'F1' trailer: Brad Pitt impressed Lewis Hamilton driving 180 miles per hour for movie

Yahoo

14-03-2025

With a promise from decorated Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton that this will be "the most authentic racing film you will ever experience," F1, starring Brad Pitt and Javier Bardem, directed and co-written by Joseph Kosinski, is easily one of the most highly anticipated films of the year. In the newly released trailer for the film alone, you get the sense that Kosinski is very much putting the audience in the driver's seat, feeling the thrills and speed of racing.
Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a 1990s Formula One phenom, but known for being "the greatest that never was." That's until he's approached by a former teammate, Ruben Cervantes (Bardem), owner of the fictional Apex Grand Prix team, with a proposition to come back to Formula One, alongside the team's superstar rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris).
"Some people look at Sonny Hayes, they see a guy who lives in a van. A gambling junkie who missed his shot. The best that never was. But I see possibility," we see Ruben tell Sonny in the trailer. "My rook is a phenomenal talent. But he's young. You plus him, boom, I got a team."
'I'm offering you an open seat in Formula One. The only place you could say, if you win, you are the absolute best in the world," Ruben tells Sonny later in the trailer.
But Sonny and Joshua don't really see eye-to-eye. Sonny thinks Joshua is an "asshole," and Joshua thinks Sonny is a "dickhead." And that sets us off on this thrilling underdog story.
Impressively, the film was shot on real Formula One tracks during real races, like Abu Dhabi, Monza in Italy and Las Vegas, in a attempt to bring a very authentic representation to the movie.
"Every track has its own personality, its own character, and because we went to all of these places for real, you really feel like you've gone around the world when you watch the movie," Kosinski said during a virtual press conference on Tuesday. "So we were actually there on race weekend with hundreds of thousands of people watching us, finding these time slots between practice and qualifying, that Formula One graciously afforded us."
"So we'd get these 10 or 15 minute slots where we'd have to have Brad and Damson ready in the cars, warmed up with hot tires ready to go, and as soon as practice ended, they would pull out onto the track. ... But the crowd you're seeing was really there in the stands. I don't think the crowd realized that Brad Pitt was in the car that was in front of them. And so there was definitely this heightened quality to every race. We were also shooting dramatic scenes on the grid before races."
So how is Pitt's Driving ability? He has the seal of approval from Hamilton himself.
"Watching Brad drive around speeds over 180 miles an hour (over 289 kilometres per hour) was really impressive to see, because it's not something you can just learn overnight," Hamilton said. "And the dedication and the focus that Brad put into this process has been amazing to witness."
But ultimately, for these actors, it's pretty extraordinary have Hamilton as a driving instructor to prepare for the movie.
"You have to be fearless and when you see Brad driving, that's not acting. He's really concentrating on keeping that car on the track and out of the wall during all those scenes," Kosinski stressed. "So that's something that you just can't fake, I think. I hope the audience feels that when they watch the movie."
While the Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive sparked significant interest in Formula One around the world, Kosinski was among the fans inspired by the series.
"I found that it's an incredibly unique sport in that your teammate is also, in many ways, your greatest competition," he said. "And for me, that makes for a great drama.
"I also loved how the first season of the show focused on the last place teams, the underdogs rather than the Ferrari, the Mercedes, the Red Bull, the teams that you see at the front of the pack. And I thought that there was an interesting story to be told about an underdog team in trying to not win the championship, but just trying to win one race against these titans of the sport. So that's where it started."
But ultimately, for a racing movie, with a significant number of people primed for the experience of watching the film as racing fans and Drive to Survive enthusiasts, Kosinski was tasked with having to really translate that thrill of speed to the audience. In order to do that, the firs thing Kosinski did was reach out to Hamilton.
"Having Lewis gave me this incredible in into this world, and one of the people he introduced me to was Toto Wolff, the team principal of Mercedes, and I started talking with them about wanting to capture the speed of this sport," Kosinski shared. "It was actually Toto who came up with the idea of, rather than making a movie car fast enough to kind of achieve these speeds, he said, 'Why don't you ... take a real race car and then work the cameras that you need into that.' So we did that."
"We actually bought six F2 cars, real F2 race cars and worked with Mercedes-AMG, the Formula One team and their engineers, to build real race cars that could carry our camera equipment, recorders and transmitters for making this film. So every time you see Brad or Damson driving this movie, they're driving on their own in one of these real race cars on a real F1 track."
While there seems to be much to enjoy for racing fans, Kosinski highlighted that there are plenty of other storytelling elements for the audience to enjoy in this story.
"It has the tension you would expect in a movie like this with all the action, but at the same time there's real heart here, especially in the story of Sonny Hayes and this kind of redemption journey he's on," he said. "There's humour in there, there's some romance, there's a little bit of everything that you need to tell a fully fleshed out rich story like this."