F1 movie cast reveal how Lewis Hamilton changed the film

Yahoo

7 hours ago

While Netflix's documentary series Drive to Survive introduced Formula One to a new audience, the aptly titled F1: The Movie looks set to take the sport to a whole other level.
However, despite being a Hollywood production, the new movie from Top Gun: Maverick helmer Joseph Kosinski has a certain amount of authenticity – thanks, in part, to one of its producers: Britain's own Sir Lewis Hamilton.
"Lewis [Hamilton] was really pivotal, not only to adding authenticity, but going through so many of the driving sequences and the script and making sure that it's stuff that would actually happen," Damson Idris, who plays up-and-coming rookie racer Joshua Pearce alongside the film's lead star Brad Pitt, tells Yahoo. "He really encouraged me and Brad to keep going. And, you know, drive fast, as he would always say."
Sarah Niles portrays Joshua's mother and had "long conversations" with the seven-time Formula One champion Hamilton about his life and father. "You can just feel how the journey has been so hard for him to get to that space," she says. "He's coming from a completely alien world. [F1]'s not a world that he's part of."
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, best known for his work on numerous franchises — including Top Gun, Bad Boys, Pirates of the Caribbean, and National Treasure — explains how Hamilton's insight even influenced the way the production was edited.
"It got down to such a detail where he would tell [Kosinski] 'You're going into turn three at Silverstone, I hear you're in third gear, I'd be in second gear,'" he says. "Joe had to constantly change the picture to Lewis's keen eye and ear, when he was seeing things that weren't accurate. But we didn't make a documentary about F1, we made an emotional, fun, romantic movie about these characters."
As well as collaborating with Hamilton, the filmmakers worked with Formula One's organisers in order to shoot on actual race days. That meant filming at Silverstone during the 2023 British Grand Prix weekend, along with other races.
"The only limit they put in place was, 'Don't get in the way,'' says Bruckheimer. "They were great. We had Mercedes build a car for us. The only problem we had was that the other teams thought they were going to be the villains, and so we had to spend a year saying, 'No, it's a competition between our two drivers [Pitt and Idris]. That's our story."
There was a certain amount of pressure on the actors to deliver performances while the real F1 was taking place, which meant Idris and Pitt underwent over four months of training.
"Tough is a good way to describe it," Idris says. "We just trained everywhere. But Joe's reasoning for that was to get us as confident as possible behind the wheel for when we were actually rolling, and it was just a whirlwind. It was so much fun. We drove up to 180 miles per hour. I'm on a different level. Getting back into the road cars is kind of boring now."
"The good thing is that they're both natural athletes," Kosinski adds. "Damson was a football player, and Brad is just in incredible shape and rides motorcycles, so he has a natural grip of it. Lewis took Brad to the track and evaluated Brad in person. They went on the track together, and Lewis came out of that seeing Brad had a really nice feel for it. We then put them in an intense training sequence for about four months where they worked their way up through different classes of race car to eventually get to the level we needed them to."
The original idea for the film came to Kosinski while he, like so many other, watched Drive to Survive. "It really opened my eyes to this idea of focusing on the last-place team rather than the first-place team," he says. "That was the interesting way in, because that first season they focused on a storyline about Alex Albon living with his mom and his sisters in an apartment, and trying to prove that he belonged in this sport.
"To me, that was where the spark of the initial idea came from, focusing on a team that loses every week and what it's like to be there, struggling to work your way up. Then, talking with Lewis, just getting that insight into what it's like to be inside this world – because he's been both a rookie and now a seven-time world champion. He's seen it all."
After she auditioned, Niles watched the series, finding it "epic" and seeing Shakesperian qualities in the sport: The politics, the personalities, the strategies." Meanwhile, Idris watched the entire thing, start to finish.
"It was actually helpful, although die-hard Formula One fans would hate to hear me say that," he says with a smile. "Like, 'Oh, he's a TTS fan!' But I thought the doc was great, and it definitely informed us. None of us would be here if he didn't watch Drive to Survive."
F1: The Movie is in cinemas now.