by Wallace Wyss –
It’s in the November issue. GQ’s writer, Stuart McGurk, starts out telling the reader that this movie “tells the true tale of the grudge match between Ford and Ferrari in the Sixties and how the battleground became the 1966 Le Mans 24 Hours race, where an upstart Ford team led by Texan Carroll Shelby (Damon) and driven by the British-born professional pain-in-the-ass-genius Ken Miles (Bale) took on the might of Italian motor racing.”
McGurk also characterizes it as “variously, a high-octane, old-school racing movie, a knockabout buddy comedy, a heart-wrenching drama and an Oscar-bait biopic all rolled into one.” While he describes it as a “must see” he doesn’t use the phrase “Oscar potential.”
It sounds as if the two stars both hammed it up to see who can get the most attention on screen. Writes McGurk: “If Damon is exactly the guy you’d expect – the everyman’s everyman, funny, chummy, an anecdote tombola and absolutely the guy you’d love to have a beer or ten with – Bale is not at all what you’d imagine from his brooding roles, legendary dedication and propensity to gorge or starve until the character’s waistline fits. He’s wide-eyed, a little goofy, a little silly and, unlike other transatlantic Brits whose accents have settled somewhere mid-trip, Bale has, if anything, become even more British – and, dare we say it, a bit cockney – with the time spent away, as if British Bale is a part he’s still perfecting and hasn’t nailed quite yet. We start with how they met, but then most of the questions never seemed to matter anyway, as it turns out each was on starters’ orders, and then: we’re off.”
Bale confided to the GQ reporter that he was a bit put off with director James Mangold saying he was already a lot like Miles who comes off as a bit of an A-hole at first: “Like, someone who’s been called an arsehole throughout the whole film! I don’t know how to take that. He sent me the script. And you’re the last person to recognize any relationship to yourself. And after a while – I’ve known Jim for over a decade, we worked together back in 2006 [on Western 3:10 To Yuma] – he was like, “Christian, the character’s just you. Don’t you get that? It’s you, you difficult wanker!” That’s how he said it to me. “You know it already!”
In preparing for the film Damon watched documentaries. He told McGurk: “There’s a lot of documentaries that have been made about this and a lot of footage that exists just on YouTube. And I always found it interesting that every time I stumbled upon a clip on YouTube of Carroll Shelby talking about Ken Miles, he would get choked up a little bit, even as an old man. It would just catch his throat and he’d say something like, “Ken Miles is a hell of an engineer.” It was quite a loss for all those guys.”
(Editor’s Note: Miles was killed testing a predecessor to the Ford Mk. IV at Riverside)
Read the GQ interview here.
Let us know what you think in the Comments.
THE AUTHOR: Wallace Wyss will be reporting on a preview in November. He is the author of SHELBY The Man, the Cars The Legend, available at Enthusiast Books.
Photo compliments of GQ
Here is the cover of this GQ British edition issue. It uses a different photo without the Cobra.