Adam Driver at the 80th Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, August 31, 2023
| Photo Credit: GUGLIELMO MANGIAPANE/REUTERS
Actor Adam Driver’s film Ferrari, directed by Michael Mann, is premiering at the Venice Film Festival, and the actor in a press conference today called out Netflix and Amazon for not meeting the demands of SAG-AFTRA, the striking actors’ labour union.
“I’m very happy to be here to support this movie, and the truncated schedule that we had to shoot it and the efforts of all the incredible actors working on it and the crew. But also, I’m very proud to be here to be a visual representation of a movie that’s not part of the AMPTP and to promote the SAG leadership directive which is an effective tactic which is the interim agreement,” Variety quoted Driver.
“The other objective is obviously to say, why is it that a smaller distribution company like Neon and STX International can meet the dream demands of what SAG is asking for — this is pre-negotiations — the dream version of SAG’s wishlist, but a big company like Netflix and Amazon can’t? And every time people from SAG go and support a movie that has met the terms of the interim agreement, it just makes it more obvious that these people are willing to support the people that they collaborate with, and the others are not,” he added.
Driver is attending the premiere as Ferrari has been exempted by the unions since it was made outside the studio system.
“Ferrari got made because the people who worked on Ferrari made it by forgoing large sectors of salaries, in the case of Adam and myself. It was not made by a big studio — no big studio wrote us a check. And that’s why we’re here, standing in solidarity,” said director Mann as quoted byVariety.
The biographical film has Driver play automotive tycoon Enzo Ferrari and it also stars Penélope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, Sarah Gadon, Gabriel Leone, Jack O’Connell and Patrick Dempsey among others. Ferrari is adapted from Brock Yates’s 1991 biography, Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine.
The official synopsis of the film reads, “Ferrari is set during the summer of 1957. Behind the spectacle and danger of 1950’s Formula 1, ex-racer, Enzo Ferrari, is in crisis. Bankruptcy stalks the company he and his wife, Laura, built from nothing ten years earlier. Their tempestuous marriage struggles with the mourning for their one son. Ferrari struggles with the acknowledgement of another. His drivers’ lust to win pushes them out to the edge. He wagers all in a roll of the dice on one race, the treacherous 1,000-mile race across Italy, the iconic Mille Miglia.”
The film will get a wide theatrical release in the US on December 25.
Meanwhile, here’s the teaser of Ferrari: