Joseph Kosinski‘s racing drama “F1: The Movie” has been justly celebrated for its high-octane racing sequences, which incorporate cutting-edge filmmaking technology to convey a visceral sense of what it’s like to drive a Formula One car. However, those set pieces would not work if the entire film were a constant blur of speeding cars. The film’s quieter moments — focusing on actors Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, and Javier Bardem — also needed to have the same level of tension, beauty, and artistry, even when a starting grid was nowhere in sight.
For this, Kosinski turned to his longtime collaborator Claudio Miranda, the cinematographer who has shot all of the director’s films going back to “Tron: Legacy” in 2010. When it came to those character beats, the filmmakers were guided by the same principles as the racing scenes: Make them as grounded as possible. “There weren’t many sets on this movie,” Miranda told IndieWire. “The locations were our sets.”
And so, in a big way, were the cars. Although Miranda admired John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film “Grand Prix,” he felt that many of the other racing films he looked at were lacking when it came to capturing the actual speed and intensity of the sport. “ One of the things we really wanted to improve on was speed,” Miranda said. “A lot of movies use process cars or biscuit rigs, and those things only go maybe 60 miles an hour. And knowing that these cars go 200 miles an hour, that’s just way too slow.”
Miranda and Kosinski resisted suggestions to shoot scenes with a car on a platform. “That’s not our movie,” Miranda said. “We watched movies that were done in that style, and they do tricks like speeding it up or putting the vehicle on a gimbal or in the volume… but that seems a little bit sad. I think the audience can recognize that stuff, and they just feel when it’s AI or the volume, and it’s not real. The excitement level probably drops because of it.”
With that in mind, Miranda collaborated with Sony, Formula One, Mercedes, and other companies to create a system for filming the actors as they drove their cars at 200 miles per hour – no easy task given that even the slightest amount of extra weight slowed down the vehicles. “The smallest cameras that existed at the time were just way too big,” Miranda said, noting that this created a challenge he didn’t have to face on “Top Gun: Maverick,” where the planes he was mounting cameras on could handle hundreds of extra pounds — and didn’t require the same kind of visibility for the pilot.
“This wasn’t like ‘Top Gun,’ where I could block up the whole front view and it doesn’t really matter,” Miranda said. “These drivers really needed to see where they were going; that was critical.” Ultimately, Sony designed cameras that Miranda described as “sensors on a stick,” which could capture high-quality footage and relay it across the track to recorders via state-of-the-art radio frequency tech. Miranda was able to capture up to a dozen unique angles at a time on each car, and could pan and tilt rather than being constricted to a fixed camera position.
All of this led to the most kinetic and realistic racing movie ever made, but the methodology didn’t stop on the track. “The thing I love about Joe is that he’ll always try to shoot in a real place, a real environment,” Miranda said. That meant that not only did the racing sequences avoid process shots and green screen, but the more intimate moments did too — even when they theoretically could have been shot on a stage with much less expense and effort. At one point, Pitt’s character opens up about his regrets and failures to Condon on a hotel balcony in Las Vegas in what is the movie’s most emotional scene; it also, thanks to Miranda and Kosinski’s approach, is the most visually beautiful.
“We did that with just one camera — multiple set-ups, but one camera,” Miranda said. He noted that a dialogue scene like the balcony exchange could easily have been done on a set and would have looked convincing, but again, being on location in Vegas created an emotional effect that might otherwise have been elusive. “The city lights come from underneath, and it feels like they’re really lighting that scene. Sometimes, signs will blink and it lifts the whole scene up, but you probably wouldn’t make that choice on a stage where you’re trying to make things more consistent. And the fountains in the background give it a great view.”
The balcony scene is also emblematic of one of Miranda’s greatest and most underrated strengths, his talent for showcasing movie stars. While it’s not necessarily difficult to find a way of shooting Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt in ways that display their charisma, in “Maverick” and “F1” Miranda takes their star power to an extra level through his careful lens selection and lighting. Simple images of Pitt walking toward a long lens take on a mythic grandeur in Miranda’s hands; it’s the kind of pleasing classical style that used to be more common in the glory days of the Hollywood studio system but which has become more and more rare in recent years.
The precision of Miranda’s visuals is all the more impressive given how often he had to grab them on the fly, as the drama was staged in between breaks during real races where Kosinski and his crew were piggybacking on Formula One events to take advantage of their resources and scale. “They don’t give you grace,” Miranda said. “If you’re not done in 10 minutes, you have to get the car off the track. There were scenes we shot that we had one chance to get, and that was nerve-wracking.”
The company’s ability to execute difficult shots in tight windows was thanks largely to careful rehearsal and planning. “We just had to have everything really buttoned up,” Miranda said. “It was a collaboration between many people across different spectrums, not just my grips and the camera department and the art department, but Formula One and Mercedes and more — half the people helping us weren’t even in the film industry.”
The camaraderie between Formula One and the “F1” crew led to some of the movie’s most extraordinary shots, images that Miranda said would have been unachievable otherwise and which spoke to the special nature of the cross-industry collaboration. “One day, there was a red flag moment and they said some of the teams would help us,” Miranda said. “They all did. They all brought their cars out, and they were all out there for real — that’s not a CG shot. I was almost crying, it was such an emotional moment.”