After the commercial and critical success of Logan, director and screenwriter James Mangold is set to take on the racing world for his next film.
Variety reports that Mangold will be directing a film about the rivalry that developed in the 1960s between Ford and Ferrari. While casting is a long way away, Variety’s sources have Christian Bale and Matt Damon as top targets to play the lead roles.
The story would center around legendary car designer Carroll Shelby and driver Ken Miles, working for Ford to try and defeat Ferrari. As the story went, Henry Ford II tried to buy Ferrari and after Enzo Ferrari didn’t sell, Ford went on a kind of revenge kick and hired Shelby and Miles to design a car that was dedicated to racing at Le Mans to try and topple Ferrari’s dominance at the legendary 24 hour race. That creation was the GT40 and has been a part of Ford’s racing stable for over 50 years.
Mangold is interested in having Bale play Miles while Damon play Shelby. Ironically, Bale was supposed to be in a film about Enzo Ferrari but had to drop out due to having to undergo unhealthy weight gain for the role.
Now that it’s been over 50 years, the Ford vs. Ferrari rivalry has been given new life. After the success of Ron Howard’s film Rush, about the classic 1976 Formula 1 championship battle between James Hunt and Niki Lauda, Mangold is set to follow in that path of classic racing storytelling.
[Variety/Photo: Ivan Nikolov/WENN.com]
