F1: The Movie revved up its awards campaign with a packed event at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, where the film’s creators and stars, including Brad Pitt and Damson Idris, shared the spotlight with Formula One vehicles. The race cars were on display throughout the event space, giving attendees an opportunity to see the actual vehicles the crew worked with during filming.
Director and producer Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick) said that F1 would likely not have happened without the involvement of Lewis Hamilton, the record-breaking F1 driver who also served as a producer on the project. “That was the secret ingredient of this film, and we could not have made it without his help every step of the way,” Kosinski said during the post-screening Q&A. “We would go through the script line-by-line after race weekend on Zoom calls, getting every turn, every gear correct.” Not only did Hamilton weigh on the film’s technical aspects, Kosinski said, but also what he called “the more spiritual side of what he does,” crediting him with inspiring the scene on the balcony where Brad’s character tells Kerry Condon‘s character why he drives. “A lot of that came out of this really kind of personal discussion we had with Lewis one day where he told us about that, and he said to me, ‘The car disappears,’” Kosinski recalled. “I instantly knew how to shoot that scene, and that is an amazing gift you can only get from someone who lives and breathes it every day.”
More from Gold Derby
Hamilton said getting being involved with the film was an “unbelievable” experience and his “biggest dream.” But what mattered more to him was how true-to-life the film is. “If you look at a lot of the movies before that filmed racing, they just didn’t quite capture it or keep you on the edge of your seat,” he said. “If you look at [movies from] back in the day, from the McQueen days where the guy is laying on the front of the car and filming, to now what you’re seeing with the incredible evolution of technology with Apple, the new cameras they designed, to capture different angles. … The footage we have from the cars is better than what you see watching Formula One.”
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer stressed how uniquely difficult portraying the intricacies of the sport onscreen proved to be. “There are only 10 teams, two drivers to each team, and it’s the only sport where your teammate is your competitor,” he explained. Capturing that reality was paramount to the producer. “When I say [it’s] real, Brad Pitt and Damson practice drove for four months, with Lewis overseeing part of it to make sure that they could drive these cars,” he said.
The actors drove on real race tracks at the same speeds the professionals do, which added another layer of stress. “The scariest thing for me as a producer [is] you don’t want anybody to get hurt, and the scariest track for us was Vegas, because in Vegas there is no runoff,” Bruckheimer said. “It’s a street track, so if these guys miss a turn, they go right into the wall. But fortunately, they practice so much and work so hard that they made every turn.”
Pitt’s character, Sonny Hayes, is the comeback kid in F1, which Pitt believes is why audiences have connected to him so deeply. “I think the Sonny Hayes character is a redemption story,” he said. “We’ve all stumbled in our lives. We’ve all had times where we’ve had to pick ourselves up when it seemed impossible, the odds seemed impossible, and get back in the fight. That’s when we grow, that’s when we see the most growth, and that’s when we see the most rewards as individuals. So that would be my guess because that’s what appealed to me about it.”
Another relatable element of the high-octane project is the relationship between Idris’ character, Joshua, and his mother (played by Emmy winner and Ted Lasso star Sarah Niles), who ends up advocating for her son’s well-being when he’s preoccupied with winning. “I’ve had to apologize to my real mother plenty of times,” Idris joked. “The whole experience with Sarah was so effortless. Her energy and aura, as the kids say today, instantly puts you there.”
Niles, for her part, got to establish her character with help from Hamilton. “One of the things [Joseph] also said to me is you had a writer overlooking the character, and I was like, ‘There’s only two scenes in this film with this character [at the time]. You’ve got a writer specifically overlooking this character?’” she recalled. “That’s when you understand the levels of how you create the whole story. … I didn’t really understand until I watched the movie just how much heart is in the movie.”
Production took place during actual Formula One competitions, which meant the actors were under tremendous pressure to nail their lines. “Because we wanted to shoot this film live at the Grand Prix while the events are going on, often we’d only get a few minutes,” Kosinski said. “There were times where I’d tell Brad and Damson, ‘We’ll be lucky if we get three takes at this.’ Especially during that opening scene at Silverstone, we actually shot three scenes back to back in about 15 minutes. We spent two weeks rehearsing, blocking, and we did it with a stopwatch to show the FIA that we could actually pull off what we were going to do, and then you add 100,000 to 150,000 spectators into it and the chaos of the start of an F1 race, and we’re trying to shoot a movie, and [the actors] know they’ve got two takes to get it and whatever they do is going to end up in the movie. That’s the price you pay for making a movie like this.”
Much of the footage in the film was captured on cameras specially created by Apple, which provided such high-speed video that Formula One is trying to use them for their broadcasts, according to Kosinski. “The cameras to shoot this film did not exist when we started. We had to invent them ourselves, so we started with the system that we developed for Top Gun: Maverick, and we worked very closely with Sony, my DP, Claudio Miranda, and his whole camera department, who are all geniuses,” he said. “[We were] printing parts overnight in our hotel rooms to make this all work. We developed a new camera system about a third of the size that was a prototype. Sony built 20 prototypes for us, and those were the tiny cameras mounted onto these cars.”
Bruckheimer promised it’s “really [the actors] driving,” even with all of the technology surrounding them. “It’s not like there’s a stunt driver in front of them or they’re being towed by another vehicle, which is typically how you would make a movie like this,” he said.
The filmmakers then handed over all of the footage to editor Stephen Mirrione, who had the daunting task of combining race footage with over 5,000 hours of film. Said Bruckheimer, “That’s the kind of effort that Joe demanded, and our team here demanded, to make the movie as accurate as possible.”
Following the Q&A, attendees headed up to the Academy Museum’s open-air rooftop for drinks, a buffet, and photo opportunities with the panelists — along with the cars.
F1 is avaible for VOD download and rental on most platforms; it will be available for steaming on Apple TV+ on Dec. 12.
Best of Gold Derby
Sign up for Gold Derby’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
About the Author
