There’s nothing like a bit of macho melodrama to get bums on cinema seats, and legendary Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer knows that unspoken truth better than most.
Just three years after Top Gun: Maverick breathed new life into the action movie genre, Bruckheimer reunited with director Joseph Kosinski and writer Ehren Kruger on F1: The Movie, a pedal-to-the-metal popcorn blockbuster that quickly became the most successful sports movie of all time and the highest-grossing film of Brad Pitt’s career.
Did Apple have its sights set on a lucrative live sports deal the whole time? Perhaps. But as Bruckheimer tells me ahead of F1’s Apple TV debut on December 12, the iPhone maker was as enthusiastic (if not more) about the filmmaking process as any traditional movie studio.
“Apple wanted to make the movie that we made,” Bruckheimer explains in London. “They wanted it for real. Eddy Cue, who is [senior VP of Services] at Apple, is a big sports car enthusiast, and he’s actually on the board of Ferrari, so it really helped that he was somebody 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 working with us.
Jerry Bruckheimer
“And when Joe [Kosinski] called Brad [Pitt] and pitched him the story, Brad said, ‘Look, the only thing I’m gonna tell you, it’s gotta be done for real. I gotta drive.’ And that’s the way 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 involved in developing the movie, of course. 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 working with us.”
When I ask whether 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 movies – he’s quick to praise Apple’s knack for developing innovative camera technologies: “Well, the good news is that Apple is a tech company. And they gave us the iPhone camera [to film with], an enhanced version of it.
“So we had one of [Apple’s] cameras on nine drivers in the actual cars – not our [mock] cars; the actual race cars. And some of the footage you see is [captured at] 220mph, whether it’s of Max (Verstappen) driving, Lewis [Hamilton] driving, or Brad [Pitt] and Damson [Idris], who both did all their own driving.”
The ‘enhanced iPhone camera’ Bruckheimer is referring to is actually an Apple-designed version of the cockpit camera used in real-world Formula 1 broadcasts. The problem with those cameras is that they capture 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, too, developed a new Rialto Mini camera for the same purpose).
As Wired notes, the custom firmware used to run 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 to planning Top Gun 3, National Treasure 3, and Pirates of the Caribbean 6 (yes, really), I ask whether he ever saw Apple CEO Tim Cook jump into an F1 car during the shooting of the film:
“First of all, [he] can’t get in the car,” Bruckheimer laughs. “The seat is molded to your body. I mean, it takes an F2 driver almost a month before he can get in an F1 car. That’s how difficult these things are to drive. It takes 35 people just to start the car! It’s an amazing sport – very expensive, and the technical knowledge is unbelievable.”
I’ll take that as a ‘no’ then.
F1: The Movie begins streaming on Apple TV on December 12.
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