One of the most spectacular sporting leagues in the universe is the world of F1 car racing. Made famous over the years by names such as Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton F1 is a sport embraced by millions of fans around the world. The lure of the sport seems to come from the fact that it mixes prestige with danger and speed in an octane world that only the most skilled drivers are allowed to take part in.
Now that world is coming to the big screen in a way that this sport has never been captured before. Starring Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, Damson Idris and Kerry Condon and directed by Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski F1 is one of the most eagerly anticipated movies of 2025 and recently we were lucky enough to sit down for a chat with Kosinski to learn how this epic film was put together.
“Well, I think like a lot of people during Covid, I found myself starting to watch the races,” says Kosinski when asked where the idea for F1 originally came from. “Then I found this great television show called Drive to Survive, and I found that it’s an incredibly unique sport in that your teammate is also your, in many ways, your greatest competition. And for me, that makes for a great drama. I also loved how the first season of the show focused on the last place teams, the underdogs rather than the Ferrari, the Mercedes, the Red Bull, the teams that you see at the front of the pack. And I thought that there was an interesting story to be told about an underdog team in trying to not win the championship, but just trying to win one race against these titans of the sport. So that’s where it started. And lucky for me, I had a contact who was in Formula One that I could reach out to, so I did.”
As Kosinski showed us all with Top Gun: Maverick he is a director that not only knows how to capture speed for the big screen but he also has an unique way of making the audience feel like they are part of the action. He once again wanted to do that for F1 but as we soon learned that took a huge commitment.
“Well, the first thing I did was I reached out to Lewis Hamilton and obviously he lives that sport every day,” he explains. “He’s one of the greatest of all time and asked him to be my partner on making this film. So having Lewis gave me this incredible in into this world, and one of the people he introduced me to was Toto Wolf, the team principal of Mercedes. And I started talking with them about wanting to capture the speed of this sport, and It was actually Toto who came up with the idea of rather than making a movie car fast enough to kind of achieve these speeds, he said, why don’t you start with a race car and take a real race car and then work the cameras that you need into that. So we did that. We actually bought six F2 cars, real F2 race cars and worked with Mercedes AMG, the Formula One team and their engineers to build real race cars that could carry our camera equipment recorders and transmitters for making this film. So every time you see Brad or Damson driving this movie, they’re driving on their own in one of these real race cars on a real F1 track. So that’s kind of how we approached the making of this film.”
Through working with the F1 teams Kosinski soon learnt that behind every driver is a massive amount of people whose work puts the cars on the track each weekend and soon he wanted them to be part of F1 as well.
“Yeah, the drivers are certainly the face and they’re there in the car every weekend, but there literally are thousands of people at the factory working on these cars, putting them together the day of the race,” says Kosinski. “A lot of the parts are literally manufactured days before the race and put on the car. So that was the other aspect that I wanted this film to capture was not just the story of the drivers, but the engineers, the team principles, the team owners, all the people who bring this sport to life and put that car on the track every weekend.”
When you look at the trailer for F1 one of the first things that hits you as an audience is how natural the film looks. In order to achieve that feel Kosinski decided the only way to do it was to put the stars of the film actually in the cars and then film on race weekends, but of course that needed a lot of things to fall into place.
“Brad and Damson are both driving in this film and in order to get them into these race cars, it required months, literally months of training,” Kosinski says. “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 shot at pulling this off.”
“Brad just had that natural feel for grip in the car and what we’re doing on this film is dangerous,” he continues. “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.”
Then came the big question. How did Kosinski and his team manage to film during actual Grand Prix weekends.
“The tracks, the location is one thing, but on Race Weekend, it just becomes this whole different world,” he says with a smile. “It’s like a traveling circus. So we couldn’t just shoot at the track without the race going on. It would’ve been the wrong dynamic. So we were actually there on race weekend with hundreds of thousands of people watching us finding these time slots between practice and qualifying, that Formula One graciously afforded us. So we’d get these 10 or 15 minute slots where we’d have to have Brad and Damson ready in the cars, warmed up with hot tires ready to go, and as soon as practice ended, they would pull out onto the track. We’d have 24, 30 cameras ready, rolling, and I’d have to shoot these scenes in these very short, intense, high-speed windows. But the crowd you’re seeing was really there in the stands. I don’t think the crowd realized that Brad Pitt was in the car that was in front of them. And so there was definitely this heightened quality to every race. We were also shooting dramatic scenes on the grid before races, so it was a very unique way of working rather than having a whole day to shoot a scene like you normally would on a movie. We had these nine or 10 minute slots, so it was like a live stage play, but in front of hundreds of thousands of people shooting at 180 miles an hour, literally. So it was an adrenaline rush every weekend, but what we captured is something you can’t fake, you can’t stage.”
So as a cinema loving audience be prepared to be thrust into the world of Formula One Car racing as F1 hits screens on the 26th June 2025.
No Comments