Penélope Cruz enters the room and greets each journalist. She arrives somewhat late, she has just met Richard Gere at the Madrid hotel where she is meeting with the press to present Ferrari, Michael Mann's latest film, which opens on Friday. A director, the one from Collateral, whom the actress portrays as very controlling – “he even chose the houses where the actors were going to stay during filming, he sent me selections of houses, I told him not to waste time with that, but he I wanted to and I went to see them in person” – but incredible with the actors: “I prefer a director like that to one who doesn't care about everything or who thinks whatever you do is right. He can sometimes be tough and a little scary, but he is very intelligent and has a sense of humor. And he treats us actors with patience, care and affection.”
The actress wears a Chanel that speaks for every thread and that contrasts with the sober clothes, of an Italian housewife of the fifties, that her character wears: Laura Garello, the wife of Enzo Ferrari, the great racing car builder, incarnated by Adam Driver. A woman crossed by the death of her son and systematically deceived by her husband, who even had a parallel family, but a tough woman in charge of the company's finances, who will suffer in this film one of her worst tragedies. . A role for which the Screen Actors Guild of the United States has nominated her for best supporting actress, competing with Jodie Foster and Emily Blunt. And he hates speed.
“I'm a very bad co-pilot, I control everything you do, everything seems wrong to me. I can't stand the speed. It was my first question to Michael Mann. I told him that I was very excited to work with him. 'But it's called Ferrari. You don't expect me to drive one at 200 per hour? Because I'm telling you no. 'You don't even have to get on one,' he told me. My sister was hit by a car while going to school on a pedestrian street. I remember perfectly that she was dressed in red, he knocked her down, she lost consciousness. My mother took her to the emergency room. I realized over the years what trauma she had from seeing my sister unconscious and going to class without knowing if she was okay,” she recalls.
And he explains how he has empathized with Laura, a character that everyone hated in Modena, the city of Ferrari. “A lot was known about Enzo but almost nothing about her. I had to discover things, the little there was in a couple of books, visiting the apartment where she lived, the room where she slept. She impressed me. I understood what level of acute depression she lived with. And the couple's doctor, a close friend of theirs, gave me crucial information: love letters between the two. He surprised me how much love, affection and respect there was in them when everything had already happened to them, even that he started another family and had another son and all of Modena knew about it except Laura. I was filled with anger and the need to give a voice to a woman whose little she had was wanted by many men in the company because she was in charge of the numbers,” the actress recalls.
And he highlights that in Modena there were people who “believed they had the authority to give their opinion about Laura because they had seen her three times in their life and felt that Ferrari was something of their own, and they told me that she was scary, that she was a bug, that she was crazy. There was no compassion, they preferred that part of Ferrari's history remain buried. But this lady has a story that represents that of so many women and not only at that time in Italy, but now also anywhere in the world. “We all know cases like this and it is fortunate to be able to give them a voice.”
Asked about him
