The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of F1 The Movie.

This is an exceptionally immersive film. Can you talk about working with all your partners around to the world to get this made? It’s a huge undertaking.
Jerry Bruckheimer: That part was about a year-long process. We brought in Ehren Kruger, who wrote Top Gun: Maverick, to write the screenplay based on Joe’s [Kosinski] idea for the story. First, we went to Brad, pitched the idea, and asked if he was interested. And he said, I’m in because I’ve always wanted to make a racing movie. In fact, Joe almost made a racing movie with him! Then we pitched it to nine different studios and Apple was the one who gave us the tools for the way Joe wanted to make the movie. Those tools were no green screen, none of that. And Brad made it a stipulation—if you want me to make this movie, I’m in the car. We made a deal with Apple, and they said, all right, we’ll take that chance if you really believe you can make it safe and put Brad in that car while being smart about it. Joe took Brad out to track before he started anything. He had Lewis Hamilton there and they put Brad in a car and they asked Lewis, what do you think? Lewis said, he’s a real athlete, he can do this. And then Lewis took him for the ride of his life, spun him around the track. Which is insane, the way they drive.

Then we had those pillars together and then we went to London, Brad, myself and Joe, and pitched what we wanted to do to Stefano Domenicali, who’s the head of F1. Joe, being smart, didn’t do storyboards. He made a video. He showed them what he did in Top Gun. In other words, we didn’t have Russian jets. So what he did is he took the F18 and skinned it with a Russian jet. He showed him that piece of work, that film that he did, then he took one of their races and took our car and skinned one of their cars, so Stefano could see how our car integrated with F1. The other obstacle was, since Lewis is with Mercedes, what’s going to happen to the nine other teams? There are ten teams, two drivers to each team, and it’s the only sport where your teammate is also your competitor. We had to clear that hurdle too. And we did the same process with all the team owners, team principals, and eventually the drivers. Brad, Joe, and I stood in front of all twenty of the drivers and said, here’s what we want to do. We showed them the same video. During that season, Red Bull was really in competition with Mercedes. And since Mercedes was going to build our car, Red Bull thought for sure that they were going to be the villain because they hated each other that season. It took a year to convince them that the competition was going to be between our two drivers, not between other teams.

Eventually throughout the year, they kept seeing us at races and we went through this for two years before we started shooting. Then we had the actors and writers strike in the summer of 2023, and we had to shut down. But the good news is that Joe got to shoot all the second unit while the actors were out. He went out and shot a lot of interesting racing stuff. And then we came back the following year when we finally had the actors back. Meanwhile, Red Bull kept seeing us at the track, all the time. And Joe built a garage that was right in between Ferrari and Red Bull. We were the 11th team in the sport. We were integrated, just like you were integrated into this movie. It was fascinating to watch how this amazing sport operates because they travel. There are over twenty races all around the world, and they move their garages. They move all their cars. We were part of it, shipping our cars and our garage all over the world. It was really a daunting task. And then you had to do the driving and that was on the tracks while there were races. What we would get is time between the qualifying and practice races—they would give us ten minutes, fifteen minutes, and sometimes nothing. We had to make up for the nothing somewhere else. But it was such a great experience because in the end, what you saw was our two actors driving those cars every time we cut to them in the car. That was not green screen. That was them. When you cut to the outside of the car, that was also them driving. Over the course of four months prior to shooting, they became expert drivers. Not that they could compete in a race! Because our car is an F1 body with an F2 engine. And when you jump from an F2 engine to an F1 engine, it’s like almost going from a car to a rocket ship. Even with an F2 driver who’s a champion, it takes him at least a week to be able to understand the steering wheel and how to propel this car because they’re so difficult. These twenty drivers are the best in the world.

Everything that happened in this film racing wise, happened in F1. Through the course of history, every kind of gimmick that Sonny did in the film, an F1 driver did. Eventually we got all these stories from the team principals and the drivers themselves. The socks were a great example. The head of Williams told me he had a driver that brought mismatched shot socks to the track, and it was the first race he ever won. So he never changed.

We all want to have second chances

The visual design of this film is incredible, but I’d like to talk about the emotional design, because I found that to be incredibly compelling. Can you talk about constructing the opening?
Joseph Kosinski: When JP and Sonny first meet each other, it feels like you couldn’t find two more different people. They’re two different generations. They have two completely different backgrounds. They feel like they have nothing in common, but what you find over the course of the film is that they are the same person. Ruben’s character is the first one to point it out. When Sonny’s complaining about Joshua in the ice bath, Ruben points out that Sonny was all those things at his age. What I like about the film is it’s about two people who feel like they have nothing in common finding out that they actually have a lot in common. The main thing they have is this passion and talent for racing. The difference for Sonny Hayes is that something happened in his past that derailed him and he never got that dream of winning an F1 race. He thought it was lost forever. He made mistakes along the way and when he sees this kid who reminds him a lot of himself about to make the same mistakes, he’s able to use his experience and impart some wisdom and get Joshua Pearce on the path to being a great team leader, which Sonny already is. That’s the heart of their relationship.

Where do you find Sonny Hayes at the opening of this film? This was something that we actually had wrong the first time. In the first draft of the script, we opened and found Sonny Hayes at the Baja 1000 race, which is the now the last scene of the movie. Lewis Hamilton and Toto Wolff, who is the team principal of Mercedes, said you can’t go from Baja to Formula One. It’s impossible. It’s so different. There’s no way a driver could make that leap. That’s when Lewis said, why don’t you start him in endurance racing? And there’s this famous endurance race in Daytona called the “24 Hours A Daytona,” where they drive all night long. And what that unlocked for me was that we would find Sonny in his natural habitat in a US race in Florida. It’s IMSA style, which is the endurance racing where it’s a little closer to Nascar, which Jerry knows something about. Then we’re going to take this American icon and we’re going to drop him into the world of Formula One. And when Sonny shows up on that track fifteen minutes into film, it should feel like this a guy who’s walking onto another planet, you know? I love that contrast of bringing this outsider in. Brad’s the only American in this film, which is very true to Formula One. It’s a very international sport. It’s not a very American sport.

In a film like this, the instinct is to get to the racing right away, but you let the film breathe.
JB: Well, the racing is minor to me. We’re great—we can do that. We’re great at making action, but it’s the emotional connection that we have with our characters and with the audience that makes the movie special. If we can get you to feel something, if we can tell you a story that makes you connect with our characters and gives you an emotional response, then people are going to see that movie.

We had a bunch of blind preview screenings, where people have no idea what they are going to see. Then there’s a focus group, twenty people in the room. The first question they ask the focus group is, how many of you were aware of F1 or have been to an F1 race? One hand went up. Then they asked them, how many you are interested in watching a race or going to race? Every hand went up. Racing is what the energy is, but it’s the characters journey through the racing world that makes it interesting. Sonny and JP fight, but then they come together and build a team to win. We all want that in our lives. We all want to have second chances. We all want to have the ability to work with a great team and win. And that’s what we’re trying to convey to audiences.

Could you talk about developing the aesthetic of the movie? I’m particularly interested in how you integrated the lighting at the stadiums.
JK: I think the aesthetic was very much inspired by the world of Formula One. My entry was through Mercedes. We shot a lot of scenes at their factory. You can see how the aesthetic is very clean, very minimal, very high-tech. In terms of the lighting, I said to Claudia [Miranda, Cinematographer] that when we’re at the track, we’ll have to work with what we have, we’re not dragging lights around. I was excited to use this sort of available light approach and work with what we had. We were shooting during real events, which meant that instead of having a few hours to shoot a scene, we might only have eight minutes. But I didn’t want it to have a documentary feel. I didn’t want to feel like we just ran out there and hosed it down. We did a lot of pre-planning, rehearsal, and blocking with a stopwatch while having cameras preset so that I would never have to sacrifice compositionally what I wanted to do stylistically with the movie. We just had to be very much prepared to have the actors walk into a setup that was ready to go.