Inside the Making of the New F1 Movie with Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, and Lewis Hamilton
That final week in Abu Dhabi, that final night, the army of crew reassemble at sundown. They have been together for nearly 18 months—and are still yucking it up. “No matter if it’s a good movie or a bad movie, a great script or a dog-shit script,” someone says, “when the crew vibes, the movie is better.”
Bruckheimer emphasizes the same point, in his own way: “And this group! Everyone is still getting along. I haven’t had any calls from HR. It’s incredible.”
The platoon sets up one final sequence for Pitt, an impressive crane shot that tracks Pitt as he walks beneath the grandstands against an onrush of fans heading for the track. When the crane, a Scorpio 45′, gets stuck, it takes nine guys, including Oscar-winning cinematographer Claudio Miranda, to muscle it into position.
The scene is meant to communicate: Our lone wolf isn’t here for this pomp and circumstance.
Pitt gets his sweat-and-Champagne spritz from Jean Black. The dozens of extras enter frame as though released from a holding pen, perfectly appointed, ready for their moment.
After a few takes, Kosinski’s satisfied.
“That was cool,” Pitt says. “Yeah, that was nice.”
Before midnight, it’s all over for Pitt. They wrap him in front of the cast and crew.
Idris can’t believe it. “How do they wrap Brad Pitt before me?” he jokes with me later, reflecting back on that night. “He was like, ‘Hey, man, you’ve got my number. I’m going to text you.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean you’re going to text me?! Where are you going?’ ”
There’s a similar moment for their characters in the film—the heroes are finally getting along, but the lone wolf is onto the next. Just looking for a new place to race.
THE VETERAN
But before he leaves for good, they sneak Pitt out for one final session in the car. “I think they may have just given me that out of pure sympathy so that it wouldn’t come crashing to an end,” Pitt tells me later. “Lewis would talk about it, finding this groove as a driver where he could…. Time slowed down for him and he could see every corner, every crack as a breaking point in the asphalt, every bump and just said no one could touch him and what a sublime, like, experience this is for him. And I felt my version of that certainly, certainly that very last night. I think because I got the extra night, it was like a freebie and I was even more free because of it. And I went out a couple of times and had just the most beautiful sessions that I can put myself back in the car and I can feel absolute bliss—and I miss it.”
After Abu Dhabi, the production scatters to the wind. Kosinski finishes a first cut of the movie, but is sent scrambling for a week during the LA wildfires. “So the first time I ever watched the film all the way through was on my laptop in a hotel room, evacuated,” he says. Not exactly how they drew up what Kosinski had described as a movie “meant for IMAX, the biggest screen possible.” Idris begins production on a new film in Cape Town. “I’m going through a phase of my life where I want to be in the motherland,” Idris tells me. And Hamilton begins a new season, his first with Ferrari, picking off a victory with his new team at the sprint race in Shanghai.
Meanwhile, when we speak again in the spring, Pitt is in a marvel of a home in the vast natural dreamscape of rural New Zealand, shooting his next film. It is a Sunday, a day off. He is, on this day off, all alone on the other side of the world from where I’d last seen him. What do you do to make a new place home? I ask.
“I’m a bit of an architectural snob and I’m a bit of a nature lover,” he says, “so I just look for a really beautiful spot for a new experience instead of trying to re-create the—I mean, I bring my own sheets. I’ve grown fond of softness in my older age, but that’s about it.”
Having spent so much time with Lewis and the other drivers now, what do they have most in common with a big movie star?
“There’s an isolation,” Pitt says. “Even a loneliness when you don’t feel like things are clicking. They usually lead to something greater and you can find purpose in it. But there is a definite isolation and it’s not necessarily a negative, it’s an endeavor and a constant discussion with you and yourself of maintaining this thing. And, yes, I think we’ve got it bad. But those guys are so scrutinized and that sport is so revered and there are so many of us that think we could do it, too, just because we drive a car fast down the freeway or something. They get so much shit. It is shocking to me. They’ve got to have thicker skin than even us.”
