DESERT STALLION

Crashing Ferrari’s film shoot

TIME is money on the set of a big-budget motion picture, so I’m determined not to waste a moment. I’m seated in the star of the show, a ‘Rosso Fuoco’ coloured Ferrari California T, roof open to a cobalt outback sky, waiting for instruction from the production’s creative director, an infectiously enthusiastic chap named Ben Garland.

To deliver an Oscar-worthy performance, I figure I need to fully understand my character; I need Ben to guide me as to which acting great I should be channelling. Should I be a brooding, edgy, early-de Niroin- Taxi Driver type, looking in the car’s rear-vision mirror, demanding to know who’s talking to me? Or should I be more like Russell Crowe’s Maximus Meridius in Gladiator and be all steely and manly as I prepare to unleash hell on the Cali T? Ben gives me a half-smile, but I see pity in his eyes, like he’s dealing with Forrest Gump’s retarded brother. “Just ring the crap out it, roost lots of dirt, make heaps of noise. That’ll be fine, Ash.”

There was a time, I’m sure of it, when thrashing the bejesus out of a half-million-dollar Italian thoroughbred on dirt roads, bouncing it off the rev limiter, filling its hand-crafted custom interior with talc-fine dirt, was not encouraged. Actually, by ‘not encouraged’, I mean it would see you banned from Ferrari press cars, dismissed from your magazine, and possibly arse-thrashed by a rattan-wielding publisher.

Curiously, though, when expensive cinema cameras and a production team are introduced, that whole premise is flipped on its head. So I do as I’m instructed, wringing everything from the Cali’s twin-turbo V8, lighting up the red LEDS on its gorgeous carbonfibre wheel and hanging her ample rump as far sideways as I dare. An epic dust storm follows, most of which ends up in the cabin, surely blunting the California’s powerto-weight ratio just a little. Everyone applauds, as if I’d just won Le Mans while simultaneously reversing climate change. It’s official: I like the movie business.

Of course, big dirt slides and making lots of noise in someone else’s Ferrari is great fun, and especially easy for me as I’d just arrived to this remote clay pan about 40km north-west of Broken Hill. For the toiling crew, however, this is day four of a shoot that has already taken in Sydney’s city streets at night, the Royal National Park down south, and the iconic Sea Cliff Bridge in the northern Illawarra region.

It’s all part of a “visual narrative” created by Garland and now being painstakingly brought to life by him and his eight-strong crew. I’m just here to do some driving – although it quickly becomes apparent that important continuity issues mean that’s being largely covered by someone with a far less offensive head – leaving me to slide around for the shots where the driver is obscured, ask a few dumb questions and generally get in the way.

The scale of the project is intriguing, though. It began as a storyboard created by Garland showing the journey of car and driver through some of Australia’s more visually iconic locations, intended to show the Cali T making the transition from a city pad, out on the open coast road, and finally to the red-dirt outback.

Garland is a warm, engaging chap who talks a lot about “telling stories that have real heart.” He’s friends with Baz Lurhmann, he tells me, and wants this Ferrari piece to visually have a similarly expansive, lush feel. I nod understandingly, but all I can think of is Hugh and Nicole in Australia and hope Ben and I don’t come to blows over ‘creative differences’.

“I wanted it to have a bit of a Batman feel, initially, with our driver leaving his lair in the city,” Ben explains. “The harbour bridge and the cityscape are all part of it,” he says, “but location-wise, the outback will be the real hero…”

I’m here to do some driving, ask a few dumb questions and generally get in the way