People familiar with the work of Joe Kosinski know that he strives for an extra dose of reality in his blockbusters. In the making of Top Gun: Maverick, he didn’t simply enlist a fleet of stunt pilots and/or make exclusive use of green screen; he got his actors very comfortable sitting in the cockpits of real jets. This in mind, it will surprise nobody that Brad Pitt does all of his own driving in Kosinski’s new racing thriller F1... but adding this special verisimilitude meant hinging the entire film one one thing: Pitt’s skills behind the wheel.
As you can see above, the first trailer for F1 has landed online, and in advance of the preview’s launch, Joseph Kosinski participated in a virtual press conference earlier this week. The filmmaker spoke to the technical aspects of making the new thriller, and he emphasized that there was an effort to let the stars of the film literally be in the driver’s seat. Said the director,
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 [Idris] 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.
The complication here, of course, is that while an actor may be good at pretending to be other people, they may not actually have the natural skills required to operate a real Formula One car. The real drivers in the sport famously have incredible reaction times that allow them to safely operate the vehicles. Joseph Kosinski couldn’t rely on the stars of his movie to perform on that level, but he needed them to posses a particular level of competence.
This required months of training, and the actors notably got the support of Lewis Hamilton, a driver who holds multiple records in the world of Formula One racing and is a producer on the new film:
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. 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.
Intense training was always going to be required to get Brad Pitt and Damson Idris properly prepared for their performances, but Joseph Kosinski noted that Pitt already had some innate skill that made the whole process that much easier. The director continued,
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.
Physically and operationally, motorcycles and F1 cars are obviously quite different, but one can logically understand the link being made here. Not only does one require the aforementioned speedy reaction times to remain safe, but you need a certain level of confidence to kick the engines into high gear. Joseph Kosinski explained that Brad Pitt had both covered.
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.
In F1, Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes – a former Formula One driver who is recruited back into the sport when a friend (Javier Bardem) teams him up with a young talent named Joshua “Noah” Pearce (Damson Idris). The talented ensemble cast also includes Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies and Shea Whigham, and the film, with action that will demand the big screen experience, will be in theaters domestically on June 27.