Hill review — the moment Damon found out my dad had died in a plane crash

Times

12 hours ago

In an era of big Formula 1 personalities — Prost, Senna, Schumacher — Damon Hill often seemed to have the most troubled air about him. Watch the new film Hill (Sky Documentaries/Now) and you'll find out why. When his wife, Georgie, says, right near the start, 'He was one of the saddest people I've met in my life', it's clear this is going to be a film that does what all the best sports documentaries do: find the human story, the deeper psychology behind the sporting glory.
So while, as an account of an underdog's rise through the F1 ranks, this has all the gripping intensity that made Netflix's Drive to Survive such a hit, the film goes further. There are constant reminders that this was a man trying to escape the shadow of his beloved father, Graham Hill, who, as anyone with a longer memory of the sport will tell you, was killed in tragic circumstances.
That was in 1975, when Damon was 15, and he'd spend the next two decades defined by the shadow of his father. 'If your dad is the star of the show, then who are you?' he says. Yet rising above it all, an inspiring point emerges about the value of determination: Damon's was very much inherited from his father.
Graham was a two-time world champion with something of the dashing matinee star about him (albeit with a hint of Terry-Thomas in that moustache). His son was in awe of him. 'It was almost like the house came alive when he came back,' he says. There's an awful irony in the fact it was only after Graham retired from the lethal world of F1 — much to the relief of his family — that the worst news came.
Damon recalls how one evening, 'I was watching TV with my younger sister. We were expecting Dad home, my mum is in the kitchen and then … 'We interrupt this programme with a newsflash …'' I suppose there is no right way to hear the news that your father has been killed in a plane crash.
Damon shares vivid details of his feelings in that moment. 'I remember a kind of wave of heat coming up through my legs and into my face and I remember clocking what this meant — not being sure, but being terrified.' Home video footage and news clips combine, images of Graham fracturing and fading in haunting style.
Damon and Georgie offer to-camera interviews that initially may suggest a generic approach compared with, say, the film Senna, where the absence of talking heads added to its power. Yet seeing the subjects helps us to feel closer to them then and now: Damon a trim, silver-haired figure; Georgie a shrewd, likeable presence who offers revealing perspectives on her husband's (formerly) rather tortured soul.
As a driver, Damon wanted to prove people wrong, a sentiment that leads the way through the film's account of his rise through F1. There's a certain spikiness in his memories of feeling undermined, at times, by Williams bosses (when, for example, Nigel Mansell was brought back into the fold in 1995), and his clashes with Michael Schumacher. Generally it's believed that in the final race of 1994 Schumacher steered into Damon, putting them both out of the race and securing the German the world championship by a point.
Then there is the remarkable central section where Hill becomes a kind of companion film to Senna: we hear fresh perspectives on Ayrton Senna's fatal crash in 1994, including Georgie's recollection of how he talked to her right before he climbed into his ill-fated car, giving her reassuring remarks about Damon.
Damon talks of not wanting to go to Senna's funeral, just as his father hadn't wanted to go to his great friend and fellow driver Jim Clark's. It was Jackie Stewart who advised Damon: 'You'll regret it for the rest of your life if you don't go.' So he went. His last funeral had been his dad's; now he was a pallbearer at Senna's.
Later that year, at the Japanese Grand Prix, Damon felt something transcendent when his hands on the wheel seemed to become not his own: 'I just felt like I'd been visited by some sort of spirit.'
Such candour is effective, so that when the film reaches its climax at the end of the 1996 season, you find yourself invested in the emotional release of his eventual victory. Damon Hill's life had 'fallen to pieces' in 1975, but through sheer determination, 20 years later he'd 'put it back together again'. It's sport as catharsis, and really quite moving.
★★★★★