Going from high-energy thrills in the air with Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick to the high-energy thrills on the ground with Brad Pitt in the upcoming film F1 might seem like a pretty obvious shift for director Joseph Kosinski. However, the director says the movies could not have been more different.
Kosinski’s work on Top Gun: Maverick does connect to his new film, as Formula One star Lewis Hamilton nearly cameoed in Maverick, and it was due to that the two began to talk, leading to Hamilton becoming a producer of the movie F1. However, the director tells EW that the movies were quite different in another key way. As in Top Gun, they were in the middle of nowhere, while much of F1 was filmed in front of a live audience. Kosinski said…
On Top Gun, we were off on an aircraft carrier 100 miles off the coast. This movie we shot in front of an audience of 400,000 people. Often, I had only a few minutes to shoot a scene because we were actually shooting it at the real live event. There was a stage-play-esque vibe to this where we had to be very well prepared, but execute in the moment and only get a few takes at a scene.
F1 used a fairly unique, but somewhat obvious, strategy for recreating the look and feel of actual Formula One competitions by filming in the middle of them. This meant they didn’t need to bring in thousands of extras or fake crowds with CGI. However, it also meant that filming was on a fairly tight schedule.
Scenes of F1 would be filmed between the other festivities of the event. This meant everybody was limited in what they could do, as the shoot didn’t want to cause problems with the actual races. If they couldn't get the shot they wanted, they had to move on empty-handed.
During Top Gun: Maverick, the film likely had all the time in the world. If a scene required multiple takes, not an unlikely situation given they were filming scenes with actors actually flying in jets, they could take the time to get what they needed. Here, everybody had to be ready to get it right in one take, because if they ran out of time, it could cause serious delays.
Based on the F1 trailer, this will be a movie full of pulse-pounding action. But it's also likely that pulses were also pounding on the set as everybody dialed and knew they had to do their jobs perfectly to make sure they could get what they needed in the time they had. We’ll all get to see the results when F1 hits theaters next month.
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