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.”
In this sense, the two mixers were an ideal team. Peralta is a lifelong Formula One fan, while Rizzo is an F1 novice making a rare venture into sports movies after a career that brought him five Oscar nominations and wins for “Inception” and “Dunkirk.” “This is a magical crew that we’ve put together,” said Rizzo, who added that he picked the film not because of its genre but because it was another chance to collaborate with Kosinski, whom he’d worked with on “Tron: Legacy,” “Oblivion” and “Spiderhead.”
Peralta, whose credits include “Avengers: Endgame,” “Doctor Strange” and “Glass Onion,” was responsible for the sound effects. He was particularly motivated by two edicts presented by Kosinski early in the process: “Every race needs to be different” and “We need to tell the audience what’s happening, because not everybody knows the sport.”
In a bid to help those unfamiliar with F1, Peralta and Rizzo decided to have real announcers calling each race. In addition to breaking down the action for the neophytes in the audience, the announcers “made it even more believable for all the F1 fans, because those are the voices we’re used to hearing on the broadcast, Peralta said.
Another challenge was differentiating the various races: music in one, no music in another, a muffled “underwater” sound in one, a furious montage of sound and action in another, all leading to a final “everything goes” race, in Peralta’s words. “That’s how we structured the whole thing,” he said. “And I think one of the hardest, most challenging things for me was, How do I make these cars, which don’t sound as theatrical as you’d like, sound (better) for this movie?”
The racing vehicles operate at very high RPMs, which gives them a high-pitched, whiny sound. The mixers were wedded to the idea of creating the most realistic, you-are-there racing movie, so they knew those sounds had to be accurate while still providing additional oomph for a deeper, throatier experience. “We needed to introduce some common low end,” Peralta said. “That was the only way we were going to get through this, because if you ever watched a Formula One race on TV, it’s not necessarily the most exciting-sounding event. One of the things we came up with was variety — shifting up, shifting down, that’s a different sound. When they get really close, we can introduce a more low-end sound, and then when they’re passing, we can whip the sounds around. It was a little bit of everything.”
But Peralta and Rizzo knew that the best way to make races energizing wasn’t to go full-throttle. Rather, they aimed to make a complex sound profile that would, according to Rizzo, “serve the story, serve our director, do something fantastic and celebrate the sport with this cinematic opportunity.
“If you make something overly loud, you are literally pushing people away, and we didn’t want that,” he added. “We wanted people to lean forward because they’re so drawn to the adrenaline that’s bubbling within them. It’s easy to make cars loud at the movies. Let’s do it in a very strategic and orchestrated way to make it thrilling and as close to the driver’s experience as you can.”
This story first ran in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
