
Actually, Conde Nast Traveler, if you're based in Modena, you can go every weekend somewhere wonderful. Not that we had as many weekends as there were lovely places to go. But still, they vary so radically the character of each of these towns, and in no time you're in Padua or Verona with a drive of an hour and a half or so. It changes totally, the architecture, the food, they all have such different characters. Which is why Michael was keen to be based specifically in Modena. We all lived there. My apartment was actually in the next block from the Ferrari house that you see in the movie. So when I watch the movie, I’m not just remembering making the movie—I’m also thinking, “There’s the road to the local Tesco!” That doesn’t sound very Italian of me.
Not the local Tesco!
Luckily, there were markets at the weekend, but when you're working the hours we're working, you have to rely on Tesco too.
Can you take me on a tour of Ferrari’s Modena?
So, the church that Ferrari used to go to [San Giorgio] was just across the road, just across from the barber shop—the barber shop in the movie is the one Ferrari really went to. And to get to these two places from his apartment, you would literally cross two streets. It's not a long journey. In the barber shop, they had all these photographs of what it originally looked like, which was fantastic because we could recreate it perfectly in the space.
Michael was keen for us to use [San Giorgio] where the Ferraris really went for that rather amazing scene during communion, when they’re all watching their stopwatches. They were doing renovations and wouldn’t have us, so we found another church [San Pietro] that was a stone’s throw in the opposite direction—nearer to the little patch where I was living.
I have to mention the amazing location manager, Janice Polley, who has worked with Michael for something like 30 years. She and I explored Modena together on day one and the first thing we did was look at the Ferrari house that you see in the movie, which is in this lovely sort of courtyard, almost in front of a fountain. It's just on the outskirts of town.
.%2520Photo%2520Credit%2520Lorenzo%2520Sisti.jpg)
As for the local factory, there's an awful lot of visual research references that we got our hands on so that we could see exactly what the factory looked like in 1957. Michael wanted this very clean, almost Bauhaus style as it spoke volumes about the character. You know, his home life with Laura is pretty chaotic, but the factory is super precise and clean and very elegant actually, in its simplicity. The factory had a very specific shape, and we found a place where they manufacture dairy products in town that could match it. The courtyard was actually cobbled, and I really liked that as a feature, and it was built in the ‘60s out of red brick. The dairy factory was owned by three or four elderly sisters who were quite tricky, and I remember Janice had to do all sorts of acrobatics to finalize the deal.
Speaking of all the places you can spring off to from Modena—at the very start of work on the film, my set decorator and I booked an Airbnb for the weekend on Lake Garda and were really looking forward to it. I had just sent Michael the pictures of this dairy factory, saying we could achieve the Ferrari factory there if we just built certain parts like the iconic gateway and adhered yellow scenery to the facade. I sadly had to spend that weekend directing the design because Michael wanted to see my suggestions by Monday [laughs].
The mausoleum in the film is the actual Ferrari family mausoleum, although obviously there are more members of the family in the mausoleum now than there were in 1957. We dealt with that quickly—Michael didn’t want to impose on the family here especially—by facing the tombs with fake marble with a team of fantastic Italian scenics.
When I got hired to do this movie, Janice and I were going back through the photos and seeing how much stuff had changed, you know, how many signs of the 21st century we’d have to clear. What was incredible, but you could never do in America or in England was, for example, the street where the Ferraris lived, it's called Largo Giuseppe Garibaldi. It's a boulevard, it's got a fountain in the middle. It's got buses that go by, and it just works. It's a main artery into this little town. We built housing to make the modern traffic lights look period and covered the bus shelters to eradicate the 21st century—you’d have to do much more for London or Los Angeles—and the fantastic thing was they let us leave them. Apparently, the people in the town wanted them to stay that way, but of course it was all just plastic.
The interior of the Ferrari apartment meanwhile was not in Modena, but in Reggio Emilia which is a little city up the road. They are rival cities, this is the irony. It was the best space we could find for the windows and the modesty we knew the Ferraris lived in at this time. The owner was very proud of her interiors and so we wrapped the house to make it look like 1957. The farmhouse where Enzo kept his mistress Lina Lardi and son was just outside Maranello, a city about 25 minutes away where the actual Ferrari factory was and still is.
Can we talk about the big race?
We can. The main square at Brescia, where all of the racers sign up to race in the Mille Miglia with all of their cars parked around them, is where we shot and where it really happened. It’s a two-hour drive from Modena, and a really lovely town that I enjoyed walking around. And it has this Mussolini, Fascist-built square that you see in the movie with a strange marble balcony where Adam Driver comes in with Jack O’Connell. And to use that we had to cover up a McDonald’s. Now, the square is purely pedestrian and underneath it is a multi-story car park with grills that allow ventilation. We had to plan so that you wouldn’t be able to see those things.
The starting ramp scene happens very early in the morning, so it’s dark, and again we had loads of visual references. It took place in Brescia but we filmed it in Modena, there was a ramp and a street that we could build. It’s not as specific. The other pit stops—Rome, Verona—we shot entirely in Modena. Modena has a very distinct color scheme of terracotta and rust. Interestingly, though, there’s a large square in the center called Piazza Roma that we used for Rome that has a white face, which is very unusual for Modena. So we would find architecture of a different color palette to sell the idea that you were in a different city. Verona was Piazza Grande.
Then, there was the terrible Guidizzolo crash. We visited the memorial, but we knew we would not be able to film there. There needed to be a little farmhouse set back from the road. Something that is distinctive in video footage is that the cars are just hurtling down these roads in poplar trees. We thought this would be very easy to find in Northern Italy, but we ended up circling and circling the countryside in a helicopter, although we eventually did get it.
What was your relationship with Northern Italy before this film and what was important to you to capture?
All of the prep for Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, which filmed at the bottom of Italy. We had a lovely Sunday lunch at Lake Iseo and it’s just so beautiful. I love Italy—everyone accuses me of being incredibly negative when I talk about the death of beauty in Europe and the States. There’s so much ugliness, and personally, doing what I do, I find that deeply depressing. But you go to Italy and you think, “Beauty will never die here. They can’t kill it here.” When my stepdaughter watched the film, she was kicking herself, asking, “Why didn’t I come visit you?”
Ferrari is in theaters beginning December 25.
