The director of F1 has revealed how a real-life racing legend helped shape the movie’s realistic racing sequences. The big-budget Brad Pitt movie features the star playing retired Formula 1 driver Sonny Hayes, who gets another chance behind the wheel as a mentor to newcomer Joshua “Noah” Pearce (Damson Idris). The movie’s star-studded ensemble cast also includes Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies, Kim Bodnia, Javier Bardem, and Shea Whigham.
ScreenRant was in attendance at a virtual Q&A with director Joseph Kosinski promoting the new trailer for F1. During the conversation, he revealed that real-life Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton, who appears in the movie in addition to being a producer, was instrumental in crafting the realism of the scenes. Hamilton took Pitt, Idris, and Kosinski behind the wheel at the beginning of what turned out to be “literally months of training.”
This training period was mᴀssively important, because the actors were actually driving 180 miles per hour on real Formula One racetracks. Kosinski revealed that Pitt is “really concentrating on keeping that car on the track and out of the wall during all those scenes.” In addition to advising Kosinski on the technical side of racing, Hamilton was also instrumental in crafting the story and offering “insight into what it is that drives” people like Sonny. Read the director’s full quote below:
Yeah, well, yes it was [actually Brad Pitt behind the wheel.] Brad and Damson [Idris] are both driving in this film and in order to get them into these race cars, it required months, literally months of training. But the first day was really fun. It was me, Brad and Lewis Hamilton at the track together, all of us jumping in cars and driving each other around in sports cars, which was one of those things, I’ll never forget having Lewis Hamilton as your driving instructor, but what we learned and what Lewis was really interested was seeing did Brad know how to drive right? Because if Brad can’t drive, this whole film wasn’t going to work.
And what Lewis was very happy to discover was that Brad had a lot of just natural ability right from the start, and I don’t know where he got that or if he was born with it, and he rides motorcycles, which I think has something to do with it, but he’s just a very talented, naturally gifted driver, which for Lewis after that first meeting gave him a lot of confidence that we might have a sH๏τ at pulling this off.
He’s just had that natural feel for grip in the car, and what we’re doing on this film is dangerous. So yeah, you have to be fearless, and when you see Brad driving, that’s not acting. He’s really concentrating on keeping that car on the track and out of the wall during all those scenes. So that’s something that you just can’t fake, I think. I hope the audience feels that when they watch the movie.
Lewis was instrumental in not only the technical aspects obviously, but in the real kind of formulative stage of the movie, formulating this narrative. We tell the story of Sonny Hayes, who’s kind of veteran racer, and then Joshua Pierce, who’s a rookie. Lewis has been both. He’s been the rookie almost winning his first season in Formula One and now with Seven World Championships. He’s kind of seen it all. So his perspective on shaping the narrative of these two characters and kind of giving me real insight into what it is that drives him, what makes these guys want to do this day in day out, it was really, really helpful. We couldn’t have made this film without him.
What This Means For F1
It Is Continuing A Major Filmmaking Trend
What Kosinski’s comments about F1 reveal is the fact that the upcoming 2025 movie will continue a major trend for both the director and modern blockbuster filmmaking. Kosinski kicked off his career with movies that were largely in the sci-fi genre and less grounded in reality, such as Tron: Legacy and Oblivion. However, he reunited with Oblivion star Tom Cruise for the 2022 smash hit legacy sequel Top Gun: Maverick, which was brought to life in the middle of Cruise’s run of splashy, real-life stunts that had come to drive his performances in the Mission: Impossible franchise.
Cruise’s Mission: Impossible stunts include climbing the Burj Khalifa and clinging to the side of a midair plane.
Top Gun: Maverick brought its flying scenes to life with as little extraneous CGI as possible, continuing Cruise’s commitment to onscreen realism. Though he is not working with Cruise for his latest movie, Kosinski has clearly taken that approach to heart when it comes to Brad Pitt’s F1 driving. Because of the high-stakes intensity of the course that the star was driving, the veil between fiction and reality will become as thin as possible in those scenes, putting viewers inside a real, though slightly modified, racing car.
Our Take On Joseph Kosinski’s F1 Comments
The Danger In The Movie Is Real
While it seems likely that the exact racing situations in F1 will have been largely achieved through editing, in terms of how the onscreen cars are interacting with one another, Kosinski’s description of the filming process makes it sound as though it was a genuinely dangerous process. The fact that nobody was hurt during the production of the movie can almost certainly be attributed to Hamilton and other real-life Formula 1 professionals who were able to help guide the project across the finish line.
