ALISON BOSHOFF: Brad to make Pitt stop at Clooney’s £10m Berkshire home for F1 movie
Residents of the picturesque village of Sonning are used to damping down the impulse to rubberneck when their A-list neighbours George and Amal Clooney are in town.
The actor and his British wife bought a £10 million house in Berkshire in 2014 and live there part-time with their twins and staff. Visitors have included the Obamas and Harry and Meghan.
Now the locals had better brace themselves as Brad Pitt, Clooney’s dear friend, and fellow holder of People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive title, is about to arrive.
Pitt, 59, will touch down any day now for an extended stay in the UK to film Apex, a Formula 1 movie. Production of the film is based in Aylesbury.
The first day of filming will be at the British Grand Prix in Silverstone early next month and Pitt has been having training so that he can drive a modified F2 Mercedes car, which will have F1-style bodywork to look like the real thing.
George Clooney and his wife Amal bought a £10million house in Sonning, Berkshire in 2014 and now live there part-time
It will have the smallest ever moveable 6k camera and director Joseph Kosinski — of Top Gun: Maverick — is planning to take viewers right into the cockpit, doing for motor racing what his film did for planes.
Claudio Miranda, the cinematographer who made Top Gun: Maverick such a thing of beauty, is also in place for this film.
Lewis Hamilton, the seven-time F1 champion, is one of the film’s producers and he has been instrumental in getting permission to film at Silverstone, as well as Belgium and Italy later this summer.
F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali conceded in an interview a few weeks ago that agreeing to have Pitt and the crew there was ‘quite invasive in terms of production. It’s something that we need to control, in a way, but it will be another way of showing that Formula 1 never stops.’
Brad Pitt (pictured) will portray a retired racing driver who comes back into the game to help a struggling newcomer
Pitt will portray a retired racing driver who comes back into the game to help a struggling newcomer, played by Damson Idris. Kerry Condon, of The Banshees Of Inisherin fame, will play the team’s technical director.
Although Pitt has had driver training already, he will not be racing against others on the track. He will be filmed in the car at the site on race day. Footage of the actors will be intercut with that of the real drivers and their teams.
Talk is that the insurance in this case is swingeing. The cost will be borne by Apple Studios. The film has been put together with great ambition by fabled producer Jerry Bruckheimer with a budget said to top $100 million.
Pitt hasn’t spent an extended period of time in the UK since 2011 when he (and then wife Angelina Jolie and their children) lived for months in Richmond, Surrey, while he was making World War Z. He and Clooney finished making the thriller Wolves, in New York, in April.
Tom Cruise (pictured) has largely been based in the UK for the past five years and is currently filming Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part Two
Alongside Clooney, 62, Pitt will have another companion during his British summer — Tom Cruise. Cruise, 60, has been largely based in the UK for the past five years and is currently filming Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part Two.
He is already close pals with Lewis Hamilton and has apparently been telling Pitt about fun things he might like to do in the UK. There is a suggestion that Cruise is planning to take Pitt to Wimbledon.
Pitt, Clooney and Cruise might even take in the Goodwood Festival Of Speed next month — a Cruise favourite.
One question is whether Pitt will be solo on this visit. He started dating businesswoman Ines de Ramon, 29, last November. By this spring, U.S. Weekly magazine was reporting that they exchanged ‘I love yous’ and that the ‘committed’ romance was ‘moving forward’.
