Editor’s Note: Ford v Ferrari is Jim Mangold’s first time directing a film about racing, or even about cars. As the car nerds that we are, should we be worried? The short answer? No. Ford v Ferrari’s release date is November 15.
After an initial run of low-budget films—including Girl, Interrupted and Cop Land—won critical acclaim, Mangold’s movies have progressively marched toward bigger-ticket works. But Mangold has stayed pure to character-driven dramas, just at larger scale and with larger budgets, such as Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma, Knight and Day, The Wolverine, and Logan.
So how would Mangold approach a movie about racing, when many racing fans couldn’t care less about character-driven dramas?
If you are a film geek or a car nerd, the following interview with Mangold delves into his core beliefs about movie making, his relationship with facts and the truth in creating a dramatic narrative arc, how to create a racing movie for a mainstream audience who doesn’t care about racing (especially racing that happened 50 years ago), how to portray racing in 1960s France from footage shot in California and Georgia, why certain scenes were left on the cutting-room floor, and how making a film about Johnny Cash affected how he created Ford v Ferrari.
If you are patient and read all the way to the end, you’ll likely learn a few secrets that the movie studio probably wishes you didn’t.
Jonny: I have to get some car-geek questions out of the way. Before you saw the script, did you know the story?
Jim: No. No. Not this particular story of the ’66 Le Mans. I had heard of Carroll Shelby and I knew of him and I knew the cars he had designed. And I knew he had moved from being a driver to a designer. And I knew he has joint ventures with Ford. But I had never heard of Ken Miles before and certainly didn’t know the story at all until I‘d read the script. I mean, the script was in different shape, a different form, than the movie we made. But it was still covering that story.
Jonny: Had you ever seen yourself making a film about cars before?
Jim: Not about cars, about car racing specifically, no. If you had asked me, I wouldn‘t have seen that as a logical thing or something I would‘ve predicted. But for me, if you‘d asked me about three-quarters of the movies I’ve made at an earlier phase, would you ever see … in fact, that’s part of my attraction to movies, is that I can’t imagine making them. So then I live through the experience and now can imagine it.
I think too often with directors, people try to put us in the country, rap, or disco slot for the record store and don’t get some of what we really do. My job is to tell a story. Whether the story takes place at a race or takes place in the Old West or takes place in Manhattan or takes place in a period or is a comedic … the core things I’m interested in with the story stay pretty consistent from movie to movie. And I feel like I’ve been very lucky that I’ve wandered from genre to genre, because I keep learning from them, meaning I learn things that are applicable to other things, you know? And it makes you, I think, a richer filmmaker. That you can operate in these different genres and each one, the technology and the world and world building, even when you make a fantasy film, able to have this thing like world building.
Read our Ford v Ferrari movie review here.
But I’ve got to believe that every movie requires world building. That you have to understand what Detroit was like in the mid-’60s. You have to understand what Southern California was like at that moment. You have to understand what it is to be part of the hot-rodders circuit in the early ’60s.
These are things that I have to learn, absorb, and try to make real on the screen. No different than when I’m making the world of the X-Men real on the screen. Or anything else. It’s the same kind of skills, or lack thereof, that are required to make something come to life.
Jonny: I don’t know how to put this, but this is almost like a holy subject you’re taking on. It’s like, in a way, telling a story from the Bible. And I imagine with something like Logan, the Comic Con, comic book fans would be just as—
Jim: Hey, try Johnny Cash. Try Johnny Cash.
Jonny: Right. I was going to say, Walk the Line. So you seem to be attracted to subject matter where you’ve got to get it right.
Jim: Well, you can never get it right for everyone. The bottom line is you’re never going to get it right for a room. But what you can do is try to make something that within the context of the fade in and the fade out at the end is truthful, or has a truth to itself.
Meaning that there isn’t only one book about these drivers and these racers and this race. And that’s because there’s many angles to this story. When you’re making a movie, because of the cost and the marketing, there’s usually just one movie, at least every generation, made about some of these kind of topics.
But you can’t let … you actually have to push that way. It’s useless energy, the worry about what people are going to say. Because when I was making Walk the Line, Joaquin [Phoenix] would come up to me every day, and he goes, “Say that thing, say that thing.” And I go, “You’re not Johnny Cash.” And he goes, “Thank you.”
Because it’s too much weight. Like it’s too hard, you know? The weight of trying to be a real person in a scene and act and then think about whether you’re doing a good enough Rich Little impression of that actor or that singer or whoever it is, you’ll end up doing a disservice to the person you admire because you’re not bringing yourself.
In a similar fashion, maybe less literally, if I get consumed with fear about what people are going to say, I stop functioning at my best. And therefore, I don’t do my best job, and then I’m even in worse shape for those fans.
The other thing I learned about true life stories making the Johnny Cash film is there are so many false narratives out there. That one of the things I had to deal with when I was writing Walk the Line, that there were a lot of fans who were very attached to stuff that didn’t happen.
And so I was … John and June were still alive when I was writing the script. So I got it from the horse’s mouth, what happened and didn’t happen. And I checked it, even in their case. And in some cases they were contradicting the more sanitized versions of things they had published. That fans had all read.
So you’re always having this kind of ongoing “What is true?” And it is an evolving thing. But the great thing about making a movie is that ultimately you have to lean into what feels true. And what I’ve been so amazed at is, whenever I come to a moment working on a true life story, where the moment in the writing or the staging feels false, if I dig deeper I usually find that someone’s lying about what went down. The reason we’re having a hard time making this moment happen on the screen is the story we’ve been told is full of shit. And so then you’re trying to get … you have to get to the bottom of it. Because no one publishes self-deprecating autobiographies. So everyone’s version of the past somehow positions them in the best light, at the most opportune moment. So you’re always having to find that fine line between it all. You know?
Jonny: Right. And I was going to say with this subject matter, I knew Shelby a little bit. I met him a few times. But he was known as a master bullshitter, basically. So I think it would be tough to do a film like this. Because you don’t know what’s true.
Jim: Right. So that’s one of the themes that runs through the movie. Obviously, I got that. I never got to meet him. Two of the screenwriters I worked with did. But I knew a lot of people that knew him, and we interviewed a lot of people who knew him.
And I could tell from even just clips of him that he was a master salesman and a bit of a storyteller. And so some of what we actually play in the movie is his kind of growth in the movie is learning the limits of his persuasive abilities. And not just the limits of what he can persuade someone into but also, in the case of Ken Miles, what you could talk someone into that you may regret. Which as I understood it Shelby really regretted the outcome of the ’66 race. And to the degree that he had talked to Ken about it and regretted it.
Jonny: You talked about how this was similar to Walk the Line. Was there anything that, maybe just because of the car aspect, but anything much different about this film than the other? I don’t want to say bio films, but…
Jim: Honestly this movie, yeah. The differences between making a biopic like Walk the Line is where that movie’s special effect, as it were, its kind of dazzle was the music and the performance of the music.
This film’s dazzle, or musical numbers, are the action and the races and the cars themselves. And so I really needed to get that right. And at the same time, I was trying to avoid all the tropes and clichés of car commercials and car porn and try and do it in a way that felt real. Not just Hollywood sexy but more real. And was also accurate.
Jonny: It’s funny you say that. I actually was writing in the review how the racing sequences, to me, were a nice blend of accurate but also stylized. Because if you just watch racing footage on YouTube, it’s pretty dull. But you got a lot of the technical stuff right, yet it was still stylish and fun to watch from a movie perspective.
Jim: Well, I was going less for style that you noticed, per se—style being kind of like everything’s blue or everything’s overt theatrical style—and more for shooting it in a different way. And this is a similarity with Walk the Line. It’s analogous. When I watched a lot of old country music biopics or musical biopics, I would notice whenever someone sang, the camera ended up going into the best seats in the house and you’d just watch from the audience as they sang. And I thought that was really boring.
I thought, “I’m tracking Johnny Cash, June Carter, and all these other characters, on the stage. Why am I leaving them when they’re singing and watching them sing?” And so we made it our goal, on that movie, to keep the camera on the stage. Even when they were performing, you really were getting to see what it felt like on stage and backstage in a concert.
Very similarly, what I wanted to do in Ford v Ferrari was to give you a feeling of what it’s like to be in the pits or in the car. Which of course modern racing, modern televised racing, tries to give you a little of with these little radio mount cameras. But it’s gamey, at best. We really wanted you to feel in the claustrophobic cockpit and really feel that speed and the danger. And to experience the race in a way that had no similarity to television coverage.
Jonny: I think you were successful with that. Was there anything that didn’t make the movie that you wanted to make the movie? Like for instance, I was very happy to see Phil Remington because Phil Remington’s kind of a hero of mine, and I loved the way he was portrayed. But, like, Denny Hulme, who was Miles’ co-driver in the race, I think he was in half a scene and then maybe someone said “Denny” at some point. But was there anything that … obviously you have to make choices; you’re not making a documentary.
Jim: Well, part of the choices, each example is different. I mean are there some scenes that featured Phil Remington that didn’t make the cut? Yes. I would say the first cut I saw of the movie was almost four hours long. But there was a point when we were about 3:15, where it was pretty damn good movie. Just long. Very. I mean it’s still long, on the long side. But very long. Like Lawrence of Arabia long.
And obviously some scenes had to bite the dust to get it down to two and a half hours. And do I ever miss them? Yes, sometimes. But do I think the movie does fine without them? Yes. I mean, the rule I was trained with is if the movie functions well and emotionally is exciting without the scene, then it shouldn’t be in the picture. Meaning that it shouldn’t be there just because you like the scene. It should be there because it’s about the sum of the parts thing. If you remove it, does it cripple the movie? So if removing it makes no difference other than you like that scene, that’s not a good enough reason for it to stay.
In relation to Denny Hulme, it’s a more interesting question, which is that partly because of the way the story was about the relationship between Ken and Carroll and partly because if you’re doing a tag-team race, if I focus equally on the stories of both the other drivers, the relief driver and the second driver and the first driver, if we’re not connected to Denny Hulme’s story in this movie and I don’t have enough time to set up Denny’s story in this movie, then in a way it becomes a casualty of the fact that the focus of this particular film is on these people. And therefore it’s really hard to get into all of them.
Jonny: My cards fully on the table: My former boss (Angus MacKenzie), a good friend of mine, was Denny Hulme’s navigator when he used to do rallies in Tasmania. So if I didn’t ask …
Jim: Well you’ll be thrilled to know he’s played by Stig (Ben Collins) from that show.
Jonny: From Top Gear.
Jim: And he did a lot of driving for us.
Jonny: Very cool. In the Americanized folklore of this story, Henry Ford II is sort of like the good guy and Enzo Ferrari’s the baddie. What I really, really liked about the way you portrayed it was like Ford wasn’t so good and Enzo wasn’t all bad.
Jim: No. In fact, I found with audiences the character people liked most beside our two principles is Enzo. I always feel that way. I think he’s really cool and has tremendous honor. And honestly, when he tells off Ford, I think he’s right about most everything in that moment. When I make a movie, I don’t think about bad guys and good guys. Even Westerns. Meaning that I think about antagonists and protagonists.
And what’s the difference between the words? One is assuming the presence of evil in one side or another. And I’m not assuming in one side the presence of evil, in anyone, per se, as much as they have an agenda that runs counter to the ones that we want for our heroes. So really that’s more what it becomes about. And in many ways, Ford was an antagonist to our heroes’ desires, Leo Beebe was an antagonist to our heroes’ desires. At some points Ferrari was. At least his drivers and his cars were antagonists. But by the end of the picture, if you’re making a sophisticated movie, these relationships need to change. It can’t be … you’re not making Buck Rogers. So that it should be, in some way, more sophisticated than just putting someone in a black hat. And Ferrari is a hero of business, design, racing …
Jonny: Italians. The entire nation of Italy.
Jim: Yeah. And in many ways I love that moment we created at the end where he’s kind of the one person who recognized what Ken Miles achieved. Because it was so pure, in a sense. Enzo and Ken Miles have something in common. Which is they are purists. They are in it not just to win it, and not even really only to win it. They’re in it for the thrill of putting a great car on the road. On the track. And that… they’re trying to beat themselves. I think they have that in common. That they’re so good at what they do that they actually focus on trying to outdo themselves in their last lap or last race. Because they’re so much better than everyone else, that’s the best thing for them to focus on to improve their own game or design or business. And that was very much what I tried to depict.
Jonny: I think it was incredibly successful. To me I was really enjoying the movie, and then when that little nod happened, I thought it entered a different realm. Like, this is a very smart, sophisticated film. I don’t know. I’m being too something here. But I really like that.
Jim: My heart was with Enzo, in many ways, watching the movie. Meaning that the only real part of the Ferrari tradition that is actually an obstacle for our heroes is just that they’re so f—ing good. And so our heroes, to even get in the race or have a shot, have to get in the same league as the greatest racer, race car designer, in the world. And so he’s not so much an antagonist or a bad guy as much as he’s just the bar that they’re going to have to get past to achieve greatness.
Jonny: Right. Beating Ferrari at Le Mans is just the thing to do. Let me ask you again: You’re not making a documentary, and I don’t know if you’re aware that earlier versions of the script had this, but Shelby had a real, personal beef with Enzo for a couple reasons. One, he wanted to race for him and Enzo didn’t let him. And then two, because of some, let’s just say cost cutting, some Ferrari drivers were killed who were friends of Carroll’s. Was there any …
Jim: Well, these are facts. But they aren’t scenes. I learned this lesson making true-life movies, which is that I can’t make scenes about facts. That it becomes an inert scene where you’re illustrating a moment. But we made sure to put the kind of memorial wall in Ferrari’s office for all the deceased drivers. But in a way, it goes without saying that all business scions have a casualty list. Meaning that you just don’t get that rich and that important in the world without people giving everything, even the ultimate gift, for you. And that … I don’t know. I mean I think the general idea that Shelby might’ve felt that Ferrari scrimped on safety is an interesting and debatable point. Not debatable whether Shelby felt it. But you know, even Ford and the design team of the GT40, as I understood it, they didn’t put a roll bar in the car until after Ken Miles died.
Jonny: That’s absolutely correct. No, it was a personal beef.
Jim: I mean whether it’s to one degree or another, every side was guilty of the fact that they were in such hyper-focused pursuit of speed and agility and putting the lightest car they could on the road. Almost by definition, considering they were so weight conscious, was the fact that they were really providing no safe zone for their drivers. And when you look at the designs of some of these cars and the amount of the bubble of glass that these people were sitting inside as they hurled pell-mell …
Jonny: Oh, well, racing was insane.
Jim: It’s crazy.
Jonny: No, racing was insane. Le Mans was just one thing. Not to bore you to death, but the American Can Am series—that’s what killed Bruce McLaren, Can Am cars. Because they were twice as powerful and lighter. They were nutso. The point I was driving at was Shelby in ’64 went to Le Mans and beat Enzo, beat his 250 GTOs with Shelby’s Daytonas. And again, this is just car nerd stuff. I’m a big car nerd. I write for Car Nerd magazine. [Ed Note: Not actually, but that would be a funny title.] I’m just curious if any of that was in an earlier draft of the script, and you just thought this was the best way to tell the story.
Jim: We saw the best way to organize the story was about the effort to build the GT40 and go up against Ferrari. And that to the degree that you clogged the narrative with other important historical facts—but ones that got in the way of the best story—I’m pretty much a strict believer that the best version is the one that makes the most sense to the person who doesn’t know this history. Meaning that the real audience I’ve got to make a movie for, at the price point I’m making a movie like this, is for the people who don’t know anything about this story. And may even have a distaste for racing or this sport.
And that if I was making a movie that only played to racing fans, I would never get a chance to mount the spectacle we mounted in this movie. Meaning that it’s just economically unfeasible to make a movie that plays to only a very small segment of the male-dominated, predominantly male, crowd. By the way, an age group that rarely goes to the movies anymore.
And I had to make a movie that’s also going to appeal to 18-year-olds who may not watch any racing. And maybe lost on YouTube most days. So that’s the kind of appeal a picture has and the kind of pull on an audience. But when I made a movie about Johnny Cash, I made a movie specifically thinking about some man or woman who was dragged to see it and is like, “I don’t like country music. I don’t like Johnny Cash. He can’t sing.” That’s who I made the movie for.
I wanted to convert the nonbeliever. And that as I got into racing working on this picture, my goal became how do I convert the nonbeliever. Because the problem with trying to please the believer is actually also, separate from all socioeconomic reasons, is I’ll never please them. Because they’ve got their own thesis about everything. So that the reality is that they’re also the most finicky.
It would be like saying, “I’m going to make pasta for someone who only thinks about pasta, all day long.” And they’re going to always find something wrong. Why is this so al dente? Why didn’t you put ricotta here? This sauce doesn’t taste right. There’s too much concentrate here.” It’s like it’ll never be right for them. And so you’re really making it for the uninitiated, to invite them into this world. And take them on this ride.
Jonny: I’m asking this one because I was recently with Chris Theodore, who was the chief engineer for the second-generation Ford GT that came out in 2004. He just wrote a book about Shelby. He was really good friends with Shelby, plus a business relationship. And so he was asking me, he said, “I saw the trailer. Henry Ford never got in a car with Carroll Shelby.” And I’m like, “Well, when I saw the movie, I was like …”
Jim: Well, he did get in a car. I’m blanking on with who now. But he did get in. With Ken or with someone.
Jonny: Yeah, but Chris was so adamant. He’s like, “This movie’s terrible because Henry Ford would never climb in a car.”
Jim: A dramatization of a historical moment is exactly those words. Dramatization. Meaning that we are making this to keep you glued to your seats, laughing, crying, eyeballs on the screen. We are not making, nor could I make, anything like a nonfiction book. And by the way, I’m sure your friend would have arguments with half the books written about this period.
Jonny: Oh, he does. Trust me.
Jim: Yes. I know these folks. So I know that there’s no winning. It’s like your uncle at Thanksgiving. It’s like there’s no winning that guy. I’m going for the rest of the table.
Jonny: And I think you were very successful. Basically, what I said in my review, the first paragraph, I’m saying, “There’s a bunch of ‘mistakes.’” And then I said, “Now forget all that. This is not a documentary. This is Hollywood.”
Jim: It’s also what you have to leave out. Hollywood or not, you have to leave stuff out. As you know as a writer, three-quarters of writing is actually what you don’t say. And movies are no different. And the reality is that in telling a concise story, you have to leave stuff out. For people who are so into the world, there is nothing they’d leave out.
Should I discuss Shelby’s family still in Texas? Should I get into it? What should I get into? Where’s the limit? And everyone would have a different line to draw about what’s appropriate or not appropriate to get into or explicate about. And the trick is, in the end, you have to gather all the facts and then reprocess them through the prism of what would be like a fictional movie. How can I best tell this story?
And by the way, for historians, the West that we love in Westerns didn’t exist. Meaning this moment when there were freight trains and stagecoach robbers and train robbers and Native Americans and war, this existed maybe for three to four years in American history, when all these things coexisted. Yet somehow in movies, the American West—and books of the American West—you’d think there was a sustained period of 20, 30, 40, 50 years. Well, it didn’t exist!
It’s a very short period of time between the end of the Civil War and the dawning of the industrial revolution. And that brief window is where all Westerns took place. And so we’ve fabulized, kind of turned it into a fever dream. And that’s what I do for a living. Meaning I’m here to make a kind of fever dream out of this very great moment in history.
Jonny: Well, just back to Shelby’s family for a second. His grandson happened to be in the theater yesterday. And I just eavesdropped—he was talking to some people afterward. But he really liked it. He said it was a kind and fair portrayal of his father, and he said that he’s really glad that the end, you got in the line about “… finer than frog fur.” Because he was saying his dad couldn’t go 10 minutes without some kind of weird little Texas slang. He was saying the one he’s surprised didn’t make it was like, “This engine couldn’t pull a string out of a cat’s ass,” or something like that.
Jim: Yeah, that would give me … some of Shelby’s aphorisms would get me to a rated R pretty fast.
But yes. I mean we wanted to try and capture a flavor of all of these things. I think in many ways Matt really captured Shelby the fabulous, Shelby the storyteller. And in many ways, it depends when your story comes out how much you can get into it, but the unwinding of the movie very much becomes about Shelby coming to the end of words being useful. And usually they’re so useful to him. You know?
I mean, I always thought their relationship, Shelby and Miles, was like together they made a complete person. Like Shelby had heart disease and couldn’t race anymore, so Ken was the side of him who could still drive.
Jonny: Yeah, his surrogate.
Jim: And Ken was unbridled competitiveness, expertise, with unrelenting focus on the road. And Shelby had evolved into more of a salesman and someone who could turn anyone around. And Miles is terrible at that. He would insult people. He was almost kind of Asperger’s-y and was antisocial and couldn’t really function with people. And together they made a whole person. And I think that’s why, in many ways, it’s structured like a love story. That after Miles’ death, Shelby loses a part of himself.
Jonny: I agree. And I’ll just say, I’m really glad somebody made a movie about Ken Miles. And Phil Remington. Because the Shelby story is very well known. But the guys behind it, they never got their due.
Jim: Particularly Ken, I mean, particularly because of how things unspooled after ’66. He just got erased, you know? So it makes it all the more tragic, the decision at Ford, to slow him down. Because it was the last major race he drove.
Jonny: Can I ask a quick technical question? Only because I’ve been to Le Mans several times. Where did you film the Le Mans sections?
Jim: Well, it was a technical challenge. Obviously, Le Mans doesn’t look like it did in the mid ’60s anymore. So we couldn’t shoot it in France, because … well, I guess we could’ve shot it somewhere else in France. But that would be too difficult.
Jonny: Not at Circuit de la Sarthe.
Jim: But the village of Le Mans, we shot in Le Mans.
Jonny: Right. Recognized that.
Jim: And in fact, the organization that runs the race actually lent us period cars. You see some of them dressed in those scenes. Priceless vehicles that are dropped into the background of that scene.
But the actual shooting of the track itself was an incredible technical achievement by my crew and department heads all working together. Essentially the grand stand, the start and finish line and the grand stand, was in Agua Dulce, California. And we shot it on an abandoned runway. Because obviously if you’re going to shoot a movie about race cars, you got to have driving. You need a long strip of road you can own where you can drive cars in healthy excess of 120 miles an hour.
And then, yeah, you need a run up. You need the space for them to get (up to speed). No one ever thinks about that. They find some great street to shoot on, but they don’t think how you going to get up to speed or how you going to accelerate. And then the rest of the track, I wish I had a list. I may actually prepare it, of all these locations. But essentially there’s one racetrack in Georgia, rural Georgia, near Atlanta, where we built the Dunlop Bridge, and we did the next leg of the trip, after you pass the grandstand.
And then there’s another area six hours away in Georgia where we found a long, straight, super-straight road, which we had to repaint the lines to look European. And it was one straight road we could own. I mean you have to get a road. You remember logistically I have to find a country road in which everyone who lives on that road will not be driving, no kid will be riding down their driveway on a bicycle. Because we’re driving cars really fast down that road.
So we found a straightaway for the Mulsanne Straight in another area of Georgia. And we basically pieced together. But the part that at least, when I say a monumental challenge, the part that was so interesting is that every car has to have five different levels of dirt. Right? When they start the race and they’re perfectly clean and so on.
So we had five levels of dirt. And then when it rains, they go from level five for instance all the way back down to level two. Because they get cleaned by the rain. And then you have the light. Is it morning, midday, noon light? Or is it twilight or is it night? And is it raining or just the roads are wet? And what position are the cars in in relation to each other? So now imagine you have five or six locations, let’s say five in Georgia and one in California, and these cars have to be in the same configurations in relation to one another: who’s on the outside, who’s ahead by a half lane, who’s on the inside. In each of these location shot weeks and weeks apart, 3,000 miles apart, and it all has to cut. And that was a real challenge.
Jonny: We just shot a three-lap race that took place over 20 minutes. Then we had about six hours to fake parts of it. Same day, same cars. So yeah. That sounds like a logistical nightmare.
Jim: Well, there was just a lot of paperwork and practice videos and a lot of Matchbox cars on overhead drawings and all that stuff. And everyone playing together, having to work together.
Jonny: Final question. Has your personal relationship with the automobile changed after making this movie?
Jim: Yes. I definitely think that it made me think more about these conveyances that take us through our lives. And in many ways about them. Not just about the speed and the handling and what it’s like to hug the road and get behind the wheel of one of these cars that feels the road, is so attached to the road.
I mean, that’s the biggest thing you feel driving these cars, to me more than the speed, is the connection to the road. And that in our lives, driving SUVs and minivans and whatever we do with our families that we feel like we’re floating high above the road. These cars feel like you’re literally sitting on the road. And that, yes. But also other things. The way cars are a mask for us. The way we define ourselves.
Like I’ll be on the freeway and some car will cut in front of me. And later I’ll pull up next to this car, and I’ll see there’s like an 80-year-old woman driving it. And I’m going like, she’d never cut in front of me in the line at Dairy Queen, but she has no problem jamming herself in front of me on the freeway. And the permission that the body of a car gives us to be the person we want to be, it’s almost like a mask. A very large mask where we become—we can extend ourselves, we can be the worst of ourselves, we can be the best of ourselves. It made me think a lot about that.
Jonny: Interesting. And very cool. Personal note: I really, really enjoyed the film. Much more than I thought I would.
Jim: That’s great, Jonny. That makes me happy. That’s why we make them.
Jonny: It was one of those where I assumed it would be tough for me to watch because I’ve been writing about this topic my entire life and I know a lot of these people and their kids and I know how much it means to everyone. But I thought it was just a wonderful. What they did, it’s such a cool and important thing. And I’m just glad someone’s telling the story.
Jim: In the end, for the fans who are reasonable, the thing in the end is if you leave it all on the field. If it looks like you really tried your best, most people are going to see that you have respect for the sport and respect for the history.
And that’s, to me, the most important thing. I can’t get everything exactly as it was. Nor can I make everybody’s point of view on these historical events all get captured by the film. But I think that what I can do is demonstrate respect for what went down. And the importance of it. And also the kind of greater poetic meaning of it all. You know? And that’s what I hope people, the experts and the kind of hardcore racing folks, get out of it. Is they can see that we really gave a damn.
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Source: WORLD NEWS
