Audiences will likely be surprised by two things when they see Joseph Kosinski‘s “F1.” One, that a huge percentage of the film’s drama and actual running time, especially compared to the standard Hollywood sports movie, takes place on the race track. Two, that the racing footage is incredibly realistic.
As has been widely reported and publicized, the Apple-backed film produced by legendary driver Lewis Hamilton (for non-racing fans, this is the equivalent of LeBron James producing a basketball movie featuring actual NBA players and teams), did strike a partnership with Formula One to shoot during its biggest races, including some time with the film’s stars, Brad Pitt and Damson Idris (who spent months of preproduction learning how to drive a 200 mph race car), behind the wheel.
And while all that is true, and a key aspect of how the film was made, it does not quite explain how our heroes’ fictional APXGP, or Apex, race team was integrated into the 2023 and 2024 Formula One seasons.
What follows? A breakdown of what you need to know about how “F1” was actually made.
And if you want to listen to director Joseph Kosinski discuss the making of “F1,” the full conversation is below, or subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever podcasts are found.
Access and The Partnership
Once the “F1” creative team, led by Kosinski, Pitt, Hamiliton, and producer Jerry Bruckheimer convinced the racing league they were trying to realistically capture the speed and behind-the-scenes work of Formula One, the sports league approached the film as a true partnership, opening the doors to a multi-faceted collaboration to create a film they believed would promote the sport.
Tim Bampton, who worked for three decades in professional sports, was hired as an executive producer to oversee and lead the integration of the film and racing. The access was truly unprecedented, with the enormous Apex team traveling from city to city, building their garage, and getting ready for the next week’s race alongside the other racing teams.
This allowed “F1” to stage its movie against the electric atmosphere of the world’s fastest cars roaring past crowds of 300,000-plus on legendary courses that uniquely weave through iconic locales like Las Vegas and Budapest. It’s production value that even a $200-plus million film like “F1” can’t afford, and that visual effects can’t replicate.
2023 and 2024 Formula One Seasons
“F1” features nine actual races, and racing fans will recognize memorable moments, like Checho’s turn one collision in Mexico, or Ocon and Gasly colliding on the first corner in Hungary, that were integrated into the film. Kosinski promised drivers his fictional film would preserve each (with one notable exception) of the real races’ leaderboards, which wasn’t a sacrifice for a story about an underdog team at the bottom of the standings, fighting for its very survival.
The original plan was to shoot the entire movie during the 2023 race season, but the actors’ strike hit right as production had started. The SAG work stoppage meant Kosinski’s team would shoot 38 days of racing during the 2023 season, then return for the 2024 season to shoot with the actors. While at the time, the strike was a devastating blow to the already expensive production, Kosinski told IndieWire the film benefited from the split season approach, allowing them to edit in between seasons and return to the famous tracks in 2024, knowing how, where, and what exactly was needed to finish the film.
Shooting in 10-Minute Intervals
Bampton established one guiding rule for the production: It could never interfere with the integrity of the sporting competition. This meant the “F1” team needed to be to take advantage of every five to 15-minute pause in the action. Actors and crew needed to be prepared to quickly do a shot in one take.
“It’s like doing a live show. Brad and Damson would be in the cars, tires warm, engines warm, at the gates ready to come out. As soon as the practice or qualifying session ended, they’d pull out onto the track and shoot their sequences,” said Kosinski. The director also pointed to an important dramatic scene that takes place at the grid (where race cars are positioned before the race begins) right before the start of a race, that they had one eight-minute window to shoot. “It meant rehearsing with the camera crew with a stopwatch for weeks beforehand, knowing where everyone needed to stand, so that the actors step right into our coverage. It was a completely different style of filmmaking.”
“In the Cockpit” with Sony Carmen
One of the keys to the success of Kosinski’s “Top Gun: Maverick” was putting the audience in the actual cockpit to experience the speed and force of an FA-18 plane. The goal for “F1” was similar, but a key difference being a plane flying Mach 1.6 is unphased by the weight of 50 pounds of camera equipment (the trick there was how to securely attach it), but that is not the case for the formula race cars in which every add pound and adjustment to its aerodynamics really matters.
Kosinski would need a multi-camera system that could get multiple angles, and that was extremely small and lightweight, and he could move (pan and tilt to reframe compositions). To achieve this, cinematographer Claudio Miranda collaborated with Sony to create a new piece of camera technology now known as “Carmen,” which, according to Kosinski, is essentially a “sensor on a stick.”
Fifteen Sony Carmen camera sticks were placed in different positions around the Apex cars to capture Pitt and Idris driving. The camera bodies, batteries, and RF equipment (to send out the radio signal with video village) were then built into the floor of the car itself.
Apple iPhone and the F1 On-Board Camera Pods
One camera angle racecar fans will be familiar with from television is the onboard camera pods, which are placed behind the driver’s helmet, facing out the windshield. The 720P quality broadcast footage, which has a slightly hidden camera-like feel on TV, is not of a quality “F1” could use on the big screen, but the filmmaking team worked with Apple to use the iPhone camera sensor, chip, and iOS software to build a camera that was similar in size to the onboard camera pod.
And then — and this is huge — Formula One actually let the filmmakers put the new Apple camera inside two to three of the real race cars (not just the fictional Apex cars) during the races.
Kosinski could count on having between 30 to 35 camera angles of the race itself. Approximately 16 of those came from the production’s cinema cameras, but utilizing TV broadcast cameras presented challenges. Like many sports, they Formula One races are shoot at a high frame rate with fast shutter speed to avoid motion blur (which is twice as important for Formula One, which needs to keep all the various sponsors’ logos visible). There is hyper reality and clarity to the image that is not particularly cinematic, to say nothing of how it gets compressed so it can be beamed in real-time across the globe.
“I got them to change their shutter angle for me, and we were able to intercept the 4K feed before it was broadcast, or sent over air and compressed,” explained Kosinski. “We were able to put raw recorders on those cameras, and do up to 20 of their track cameras in an uncompressed format, which we did at every race.”
VFX and Re-Skinning Cars
To integrate the Apex team’s two cars into the actual races, the “F1” VFX team would “re-skin” (a technique developed for “Top Gun: Maverick”) one of the real race cars into one of the black and gold Apex cars.
After each race, the editorial team would comb through and log every event of the race, so that when editor Stephen Mirrione needed, for example, a shot of a car passing another car on the right side, he would be able quickly access the various options from that particular race (Kosinski said that Lewis Hamilton was far too eagle-eyed and knowledgable of each track to let the filmmakers get away with cheating by repurposing footage from different races).
“We would cut the real footage from the real race [into the movie] and we would put these little ‘bugs,’ these little tiny logos, on the car that we were going to turn into an Apex car,” said Kosinski. “And that’s how I watched the movie for a year-and-a-half, with all these little floating logos everywhere, which to anyone else would be completely indecipherable, but once I had committed to those shots, visual effects would re-skin.”
Exposition and the Announcers
Each of the movie’s races has a narrative arc, which often hinges on the viewer understanding the nuances and strategy of car racing. While the goal was to make a film racing fans could appreciate, it was equally important for the summer blockbuster not to lose the casual movie-goer.
Therefore, “F1” was constantly faced with exposition problems — taking time to explain things to an audience can bring a story to a halt and remove the viewer from the immersive experience. To solve the exposition problem, the filmmakers recruited Sky Sports announcers David Croft and Martin Brundle to play themselves.
“I noticed [Croft and Brundle] do this amazing thing where they mention the fundamentals, so that if someone is tuning in for the first time, you’re getting those tidbits you need to know,” said Kosinski. “But for the diehard fans, they’re the voice of the sport, so it feels authentic.”
The announcer were brought in during post-production and recorded 19 hours of voiceover for the filmmakers to then play with in the editing room.
Using F2 Cars
Using real F1 cars for the Pitt and Idris’ Apex team was impossible. “A Formula One car requires about 30 people to start it, and costs about $250,000 a day to run it,” said Kosinski. “A Formula Two car can be started by two people and costs about $30,000 a day to run, and you’re getting 90 percent of the performance [of an F1 car].”
As Kosinski explained, 90 percent of the performance was plenty — pointing out stars Pitt and Idris had no business operating in that upper 10 percent of performance. So the production purchased six F2 cars and shipped them to the Mercedes F1 factory so its engineers and technicians could modify them to look like F1 cars and equip them for filmmaking purposes.
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