F1 trailer: Joseph Kosinski reveals how team shot Brad Pitt Formula One thriller on real race weekends

It should come as no surprise that Brad Pitt is a revhead. As he whizzed around real Formula 1 racetracks, going 180 miles per hour, his director Joseph Kosinski’s voice would come down the line through his headset.

It was almost never a direction to go faster.

“No, it was usually the opposite. ‘Slow down, please, Brad!’,” Kosinski told the media during a Q&A session to promote the official trailer launch of F1, the high-octane action thriller releasing in June.

The story follows Sonny Hayes (Pitt), a fictional former F1 driver who never fulfilled his potential but had exciting raw talent. Decades after his prime, the veteran is recruited by a Formula One team owner and friend to come back to the grid to help shepherd a young rookie.

The timing of the trailer was no coincidence. The clip launched hours before the kick off of the 2025 Formula One season in Melbourne, which speaks to more than just marketing nous. The sport and the production have been hand-in-hand since day one.

Seven-time Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton is a producer, and he was also Kosinski’s entry into that world.

On the first day, Kosinski, Hamilton and Pitt jumped into sports cars and raced around the track.

“I’ll never forget having Lewis Hamilton as your driving instructor,” Kosinski recalled. “But what Lewis was really interested in seeing was did Brad know how to drive. Because if Brad can’t drive, this whole film wasn’t going to work.

“What Lewis was very happy to discover was that Brad had a lot of natural ability right from the start. I don’t know where he got that from or if he was born with it, and he rides motorcycles, which I think has something to do with it, but he’s just a very talented, naturally gifted driver.”

Hamilton introduced Kosinski to Toto Wolff, the team principal at Mercedes AMG, who had the idea of rather than trying to make a movie car fast enough, the production should start with a real racing car and work the cameras into it.

Kosinski said the team bought six Formula Two cars and worked with Mercedes engineers to build real race cars that could incorporate cameras, sound equipment and transmitters. Any extra weight added to a car affects how fast it can go.

Kosinski had been the director of Top Gun: Maverick so had the experience of adding cameras to tight spaces, and capturing performances in cockpits from actors in control of incredibly fast machines, cope with the G-Force, and be emotionally present as their characters.

“We had to develop a new camera system, taking everything we learnt on Top Gun: Maverick and pushing it much further. You can’t put (27 kilos) of gear into a race car and expect it’s going to perform the same way.”

The F1 team, with Sony, evolved the Maverick cameras to a quarter of the size, and gave them the ability to operate and move them on motorised mounts.

This allowed Kosinski and his cinematographer to sit at base station in front of 16 screens and direct the performance in real time. On Maverick, the production would send the actors up in those fighter jets, capture the footage and if it wasn’t right, had them go back up in the sky.

The added element of pressure was the production was doing all this in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators during actual Formula One race weekends all over the world.

“I don’t think the crowd realised that Brad Pitt was in the car that was in front of them, so there was definitely this heightened quality to every race,” Kosinski said.

The filmmaker was adamant the movie had to be shot where it was happening, that you couldn’t fake the atmosphere and energy of a real race.

“We couldn’t just shoot at the track without the race going on, it would’ve been the wrong dynamic,” he said.

“We were there on race weekend with hundreds of thousands of people watching us filming during these slots between practice and qualifying that Formula One graciously afforded us.

“We’d get these 10 to 15 minute slots where would have Brad and (co-star) Damson (Idris) ready in the cars, warmed up with hot tires, and as soon as practice ended, they would pull onto the track. We’d have 24, 30 cameras rolling and I’d have to shoot these scenes in these very short, intense, high-speed windows.

“It was an adrenaline rush every weekend but what we captured is something you can’t fake or stage.”

F1 is in cinemas on June 26