We know that voice: Simon Taylor as the race announcer in Rush
Rush through the eyes of the only cast member to appear as himself: our own Simon Taylor
In Hollywood’s current roll-call, Ron Howard is an F1-stature director. Over the past 35 years this former child actor has directed some 23 feature movies, from Parenthood to The Da Vinci Code. A Beautiful Mind won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. Apollo 13 was praised for its accurate portrayal of the American space programme and nominated for nine Oscars, winning two.
British playwright Peter Morgan wrote West End hits like Frost/Nixon and The Audience, and has scripted more than a dozen films, including The Queen, The Other Boleyn Girl and Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy. He lives in Vienna: his wife, an Austrian princess, just so happens to be a friend of Niki Lauda.
When I heard that Howard and Morgan were collaborating on a major feature film about the 1976 battle for the world title between Niki Lauda and James Hunt, I was intrigued, but concerned. That was one of the most exciting, and most significant, F1 seasons ever, and I was there to witness most of it. But Hollywood’s past efforts to portray motor racing have not always been happy (although John Frankenheimer’s 1966 Grand Prix stands out). Then it emerged that massive efforts were being made to get the visual detail of the story entirely right, and owners of the actual 1976 cars were becoming involved. If anyone could get it right, Apollo 13’s director could.
To help tell the story, Morgan’s script required young actors from various countries to play TV commentators in different languages. One of Ron’s researchers found that I did the live BBC radio broadcast from the final, crucial grand prix at Fuji 37 years ago: it’s hard to realise today, but back then it was not covered live on TV. I was summoned to an audition, and found myself cast as the British commentator, effectively playing myself at less than half my current age. Sounds like an uphill task for the make-up department; but in the finished film you hear my voice a bit, but see me very little. I’m just part of a kaleidoscopic background.
Nevertheless I was needed for three days of filming. A 5.30am car took me to a massive outdoor set built on the old Blackbushe Airport in Hampshire, with a start-finish straight and pitlane. During the night the hard-worked crew – 400 of them – toiled to change it from Monza to the Nürburgring to Fuji: pits, commentary boxes and stands (filled with scores of extras and, for out-of-focus shots, hundreds of cleverly dressed dummies). Sod’s law meant it was raining when we did Monza and bright sunshine when we did the Nürburgring, but clever lighting for the former and huge rain machines for the latter dealt with that. Ron was everywhere, small, bird-like quick, ever-present baseball cap, swathed in two anoraks against the non-Californian cold. To change outfits from race to race, climate to climate, I had my own caravan with my name on the door, making me feel frightfully important. Even better were all the F1 cars, their owners wearing the helmets and overalls of their original drivers, patiently doing take after take as the different grids were lined up.
That was Phase One. Phase Two came months later when Ron Howard’s office called: could I help out with some editing? So I was closeted for eight hours in a tiny equipment-filled suite in Soho with the great Ron himself and his equally great editor, Dan Hanley, who works on all of Ron’s films and won an Oscar for Apollo 13. It was an education watching these two perfectionists working frame by frame through complex scenes, telling them what had happened historically, and arguing through the compromises needed to make the story come alive for a world audience, most of whom have never seen an F1 race and never will. As Ron said, “Will it work in a cinema in Des Moines, Iowa on a wet Tuesday?”
So to Phase Three. In a small preview theatre with about 40 others, I watched an early edit of the whole film, still with a few gaps, still without Hans Zimmer’s music. And, without grinding any axe, I think it’s terrific. It’ll upset the purists, of course: primarily because the film’s whole premise is that Niki and James dislike each other at once. That’s pure fiction, of course. They’d been friends and rivals since Formula 3, and when Niki came to London he used to kip at James’s flat. Other inevitable liberties have been taken with history. If you’re expecting a documentary, don’t expect to be happy with Rush.
But, like it or not, this is a feature film, and a wonderful evocation of what F1 was like in 1976: not over-dramatised, not over-simplified, but just as I remember it. Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl, as James and Niki, are movingly realistic, and the attention to visual detail is extraordinary. Using the best modern methods, Rush is technically and atmospherically brilliant. Go and see it.