We’ve seen the film. Now a new archive has been launched that takes us behind the scenes and reveals the making of Michael Mann Ferrari.

The Enzo Ferrari biopic, released on Netflix, stars Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz and Shailene Woodley and focuses on the events leading up to and during the last Mille Miglia in 1957. The project, which took more than 30 years to make, became a personal quest for the influential filmmaker and car enthusiast Mann.

Now the director has chosen Ferrari to start an archive of behind-the-scenes content for more of his films. Whatever your critical opinion Ferrariand despite this publication receiving mixed reception, Mann’s impressive and easy-to-navigate website certainly demonstrates the dedicated care, attention, and genuine love for the subject matter that he has personally invested in and passed on to the team around him.

It’s a maze of detail and offers a treasure trove for film students and filmmaking fans, plus there’s plenty for racing enthusiasts too.

Twenty mini-documentaries that capture the process of how (and why) a Ferrari is made are available to watch behind a $65 (£53) paywall. These include Mann and his actors’ work on character development from rehearsals to filming, details on set design, camera and artistic strategies, copies of heavily annotated scripts, notes on plot and character development, meticulous scene-by-scene descriptions and, particularly interestingly, how the replica cars featured in the film were made.

As Mann says in one of the videos, using real Ferraris and Maseratis for the action scenes wasn’t an option because “any two of them could have financed the whole movie.” Others, like the Ferrari 801 Formula 1 car that depicted the brutal murder of Eugenio Castellotti and played by the surprisingly talented Marino Franchitti, no longer exist today. The cars were built to perfection using 3D scanning, research from original design drawings, and even a toy model. Footage of craftsmen at Campana in Modena hand-forging aluminum to create body shapes shows just how much work went into such a project. Even the crashed cars had to be built this way, so the damage done to them would look real.