Adam Driver and Patrick Dempsey attended the Venice Film Festival on Thursday night to celebrate the release of Ferrari, director Michael Mann’s new film about the life and struggles of Ferrari founder and Italian icon Enzo Ferrari. At the press conference for the film’s screening, Driver and Mann spoke about the film, aiming for a Christmas release, and the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strikes.
Ferrari and its cast and crew were permitted to promote with an interim agreement from SAG-AFTRA due to the production company Neon being an independent company. Many other major American films, such as Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, were pulled from the festival lineup because of the ongoing strikes.
“Why is it that a smaller distribution company like Neon or STX International can meet the dream demands of what SAG is asking for in this pre-negotiation, but a big company like Netflix and Amazon can’t?” Driver said of the strikes. “Every time people from SAG go and support a movie that has agreed to these terms– 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. So when this opportunity came up, it seemed like– understanding the interim agreement– a no-brainer for all of these reasons of why you want to support your union.”
“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,” Michael Mann said. “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.”
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