The “Top Gun: Maverick” filmmaker, Joseph Kosinski, arrived at Formula 1 as many Americans: through “Drive to Survive” (“Formula 1: driving to survive”). In that popular Netflix series, he saw the potential for a film event, full of immersive emotions, the high bets of the world of competitive careers and the idea that your teammate could be your greatest rival.
“I don’t think there is another sport that is exactly like that,” Kosinski said. “It’s ready for drama.” The cinema has loved car races since its early days, and the popularity of the F1 has exploded in recent years. Giving him the treatment of “Top Gun” made sense. But it would take almost four years for that dream to become “F1”, which will arrive in cinemas around the world at the end of June.
It was a complex operation that would involve unprecedented coordination with the League, a revolutionary innovation in cameras technology and allow one of the world’s largest film stars, Brad Pitt, driving a real racing car to 180 miles (289 kilometers) per hour in the film. Many, many times.
It turned out that Hollywood was a bit easier to convince to make the film than the League. By the time Kosinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer approached them, Pitt had already agreed to star and had decided to go with Apple to help make the film at the level they needed, with the guarantee of a robust launch in cinemas (which Warner Bros. is driving). Then came the meeting with Formula 1.
“when you enter, the first thing they think is that you will make them look bad,” Bruckheimer said. “I went through this when I went to the Navy for the first time with ‘Top Gun’.”
There were many concerns: about anything that could go wrong, accidents and the question of the villain. But, the filmmakers explained, this story did not deal with a villain. It is a competition between two pilots: a younger pilot (Damson Idris) and a major pilot (Pitt) trying to do better.
Bruckheimer said he took almost a year to get the league to join, and then they had to go to individual teams to explain it to it as well. But once everyone got committed, they opened their world to the filmmakers.
“The amount of, say, conversations about things not related to the realization of the film has been massive only from a coordination point of view,” Kosinski said. “But there is no way we could have made this film without that association with Formula 1”.
Among the things they could do: build a garage in the Grand Prix for their fictional team; driving on the track during the weekends of the Grand Prix in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators; Put your Formula 1 cars on the track with the movie’s cars (and drivers); have Pitt and Idris at the end of the national anthem both in Silverstone and Abu Dhabi; and attend meetings of pilots and technical information sessions.
“It was a total integration of these two worlds,” Kosinski said. “There is no way that the movie could have happened or see how it looks without that association. I think you will see the result of that on the screen because you could not recreate what we could capture doing it really.”
In the true spirit of “Top Gun”, part of “really doing it” meant trying to create the experience in the driver’s seat for the public. The seven -time champion Lewis Hamilton, who was involved in the movie since the first days, told Kosinski that he had never seen a movie that really captured what he felt to be in one of those cars.
“These Formula 1 cars work in grams,” Kosinski explained. “Adding 100 pounds of camera equipment goes against what you are trying to capture. It became a technical engineering project for a year to discover how to put very small IMAX quality cameras in one of these cars.”
During “Top Gun: Maverick”, they had six Sony cameras inside the cabin. Here, engineers were able to reduce them to approximately a quarter of the size (a 10×10 cm cube). Panavision also developed a remote control that allowed the photography director Claudio Miranda to turn the cameras on the left and the right, which they did not have in “Maverick.” They had 15 camera mounts integrated in the cars and could use up to four at the same time, maintaining the penalty of weight to a minimum, and the first real planes.
“Every time you see Brad or Damson’s face, they are really driving that car,” Kosinski said. “They are not driving for them.” And once the time for action on the slopes came, it was a race against the clock.
“It was a technical feat and an organizational feat,” said Bruckheimer. “You have limited access and we entered between some of its classification laps and we had eight minutes to enter and leave the track. It is precision, you cannot be in nine minutes.”
-When Hamilton saw for the first time some of his images of edited races, Kosinski received a impulse of trust.
“He smiled and said: ‘He looks fast,” Kosinski said. “I was like,” oh, thank God. ‘If Lewis says that, we are in a good place. “
“This movie needed an icon in the center,” Kosinski said. “It’s a big, complicated and expensive movie. And I needed one of our, you know, main film stars.”
Kosinski knew that Pitt liked cars. About a decade ago, he, Tom Cruise and Pitt developed a car movie that never became. In addition, he said, “I simply felt that it was a role that I always wanted to see him interpret.”
The character is a fictional pilot named Sonny Hayes, who was “the best that ever was.” A phenomenon in the 1990s, was destined to be the next world champion before an accident in a Grand Prix ended his career in Formula 1.
“Now lead in all kinds of racing leagues that you can imagine, but not in Formula 1,” Kosinski explained, from Le Mans to swamp trucks. “He likes to challenge himself a new career league and dominate her, but then retires.”
The public knows him by conducting the midnight shift in the 24 -hour Daytona race, where he meets his former teammate and now owner of a Formula 1 team (Javier Bardem), who asks him to return to help them win a race and save them from being sold.
“It is a story about a team in the last place, a group of helpless, and Sonny Hayes in their last years having one more chance to do something he could never, which is to win a race in F1,” said Kosinski.
After the presentation, they went to the racing circuit with Hamilton and Pitt “was hooked.”
Pitt trained for three months before they began shooting the cameras to get used to the physical demands of precision vehicles. He and his co -star really led cars at speeds of up to 180 mph, and sometimes in front of hundreds of thousands of people.
“The happiest day was when they said, ‘Ok, the driving is over’, and he (Brad) left the car,” said Bruckheimer. “That was the best day for me because it is dangerous, it really is.”
The film, everyone has recognized, was greatly expensive. They had the advantage of advertising in the cars, which helped compensate some of the costs, but the operation was similar to building a real F1 team, Bruckheimer said. They built six cars, which transported all over the world along with production.
“It’s like a military exercise to move large groups of people and machinery worldwide,” Bruckheimer said.
But it was much less than the 300 million figure that is discussed, both Kosinski and Bruckheimer said.
“It’s expensive, they don’t misunderstand me. It’s a expensive movie. But it was substantially less than that number,” Bruckheimer said. “Hollywood is a very competitive place, and our friends sometimes inflate our budgets to make them see better.”
The biggest question is whether the public will go in large quantities to the box office. Until now, the test scores have been very high in all genres. And they promise that you do not need to be an expert or even a sports fan to enjoy the movie, who will teach you everything you need to know.
“It’s emotional, it’s exciting, has humor. He has great music with a soundtrack by Hans Zimmer and a lot of phenomenal artists,” Bruckheimer said. “We hope it is the perfect summer movie.”
