LE MANS ’66
Le Mans Õ66 director James Mangold on the characters that drive his racing drama
James Mangold on his new racing movie. Rejected title: ‘A Vroom With A View’.
IN 2011, JAMES Mangold took a meeting at 20th Century Fox. He was there to pitch to direct a hot screenplay (by Jason Keller, Jez Butterworth and John-henry Butterworth) called Ford V. Ferrari, about the epic showdown between two of the greatest car companies in history, culminating in the Le Mans 24-hour endurance race of 1966. “I had been stalking this story for eight or nine years,” he recalls, chuckling. “But they were like, ‘Not gonna happen.’”
But at that very same meeting he was handed the script for The Wolverine, the Japanese-set X-men spin-off that needed a director, quick-smart. Mangold read it, liked it, signed on, made it, followed it up with Logan. That gave him the clout to steer Le Mans ’66, as it’s now known, into pole position, with Christian Bale as Ken Miles, the lead driver for Ford, and Matt Damon as Carroll Shelby, the man who oversees the ultimate racing underdog story.
In fact, the reason why the movie remained stationary in Mangold’s mind garage for so long came down to that central relationship. “Where the people who were trying to tell this story in the past may have fallen down is that there are so many interesting avenues to explore,” he tells Empire. “But it was always my focus to do Butch and Sundance with these two guys, who were like brothers. Very different from one another, but connected through the purity of competition and their skill level, which was unmatched.”
As Miles, a Brummie driver who relocated to the States, Mangold instantly thought of his old friend, and 3:10 To Yuma star, Bale. “He’s a pure actor in the way that Ken Miles was a pure racer,” says Mangold. “It’s rare that
I get to see Christian in his own natural voice and playing someone so close to his natural soul. He’s effervescent in the film.”