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After spending so much time in the Danger Zone, “Top Gun: Maverick” director Joseph Kosinski should be able to handle the switch from wings to wheels with his new film “F1,” which looked like “Top Gun: Maverick” but in a car. The upcoming movie sees Brad Pitt as a down and out racer who teams up with “Snowfall” star Damson Idris’ hot shot driver to win a race against the titans of the sport, which demanded that the actors spent a lot of the film on the track as a result. In this case, that meant a live racetrack with real racers and a roaring audience watching it unfold.
/Film attended a trailer preview for the new film earlier this week, where the director revealed how every second counted getting his stars on and off the track while filming the fast-paced sequences shown in the new footage. “We couldn’t just shoot at the track without the race going on. It would’ve been the wrong dynamic. So we were actually there on race weekend, with hundreds of thousands of people watching us, finding these time slots between practice and qualifying that Formula One graciously afforded us,” Kosinski explained.
From there, the race was on. “So we’d get these 10 or 15-minute slots where we’d have to have Brad and Damson ready in the cars, warmed up with hot tires ready to go, and as soon as practice ended, they would pull out onto the track.” Getting on the road was one thing, but then came filming the high-speed races in a whole new way — and doing it at 180mph.
Joseph Kosinski took lessons from Top Gun: Maverick into F1
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Even after using up to 27 cameras filming “Top Gun: Maverick” that gathered 800 hours of footage, Joseph Kosinski still faced limitations he hoped to surpass with “F1.” “I mean, we had to develop a brand new camera system taking everything we learned on ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ and pushing it much further,” he said. “You can’t put 60 pounds of gear onto a race car and expect it’s going to perform the same way.”
Thankfully, by collaborating with Sony, the cameras used in “Maverick” were shrunk to a quarter of their original size to accommodate the new ride they were getting strapped to. From there, the crew were able to operate and move the cameras while shooting with motorized mounts (something not possible on “Top Gun: Maverick”), allowing Kosinski to capture a greater range of motion as the cars rocketed around the track. “I’m sitting at the base station with Claudio [Miranda], our cinematographer, looking at 16 screens. I’ve got camera operators on the controls for the cameras and [I’m] calling out camera moves like a live television show while they’re shooting.”
With these advances, they weren’t just breaking new ground, but burning rubber on it. “So much research and technology and development went into just being able to roll a frame of footage, in addition to the training for the actors and the logistics of shooting at a real race,” Kosinski said. “So it was a lot of prep to be able to pull this off.” Considering the tiny windows of shoot time they had available, the intense pressure to get what they needed in those moments, actors actually driving at ridiculously high speeds on real tracks, and doing it all for a crowd of over 100,000 bystanders, it doesn’t seem hyperbolic to posit that this might have been one of the toughest film shoots of all time. See how they did it when “F1” arrives on June 27, 2025.