By Casey Loving and Drew Taylor | Photography by Smallz + Raskind for TheWrap
Director Joseph Kosinski and his department heads had a need for speed. Here’s how they achieved it
Director Joseph Kosinski has never shied away from a technical challenge. His first film, 2010’s “Tron: Legacy,” was on the cutting edge of digital de-aging by having current-day Jeff Bridges confronting the version of himself from 1982’s “Tron.” “Oblivion” (2013) pioneered a technique that would later be adopted by the virtual environments of the sports-media company the Volume. And 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick” placed actors in actual fighter jets for an almost unheard-of degree of realism.
All of that seems like a warm-up to the challenges he faced on “F1,” the racing movie that stars Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes, an over-the-hill driver hired to help rejuvenate a low-rated team. Kosinski had dreamed of making an immersive racing movie for years, but he couldn’t have shot “F1” without first making “Maverick,” the zeitgeist-capturing $1.49 billion-grossing adventure that was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
“What I learned on ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ was that the audience does appreciate and really responds, I think, viscerally and emotionally, to footage that has been shot for real,” he said. “There is something that you can connect to when it’s done for real, when you know someone’s really going through the experience.”
Kosinski consulted Toto Wolff, the Austrian billionaire and principal of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, who told the filmmaker, “The thing that movies haven’t ever really gotten right is the speed. Because by the time you put movie cameras and batteries and the structure required to hold a camera on a car, you’re slowing it down. So the footage you end up with can be real and captured in the real environment, but the speed is going to be slow, because you’re not going to be able to corner with all that weight.” Wolff’s suggestion: “Start with a race car and modify it to film your movie, rather than the other way around.”
Casting
Lucy Bevan
As a craft, casting hasn’t always gotten much credit. But the Academy is changing that this year, introducing it as a new competitive category at the 98th Academy Awards. “It’s a total delight,” said “F1” casting director Lucy Bevan, whose career has included the Best Picture nominees “An Education,” “Belfast” and “Barbie.”
Cinematography
Claudio Miranda
Claudio Miranda entered “F1” with the same goal he had on “Top Gun: Maverick” — render action sequences as kinetically as he could and capture as much as possible in-camera. Working with a big budget, high-quality equipment and premium access to the world of Formula One, Miranda began planning the shoot about a year before filming actually began, taking the time to study the cameras “and prep on all our crazy ideas.”
Film Editing
Stephen Mirrione
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.
Music
Hans Zimmer
It wasn’t Hans Zimmer’s first time around the racetrack. The famed composer, who created the iconic scores that define “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “The Dark Knight,” “Dune” and many more, has a history with racing movies that predates Joseph Kosinski’s latest hit. Back in 1990, less than a decade into Zimmer’s career, he composed the music for Tony Scott’s “Days of Thunder,” starring Tom Cruise as a NASCAR driver. More than 20 years later, Zimmer tackled “Rush,” the Chris Hemsworth Formula One movie directed by Ron Howard.
Sound
Juan Peralta and Gary A. Rizzo
For re-recording mixers Juan Peralta and Gary A. Rizzo, auto-racing fans were a key audience they hoped to please with their work on “F1.” They weren’t the only key audience, however. “We wanted to properly represent the film for Formula One,” Rizzo said. “But we also wanted to make it a thrilling, immersive experience, and an opportunity for audiences who go out to theaters to have a reminder why a theatrical environment is the ideal way to experience a piece of cinema like this.”
Visual Effects
Ryan Tudhope
It’s not every day that a craftsperson wants their work to go unnoticed. But Ryan Tudhope, “F1″‘s visual-effects supervisor, did. Like “Top Gun: Maverick” before it, “F1” features a compelling mix of in-camera action with digital effects meant to heighten and augment — not overwrite — what was captured practically. The strategy paid off for “Maverick,” with Tudhope, Seth Hill, Bryan Litson and Scott R. Fisher earning Oscar nominations for Best Visual Effects.
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