Gilles Villeneuve: The Movie

Ferrari, the man, the myth and the movie

Piero Ferrari, son of the Grande Vecchio Enzo Ferrari, admits that over the years he resolutely resisted the approaches of filmmakers who wanted to make a film about his father's extraordinary life, until he met popular Italian television actor Sergio Castellitto and Producer Angelo Rizzoli.

Castellitto, he decided, was the right person to interpret the very complex role of his father. So Rizzoli joined established international Director Carlo Carlei and Director of Photography Gino Sgreva, AIC, who had worked together on the extremely successful television movie Padre Pio, to make Ferrari, the highest budget television movie ever produced by Mediatrade, the fiction production arm of Mediaset, Italy's popular private television network.

Ferrari opens in the mid 1980s with an elderly Enzo Ferrari still managing the company's races division, though for him times have irrevocably changed. The company has been sold to Fiat, the Rossa is in crisis and the last Formula 1 Championship Trophy had been awarded several years before. In a mood of deep reflection, Ferrari talks to a journalist (whose identity is revealed at the end of the movie) about his long life, which had but one focus- a passion and dream to race cars and then to build the fastest car in the world.

Numerous evocative flashbacks form the hub of this fascinating two-part, one hundred minute cinematic television movie about the man and the myth. Ferrari was filmed in English in Maranello, the real location of the Rossa, as well as Modena, Bologna and Ferrara, and the autodrome 'Enzo e Dino Ferrari' of Imola; all interiors were shot in Rome. (to read the all article)

Screenshots of Gilles Villeneuve's scenes