Sylvester Stallone may have tried and failed before in an effort to bring the glamour and excitement of Formula 1 to the big screen, but now somebody else is going to give it a bash, Autosport reports.
After reaching a landmark deal with the sport's commercial chief, Bernie Ecclestone, Hollywood-based Michael Shevloff and Oscar winners Mark Monroe (writer) and Paul Crowder (director) are well advanced with plans for an action documentary on F1's most dramatic years - the period stretching between 1968 and 1982. The film is tentatively penned for released early in 2011.
The men behind the movie hopes it will appeal to the hardcore enthusiast as well as casual fans. Monroe, who won an Oscar with colleague Crowder for the documentary film The Cove, spoke to Autosport this week.
"My partners and I really believe that documentaries can be entertaining and engaging - not just reporting facts," he said.
"We want to make a big action movie - do something that puts people in the car and makes them gasp at the speed of the thing. Then, tell the human stories all the while, so you can dip in and out of these human stories with these big action moments that are enhanced from archive footage.
"We will do it with music, flare and energy - and get people excited about it. It is a pretty tall task as we have to hit the right tone so the proper fans don't think it is a rubbish, but also make it broad enough so that someone who doesn't know anything about the sport can really enjoy it.
"That is the task and it is a tough one - but it can be done and that is what we have set out to do. It is a tough order to make a dramatic film about a dramatic sport," he explained. "To make a film and say we will spend 100 million dollars or 200 million dollars on this movie - well Bernie would just reply and say the teams spend a billion dollars on the sport. So I don't know how you would make it bigger than it is. It is bigger in real life than you could ever make in a film, so a documentary is a much better form for this. The real thing is so huge that if you put it in a movie, the whole thing would seem contrived."
The as-yet unnamed movie will focus on the time between Jim Clark's death at the Hockenheim race in 1968 and Gilles Villeneuve's fatal accident at Zolder in 1982.
Stay tuned.
Add a Comment