The Upcoming F1 Movie Looks Cool, But Sounds Like A Real Pain To Make

One of the most anticipated movies of the summer is F1, the movie about, well… F1.

You're no doubt aware of this flick, which has been in the works for years and stars Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, and Javier Bardem, is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and features input from seven-time Formula 1 champ Lewis Hamilton.

And they got the perfect guy to direct: Joseph Kosinski, likely best known for directing Top Gun: Maverick. 

So the guy knows how to direct movies about fast things.

But the process of making this movie — which cost a fortune to make, but according to Kosinski and Bruckheimer in a new interview with the Associate Press, it wasn't quite the $300 million that was widely reported a while back — sounds like a complete and utter stress-filled pain in the ass.

This started before even a single frame had been shot.

"When you come in, the first thing they think is you’re going to make them look bad," Bruckheimer told the AP. "I went through this with when I went to the Navy the first time on Top Gun."

You can understand why that would be. Teams and the series don't want to risk their reputation and sponsorship dollars on a movie like this, but as Kosinski noted, there was no way to do the movie without F1 being involved, with the series even allowing them to build a garage for the film's fictional team at certain races.

Brad Pitt (middle) and Joseph Kosinskion oj set at the Las Vegas Grand Prix during production of <i>F1</i>. (Photo by Mark Thompson/Getty Images)

"The amount of, let’s say, conversations regarding things not related to the actual filmmaking has been massive just from a coordination point of view," Kosinski explained. "But there’s no way we could have made this film without that partnership with Formula One."

But once that was all worked out, they had to figure out how to shoot an authentic F1 movie because you can't just slap a big, bulky camera on a car and call it a day.

"These Formula One cars, they deal in grams," the director said. "Adding 100 pounds of camera equipment works against the very thing you’re trying to capture. It became a technical engineering project for a year to figure out how to get very tiny cameras that are IMAX quality onto one of these cars."

Dude… a year of trying to figure out how to get the cameras to fit on the car before they even shot anything.

Alright, I'm glad these guys made the movie because the thought of having to go through all of these hoops is going to give me a panic attack.