There have been plenty of great car chases in cinema history, but you can count the number of great movies about driving on the fingers of one leather glove. James Mangold's Le Mans '66 (still known as Ford v Ferrari in the US) aims to change all that. The story of how Ford, then something of an underdog on the racing scene, took on the supremacy of Ferrari at the 1966 Le Mans 24 hour race, it stars Christian Bale and Matt Damon as the driver-manager combo who hoped to propel them to glory. Here, Mangold breaks down the film’s first teaser for us.
THE PERFECT LAP
We first meet Christian Bale’s Brummie racer, Ken Miles, and his young son, Peter, as they get to familiarise themselves with a racetrack, pre-race. Think of it as an early version of Martin Brundle’s gridwalk. "Can you see the perfect lap?" Ken asks his son. "Most people can’t."
"There’s a huge component of this sport that’s about psychology and a man’s confidence and connection to this machine," says Mangold. "Ken is saying that he’s always trying to keep his eye on this perfect lap which, if executed, makes his opponents irrelevant. If he can strip himself of all the distractions, all he has to do is go faster than any man has ever gone and he will win."
MILES AHEAD
Le Mans '66 is based on a true story and, as such, Ken Miles was a real person, a former tank mechanic and operator who built the cars he raced. Mangold jumped at the chance to work with Bale for the first time since 3:10 To Yuma. "I never get to see Christian playing a Brit," he laughs. "It’s rare that I get to see him in his own natural voice and playing someone so close to his own natural soul. He’s effervescent and glorious in the film."
GOOD CARROLL SHELBY
Miles is recruited, nay, persuaded to throw his lot in with Ford by Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), a former Le Mans champion driver who had to retire from the business due to heart trouble, and then "found a way as a hustler and a designer", working with his own team, Shelby American, and then taking on the job of managing the Ford campaign for Le Mans. "He never left the racetrack," says Mangold. "That’s why he took this assignment for Ford."
MILES AND SHELBY
The trailer makes clear, in both a warm scene at a diner and a moment when an enraged Miles punches Shelby, that the relationship between the two men runs the gamut of emotions. "The connection between these two men, one in the pit watching, the other driving, was one of deep admiration and love," says Mangold, "but contaminated by the natural longing that Shelby must have felt to want to be in the car himself. But they were brothers, believing in each other, picking one up when the other is down. It’s a film about friendship, more than anything else."
MUST GO FASTER
But it’s also a film about racing. And going fast. Very fast. Faster than pretty much anyone had gone before, in the history of motorsport. Shelby says "it ain’t about speed", and while that was partially true, it didn’t hurt that the sport had entered a new era. "In the mid '60s there were huge technological changes occurring," explains Mangold. "It became about how do you control and manage this much power? They had found a way to build insanely powerful engines. It was just, how do I sit on top of it and not die?"
FLAME OUT
Which wasn’t always, if ever, in the drivers’ control. In one scene, we see Miles being helped away from wreckage. The danger to these men was very real, something Mangold was keen to suggest and explore. "People are dying to your right and to your left. People lose control. A single washer or bolt not being tightened is the end of a car in a 24 hour race," adds Mangold. "It’s the ultimate test of engineering as well as driving as well as the ability just to stay fucking awake."
RACING FOR REAL
Mangold is no fan of CG for the sake of it. He, after all, is the person who famously railed against the notion of a "city-block destroying CG fuckathon" in his script for Logan. And while there are visual effects aplenty in Le Mans '66, they’re mainly to help conjure a sense of period, or to extend the track on which Bale, Damon, and the coterie of top drivers Mangold assembled for the film, strutted their funky stuff. And strut it they did. "We had a litany of vehicles, we got out on tracks, and we raced 'em," says Mangold. "Christian drove. Matt drove. The entirety of the races are analogue. It’s really physical, which was the whole point for me. There is still something unique about that which is real."
HENRY FORD II
Tracy Letts, the great playwright/actor, is Henry Ford II in the movie. And, as those numerals after his surname might suggest, this is a character struggling with the notion of being a living sequel; grappling with an enormous shadow – that of his father, Henry Ford. "He is very much a legacy running a company,” says Mangold. “HHe was running the company at a time of tremendous change post-war, when the automobile business was radically changing and Ford's dominance was threatened. People wanted to be driving what James Bond was driving. Porsches, Aston Martins, Ferraris. Fords were no longer the aspirational vehicles. They didn’t know how to get back into the game of being sexy or aspirational." Beating Ferrari at Le Mans would be a good start.
MEET MOLLIE MILES
Blink and you might miss Catriona Balfe's Mollie Miles, the wife of Ken. Which might trigger fears that Mollie might be another standard movie wife, listening to the radio fearfully for updates of her husband. Mangold is aware of this giant, juddering cliché and is keen to avoid it. "She understood what her husband did. She had been with him since before the war," he says. "She knows exactly who she married and wants him to fulfil his own dream, which he’s entering middle age having not had a chance to fulfil. She knows it haunts him. It’s a destiny for him on the track that he’s never had to fulfil. It’s a really unique relationship. She’s fabulous in the movie."
TAKING FORD FOR A RIDE
The trailer ends on a humorous note with Shelby, behind the wheel, taking a terrified Ford for a little spin. "We all have these Trumpish characters that we know that are our bosses, our overseers, who don’t quite get what the struggle in the trenches really is," laughs Mangold. "I do think there’s a universal thrill to making your boss do your job for a day. And having them suddenly encounter, in this case, the hair trigger between life and death that you exist on when you’re driving one of these hulking beasts at 200 miles per hour." We’ve all been there.
Le Mans '66 (AKA Ford v. Ferrari) is released in the UK on 15 November 2019.
