While Shania Twain would no doubt have been left nonplussed, the sight of Brad Pitt striding down the Silverstone pitlane in racing overalls moved many onlookers to great excitement during the British Grand Prix weekend. Inconvenienced by the disobliging intervention of a pandemic and a writers’ and actors’ strike, Brad is now close to ‘wrapping’ his passion project, a much-anticipated movie set in the milieu of Formula 1.
For over a year speculation has swirled around details of the production, despite the film-makers giving regular off-the-record briefings to the media while shooting at grand prix weekends (perhaps to make up for the passive-aggressive emails entreating paddock folk not to look at the cast or the cameras during the course of their work). Until recently it didn’t even have a name. There’s been reports of costs escalating beyond $300million – although, while this sounds like a substantial expense, it doesn’t even put F1 in the all-time top 10 costliest productions. Still, it will likely have to gross half as much again as Pitt’s most successful outing at the box office – 2013’s World War Z, another troubled production – to turn a profit.
We’ve now had the opportunity to see a poster and a teaser trailer (see p20). Both pose questions. Not only is the film called F1, it also (currently) uses the official logo, which begs the question of how much commercial and intellectual sovereignty the commercial rights holder demanded in exchange for letting the cameras in. Quite apart from anything else, it also induces a jarring typographical mismatch with the typeface used for Pitt’s name.
It would be easy to punch below the beltline at some of the trailer’s silliness, not least the choice of Queen’s We Will Rock You as backing music. Frankly the Mii channel theme from the Nintendo Wii would have been a more appropriate choice, particularly when Brad and his technical director debate the need to “build our car for combat”.
Balanced against all of this is the undoubted pedigree of the filmmakers. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer is a master of wrangling big, noisy action movies and the hits on his CV far exceed the occasional misses (although Gemini Man, on which Paramount lost over $100m, is 117 minutes of your life you won’t get back). Director Joseph Kosinski’s acclaimed Top Gun sequel memorably eschewed computer-generated effects in favour of more visceral practical techniques.
Ultimately it’s a big bet on Formula 1’s new post-Drive to Survive market in America. What’s perhaps most interesting is that Apple not only outbid Netflix for the production, it agreed an unusually long period between the theatrical and streaming releases. The eyes of the movie industry will be locked on what happens next summer.
