{"id":392162,"date":"2026-01-06T17:29:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T17:29:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/392162\/"},"modified":"2026-01-06T17:29:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T17:29:10","slug":"how-the-f1-team-made-their-racing-drama-feel-so-realistic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/392162\/","title":{"rendered":"How the \u2018F1\u2019 Team Made Their Racing Drama Feel So Realistic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tNo viewer of F1 should be surprised by the amount of real-life action weaved into Joseph Kosinski<\/a>\u2019s riveting film. As the decorated artisans behind the box-office smash told a packed house in Los Angeles, following a special THR screening last month, everything from its look to its pace to its sound was drawn directly from races around the world \u2014 both in research for the story of a retired former prodigy (Brad Pitt<\/a>) returning to the sport to save a flailing team from the brink, and in the literal material collections. \u201cWe were capturing all of the broadcast cameras that Formula One shoots with at all the tracks,\u201d said Oscar-winning editor Stephen Mirrione, who won at the Critics Choice Awards<\/a> for best editing on Sunday. That alone amounted to thousands of hours of footage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThousands of additional hours of footage, meanwhile, were dedicated to the actual filming of the narrative drama \u2014 thus F1\u2019s grand, unique challenge was cohesively merging those two strands of the process. Take, for example, the cars that Pitt and costar Damson Idris<\/a> drove \u2014 they were technically F2 vehicles, which could approximate the look of a real F1 car, but did not sound quite the same. \u201cOur job was to basically replace the sound of all the production cars with real F1 sounds,\u201d said re-recording mixer Juan Peralta. \u201cThen our biggest challenge was to make every race different, so that you\u2019re not just hearing the same thing over and over again. These cars, even though they\u2019re fast and they\u2019re amazing, don\u2019t sound very interesting after two hours.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThus, the racing sequence in Hungary sounded like \u201ca music video.\u201d In Las Vegas, it sounded \u201cunderwater,\u201d playing out in the chaotic head of Pitt\u2019s Sonny. Then it\u2019s off to Abu Dhabi, where the sound design goes \u201call out \u2014 we do everything.\u201d However crafty these elements get, though, it\u2019s based in the pulse-pounding realism of what F1 has to offer. \u201cOne thing that was really great that [we got] were the [actual] crowds \u2014 they had stands of thousands of people,\u201d said supervising sound editor Gwendolyn Yates Whittle. \u201cYou just can\u2019t create that sound.\u201d (Her team shared in the Critics Choice Award <\/a>on Sunday for best sound.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe focus on authenticity extended to the performances. Pitt and Idris worked with a lauded stunt team, including Luciano Bacheta, who served as lead sequence coordinator and a stunt driver. The process began with teaching them how to drive the cars safely, efficiently \u2014 and finally, with some flair. \u201cI\u2019d say to Brad, \u2018I\u2019m behind you, look for me, and when I try and come past you, there are no rules \u2014 you can push me off if you want,\u2019\u201d Bacheta said. \u201cAnd he did. He got a kick out of that.\u201d The extensive prep then helped the team pull off exceedingly tight windows of actual shooting time on the tracks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen we got to Las Vegas, where we only had 10 minutes to get Brad\u2019s coverage at night \u2014 freezing cold, like 2:00 AM \u2014 he was so prepared and able to do it,\u201d Bacheta explained. \u201cLas Vegas is one of the two tracks where he hits top speed of 180 miles an hour. He was able to do it all in pretty brutal conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs all of this footage and craft was coming together, songwriters and music producers Blake Slatkin and John Mayer started watching cuts of the film in preparation for the song that would end the film, \u201cDrive,\u201d to be performed and co-written by Ed Sheeran. (It\u2019s been shortlisted<\/a> for the best-song Oscar.) \u201cSo often I think of myself as a boutique \u2014 and I do boutique things \u2014 but I like being in touch with that part of me that wants to go to the movie theater in the summertime and walk out with a spring in my step and go, yeah, I\u2019m a part of something big,\u201d Mayer said. Finding that inspiration through F1 was easy enough.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAll it really is is trying to make an audible \u2018Fuck yeah!\u2019 You just want to walk out of theater and go, \u2018Fuck yeah!\u2019\u201d as Slatkin put it. \u201cWe could spend weeks doing our part and trying to get it to sound perfect, but at the end of the day, it sounds like the ethos of: We\u2019re having fun. We don\u2019t give a shit. We\u2019re just naturally rocking.\u201d Of course, as the F1 team will tell you, it takes a lot of work to get there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No viewer of F1 should be surprised by the amount of real-life action weaved into Joseph Kosinski\u2019s riveting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392163,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[3491,49,48,10574,45888,578,576,577,40573,82],"class_list":["post-392162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-brad-pitt","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-critics-choice-awards","tag-damson-idris","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-joseph-kosinski","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392162","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=392162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}