SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains mild spoilers for F1. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
With the film's stars sitting in the driver's seats of the vehicles and exceptional cinematography offering a perspective on speed never seen before on the big screen, F1 is a movie that brims with spectacular racing sequences and has no problem delivering excitement simply by depicting high velocity – but is any racing movie really complete without at least a couple crash scenes? It's basically an expected part of the cinematic experience, but what you may not know is that the accidents in the movie were specifically modeled after accidents that happened in real life.
In a recent episode of the podcast The Big Picture, F1 director Joseph Kosinski digs into the making of the new movie, and while discussing how the crash scenes were filmed, he explained that they are specifically based on actual incidents. He noted that the flashback sequence where the career of Sonny Hayes is derailed was actually inspired by events from the life of one of the consultants behind the scenes of the movie, and it was put together with multiple components. Said Kosinski,
All the accidents in the film are based on real-life accidents or combining pieces of different ones. There’s one in the 1990s that’s very much based on a real accident and a real person, an ex-Formula 1 driver, who was a consultant on our film and involved and graciously allowed us to use his life experience and allowed us to modify it to be part of Sonny’s backstory. So that was really kind of a blend of period footage, where we digitally altered it and footage that we shot ourselves kind of blended together along with some new technology.
It sounds a bit more complicated that properly nailing Brad Pitt's era-appropriate hairstyle for the sequence.
F1 employed some particularly fancy editing for the crash sequences set at the end of the 21st century, but the scene where Damon Idris' Joshua hits a curb and explodes during the race at the Monza Circuit was entirely produced by the production. Joseph Kosinski said that things actually didn't go precisely as planned while it was being shot, but what ended up happening was even better than the original vision:
Then there’s a crash in Monza, which we shot fully practically, which was also based on a Formula 3 accident from a few years ago in the same corner, which was intense. There’s a whole making of that on the home video release, which people can watch, it’ll be interesting. But that one did not go as planned and ended up being kind of better than I could’ve anticipated for that reason, and that's why I love live-action filmmaking.
More than just spectacle, any crash sequence in any racing movie is included principally to add stakes to the story and showcase how dangerous it is for the drivers of fast cars to do what they do – but in the making of F1, Joseph Kosinski found another side to them as well. While it's true that the drivers are in danger when their cars flip and blow up, the way that the vehicles are designed today make them far safer than they were a couple decades ago. Added the filmmaker,
That one also involves fire, which was intense and also based on a real life Formula 1 crash from a few years ago, which, I think, reminds people of how dangerous this sport is but also how safe it is, because the safety measures built into these cars and the suits that they wear have come a long way in the last 20 or 30 years that people or walking away or surviving crashes that they wouldn’t have before.
The crashes in F1 are expertly crafted, and they are one of the reasons why the movie demands to be seen on the big screen. Also starring Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies, and Javier Bardem in addition to the aforementioned Brad Pitt and Damson Idris, F1 is now playing in theaters everywhere – having finished in second place at the box office this past weekend behind the Independence Day holiday weekend debut Jurassic World: Rebirth.
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