Brad Pitt, the interview with the actor: “I stopped drinking for eight years”

LOS ANGELES. He is in pole position Jerry Bruckheimerproducer of, among others, American Gigolo, Top Gun e Flashdance. Next to him, the director Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion, Tron: Legacy e Top Gun: Maverick) and the Oscar-winning actor Brad Pitt. Immediately behind, the seven-time Formula 1 world champion, Sir Lewis Hamilton: at the American premiere, the list of names who worked on the film F1 (from 12 December on Apple TV+ after a first release in cinemas) is synonymous with success.

The narrative track is simple: based on the world of Formula 1, Pitt plays the former driver Sonny Hayes who returns to competition to join rookie teammate Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). The cast also includes Javier Bardem and Kerry Condon.

Mr. Pitt, in a 40-year career you have played dozens of memorable characters: what attracted you to Sonny Hayes?

«His is a story of redemption. We have all had difficult moments in life, we have all had to get up when it seemed impossible, and when the chances of getting back into the game seemed zero. Failures help us grow. My parents did it: it’s been eight years since I stopped drinking and I completely turned my life around. We all want a second chance, and a team that supports us. In the crazy world we live in today, I think there is a need to tell these positive stories, where a group of people work for a common good.”

Before her, other movie stars got behind the wheel, and not just for a film: Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Tom Cruise. How did this passion arise in you?

«Paul Newman said he was a racing driver who was an actor in his spare time. I feel a bit like him. I grew up watching Jackie Stewart racing in F1 in the early 70s. In the 90s I became passionate about MotoGP. I have always loved sports films and motorcycles, I have a nice collection, including one by the Japanese designer Shinya Kimura, a true artist.”

What do you like about sports films?

«Everything that happens during a game, whether it’s baseball or The best con Robert Redford, o basket come in Winning shot with Gene Hackman, it’s a metaphor for life, they are stories that move you on a deep level, they include hopes, disappointments, successes. I’d been trying to make a film about car racing for 20 years. I tried with motorbikes, with cars, I tried different disciplines, but for some reason I was never able to materialize any idea. I have to thank Joe Kosinski and Jerry Bruckheimer who, after Top Gun: Maverickthey contacted Lewis Hamilton and offered him the role of producer. This allowed us to tell a story never shot before, technically unique. Racing on a circuit is the most visceral experience I’ve ever had.”

What did he discover new?

«A world behind the scenes that I had no idea existed. Five hundred people working together as a complex mechanism where everyone has a very specific role. F1 is a film that takes you into the world of Grand Prix, showing things that most people don’t know. In Formula 1 everything is studied down to the smallest detail and the movement of a millimeter can completely change the way you drive. For millions of people it is a religion. There are ten teams in the championship, with two drivers for each team. It’s the only sport where your partner is also your opponent, because every driver wants to be number one. This creates incredible drama, and this is exactly where we began our story.”

The novelty of the film is that you shot on real circuits during the Formula 1 season. How did you do it?

«The idea came from Toto Wolff, director of the Mercedes Amg Petronas F1 team, who is also one of the executive producers of the film. Instead of building a fake car and trying to make it fast, we started with a real race car, and then mounted the cameras we needed. One of the main tasks in this process was to develop a completely new camera system, because it was not possible to add thirty kilos of equipment on a racing car and expect the same performance on the track. So we installed transmitters that controlled the movement of the cameras, which sometimes showed the action on 16 screens at once. The technology is crazy.”

And the result?

«We have never seen such speed reproduced on a screen. Lewis Hamilton wants to integrate it into the real world of F1, so he can watch it on TV. When we started, these types of cameras didn’t exist. We started with the system developed for Top Gun: Maverick and worked closely with Sony. Together we created tiny devices that allowed us actors to be filmed driving. Lewis filmed his Abu Dhabi race, in 4K resolution, and around thirty of these shots ended up in the film. We didn’t use stuntmen and we weren’t towed by another vehicle as is usually the case in films of this type: everything was created specifically with the aim of capturing what Lewis wanted from the beginning, which was to give the audience the experience of driving one of these cars. More than 5,000 hours of footage were used for the editing and the sound engineers recorded the audio on all the circuits, because Lewis knew that the sound would be different in each of them, even at every bend.”

The hardest thing?

«Normally, when you shoot a film, you have hours or days to make a scene. Since we wanted to make this film live during the Grand Prix, we only had a few minutes available. There were times when the director would say: “Get ready, if we’re lucky we can do three takes.” Especially for the opening scene at Silverstone. We shot three scenes in a row in 15 minutes. We have been preparing for months to be ready and not hinder the official races. But no one prepares you for racing in front of 200,000 spectators, for the chaos of the start of an F1 race, for the tension of not making any mistakes. I don’t remember a single case where someone did something wrong, sometimes there were people running on the track and wanting my autograph, but in the end we did a great team job. The pressure only enhanced the film’s narrative tension: it has an energy that would have been impossible to capture using special effects. And I thank all the teams and drivers who have been very generous and patient. It was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.”

Your favorite circuit?

«Maybe Silverstone is the most fun. It’s a huge event, almost like being at Woodstock with 400,000 people camped out for three whole days. It still has a slightly ancient feel, perhaps of what Formula 1 was like in the years when I watched it on TV. When it’s a road race like Monaco, whoever qualifies first or second will win the race unless they have a mechanical problem, because it’s impossible to overtake, but Silverstone is different, very fun to watch.”

Twenty-five years later Fight Club… what different type of preparation did you adopt?

«In that film I had absolutely no idea what I was doing (laughs)! We would punch each other without even knowing how not to break our fingers. Here I had to learn to drive these cars, not to crash, I prepared for two years, I put more than 10 thousand km under my ass. It’s absurd what these jewels can do, it’s absurd what pilots do. They have ice in their veins. When I started my career I thought that if I wasn’t successful, I could become a truck driver, I dreamed of buying a colossal 18-wheel truck and working while travelling. But then we know how it ended…”.

On the Friday of 12 December 2025