{"id":305798,"date":"2025-11-25T11:23:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T11:23:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/305798\/"},"modified":"2025-11-25T11:23:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T11:23:10","slug":"behind-the-scenes-how-f1-made-a-movie-at-real-f1-races","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/305798\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the scenes: How ‘F1’ made a movie at real F1 races"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Joseph Kosinski didn\u2019t want to direct \u201cF1\u201d<\/a> unless he was able to do it the hard way. That was the germ of an idea for what would eventually become one of the biggest hits of 2025: Create a movie about an underdog Formula One team that didn\u2019t fake being at F1 races, but actually became a part of them.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was kind of like, \u2018Yes, this is a little insane,\u2019\u201d said Kosinski, \u201c\u2018but if we can pull it off, we\u2019ll get something totally unique.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Kosinski doesn\u2019t present as your average adrenaline junkie. He\u2019s mellow and looks like he could work at a bank \u2014 in fact, he pursued architecture before finding a calling in film as a David Fincher prot\u00e9g\u00e9. Kosinski was trusted with blockbusters from his debut, 2010\u2019s \u201cTron: Legacy,\u201d and in 2022 broke through with \u201cTop Gun: Maverick,\u201d which strapped Tom Cruise and other insurance liabilities into actual fighter jets<\/a> as an alternative to relying on CGI.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think on \u2018Maverick,\u2019\u201d Kosinski said, \u201cI found out that the audience does appreciate when you shoot something for real. They can tell the difference between something done on a soundstage and done in a real situation. It\u2019s something we are very attuned to and connect to.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cF1\u201d tells the story of Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), a leathery road dog of a driver who gets called back into Formula One by an old racing friend (Javier Bardem), who\u2019s now the owner of a struggling team, desperate for a Hail Mary. The film is partially based in reality; the Hayes character is inspired by Martin Donnelly, whose promising career was cut short in 1990 by a gruesome crash. It\u2019s also partially based in a fantasy in which someone old enough to have seen the 1966 epic \u201cGrand Prix\u201d in theaters would be allowed to sit in the driver\u2019s seat of a modern F1 team.<\/p>\n

\"Director <\/p>\n

Director Joseph Kosinski on the set of \u201cF1.\u201d <\/p>\n

(Apple TV)<\/p>\n

But the fantasy elements were designed to be offset by a hyperrealism that\u2019s rarely afforded to film productions \u2014 not just in the ability to feature the actual teams and drivers, but also to film a significant portion of the movie at the races themselves. It helped that the production had Lewis Hamilton, one of the best drivers in the history of the sport, on board as a producer to help grease the wheels with the F\u00e9d\u00e9ration Internationale de l\u2019Automobile, the governing body of F1. Even with Hamilton, though, Apple \u2014 which ultimately spent over $200 million on the movie \u2014 had to prove to the FIA that they could set up at an event like the fabled British Grand Prix at Silverstone and not cause a pileup.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had to rehearse the blocking and staging for about two weeks with a stopwatch in front of the FIA to prove to them that we could actually shoot a scene and get off the track before the race started,\u201d said Kosinski, referring to a crucial scene when the characters played by Pitt and Tobias Menzies first meet.<\/p>\n

Unlike \u201cMaverick,\u201d in which military pilots flew the jets, \u201cF1\u201d features driving from Brad Pitt and co-star Damson Idris, in some sense because it was the only way to get the shots they needed. \u201cThey\u2019ve got four cameras in front of them that are whipping around and they\u2019re having to do their lines and perform,\u201d said Kosinski. \u201cBut mostly they\u2019re trying not to die in front of 100,000 people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Every department \u2014 from the actors to craft services \u2014 had to learn how to operate at dangerous speeds and with higher stakes. Ben Munro, who did the production design with Mark Tildesley, explained that, normally, his department would have two weeks to build a set; in some cases on \u201cF1,\u201d such as a scene filmed at the McLaren headquarters, they would have just 12 hours, overnight.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you try to integrate with the real world, ultimate control becomes harder,\u201d Munro said. \u201cAnd as filmmakers, we\u2019re used to being in ultimate control.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

The \u201cF1\u201d team developed new cameras to capture the film\u2019s ultra-realistic high-speed racing.<\/p>\n

(Apple TV)<\/p>\n

The camera team too had to be adaptable and mobile (no VistaVision<\/a> here), all while figuring out how to capture footage at 180 miles per hour that couldn\u2019t be covered with more than a few takes. \u201cFirst, we had to make a camera that didn\u2019t exist yet,\u201d said Claudio Miranda, the film\u2019s cinematographer.<\/p>\n

Miranda, who won an Oscar for \u201cLife of Pi,\u201d worked with Sony to develop small, agile \u201csensor-on-a-stick\u201d cameras with Imax-worthy lenses to place around the cars. Coverage became essential \u2014 there were 16 camera positions to capture as much as possible. With both the racing itself and the hoopla around race weekend, the usual filmmaking mindset simply had to change: \u201cI\u2019m not always able to shoot sunset for this shot, or backlight for this quarter,\u201d said Miranda, describing his thinking. \u201cWe traded all that in for the realism of the movie. But I think that\u2019s unbeatable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other than a few spinouts (and a stray Brad Pitt fan ruining a shot<\/a> to get a selfie), the production was miraculously accident-free, despite taking almost two years to film. That may be due in part to the fact that, if you squint, it turns out that a film crew is similar enough to an F1 team to fit right in.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone had to be prepared for those nine-minute shoot windows in the same way that you\u2019d have to be ready for a pit stop,\u201d Kosinski said. \u201cThere was a really interesting kinship. And we really did feel like the 11th team after spending two seasons with them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The moment that sticks with Miranda is from the end of the production, in Abu Dhabi, when all the real F1 teams got their cars out for one grand scene together \u2014 a million-dollar setup, to undersell it by a few digits. \u201cIn the beginning, it did feel like we were this annoying little buzzard,\u201d Miranda said. \u201cI think that\u2019s why I got really emotional when everyone wanted to help us out in the final race and bring the cars out. Because it felt like, at the end, we were kind of loved.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joseph Kosinski didn\u2019t want to direct \u201cF1\u201d unless he was able to do it the hard way. That…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305799,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[3491,49,9426,48,49011,6973,578,1554,576,577,137066,40573,932,41067,14830,34316,26567,2732,82,2341],"class_list":["post-305798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-brad-pitt","tag-ca","tag-camera","tag-canada","tag-claudio-miranda","tag-driver","tag-f1","tag-film","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-front","tag-joseph-kosinski","tag-lewis-hamilton","tag-maverick","tag-movie","tag-production","tag-scene","tag-shot","tag-sports","tag-team"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}