The high-octane Formula 1 racing film starring Brad Pitt and Damson Idris illuminated how many people it really takes to win the race. The crew working with director Joseph Kosinski were an equally well-oiled machine.

Winning formula: How teamwork got F1: The Movie across the finish line

The high-octane Formula 1 racing film starring Brad Pitt and Damson Idris illuminated how many people it really takes to win the race. The crew working with director Joseph Kosinski were an equally well-oiled machine.

By Sarah Rodman

Sarah Rodman is the Entertainment Editor, covering TV and music for EW.

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December 4, 2025 12:00 p.m. ET

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With its widescreen visuals, high-volume soundscapes, and pulse-quickening race sequences, *F1: The Movie* roared into theaters this past summer.

But one of the film’s most pivotal exchanges takes place in one of its quietest moments.

Director Joseph Kosinski's deep dive into the world of Formula 1 racing centered on Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes, a grizzled-but-still-chiseled veteran driver. “The greatest that never was” has been pulled back into the driver’s seat for one last shot at the glory that eluded him as a young man, thanks to a crash that has haunted him for 30 years. Naturally, he butts heads with a hotshot up-and-comer, Joshua Pearce, played with equal parts sensitivity and swagger by Damson Idris.

Near the end of the first act, Sonny is sharing a beer in a quaint English pub with Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), the brilliant, no-B.S. technical director for APXGP (pronounced Apex GP), the team he has joined at the behest of its desperate owner, his old racing buddy Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem).

Sonny is trying to both charm Kate and convince her to do a specific upgrade to the team car...and she isn’t having any of his maverick, lone wolf act.

Brad Pitt and Kerry Condon in 'F1'.

Apple Original Films

“I have news for you,” Kate says, fully in possession of Sonny’s number. “Formula 1 is a team sport. It always was. And maybe that’s why you failed at it.”

It’s an interlude that is no less explosive for happening off the track, and when Sonny and the team get their act together to make a run for the championship, it’s a perfect analogy for the way the *F1* craftspeople, artists, technicians, and crew banded together to make one of the highest-grossing films of 2025, which was also just named one of the National Board of Review’s top films of the year. (Currently available for purchase on VOD, *F1* comes to Apple TV on Dec. 12.)

While the spotlight may shine brightest on celebrated individual names in both arenas — be it a movie star such as *F1* producer Pitt or a driver like Lewis Hamilton, who also served as a producer and crucial consultant — there are hundreds of people behind the scenes who help get them into the theater and across the finish line, respectively.

Building the Power Unit

Kosinski assembled his own pit crew to realize his vivid vision of brilliant but messy underdogs coalescing to triumph in one of the world’s most popular sports. (And it is only growing. According to a 2024 Nielsen study, Formula 1 has an estimated 750 million fans globally, including lots of glossy stars who show up to the races, including Beyoncé, who attended the recent Las Vegas Grand Prix.)

“September 2021, I sent an email to Lewis Hamilton basically saying, ‘I want to make the most authentic racing movie ever made. Will you help me?’” recalls Kosinski of the nearly four-year journey from lights out to checkered flag. “Luckily, he said yes and invited me into the garage at the Austin Grand Prix. As soon as I stepped inside, I was like, *I have to do this*.”

Kosinski knows a thing or two about working in high-velocity worlds, having directed *Top Gun: Maverick*. He also understands the art and science — and value — of drafting the right team players, many of whom also worked on that Tom Cruise megahit.

Director Joseph Kosinski and Brad Pitt on the set of 'F1'.

Apple Original Films

It is a highly accomplished group that includes:

- Casting director Lucy Bevan (*Barbie, How to Train Your Dragon*)

- Cinematographer Claudio Miranda (*Life of Pi, Nyad*)

- Editor Stephen Mirrione (*The Revenant*, *Birdman*)

- Visual effects supervisor Ryan Tudhope (*Blade Runner 2049, Deadpool*)

- Supervising sound editors Al Nelson (*Jurassic World: Dominion, Knives Out*) and Gwendolyn Yates Whittle (*Tron: Legacy*, the *Avatar* films)

- Re-recording mixers Gary Rizzo (*Dunkirk, Inception*) and Juan Peralta (*Avengers: Endgame, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse*)

- Production sound mixer Gareth John (the *Dune* movies*, The Old Guard*).

Between them, the above assemblage has, among many other accolades, been nominated for 18 Oscars and won a half dozen. (And fun fact: One of them worked on the video for Sisqo's "Thong Song.")

Throw in a propulsive score by two-time Oscar winner Hans Zimmer (*Dune, The Lion King*) and a galvanizing end credits number “Drive” by four-time Grammy winner Ed Sheeran — part of an all-star, Grammy-nominated soundtrack — and you’ve got a formidable formula for creative collaboration. And that list, each member of which represents a larger team, is only a fraction of the number that made a contribution.

Brad Pitt doesn't 'think we could have done' 'F1' without star driver Lewis Hamilton

'F1' scene rattled director Joseph Kosinski: 'The tires were not getting any grip'

Faces of F1

Casting director Lucy Bevan was one of the new recruits to the Kosinski cinematic universe, but she’s no stranger to big, boisterous spectacles, having populated the worlds of *Barbie* and another of 2025's big hits, *How to Train Your Dragon*. The veteran British casting director made her way to *F1* via Jerry Bruckheimer, with whom she had previously worked on *Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides*.

"I have always known him to be the most tremendous gentleman and inspiration," says Bevan of the super producer, who has been reliably pumping out blockbusters for over 40 years and previously teamed with Kosinski on *Top Gun: Maverick*. "He sent me this script and asked if I would meet Joe. I read it and was really blown away."

When she joined the circus, Pitt was already attached, so she was tasked with finding the other members of the company in collaboration with him, Kosinski, and Bruckheimer.

"What struck me about the script when I read it was that relationship between Joshua and Sonny," Bevan says of the bumpy-to-buddy arc between the drivers. "I thought, what an exceptional role for a young Black British actor. I was so excited by that opportunity."

Damson Idris in 'F1'.

Apple Original Films

Idris has been steadily making a name for himself in the last decade and is well-known to fans of his nuanced work over six seasons on the FX drama *Snowfall.* Bevan and Kosinski were excited to give him a bigger platform.

"Anyone who watched that show knows Damson is phenomenally talented," says Kosinski. "I knew from the moment he walked into the room in London and read two scenes for us. I thought, *Wow, this guy has got it all*."

"Damson did so well and came through that process and we ended up taking him to the track to make sure he could drive well enough, and," says Bevan with a smile, "of course he could. He had been practicing, and he was amazing."

As for APXGP owner Ruben, Bevan says they wanted someone who they "really believed could be a true friend to Sonny." Cue Bardem. And to keep Sonny on his toes, they found one of the "most amazing theater actresses out of the U.K." for Kate in Condon. "She was the youngest person ever to play Ophelia at the Royal Shakespeare Company. She's just a force and we just felt she would be a good match for Brad."

Kerry Condon in 'F1'.

Apple Original Films

Bevan can wax rhapsodic — and specific — about every actor she chose, and subscribes to the novel philosophy that whoever is currently on screen *is* the lead, and casts accordingly. "In those moments, those people are telling that story," she says of a character who may just have a few lines. "It is really important for me to get those roles absolutely right."

Which is how she wound up with supporting actors who shine even with limited screen time.

Among that group are Will Merrick, who steals every scene he is in as engineer Hugh Nickleby; Samson Kayo as Joshua's cousin and manager, Cashman; and Sarah Niles as Joshua's mother Bernadette, who can be cheeky and nurturing but also carries a gravitas.

"It was just a couple of scenes originally, and she was so great. Joe and Jerry loved her so much, they brought on another writer to grow her part," Bevan says of the actor known to *Ted Lasso* fans as Dr. Sharon Fieldstone.

Sarah Niles and Javier Bardem in 'F1'.

Apple Original Films

Kosinski was thrilled that Bevan was able to cast a wide net to source a group with a global feel befitting a global sport.

"Everyone's got a distinct face and look and there's a backstory there and you know how hard they worked to get there," says Kosinski of the characters. "That's what I saw in the world of Formula 1, faces like that, people who work so hard their whole lives to get to Formula 1. And it's not just about the driver, but it's the thousands of people behind them building this car and doing strategy and testing and aerodynamics."

"I love the idea of kids going to the movie and realizing, even if you're not going to be a Formula 1 driver, you can still be an engineer or an aerodynamicist or a designer and be in that world," he adds.

"We intentionally cast team players, actors who are thrilled to be there, make the most of every opportunity, and when they have their moment, really rise to it," says Bevan with pride. "They were also able to deal with the high pressure of that world since the film was shot during actual races. No one dropped a line, I'm happy to tell you."

View from the driver’s seat

Cinematographer Claudio Miranda and director Joseph Kosinski on the set of 'F1'.

Apple Original Films

*F1 *marks the sixth collaboration between Kosinski and Claudio Miranda. While the Oscar-winning cinematographer (*Life of Pi*) says he's "not a sports person, per se," Kosinski didn't need a racing expert, he needed someone who knew how to be nimble. Miranda proved that as his director of photography on *Top Gun: Maverick*.

"It's just problem solving," says Miranda cheerfully. "I'm not a jet guy either, right? The main point from my perspective was how to immerse people in the whole environment of F1."

"He is a mad scientist in all the best ways," says Kosinski of Miranda, who previously earned an Oscar nod for another Pitt vehicle, *The Curious Case of Benjamin Button*. (He is also the mystery crew member who worked on the “Thong Song” video.) "But first and foremost, he really is an artist. He has a wonderful eye, and we both love the challenge of filmmaking and trying to show the audience something they haven't seen before. On *Top Gun*: *Maverick*, we wanted to put the audience in a fighter jet, and we worked for a year with the Navy to figure out how to fit six cameras into a cockpit."

The pair wanted to do the same with an F1 car, but soon discovered those methods would not work because the cameras were too heavy.

Director Joseph Kosinski on the set of 'F1'.

Apple Original Films

So, the mad scientist went to work to solve the problem: devise cameras with IMAX quality at a fraction of the size and weight. Oh, and it also needed to move…on cars traveling up to 200 miles an hour.

"A 'sensor on a stick' is what I called it," says Miranda of the camera he worked with Sony to invent and with Panavision to craft a mount. "Basically, it's a sensor with a cage around it with a full frame lens mount, and we were able to cable that to all the brains that were underneath the car."

To say that he is underselling how much work and ingenuity went into crafting his creation would be an understatement. The camera — dubbed "Carmen" in Miranda's honor — took six months to build.

"We had 20 prototypes that Sony shipped to us literally a week or two before we started shooting," recalls Kosinski. "Claudio and his team installed these on our race car and got the controls working. Mercedes built the car for us. So, we basically built a race car made for filming *this* movie. Without all those geniuses behind the scenes pulling this off, we wouldn't have been able to make it the way we did. It is a miracle because it didn't exist. I think it's going to inform cameras in the future. These things are going to be available for everyone to use now."

Cinematographer Claudio Miranda (kneeling) on the set of 'F1'.

Apple Original Films

The camera innovation was just one of many, many solutions that Miranda and his team formulated over the life of the production.

Another fun challenge for the crew was shooting at the actual Grands Prix depicted in the film, from England to Abu Dhabi.

The crew would have mere minutes at the races to capture Pitt, Idris, and the other actors in the pit crew and Wendy house (portable buildings where engineering and technical teams monitor various aspects of vehicle performance during races) interacting with each other, the track itself, and other drivers and race personnel – all "playing" themselves – during real moments like the national anthem and jet flyovers.

"Most people think when you're filming, you're in charge of everything, this big machine," says Miranda of a crew's typical ability to lock down streets or schedule shooting during favorable lighting conditions. “But in truth, in the F1 world, we were a tiny speck. We're doing scenes on the Wendy house, and there's a real race going around. It's interesting to shoot like that. We tried to keep it all visceral and real.”

That meant everyone had to be agile and fleet-footed. "You're not going to have cranes and dollies," he says of standard gear at a big-budget film's disposal. "You've got little handheld rigs that you're just kind of running around with and you've got to meld into their world because we're their guests. It's just like, 'This is it. It's shooting now, point the camera and go!'"

The F1 teams treated their guests with kindness, and even made arrangements at the final race to accommodate production to bring all their cars into the pit lane for a red flag recreation.

"Most people would probably think this is a CG shot," says Miranda of the moment that includes producer Hamilton and other star drivers getting out of their cars in the background. "All the cars were there. All the teams were there, acting for us. That was really moving to me."

Now you see it (or, hopefully you don’t!)

Visual effects supervisor Ryan Tudhope loves it when he and his team successfully create what he calls "prove it" shots.

"They’re moments where we ‘prove’ that our cast was in that situation,” he says of a scene where the audience sees something seemingly small, like the image of a car on Kerry Condon’s computer screen or Brad Pitt or Damson Idris' eyes in their rearview mirrors. "I grew up in an era of film where the visual effects artisans of that time were really trying to be magicians, to create work that was hidden that you believed was real."

There are 2,500 VFX shots in *F1*. And from those fleeting moments to much larger efforts involved for, say a spectacular crash or changing the appearance of speeding automobiles, Tudhope is thinking about his responsibility to the audience to get things right — particularly the Formula 1 fans in the crowd.

"It sets the quality bar really high, not only visually, but also what the content actually is," says Tudhope, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on *Top Gun: Maverick*. "Literally anytime you see the tiny little screen on the steering wheel in the cars, we had someone who knows what they're talking about go through every one of those and say, 'Yep, your tire temperatures look right, your oil temperature looks correct.' There's a joy I take in getting all those little things right and knowing we're being true to the sport and the fans. Joe really sets the tone for that in his films."

There is a spectrum to the work, from efforts the team thinks of as getting something "right" — such as merging different takes for timing and peak performance — to the more complex "reskinning" of cars on the track or adding tire smoke or dust plumes during crashes to meet story needs.

"We had six of our APXGP cars that we built," notes Tudhope. “They're all very expensive, and we didn't want to spin them off into the gravel and risk a bunch of dirt and dust getting into the car and into the cowlings and scratching the paint. So we used an F3 car — which is still not cheap, but much, much less expensive — and would film those shots with a stunt driver spinning the car into that gravel, and then we would digitally insert our APXGP car into the midst of that accident."

Tudhope even got to play Mother Nature for the scenes at the Italian Grand Prix in Monza. In the film, it rains. On the day, it did not. "It was beautiful the whole time," laments Tudhope with a laugh. The team was unable to access the track in postproduction due to scheduling issues. And they didn't have footage of the actors on that track, only stunt drivers.

'F1: The Movie'.

Apple Original Films

So Tudhope's team needed a way to wet down the roads, insert the Monza backdrop into footage shot at Silverstone, and add the actors. It was a layered process that included editor Stephen Mirrione tracking down footage from a year that it *did* rain at Monza. Additionally, 'We had developed technology to do digital wet downs and add all of the mist and water spray coming off the stunt cars. It was a mixing of techniques. You're cutting from a 2019 shot that has real water, but all the cars are digital to a 2024 shot that we did, with real cars, but all the water's digital." You’d swear it rained that day watching the finished scene.

Although the VFX team does work throughout the production, the bulk of their magic happens in postproduction; Tudhope can’t say enough about his fellow craftspeople as well as the cast and stunt teams.

"We are only successful as a sum of all the parts before we take over," he says, tipping his cap in particular to editor Stephen Mirrione and, before signing off, encouraging EW to ask a specific question. "Ask him how many hours of footage they had in total for the movie. The number will blow your mind."

That number? 5,000.

In other words. A lot.

By way of comparison, Mirrione believes they had about 400 hours for *Traffic*, which won him an Oscar.

"They shot 2,500 hours," he says of the *F1* film crew, which was working with multiple cameras. "In addition, there was another 2,500 hours of broadcast material from the actual races. Meaning every time we went to a different track for the practice sessions, the qualifying sessions, and the Grands Prix, we were being fed all the track cameras."

While the number is staggering, Mirrione and his team did not buckle, devising various mechanisms and lists to organize the footage so he didn't have to go digging every time he needed a specific shot. He knew he had an embarrassment of riches.

"It was a miracle in terms of what all that footage provided for us," he says. "We had hundreds of hours of B-roll for every race where I've got the best camera operators in the world for that particular corner of a track. I could pop around and see all the angles of any given race including the helicopter footage, which was really fun to watch."

While many on the *F1* creative team viewed the popular Netflix series *Drive to Survive* as a gateway drug or source of inspiration, Mirrione chose to abstain for artistic reasons.

"Joe encouraged me to watch to learn more about it," says the racing newbie. "I started, but I quickly realized that if I got too involved in the series, which is really well done, it would influence me. Either I'm going to start using the same storytelling techniques or I might avoid doing something. My approach was, the less I knew about it was almost better. I wanted to learn it through the script and the performances, and the dailies. That way I'm pretty sure if I understand then the audience is going to have an easier time understanding it."

Mirrione, one of the very few people who experiences the films he is working on alone, sees himself as the audience; he realized that if he wanted to give people the "in the driver's seat" experience, quick cuts in certain situations would evoke that energy.

"Something I was always really conscious of as I was putting things together was the sense that I always felt like I was getting glimpses of things," he says of sequences where it cuts from the driver POV to a crowd shot to the crew at the Wendy house or in the pit lane. "Otherwise, you're not living in the scene," he says of the race pacing. "You're just watching a race happen, and races are really exciting — but that's not the goal of the movie. You want to be feeling things and getting thrust into different points of view. That was something I was striving for from very early on."

Mirrione notes that one reason Kosinski's crews return to work with him is his collaborative nature, and that even an epic production like this is fun. He particularly enjoyed watching another film crew/APXGP crew parallel happen as the film unspooled.

"The final result is important. But for me, it's the experience of working on it that really matters," says Mirrione. "One of the things I love about the movie and the finished product is the fact that the movie is about teamwork, and I could see the team getting better and better as we progressed, just as they do in the film. I'm not even sure we as a team were aware of it consciously, but I can see that arc clearly now when I watch the movie."

Damson Idris and Brad Pitt in 'F1'.

Apple Original Films

Mirrione understands that this meta layer may not be legible to the audience per se, but it adds a certain frisson for the crew. "It's super rewarding to feel audiences responding to that emotionally."

"We all know what it's like to struggle," says Kosinski of the film's aspirational story. "We all know what it's like to be at the back of the pack."

For all its whiz-bang inventiveness and speed, Kosinski had the same ambition going into *F1* as he has for all of his films.

"It always starts with the story, and then you put these hopefully relatable, emotional, entertaining characters in a world that deserves to be seen on the big screen," the filmmaker says. "That's what we did with *Top Gun: Maverick* and tried to do with *F1* as well: give the audience the experience of being in a world that they'll never be a part of. Only 20 people get to drive these cars. Lewis Hamilton said to me at the beginning, 'I've never seen a film that really captures what it's like to drive one of these cars.' That was the bar, and everything we did was aimed at that and hopefully telling a story that works for people who love racing but, just as important, works for people who don't care about racing. I'm very, very lucky to work with great people and that's why I generally work with the same people over and over."

Many of the people who work on the technical elements of a film log long hours painstakingly getting a single sound or image or edit just so. When they have done those jobs well, often the highest compliment you can pay them is to not notice that work at all.

Ryan Tudhope sums up a common theme echoed among his *F1* below-the-line teammates. "I actually am most proud when the audience doesn't know that we did anything," he says. "It's not about invisibility to the point where no one gets credit for what they did. It's about when the audience is watching the film, in the moment, they are not thinking about us. They're thinking about the story."**

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