The Jeff Bezos & Lauren Sánchez Wedding

25:43He sees him, frankly, as a future king because he says Vance can tell the story of America. And in doing so, he crosses the cusp into a whole new vision of the world at the centre of which is not democracy, but the CEO, the authoritarian, the monarch. You can hear episode one right now. Just search The Rest is Politics wherever you get your podcasts.

26:12Welcome back, everybody. From Love to Fast Cars, the F1 movie. This show's got it all. It really has. Yeah, the F1 movie, which came out, it gets one of those slightly longer release opening weekends because of American holidays. It's produced by legendary action producer Jerry Buckheimer. It's directed by Joseph Kaczynski, who did Top Gun Maverick, so knows quite a lot about having to make small cockpits look exciting. And it stars Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes, who's returning in a kind of mentor role. As an F1 driver. As an F1 driver. He was an F1 driver from the 80s, had a crash. He's now coming back.

26:50He's had a crash in the 90s. Now comes back. He's sort of 60-odd, and he comes back to help out his old friend, Javier Bardem, who runs a slightly dilapidated racing team who have to win a race before the end of the season or they close down. Or the board's going to take his company off him. Yeah. It's taken 55 million in the US and 85 million worldwide. We always knew it was going to be bigger worldwide than the US, but it's drawing those US audiences in. that is an unbelievable opening for a sports action movie like what it whatever it's about never mind that it's about something that used to be considered niche that is an unbelievable opening that must be perhaps biggest ever apple's it's it's not quite i don't think it's quite as um big as world war world war z world war z in our language like jay said that didn't trouble me and it's by far and away apple's most successful theatrical release remember they've only had about five theatrical releases Killers of the Flower Moon which you know all of that but it didn't make its money and then they've had big flops like Matthew Vaughan's Argyle that was a big flop and they have very very little this is like massively broad entertainment that you can take basically your whole family to see and it's very very successful and just on its own terms in like the sports action genre that is a brilliant opening we're calling it it's a hit I have to say Richard I mean, we've both seen it.

28:13To me, it is totally phenomenal what Formula One has done for itself in recent years. It is unbelievable. They've pulled off a real coup here. Yeah, I mean, they really have. First of all, Drive to Survive is brilliant. And it's become this sort of thing that has brought so many people into watching their sport. And it's become the template for other things. You know, everyone would like, other sports would like to replicate that now. But then to have this movie as well, it's really hard because it's become such a sort of part of the fabric of sports documentaries. drive to survive to think they were really the first people who did it in that way and then to have this movie and which they you know is quite obviously a massive sales pitch for formula one and we can talk about how they actually end up doing it within the movie itself which i find hilarious agreed and it's just a huge thing to have done that for yourself to make yourself this kind of entertainment enterprise aside from what happens in these 90 minutes of which there are only a few a year which are the races and to sell to america particularly which is the home of NASCAR and to sell a movie, which you unequivocally understand in this film, that whatever form of driving you do, wherever you've driven, for whoever, there is one pinnacle in the world of driving, it is F1.

29:23This is the greatest driving experience in the world. And in America now, that's sort of accepted. And that was definitively not accepted. Even five years ago, F1 found it very hard to break into the US, which is a huge market. And now, I mean, culturally, we understand that F1 And it is the absolute pinnacle of what you can achieve in a car. Well, the American rights come up again, I think, next year. And I think ESPN have them now. And I really bet you Apple goes for them now. And it's really interesting. Anyway, so let's talk about the film. But my God, what about even the ads before? Every ad before, I don't know, we saw it in completely different cinemas.

30:00Every ad before was for either an F1 sponsor or a partner. Obviously, there's advertising throughout the movie because things are written on the card. The advertising throughout the movie is amazing. It's almost beautiful in the way you can just see. Advertising has achieved its final form. Almost every single frame you're thinking, okay, that's paid for, that's paid for. Okay, that's good. So I don't know how much it costs, but a lot of it was offset. A huge amount was offset. And as you say, because it's F1, everything is branded anyway, so it's perfect. It's authentic. You're not kind of thinking, it's weird that they would have Pepsi there.

30:33You think, oh no, of course they would, because it's an advertising warning. If they didn't, it would not be authentic. and there's no point trying to invent some cheesy soft drink that doesn't exist. Just grab Pepsi to sponsor it. Oh, a cheesy soft drink. Sounds terrible. That makes me feel quite ill now. Okay, the movie itself, first of all, I'll talk about what is done for Brad Pitt in a minute. In a movie like this, you have to explain the sport a lot. Oh my God. Oh my God. You remember that Michael York character in the Austin Powers movies called Basil Exposition? They've got so many Basil Expositions in there.

31:00I'll tell you why, because people don't understand the rules of it and obviously lots of Formula One races hinge on sort of technicalities or... Almost all of them. Pit stops or, you know... Anyone you have to look at a clock to see how well anyone's doing. So the whole, you know, but you've got... First of all, so all the opportunities for exposition are the track commentary, the stuff that goes over the loudspeakers that people in the crowds hear is constantly in this movie. People saying, well, he can do this, but he's... In fact, what's happened here is... Yeah, but also, you know... I'm not going to spoil any plot points, by the way.

31:30But, you know, this team at the beginning of the movie, at least, at the back of the grid, and they spend an awful lot of time, the on-track commentator talking about the cars that are in his 17th and 18th. Yeah. I mean, remember, this is a battle for last place. Yeah. Or whatever. And then there's the people who were actually in Drive to Survive, like that motoring journalist and commentator Will Buxton. Yes. You know, has a significant Basel exposition role in this movie as well. Yeah. No, the real Basel exposition are Martin Brundle and David Croft who were the F1 commentators because they're, you know, do you remember when you used to play like the early football Sims and, you know, there'd be like Martin Tider and Alan Smith where they spent like three days in a Soho recording studio saying, oh, he's passed it down to the wing.

32:08Yeah. Great cross there. It's a clearance. It was that almost nonstop. Brundle and Crofty. Throughout the whole movie. Yeah, they did a great job, by the way. But, you know, they're having to say things like, and don't forget, because the safety car has come out, it could be a useful time to go into the pits because half the time in the pits will be taken off. So actually, you can keep track position at this point of the race. Okay. I'm not joking. This is not to denigrate the achievement of the movie, which is pitched at the level that if you don't understand it, they want you to be able to understand it.

32:38But also you don't understand it because if you're like, I've made a million quiz shows. If something's simple, explain it and people will understand it. If it is something like what happens when a virtual safety car comes out, the people who know F1 already know what happens, okay? And you explaining it to them, they're going, yeah, Martin, I know. And the people who don't know F1, what you are saying makes zero sense whatsoever. but it's just noise it's noise in the background it's hysterical and you're sitting there thinking I can't believe I'm having the virtual safety car explained to me and it's a really important part of that too I want to get Martin Brundle and David Croft in the studio because they did such a great job I just want to hear about the day they spent so do I with the script in front of them saying and just one more time make it a tiny bit more natural can you do it a tiny bit more natural and they go well we would never say this but we'll give it a go yeah and there's a the sort of heel in it who's played by Tobias Menzies, honestly, one of the first things he says on screen was, I'm a huge fan.

33:35I've binged all of Drive to Survive. There's so much, you know. And what I love about it as well, because they shot hugely. Oh, we should say, by the way, and I should say as well, I loved this movie. I loved it. I loved it and I didn't love it. I loved it and I didn't love it. I was glad I watched it. Yeah, so was I. Come on. The Brad Pitt bit of it, I liked. I mean, it is a bit like having Drive to Survive, but instead of Christian Horner, you've got Brad Pitt. I'm going to take the upgrade. But what I love is that, so first of all, Kim Bodnia, who used to be in The Bridge, he plays the team principal and you just realise, oh my God, of course, you look exactly like one of the team principals.

34:15Yeah, exactly. It is perfect physical casting. And the other team principals, by the way, are played by themselves. They're like press conferences where all the people you'll know and love from Drive to Survive literally play themselves. Zac Brown is in there. Toto Wolff. Toto Wolff, yeah. I'm going to say some of them acted well Toto Wolff listen love the guy he needs work yeah don't give up the day job Toto but what I find what was so funny about it in lots of different ways was you know you end up because they're so desperate for it to be authentic which is a whole set which I think is extraordinary because in the old days you used to be able to make a sort of and Jerry Brookheimer did it himself even if you would make something like Days of Thunder and okay there are a couple of real race drivers in that and nascar drivers but it was fine for it to be at a sort of basic level and for things to happen that could never really happen in the real world and the reason that so much of this plot has to hinge on things like digital safety cars is because in the in the era in which we live you're so afraid of fans saying it's nothing like this this could never happen and actually that mattering and then not just being a sort of general wide release summer fun movie which is what you could get away with in the past is that they have to have every single thing right.

35:29And it has to be done on the tracks, the real circuits, and you have to be able to see all the people. And it's quite funny, you know, you're watching someone like, obviously Max Verstappen can't really be doing with Drive to Survive, so I can tell you, he does not look like he can be doing a whole lot of this movie. There's a few cutaways of him. Lewis Hamilton is an executive producer and is massively involved in this movie. Massively involved in it. And he's got a production company now and he's looking, obviously, to do more things. I was seeing an interview with him where he was saying, and then, you know, Hans Zimmer gets involved.

35:55So we go to Hans Zimmer's studio and you're like, I don't know, I don't know if you absolutely have to be in Hans Zimmer's studio. I don't know if Hans Zimmer is going, oh, I'd love to start work on it, but Lewis Hamilton hasn't come in yet. But, you know, he does. I thought the soundtrack was a mess, by the way. Sorry. When you're talking about the authenticity of it, often producer credits like that are vanity credits. It feels like Hamilton, the one thing Hamilton does talk about, and I absolutely believe this, he said, I was there to try and make it authentic at all points. Like what they're hearing in the cockpit, Pitt, you know, what two sounds you'd hear at the same time, what sort of moves you could make and couldn't make.

36:30You know, I was across that all the time. And I absolutely buy that he was across that because it does feel incredibly real. The storyline doesn't feel real at all. As you're saying, the problem you have in this movie is what you really want in a movie like this is for Brad Pitt to come in and just, he's such a good driver that he drives faster than everybody else. Yeah. And he wins the title. Which that's what happens in movies like this. Which you can't do because we know enough to know that, well, his car is not as fast as the other cars, so it's not going to go. And they do a good thing. Kerry Condon, who is the sort of technical expert behind the team.

37:04She's really good in it. She's the absolute heart of the movie, I think. She kind of remodels the car very, very quickly, I have to say, against almost all FIA regulations. But let's let that sit. You can't do the thing of just saying, oh, my God, he was last and now he's driving. Oh, he's driven past the 19th. He's driven past the 18th because he's so fast at driving. You can't do it. So the whole movie... But that's purely because of our age, because of authenticity. In the old days, you would have made this movie and that's exactly what would have happened. You can't have that sort of movie anymore because you're so afraid of Petrolhead saying, or whichever constituency it is for whichever movie, this isn't real.

37:39Can we talk a bit about Brad Pitt's new screen persona? Because a lot has happened to Brad Pitt in recent years and we all know about it. There's been so much tabloid interest in his life, his schism with his wife, apparently with most of his children. and it's a whole big thing. And it's really interesting to see him now because he was always a different sort of young sort of tarot. And now, because things have happened to Brad Pitt, he is a character to whom things have happened. And he's moved into that mentor role that Paul Newman played for a significant part of his career. And I thought it was quite interesting seeing that.

38:17I mean, I think he's very charming in it. Yes, he is very charming. It's a really, really lovely central performance. Sort of believable. Not a lot happens with his character, I'll say that. But you like him. You like it when he's on screen. He was broken before he started. Yeah. So there's not a huge journey. And he's not mended at the end. No. Yeah. No. What I think also is very interesting about this movie is that it is an original. That means it is not based on IP. It's not based on a... And so it was interesting. A lot of people thought other movies would do much better than this. They even thought like Megan 2.0, the Blumhouse horror sequel might even beat it, which it hasn't done at all.

38:56It's sort of fallen away that weekend. But I think it's really, it's very hard. The tracking is now so off with these originals because there are so few of them. There are 80 or 90 original titles made in Hollywood every year and about 60 franchise titles. But in terms of the box office, 82 % of box office comes from franchises. Franchise. And only 18 % from originals. So something like this, whether or not you like it, we should celebrate it because this is a movie that has come, has been entirely created from nothing. And also from some scrappy underdogs, Brad Pitt, Liberty Media, her own F1 and Apple.

39:31It's lovely to see the underdog have their day. Well, actually, the director said, this is a coming together of two great brands. And I thought, my, even directors are talking like that now. Apple and F1. Which is what Orson Well said about Scissors and Cain, right? He said, I've got the castle people involved. I've got the sledge people involved. This is big sledge and big castle. I'm loving this. But actually, so, okay, bringing us on to Apple, because in order to promote this one, you've got, again, the slightly bizarre spectacle. You mentioned Hans Zimmer, and I will say, sorry, that I do think that the soundtrack was a miss.

40:03They should have had a Top Gun flying, you know, like that Harold Fortemeyer flying music. They should have had that for when he was achieving kind of race nirvana and everything was quiet. They should have had something like that. They didn't have anything like that, any of that music. So I thought that was a bit of a miss. But there was a big interview on the front of Variety recently in which Lewis Hamilton and Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, are standing together talking about this movie. They're very much the Bezos and Sanchez of this film. We keep saying, you know, why are Apple in this business?

40:38Why are Apple in the, you know, use a terrible word, content business at all? And people always say, oh, this is an incredibly expensive move. It's like, yeah, don't worry. They're like a$3 trillion company. I'm thinking of what any price of this is fine. That's like treating yourself to an expensive sandwich at lunch. Yeah, it's really, yeah. You know, once every couple of weeks, you go for it. You can have it, yeah. And that's before the sponsorship. And they do keep saying, you know, this isn't about trying to make you buy tech. But of course, in that interview, Tim Cook says, oh, yeah, all the camera technology, we're so leading in the camera technology, and we were able to put them inside the cockpit.

41:12and that's how it works like that. But you know, all of that technology is in some way distilled into the iPhone 16. I mean, it is always sort of about making you want to buy tech or bundle your purchases within Apple. And I find it's very, very interesting why they are actually doing it. They haven't gone out and bought a massive library of stuff. That's what people keep saying. They've got all this money. Why don't they just go and buy some stuff? So there's actually, obviously, they've got some great shows and they've had a really good run of stuff recently. They've got the studio. They've also got Slow Horses.

41:40they've got this is by far and away their most successful film by far and away and and if it had been a disaster then i think people would start saying are you just going to keep doing this ridiculous thing where you give creators loads of money and then you keep having flops but by the way it's far and away their most successful thing for one reason and one reason only is maybe we don't we don't know all the um we don't know all the numbers for for some of the other original stuff because they don't release it in in cinemas and this one whether it's through Brad Pitt, whether it's through F1, they've negotiated a 30-day theatrical window, which these days is almost unheard of.

42:15I think, you know, Thursday Murder Club, we're going to do a week-long theatrical window, and all that stuff is quite hard-fought. But a 30-day theatrical window is insane. But also, it means that you can have a huge opening weekend. Suddenly, this thing is at the heart of the media. Everybody's talking about it. So when it does drop on Apple itself, you have a huge thing already because people have paid to do your advertising for you. People have paid to go into cinemas, which we like anyway, because we love people going to cinemas and theaters in the States. They've done all of your pre-publicity.

42:45All of the reviews are like, this is a cinema movie. And so when it comes to your platform in a month's time, you have this ready, it's almost like you have bought a big franchise hit because you've made it hit by putting it in the cinemas. It doesn't cost you a huge amount. You know, you lose that exclusivity. for a month, but no one else is getting this after that month. You know, this is not going on Netflix. It's not going on Disney Plus. It's going on Apple. And so I wonder if it will change the views of some streamers as to whether having a theatrical release actually can be quite useful.

43:16Yes. I mean, this is such a spectacle, as it were, and they want it to be such a spectacle, and they want you to basically see an IMAX if you can. I didn't see it in IMAX, but they would love you to do that. It's too much IMAX for this. It's so big. It is very big. But I do think they will want to pick up the F1 rights because they're buying more and more sport. Like all the streamers who said they weren't going to get into sport, they've gone into sport. Well, certainly the F1 rights are going to be an awful lot more valuable than they were last time. I mean, an insane amount of value. But you have to credit the sport.

43:47I think it is absolutely extraordinary what they've done with how they're seen and the type of people. I mean, you know how American theatrical audiences are broken down by sort of race, by all different types of demographic. 38 % of people watching this movie in the opening weekend were women. That is actually, you said to me 10 or 15 years ago, 38 % of the audience for a movie about the cars would be women. You would never have believed it. And they've all come in via Drive to Survive. We've talked about before, those huge numbers who just come in and love the plot lines and love all of those sorts of things.

44:20And I think it's amazing what it's done for itself. by creating, by imagining itself as an entertainment that can exist year round in different ways and not just in those 90 minutes of race time. And I think there's nobody to touch in terms of what it's done for itself. Yeah, I think it's one of the great marketing achievements. And I don't say that like marketing achievements. Generally, that's your job. Your job is to make something, you know. Your job is to make people watch your sport. I've always loved F1. I've always seen what was good about F1. And it has always, to me, it's always been people.

44:50That's the thing I'm interested in. And to have taken that and shown that to the world in such a spectacular way, you know, you have to take your hats off to them. It's very, very impressive. And there's lots of people who will never watch F1, but they've reached pretty much everyone who might watch F1. And, you know, that's the job, isn't it? They've made people want to watch their sport and made their sport, which was totally niche, seem exciting. And it involves huge personalities, which, let's face it, in many ways, motor racing has not involved huge personalities. one of the things I think is interesting is how they get around that you know you can see through their helmets in this I wonder whether any of because that's always been a problem with F1 you can't really and they're always trying to draw you in by saying okay now you can hear their radio and we'll let you hear their radio as a fan and we'll let we'll just let we're just always trying to find ways to make it more human I wonder whether you actually have to have a black tight helmet and this was actually a piece of license that they were allowed and because of course it's a movie and we want to see the actors faces that would be my next step if I if I could, was to find a way of getting us to be able to see their faces during races.

45:54No helmets. There you go, do that. At the end, they thanked Martin Donnelly. Now, Martin Donnelly was a Northern Irish F1 driver back in the late 80s, early 90s. And actually, the crash that Brad Pitt is said to have had in this movie is based on Martin Donnelly's crash in Jerez in Spain. And you see footage of it. And it's really sort of a testament, actually, to the people that F1 is built on and the sort of extraordinary kind of bravery of the people who made F1 what it is. And I'm so happy to see that Martin Donnelly was thanked. And anyone who is interested in that previous incarnation of F1, there's an amazing documentary called Grand Prix The Killer Years about all the pioneers of F1 and, you know, some of the safety issues.

46:40And it's not the easiest watch in the world, I'll say that, but it is absolutely fascinating and works as a great companion piece to this, which is it's not all glitz and glamour. It is This Is World. And actually, I think that's something that the F1 film captures quite well. But lovely to see Martin Donnelly recognised and acknowledged by everyone on the film. I thought it's good because you see both sides of it. And if you are interested in F1... Lewis Hamilton went to him and said, can we use your story for this film? Yeah, which is fantastic because that's what F1 is actually built on. Is Lewis Hamilton the hardest working executive producer you've ever heard of in anything?

47:14He's actually done a lot of stuff on this movie. It genuinely sounds like he actually did some producing. He actually was an executive producer. And he's like racing a lot. So he doesn't have all that much time. But yeah, I think that you could tell that Lewis Hamilton had his fingers across this in a good way. I think, listen, if you like Jerry Brookheimer. And I do. And I do. You know, you've got the great kind of long shot of the sort of Tom Cruise shot, the Brad Pitt shot in this one of him walking from distance in kind of faded jeans and a leather jacket kind of walking down the pit straight.

47:46Oh my God, he's back. You know, got all the kind of Brookheimer tropes in there. But if you are ever thinking about writing a screenplay, it's worth, I would say, printing this one out because every single beat is exactly like to the second where the beats in a big Hollywood movie are supposed to be. It does not stray from them in any way. As you say, they have to explain lots of the beats with Martin Brundle saying, well, the interesting thing, of course, about being in third place is if he was in fourth place, he wouldn't be able to get the slipstream because his tyres, did I mention earlier, his tyres are soft tyres because they finished 11th in qualifying, which means they've got an extra set of tyres left.

48:22Okay, anyway, that aside, every single beat is the beat of every single Hollywood movie. Brad Pitt is great in it, I think. And that's a really good book to read if you ever want to. If you haven't read High Concept, which is the story of Don Simpson, Jerry Bruckheimer's producing partner, they create that three act, well they kind of refine the three act structure for big flashy American movies and they care so much exactly as what you said which is like I don't want to be feeling this on page 18 I need to feel it on page 15 and then in a much more amplified way on 25 and it's almost mathematical the formula they distill it's really on display in this film it's really on display but I think a special mention I think Kerry Condon is the heart of the film I think she actually makes it a film that has a bit of heart that takes it slightly away from what it might have been.

49:12And I actually cried at the end. There's a bit with Javier Bardem where I was like, oh, I'm tearing up here. I'm tearing up. Bardem totally gets the joke of this movie and at certain points is completely chewing the scenery and just doesn't care. Yeah, he's great in it. But listen, it's nonsense, but it's also kind of great. But hat tip to Martin Brundle and David Croft. Your many days in that dark recording studio somewhere will never be forgotten. I would read a full oral history about how everyone involved. Yeah, Rondell and Croft. If I wish at the Oscars, they had an award for Best Exposition.

49:44Well, this is nailed on, believe me. Anyway, so that's Formula One and it's out in cinemas now. Any recommendations this week? I have. I went to see the amazing Jenny Savile exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. It's by far the best thing I have seen this year. It is, if you don't go to see art exhibitions, go and see this. I mean, she sort of exploded onto the scene at the age of 22, Jenny Savile. She's now in her 50s. And the work, these monumental canvases are just incredible. It's absolutely an amazing exhibition. She's kind of a revolutionised painting. But you also, just to be in the presence of some of those is extraordinary.

50:28I think she's an absolute genius and I could not recommend it enough. And for listeners of a certain age, you might recognise her work. She used to do the covers of lots of the Manic Street Preachers albums and things like that. That's Jenny Savile. I'm going to recommend we finish Department Q, which I think is really, really good. So it's Netflix, and it is their attempt to have a returning series. I think they worked out after a while they've got all these limited series, and they're great, but then you have to start again every time. So they're on the lookout now for returning things, and Department Q will definitely return.

50:56And it's Matthew Goode playing a sort of slightly irascible detective. And he builds this slightly kind of ragtag band around him. And it's a murder mystery set in Scotland with loads and loads of great... If you want character actors, you go to Scotland, there's so many kind of people that are only in this for two or three scenes where you just go, you have no IMDB them. Because you think, oh my God, you're brilliant. That was amazing. It's a really, really good thing. And I think it gets better and better as the run progresses as well. so Department Q would be my recommendation other than that we've got a questions and answers episode as usual on Thursday and our bonus episode this week is on summer hits which I'm dying to do yeah what are summer hits where do they come from what are the biggest ones of all time it would be hot in the city let me tell you that much anyhow I think that's us for the day that is with our further congratulations to the happy couple always always just perma congratulations exactly we'll see you on Thursday see you on Thursday

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