There’s nothing like a bit of macho melodrama to get those bums in movie theater seats, and legendary Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer knows the unspoken truth better than most.
Just three years later Top Gun: Maverick breathed new life into the action film genre, Bruckheimer reunited with director Joseph Kosinski and writer Ehren Kruger on F1: The moviea pedal-to-the-metal popcorn blockbuster that quickly became the most successful sports film of all time and the highest-grossing film of Brad Pitt’s career.
Was Apple aiming for a lucrative live sports deal all along? Perhaps. But as Bruckheimer tells me beforehand F1Apple TV debuts on December 12th, the iPhone maker was just as excited (if not more so) about the filmmaking process as any traditional movie studio.
“Apple wanted to make the movie we made,” explains Bruckheimer in London. “They wanted it right. Eddy Cue, who’s that [senior VP of Services] at Apple, is a huge sports car enthusiast and he’s actually on the board of Ferrari, so it really helped that he was someone who was really into the sport, who loved F1 and wanted to make sure we did it right.
It’s a brilliant company and they did a phenomenal job with us.
Jerry Bruckheimer
“And when Joe [Kosinski] Brad called [Pitt] and told him the story, Brad said, ‘Look, the only thing I’m going to tell you, it’s got to be done for real. I have to drive.’ And that’s how Apple wanted to do it. That’s why we wanted to do it, and that’s how we got the movie made.
“So Apple was obviously involved in the development of the film. We had script meetings, and they [were constructive about] every script that went through them. It’s a brilliant company and they did a phenomenal job with us.”
When I ask if there was anything different or special about working with Apple, specifically—as opposed to a company like Walt Disney Pictures, Bruckheimer’s co-producer on all five Pirates of the Caribbean film – he is quick to praise Apple’s ability to develop innovative camera technologies: “Well, the good news is that Apple is a technology company. And they gave us the iPhone camera [to film with]an improved version of it.
“So we had one of [Apple’s] cameras on nine drivers in the actual cars – not ours [mock] cars; the actual racing cars. And some of the footage you see is [captured at] 220 km/h, whether it’s Max (Verstappen), Lewis [Hamilton] driving, or Brad [Pitt] and Damson [Idris]both of whom did all their own driving.”
The ‘enhanced iPhone camera’ Bruckheimer refers to is actually an Apple-designed version of the cockpit camera used in real-world Formula 1 broadcasts. The problem with these cameras is that they record footage at a lower resolution than needed for a multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbuster, so Apple built its own high-resolution, shock-resistant cockpit camera using iPhone parts—including an iPhone battery and a camera sensor powered by an unnamed A-series chip (Sony also developed a new Rialto Mini camera for the same purpose).
As Wired notes, the custom firmware used to drive this Apple-made camera actually led to two new features in the iPhone 15 Pro: log encoding and support for the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) workflow. Talk about a mutually beneficial partnership.
Before I let Bruckheimer get back into planning Top Gun 3, National tax 3and Pirates of the Caribbean 6 (yes, really), I ask if he ever saw Apple CEO Tim Cook jump into an F1 car during the filming of the movie:
“Primarily [he] can’t get in the car,” laughs Bruckheimer. “The seat is molded to your body. I mean, it takes an F2 driver almost a month to get into an F1 car. That’s how hard these things are to drive. It takes 35 people just to start the car! It is a fantastic sport – very expensive and the technical knowledge is incredible.”
Then I take it as a ‘no’.
F1: The Movie begins streaming on Apple TV on December 12.
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