Le Mans

Le Mans (1971)

Steve McQueen takes you for a drive in the country. The country is France. The drive is at 200 MPH!

Filmed during the annual 24-hour endurance race at Le Mans, Michael Delaney is a Porsche driver haunted by the memory of an accident at the previous year's race in which a competing driver was killed. Delaney also finds himself increasingly infatuated with the man's widow.

Date of release
1971-06-23
TMDB
6.8 / 10 (286)
Runtime
1h 44m
Genres
Action, Drama
Director
Lee H. Katzin

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: $7.6M

Le Mans is a 1971 film depicting a fictional 24 Hours of Le Mans auto race starring Steve McQueen and directed by Lee H. Katzin. The film began as a John Sturges project, before he was replaced during filming. It features actual footage captured during the 1970 race held the previous June.

Production

Le Mans was filmed on location on the Le Mans circuit between June and November 1970, including during that season's actual 24 Hours of Le Mans race in mid-June. McQueen had intended to race a Porsche 917 together with Jackie Stewart, but the #26 entry was not accepted. Instead, he is depicted as starting the race in the blue #20 Gulf-Porsche 917K driven by Jo Siffert and Brian Redman.

The Porsche 908/2, which McQueen had previously co-driven with Peter Revson to a second place in the 12 Hours of Sebring, was entered in the race by McQueen's Solar Productions, complete with heavy movie cameras capturing actual racing footage.

Additional footage shot after the race used actual Porsche 917 and Ferrari 512s in competition liveries. In the crash scenes, comparatively expendable technologically obsolete Lola T70 chassis were fitted with replica Porsche and Ferrari bodywork.

Although depicted as the factory-backed Scuderia Ferrari team, the 512s used were borrowed from Belgian Ferrari distributor Jacques Swaters, after Enzo Ferrari balked at supplying cars due to the script's Porsche team victory. David Piper, driving a camera car 917K that had a camera seat removed, lost a part of a leg as a result of a crash during filming.

McQueen had wanted to employ Christopher Chapman's new multi-dynamic image technique in the film, as had been done at his instigation with The Thomas Crown Affair, in which he starred in 1968. Chapman advised against it, much to McQueen's disappointment; in Chapman's words, "It was much too big a film, with too many writers; it wouldn't work that way."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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