Brad Pitt gets a second chance behind the wheel in the full trailer for F1 — and yes, the star actually does his own driving for the racing movie.
The Apple film from director Joseph Kosinski hits theaters and IMAX from Warner Bros. on June 25. Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies and Javier Bardem round out the cast. F1 features Pitt as Sonny Hayes, a former Formula One racer who was forced into early retirement until a team owner (Bardem) asks him to return to the sport and help mentor a rookie driver (Idris).
During a press event to debut the trailer, which can be seen below, Kosinski explained that he connected with racing legends Lewis Hamilton, who is a producer on the film, and Toto Wolff to help capture the speed associated with the sport.
“It was actually Toto who came up with the idea of, rather than making a movie car fast enough to achieve these speeds, he said, ‘Why don’t you take a real race car and then work the cameras that you need into that?’” Kosinski said. “So every time you see Brad or Damson driving in this movie, they’re driving on their own in one of these real race cars on a real F1 track.”
Kosinski praised his star for an innate sense of how to handle the vehicle. “Brad had a lot of just natural ability right from the start, and I don’t know where he got that or if he was born with it, and he rides motorcycles, which I think has something to do with it,” the filmmaker shared. “But he’s just a very talented, naturally gifted driver, which for Lewis after that first meeting gave him a lot of confidence that we might have a shot at pulling this off.”
The film’s team worked to improve the cameras that were used to capture flight footage for Kosinski’s most recent film, Top Gun: Maverick.
“The big challenge was just the camera system itself,” he said. “We had to develop a brand new camera system taking everything we learned on Top Gun: Maverick and pushing it much further. You can’t put 60 pounds of gear onto a race car and expect it’s going to perform the same way.”
In the trailer, Pitt’s character expresses his love for racing. “If the last thing I do is drive that car, I will take that life, man,” the actor says as Sonny. “A thousand times.”
Kosinski helmed the film from a script by Ehren Kruger, who also worked on Top Gun: Maverick. Pitt, Kosinski, Hamilton, Jerry Bruckheimer, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner and Chad Oman serve as producers for F1.
