Director Michael Mann‘s love of James Cameron’s Avatar is still as strong as ever, with the director calling the 2009 epic sci-fi film one of his four favorite films recently.
In a recent interview with Letterboxd, Mann was asked to list his four favorite films, and among 1925’s Battleship Potemkin, 1950’s The Asphalt Jungle, and 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mann listed Avatar as the fourth and final film.
This isn’t the first time that Mann has praised Cameron’s film. During the 2012 Sight & Sound poll, Mann listed Avatar as one of his 10 favorite movies ever, and heaped praise on it at the time.
“Upon the foundation of an entirely invented biosystem, Avatar is a brilliant synthesis of mythic tropes, with debts to Lévi-Strauss and Frazier’s The Golden Bough. It soars because, simply, it stones and transports you,” wrote Mann at the time.
Mann’s latest film is Ferrari, starring Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz, and Shailene Woodley
“It is the summer of 1957. Behind the spectacle of Formula 1, ex-racer Enzo Ferrari (Driver) is in crisis,” reads the synopsis for the film. “Bankruptcy threatens the factory he and his wife, Laura (Cruz) built from nothing 10 years earlier. Their volatile marriage has been battered by the loss of their son, Dino, a year earlier. Ferrari struggles to acknowledge his son Piero with Lina Lardi (Woodley). Meanwhile, his drivers’ passion to win pushes them to the edge as they launch into the treacherous 1,000-mile race across Italy, the Mille Miglia.”
Besides Driver, Ferrari’s cast includes Penélope Cruz as Laura Ferrari, Shailene Woodley as Lina Lardi, Gabriel Leone as Alfonso de Portago, Sarah Gadon as Linda Christian, Jack O’Connell as Peter Collins, and Patrick Dempsey as Piero Taruffi.
Mann produces and directs Ferrari from a script by Troy Kennedy Martin. The film is based on Brock Yates’ 1991 biography, Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine. Ferrari premiered at the 2023 Venice Film Festival and later screened at the 2023 New York Film Festival.
