MONTREAL — When they began working together on the new “F1” movie, Formula 1 living legend Lewis Hamilton was pleasantly surprised to see that Brad Pitt knew what he was doing behind the wheel of a race car.
“He had a bit of a feel for it already. It wasn’t completely alien. I worked as a driver coach when I was a kid just to make a bit of money on the side, and I had some pretty bad drivers along the way!” Hamilton, a seven-time world champion who races for Ferrari and is a producer for the movie, told NBC News at a media briefing ahead of Sunday’s Canadian Grand Prix. “Straight away you could see he had a concept of a driving line.”
Hollywood has made lots of movies about racing and Formula 1. But “F1 The Movie” — an Apple Original Films film that’s being released theatrically by Warner Bros. on June 27 — gives viewers something they’ve never seen before: a big-budget production filmed alongside racing real drivers and real teams, melding authentic F1 luminaries into the cast while filming at Grand Prix weekends.
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Joseph Kosinski hosted a screening Thursday in Montreal for F1 insiders and reporters, including NBC News, before the race weekend and a glitzy red carpet launch event Monday in New York.
The movie comes at a time of a lucrative relationship between Hollywood and Formula 1. The sport’s popularity has soared in the United States over the last five years, and F1 executives hope the first-of-its-kind movie will help the international series penetrate deeper into its top-priority market.
Pitt plays protagonist Sonny Hayes, a fictional F1 driver whose promising young career was cut short after a horrific crash in the 1990s but who makes the unlikeliest of comebacks decades later with the fictional APXGP team. It’s a story of adventure, heartbreak and the insatiable pursuit of glory, with the thrills and dangers of Formula 1 captured by one of America’s most famous actors.
The character is a daredevil who embodies elements of real-life drivers Max Verstappen and James Hunt, bringing a high racing IQ and a knack for bending the rules to his advantage. He’s enlisted in a desperation move by a former F1 teammate-turned-team owner, played by Javier Bardem, to drive alongside a young rookie, portrayed by Damson Idris, who is desperate to prove himself in a car that’s too weak to compete for wins. Their team may soon cease to exist if it can’t turn things around soon.
Pitt was “super open-minded and really dove deep into what it takes to be a racing driver, which was really cool to see,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton described it as the most “immersive” film ever made about racing, or perhaps any other sport, “in the sense of filming on race weekends.”
The movie also includes tantalizing on-track visuals and a plot line that taps into the strategic mischief and chess moves that make the sport exciting. And there are crashes. Lots of them, including fiery ones.
Pitt “did all his own driving,” Bruckheimer said in an interview, having trained for three months — first in a Formula 3 car before he graduated to the faster machinery.
“The saddest day for Brad is when he had to step out of the car and we wrapped the movie. I was more relieved than anybody else that everyone was safe,” he said.
And because it’s Hollywood, Pitt’s character is part of a romantic plot with Kerry Condon’s character, Kate McKenna, his technical director, who’s tasked with building him a winning car.
“Our ambition was to make an authentic racing film,” said Kosinski, who has also helmed films like “Top Gun: Maverick.” “And we want it to be a film that works not only for experts like you all who live and breathe this world every day, but we also want it to be a film that plays to people who don’t know anything about Formula 1 or other sports. The most important thing, of course, being that we just tell a great story about redemption and friendship and teamwork in this incredible sport.”
However, F1 junkies are likely to be able to spot some things that couldn’t — or wouldn’t — happen in real life. Pitt’s F1 car in the movie, clearly slimmer than the real F1 cars he’s racing, is a Formula 2 car, for example.
A driver also wouldn’t be conversing with his team boss in the pit lane mid-race through his helmet and the deafening noise. Plus, there are only so many shenanigans F1 will tolerate from one driver trying to finagle the race outcome.
“We wanted to find how far can you push it so that you can get right to the edge,” Kosinski said, adding that they consulted with Hamilton about how to strike that balance.
But the scenes that racing die-hards may question are part of the bargain struck to make the movie palatable to a wider audience, serving as important ingredients in the plot.
“What we’re trying to do with this movie is, first of all, entertain audiences,” Bruckheimer said. “That’s the key. It’s not a documentary; it’s a movie. Hopefully you will be moved by it emotionally.”
Formula 1 CEO Stefano Domenicali told reporters in Montreal that it requires “very F1 eyes” to think the movie glamorizes rule-breaking.
“If you look to the audience that will watch the movie, this will be perceived as racing action, authentic fighting,” he said. “And that’s what will come out. I’m pretty sure of it.”
Still, there’s plenty of realistic dialogue for avid F1 fans to feast on. On Hamilton’s advice, Sky Sports commentators David Croft and Martin Brundle, the voices of F1 for British and American fans, are also the announcers in the movie.
Croft told NBC News he and Brundle spent 19 hours filming their scenes. His favorite part? Working with Kosinski, Croft said, “a director I’ve held in such high regard for many years and who it was a real privilege to be working with to create what hopefully the audience will see as a truly authentic F1 movie.”
The script includes talk of oversteer and understeer, using “DRS” to go faster and sacrificing straight line speed for better cornering. Pitt’s character casually drops a reference to “Eau Rouge,” and there’s a storyline involving the late Ayrton Senna from the 1990s — all of which Formula 1 experts will appreciate.
“It’s threading a needle,” Kosinski said of appealing to both casual viewers and hard-core Formula 1 fans.
Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue said that when the movie was screened in the United States, “very few people” said they had ever seen a Formula 1 race.
“When we finish and we ask how many of you would like to go see a race now, literally every single hand goes up,” he said. “And so we think there’s a huge, huge opportunity to grow the sport all over the world with this movie. And I think it will do that.”
Hollywood is seeking to tap into that potential by aggressively promoting the movie all over TV and at F1 races.
“We’ll see how it grows the sport even more, but it was obviously interesting and nice to get a glimpse already or to see it,” said Sauber driver Nico Hulkenberg, who joined F1 in 2010, long before the U.S. boom. “I think the public is going to like it. I think they’ve captured more angles of the industry, of what teams and drivers do — how much goes into it, especially preparation time and between races. Personally, I liked it. It was pretty cool.”
After years of stagnating with American audiences, F1 unlocked something special by personalizing the sport to reach new, casual fans. It found a way to transcend the technical side, using social media to make the human faces and drivers accessible to regular audiences.
F1’s commercial side and its teams became relentless content-creation factories seeking online engagement. That connection, elevated by Netflix’s popular “Drive to Survive” series, attracted a newer, younger and more female audience.
“It’s one of the biggest movies we’ll see in probably this decade,” said Peter Crolla, a Haas F1 veteran who was recently hired to be team manager for the new GM-backed Cadillac F1 team next year. “They have put every ounce of energy they could have done into it. It’s the level of detail they’ve gone to [in] the desire to make it as realistic and to integrate themselves into the sport as they have done. By the end of 2024 we didn’t even feel there was an F1 movie being filmed. It was like it was literally an 11th team.”
Hamilton fondly recalled some of his conversations with Pitt as Pitt was training to drive a real race car for the movie, feeling the G-forces jolt through his body.
“Through that process, it was amazing to speak to Brad and see his shock. He’s kind of like, ‘Jeez, what are our bodies going through?’” Hamilton said. “He’d text me after the test, like, ‘My appreciation for what you drivers do is even higher than it already was.’ So I hope that reflects in the driving.”
