Director James Mangold talks
Oscar-nominated Ford v Ferrari
By Iain Blair

Filmmaker James Mangold has been screenwriting, producing and directing for years. He has made films about cops (Cop Land), country legends (Walk the Line), cowboys (3:10 to Yuma) and superheroes (The Wolverine, Logan), and he’s tackled mental illness (Girl Interrupted) as well.

Now he has turned his attention to race car drivers and Formula 1 with Twentieth Century Fox’s Ford v Ferrari, which has earned Mangold an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The film also received nods for its editing, sound editing and sound mixing.

The high-octane drama was inspired by a real-life friendship that forever changed racing history. In 1959, Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) is on top of the world after winning the most difficult race in all of motorsports, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. But his greatest triumph is followed quickly by a crushing blow — the fearless Texan is told by doctors that a grave heart condition will prevent him from ever racing again.

Endlessly resourceful, Shelby reinvents himself as a car designer and salesman, working out of a warehouse space in Venice Beach with a team of engineers and mechanics that includes hot-tempered test driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale). A champion British race car driver and a devoted family man, Miles is brilliant behind the wheel, but he’s also blunt, arrogant and unwilling to compromise.

Mangold’s below-the-line talent, many of whom have collaborated with the director before, includes Academy Award-nominated DP Phedon Papamichael; film editors Michael McCusker, ACE, and Andrew Buckland; VFX supervisor Olivier Dumont; and composers Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders.

I spoke with Mangold about making the film and his workflow.

You seem to love exploring very different subject matter in each of your films.
Yes, and I do every movie like a sci-fi film — meaning inventing a new world that has its own rules, customs, language, laws of physics and so on, and you need to set it up so the audience understands and they get it all. It’s like being a world-builder, and I feel every film should have that, as you’re entering this new world, whether it’s Walk the Line or The French Connection. And the rules and behavior are different from our own universe, and that’s what makes the story and characters interesting to me.

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