At the end of February, La Tribune released a short interview of Patrick Dempsey where the actor talks about working on Ferrari. Read the translation below.

Meeting with Patrick Dempsey, actor and race driver

You play the role of Piero Taruffi in Michael Mann’s Ferrari, which will be released on March 8 on Amazon Prime [in France]. Were you able to drive the real cars from that era in the film?

We only had an original Ferrari 335 S, Taruffi’s actually, which now belongs to an Englishman. We used it to record the sound of the V12 but couldn’t drive with it during filming, because this car is far too expensive (auctioned off for 32 million euros in 2016). We therefore had to build replicas for the race and especially for crash scenes.

What were your impressions driving these cars?

It was scary, because I’m used to modern racing cars, with a roll bar, harness and full face helmet. But it allowed me to understand the staggering risks that pilots took at the time. During filming, we drove the cars at full speed between 250 and 260 km/h to really give the viewer the impression of speed. I also thank the production for allowing me to drive the car myself alongside the stunt drivers. Steve McQueen was unable to drive in the film Le Mans [1971] for insurance reasons.

What was it like to do the Carrera Panamericana race in Mexico, which you took part in last October?

I was able to do this race in a Porsche 718 GT4 RS thanks to TAG Heuer. It was all the more fantastic because Piero Taruffi, my character in Ferrari, won this race in 1951 in a Ferrari 212. To this day, the Carrera Panamericana is the closest thing to open road races like the Mille Miglia, the Italian race in which Taruffi has participated 16 times and which he last won in 1957.

As a TAG Heuer ambassador, what watch did you get to wear in Ferrari?

I really fell in love with my character. I discovered that he had a little leather pocket on his wrist to protect the timer which allowed him to know where he was from stage to stage during the Mille Miglia. I also had a small identical pocket sewn to protect the vintage watch that we found with the curators of the TAG Heuer museum. It was a beautiful reference 3336NT chronograph wristwatch from the 1950s with black dial and tachymeter scale, which would have been a perfect watch for Piero. Unfortunately, I had to return it at the end of filming.

With productions like Ferrari, but also Race for Glory: Audi vs. Lancia about rallies or the miniseries Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 Story on Disney + with Keanu Reeves, can we talk about a trend of racing?

I think that thanks to the success of James Mangold’s film Ford v Ferrari [released in 2019, with $225 million at the box office for a budget of $98 million] the studios understood that it was possible to make money with stories about motorsport. And then there was the hit series Formula 1 – Drive to Survive on Netflix. Before this series which started in 2019, there was no incarnation, people only saw the car as a moving object on the screen and on a track. Since then, Formula 1 has become the number one motorsport in the USA, because the public has a better understanding of who the protagonists are, the different teams and the workings of the discipline. This creates a new appetite. For instance, Brad Pitt is preparing his film Apex about the champion Lewis Hamilton, and there are other projects underway.

---

Source: https://www.latribune.fr/culture-lifestyle/la-formule-1-suscite-un-appetit-nouveau-patrick-dempsey-acteur-et-pilote-de-course-991329.html