Five thousand hours of footage. That’s the rough estimate of what editor Stephen Mirrione faced when he and his team had to transform “F1” from a collection of racing footage into a high-octane summer blockbuster. Mirrione compared the volume to that of “Top Gun: Maverick,” which had around 1,800 hours of footage in total.
For Mirrione, translating such a vast library into a coherent 155-minute film was invigorating. “We had access to all 20 cameras around the track during practice days, qualifying days, the race itself and then when they were shooting with the cars, with our actors, with the stunt drivers,” he said. “Those oftentimes had nine or more cameras running at the same time. Even though you’re not necessarily looking at or using all of that material, having access to all that was so, so incredible, and I was really spoiled in that way.”
With so much footage at their fingertips, the editing team functioned partly like
a feature editorial crew and partly like a documentary unit. While some focused on the narrative elements of “F1,” others combed through hours of B-roll, marking any clips that could be of use. This made Mirrione’s job easier down the road, as he was able to click directly onto clips that could potentially suit his editorial needs for a given scene. “There wasn’t a single time that I wanted something that I wasn’t able to ultimately find,” he said.
Like much of “F1’s” crew, the Oscar-winning editor and Formula One novice cited the doc series “Drive to Survive” as a definitive text of Formula One filmmaking. He did, however, try not to let the series guide him too heavily. “I just wanted to be able to do my thing, respond to the material and not get in my head too much about ‘Am I following them too much or not?’” he said.
Though Mirrione learned a lot about this world, he used his unfamiliarity with the sport as a superpower while assembling the edit. Kosinski and company wanted the film to appeal to aficionados and a wider audience, so as he cut together various racing sequences, he asked himself a critical question: Do I understand what’s going on? “If there’s something that’s confusing me, I know ‘OK, I’ve got to find out what that thing means, what it is and how we can make sure an audience will understand it,’” Mirrione said. “It is incredibly complicated, and so, for us, (it was important to) make sure that you understood enough to feel ‘OK, the team is doing well or they’re doing poorly,’ but not to go so far with it that it becomes overwhelming.”
Due to the shooting schedule, which was built around a series of actual Formula One races, the editor noticed a bit of synchronicity between his crew’s assembly and the fictional team at the film’s center. “We were putting the races together kind of in the order of the season, which was also in the order that they happened in the movie,” he said. “What I think comes across subliminally is that there’s a parallel between the way the team is getting better and working better together, and the way we were getting better and better as a filmmaking crew.”
This story first ran in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
