Mike Fleming Jr: ‘F1’ Producer Jerry Bruckheimer Takes You Under The Hood Of Brad Pitt Formula One Vehicle

EXCLUSIVE: It was 50 years ago that Jerry Bruckheimer got his first full credit as producer, after switching from Madison Avenue to make movies. Billions in ticket-sale grosses from the biggest franchises the business has seen followed his move, establishing him as really the only brand-name producer whose name is featured in ad spots. And he will be the first one to say it’s all an exercise in problem solving.

On F1, star Brad Pitt illustrated a major creative dilemma when he introduced the film at its Radio City Music Hall premiere. As big a star as Pitt is, with his Oscar from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, how would it be made believable that his 60-year-old butt should be behind the wheel in a Formula One championship race? After all, the film’s North Star, champion driver Lewis Hamilton, was 36 the last time he steered his car to the winner’s circle, in the 2021 Saudi Arabia Grand Prix; and the oldest ever champion was 51-year-old Luigi Fagioli, in the 1951 French Grand Prix.

Just another day in the office for Bruckheimer, who produced with Apple’s creative team, Pitt and Plan B partners Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, director Joseph Kosinski, and Hamilton. They found a compelling way to make it OK, something Bruckheimer has helped do in myriad franchises from Pirates of the Caribbean to Bad Boys, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, National Treasure and plenty of one-off hits like Flashdance that are separate from the TV empire he also build with the CSI and Fire Country iterations, The Amazing Race and others. He takes Deadline under the hood of his latest vehicle, an important moment for the filmmaking ambitions of Apple Studios, as well as Warner Bros, here a distributor for hire that has a strong chance to continue its streak of box office hits.

DEADLINE: Race car movies are catnip for big stars and directors who relish the visual potential of making viewers feel what it would be like to tear around a track at 200 MPH. There’ve been some good ones over the past few years, but films like Rush, Ferrari and Ford v Ferrari haven’t drawn the kind of rabid audiences that show up to watch these races live. What gives you confidence that F1 will be the one to draw a global audience big enough to justify the event-picture budget and marketing spend?

JERRY BRUCHKEIMER: Well, it’s easier when you have Brad Pitt. Let’s start there. And you have Joe Kosinski and Ehren Kruger, who did Top Gun: Maverick. So you got a leg up, right? It’s always about the story, and this one is Rocky, the kind of thing we all want in our life. We all want second chances. We all want redemption. We all want teamwork, a team to work around us. It’s all the things that we strive for. And with the crazy world that we’re living in right now, I think we yearned for those people who are enemies and desperate in the beginning and become compatriots and work together for a common goal. That is what we’re all searching for.

DEADLINE: Playing a character who’s one part Rocky Balboa, another part Roy Hobbs from The Natural, Pitt also fits the mold of storied male movie stars who took turns at the wheel in fast cars — Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Tom Cruise are among the others. What got him to say yes? You hang around with Tom Cruise, who seems happiest defying age and gravity. But these action films are really hard and a little dangerous, and the training must be arduous. You hit age 60 and maybe you don’t want to be climbing mountains when you could do a romantic comedy and justify your existence.

BRUCKHEIMER: Brad’s the opposite of everything you just said. He loves motor sports, period. He’s been riding motorcycles for years, and he tried to do a movie with Joe previously. It was called Run Like Hell, I think, and it didn’t work out. So we put together a team. First thing we did is we went to Lewis Hamilton, before we had Brad. Joe and I said, “This is the kind of movie we want to make. We’d like you to be a producer and make sure we get it right.” He leaned in right away, said, “I’d love to do it.” Joe came up with a story, and we pitched that to Ehren Kruger to write it. We had pieces, but the linchpin was Lewis, and that was enough to coerce Brad into doing it.

DEADLINE: I forgot Brad was going to play Carroll Shelby, the Ford car designer, in that film. With your late partner Don Simpson, you made one of these racing films with Tony Scott, Cruise and Nicole Kidman — Days of Thunder. That focused on NASCAR. Compare the scales of technology and filmmaking ambition that went into this movie compared to that one.

BRUCKHEIMER: The technology is advanced tenfold. When we made Thunder, the cameras were bigger and bulkier. We didn’t have the remote head that Joe and Claudio designed, so you can go from Brad’s face to a car passing him. That’s an innovation. We didn’t even have that on Top Gun, but the cameras from Top Gun are one-third smaller than we had for Thunder. By getting Louis Hamilton, we got Mercedes to design the car; they built the car along with Joe, who helped design it. We got a leg up there with them working with us; that also encouraged anybody who wanted to be involved with us. It took us a couple of years of courting F1, courting the drivers, courting all the team principals to realize that they weren’t going to be the villain, because Mercedes was building the car. They were sure that Red Bull or one of the other drivers was going to be the competition for Brad, but that’s not what the movie we were making.

DEADLINE: The fast-car films that underperformed were on real subjects. F1 is an original fictional tale, as were hits like the Fast & Furious films and Talladega Nights. Why did you and Joe favor an original vehicle as opposed to a look at one of those great Formula One drivers?

BRUCKHEIMER: Unfortunately, most of those guys aren’t alive anymore, so that’s not a good way to end the movie. We really wanted to do a story involving personalities and competition and the struggle between the teams. Look at Formula One. I don’t know if you follow the sport at all.

DEADLINE: I’ll watch sometimes on Saturday morning if I see it on one of the sports channels.

BRUCKHEIMER: ESPN. Formula One has 10 teams, two drivers to each team. It’s the only sport where your teammate is your competitor, because each driver wants to be the No. 1 driver for that team. That’s enormous drama right there, just to start. And that’s where we started the story. It really came out of the pandemic where Joe was watching Drive to Survive, and they were following the last-place teams because all the big teams wouldn’t talk to him. They were afraid they wouldn’t portray them accurately. So he was following these last-place teams and he said, we had a team that had never gotten a point and was going to lose the team altogether unless they got a win. “Let’s start there,” he said. That’s the genesis of how we started.

DEADLINE: What doors did Lewis Hamilton unlock?

BRUCKHEIMER: Louis unlocked the door to Mercedes and Toto, which is the team principal there. They were so helpful because hey, they built a car and then they introduced us to Stefano [Domenicali], the head of Formula One. Brad, myself and Joe flew to London, and Joe had created a presentation where he showed what he did with Top Gun, because we didn’t have Russian jets, obviously. So what he did is he took it an F-18 and skinned the Russian jet over it, and he did the same here. He brought that piece of film on how he did that. Then he took part of a race of F1 and did the same thing. He took one of their cars and skinned our car over it so they could see the technology and how seamless it works. Then we told him the story, and we kept them involved every step of the way. We met with all the team principals, we showed the same two pieces of film, and we met with all the drivers, showed the same thing. Brad, Joe and myself gathered all the drivers together and showed him the things we created. They talked to him about the movie we wanted to make, and Brad was very humble and he’s very charming. It took awhile, but we finally got there.

DEADLINE: What’s Pitt like in a room when these people are thinking, “Why do we need to bother with this? We already make plenty of money. All we can do here is probably regret this”?

BRUCKHEIMER: He said, we want to be accurate. We know you’re some of the greatest athletes in the world; their hand-eye coordination’s off the charts. These are the 20 best drivers racing today. If you took one car and put every one of those drivers in that car, they’d come within a second of each other. That’s how gifted they are. They’re going 220 miles an hour on a straight, and they got to hit a corner and brake down to 50, and at the last second to keep their speed. These machines are monsters. When you watch a race, you’ll see the pit crew and you’ll see the people in the garage that’s maybe 10% of what is behind the curtain. There were a thousand people in England that Mercedes has, watching the monitors and giving them information. It’s such a technical sport.

We also felt that American audiences had really not been exposed to F1, and that’s what intrigued Stefano. He said, “Now wait a second: If you got an older audience, that could really open doors for us.” As an example, we did a blind preview in Orange County, and we you do focus group afterwards. So we had 20 people in the focus group, and the first question was, how many of you were aware of Formula One or had seen a race? One hand went up. Next question was, how many of you are interested in F1 now, that you’d like to see a race. Every hand went up. One lady said to us, “hen you announced the racing movie, I had no interest in staying. I don’t care about racing, until I saw the picture. It’s excellent. I’m recommending it to all my friends.” There’s an emotional story that hooks everybody, and it’s 8 to 80. It’s not something just for men or for young boys. It’s wider than that because it’s a story of redemption.

DEADLINE: We wrote quite a bit about the prep for Top Gun: Maverick. Tom Cruise recalled all the actors who tried to perform in those fighter jets vomited their brains out. He set up this bootcamp to try and make sure barf bags weren’t needed by the actors in the sequel. If I was an actor invited to get in one of these cars and drive 180 miles an hour, aside from a diaper change, I’d be thinking about what happens to you at that level of speed with all the twists and turns. How did you approach that?

BRUCKHEIMER: Brad said: “I’m not doing the movie if we do bluescreen. We have to drive; we all have to be able to do that.” So we created a program where they trained physically for four months to be able to withstand five Gs in those corners. Your neck and your upper body and your legs had to be very strong. Next, we started in just a road car around the track. Then we moved them up to an F4 car. Then F3 and finally our car. They got this experience of jumping levels, but not until they were ready. Before we hired Damson Idris, we took him out to a track with some drivers and they put him through the paces. We got a report that he’ll be able to do it. He’s a good enough driver. First time we took Brad to the track, Lewis Hamilton watched him drive, and then took him on a hot lap. It is extraordinary, how fast Lewis goes. Brad got a sense of what he’s in for, but those four months gave them the competence they could drive these cars and gave us the confidence that they were all right without any accidents. Of course, they had spin outs, but that’s normal. Even the current drivers have spin outs.

DEADLINE: What was the moment where you had your actors racing around the track and something happened that left your heart in your throat? Anyone hit the wall?

BRUCKHEIMER: One of our stunt guys broke a finger or hurt himself on a spin out. But beyond that, knock on wood, we really didn’t have any serious problems. My happiest day was when Brad climbed out the car at the end in Abu Dhabi, and his unhappiest day was when he climbed out of the car. He loves the precision, the need to be so precise on these cars. They’re just unbelievable. They’re rocket ships.

DEADLINE: How many laps did Brad and Damson drive around those tracks at high speed?

BRUCKHEIMER: Thousands. The way we planned it and filmed it, we went to nine races, really 10 if you count Daytona, and we got time in between practice and qualifying. So we had maybe 5-15-minute slots. The real tension for them was, I think it’s Silverstone where you got 140,000 people live, and then you have a hundred million people watching on television, and our car is out there in between practices. If these guys spun out or did anything silly, it’s in front of the world. The world didn’t know they were in the cars, but they certainly would’ve found out if there was an accident. But I think that was the most stressful on the guys.

DEADLINE: Days of Thunder featured your late partner Don Simpson playing a NASCAR racer. You guys were on top of the world back then. What did you bring to the table and what did he bring that complemented your skills?

BRUCKHEIMER: Don was a great salesman and a great storyteller. He had been president of Paramount, and he developed 120 scripts every year to make 15 or 20 movies in those days. He was riding roughshod, but doing it behind the desk while I was out actually making movies. What he learned from me was how to produce movie. I learned from him how to become a better storyteller, and how to weave character and theme and plot all together. Those are the things I gained from our relationship. He became a terrific producer. He knew what everybody did, he understood everything. So it was a great partnership in that.

DEADLINE: He dies and then you were alone, with many questioning whether you’d lost your mojo. What was the biggest obstacle you had to overcome, the thing that you had to find in yourself when you decided to go it alone?

BRUCKHEIMER: I had to overcome expectations from other people, who saw Don as the creative force, the energy, and the one who made everything happen. Don was somebody who certainly didn’t walk lightly. He was funny and charismatic and was a great storyteller. I was the one who kept the train running. When he left us, they said, “Oh, he’s finished,” because Don was the force. That was ’96. Somehow I survived.

DEADLINE: Was there a moment where you felt you’d proved yourself, and the perception of your limitations wasn’t valid?

BRUCKHEIMER: I think you look at all the movies. Con Air, and The Rock were important. He died during The Rock, and then we had Con Air. By the time I got to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, you could see a flow of good films coming out of our group.

DEADLINE: The results are inarguable. You could look at Spielberg, who’s also a director, or Kevin Feige who’s also an executive. But for a pure producer, you’ve launched more big franchises than any producer alive, I think. Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, Pirates of the Caribbean, National Treasure, Bad Boys — is there a commonality between films that launched encores, that wasn’t there with one-offs like The Lone Ranger, Flashdance or American Gigolo?

BRUCKHEIMER: Hard question to answer. Sometimes you just capture the magic and sometimes you don’t. You can’t bottle it. It’s something that we all strive for, and the public looks at it and says, oh, that looks easy. But these things are really hard, and when they work, that’s almost a miracle. You work all these years on something and when they come out and make some noise? All we can do is go to work every day and try to do the best we possibly can.

DEADLINE: Beverly Hills Cop was going to be Sly Stallone, Bad Boys was going to be Dana Carvey. These were such huge hits with Eddie Murphy and Will Smith, you just couldn’t imagine anyone else. When you reflect back on that, is it, no respect to those other actors, but thank god they dropped out?

BRUCKHEIMER: I’d met Will with his agent, or maybe an executive introduced me to him. They’d championed Martin Lawrence, but when Will came in the office and I sat down with him, I said, this guy’s a movie star. I looked at his work on Fresh Prince. He was charismatic, tall, handsome, all the attributes to be on that big screen. I fell in love with him. Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz both dropped out. Whatever they were going through, they didn’t want to do the movie. It would’ve been a different movie, but it could have been successful too.

DEADLINE: What about Eddie Murphy?

BRUCKHEIMER: Paramount had a pay or play commitment with Stallone. What we did is, we turned a script in and we told Paramount that this was for Eddie Murphy. They said, no, it’s going to be for Stallone because unless we use him in the next six months or a year, we got to pay him. So Stallone took the script, rewrote it as a little different movie, and it got very expensive. When they got what it was going to cost them, they said, we can’t afford to do this. What would you guys do? I said, we do exactly what we told you in the beginning. Eddie Murphy. We flew to New Jersey and sat down with Eddie at his house and the movie. Eddie just sat there and stared us. He didn’t laugh or do anything. I thought we were dead, and we left and we got a call from his agent who says, Eddie’s in. Sly took what he wrote and made Cobra. Also a good movie.

DEADLINE: Beverly Hills Cop was a defining zeitgeist movie of the ‘80s. Launching as many franchises as you have, is franchise potential foremost in your mind when you decide how to spend your time and what movies you want to make?

BRUCKHEIMER: No, because you don’t know. You just hope you make a good movie. And if it turns out well, then the actors or the director want to move on to another one, and the studio does, then you’ve gotten lucky. But you really don’t know, going in, what you have. Take Pirates as an example. If you go back and read some of the press before that movie came out, it was, how could these guys make a movie about a theme park ride? They’re reaching for straws. Prior to us making the movie, the studio had The Country Bears. It didn’t work. And Then a horror house movie. We were the third in that group of ride movies. The press was slamming us for trying to do this. We took an actor who, from Edward Scissorhands on down, he picked really interesting movies but this was real risk.

DEADLINE: Your honest first reaction watching his Jack Sparrow pirate?

BRUCKHEIMER: It was interesting, but oh my God, what are we going to do here? That part was written for a Burt Lancaster. It wasn’t written with the humor. I said, how are we going to get this past Disney? And then we had meetings with them and he had all these gold teeth he wanted to put in. We finally convinced Johnny to take some of the gold teeth out, but they really didn’t know what he was going to do. And when the dailies came in, they said, oh my God, we got to switch actors. This is not going to work. Is he gay? Is he drunk? What is going on here? So what we did is, we cut a sequence together and showed him off and why it worked. Once they saw that, they kind of went along with the ride for us, with us.

DEADLINE: A big part of a producer’s job is convincing your backers that this can work because if you’d made another Country Bears, it would’ve been one and done.

BRUCKHEIMER: Yeah, exactly. All we do is to constantly be selling ideas. That’s our job. We got to convince actors, directors, writers, and then we got to convince the studios. It’s a constant battle to sell ideas and concepts, but that’s what we do. That’s how we make our living.

DEADLINE: When you made the first Top Gun, you got the cooperation of the Navy. Some said, this is a recruitment poster. On F1, you had the full cooperation of Formula One. Tell me what you got in each case that was vital in making each of those films.

BRUCKHEIMER: Here’s the difference. We learned on Top Gun. We went to Nevada where the Top Gun school was, and we met with the people there. The admiral said, forget it, you’re not working here. I only can hurt my career. Tom and I went to Washington and met with the Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman. John said, I get what this could do for the Navy, if you make a good movie and I believe in what you’re telling me. This could be great for us, here’s my home number. If anybody gives you any trouble, you let me know. That Admiral was replaced by the time we made the movie. This time, we learned don’t go to the lower echelons, go to the boss. We went right to Stefano and pitched him what we were going to do. That’s how we learned from mistakes we made on Top Gun.

DEADLINE: In exchange for access to the heavy equipment, how concerned were you in each case you would lose creative control because each entity needed to be seen with the sheen of perfection?

BRUCKHEIMER: It turned out to be the opposite. They said, how can we help? Here, they made tracks available to us because a lot of the tracks have different promoters who run these races. They gave us one of their employees to be liaison to the production and to F1. He was fantastic. He got everything we needed to make sure we got all the tools and access of Formula One. We started with an early sequence where Tobias Menzies plays one of the investors and he meets Brad, on the track before he gets in the car. That’s in front of everybody, right before the race started. We had seven minutes to get that sequence and we rehearsed it for three or four days prior, to make sure that we got it right. Joe didn’t want to do it like a documentary. He wanted to do it exactly like it’s in the movie. It was precision, which Joe does so well. He had a phenomenal production team.

DEADLINE: You made Days of Thunder with Tony Scott, an auteur with popcorn films. Like Joe, he had to stylishly tell a good story, with complexities all around him, shooting in the most public of venues…

BRUCKHEIMER: Joe trained as an engineer and an architect. On Top Gun Maverick, he learned the importance of being precise. He storyboarded everything. There was no guesswork. When we came to the set in the morning, they put up his storyboards, so the crew, Brad, the cast, everybody knew exactly what shots we were doing. Everything was really. There was no helter skelter taking a camera and try to pick something up. Everything was designed.

DEADLINE: Top Gun: Maverick was shot before the pandemic and like happened with the last James Bond, the studio the sponsoring studio kicked around the idea of putting that directly on a streaming service to get its money back. Who knew how long it would take for the public to want to return to theaters? Paramount had to present Tom Cruise with that vision. I’ve heard this was in a trailer, and he hit Defcon Four. You might have been there. Can you tell me about that and what that discussion was like, and why you guys hung in there? It helped bring back the theatrical movie business, but it could not have been an easy decision.

BRUCKHEIMER: The truth is, I wasn’t in the trailer. But he said, there’s no chance you’re going to put this on a streamer and whatever I have to do to stop you, I will do it. Fortunately, he’s got an enormous amount of power. He was going to make more Mission Impossibles for Paramount. I think if it was just me, they’d have rolled over us. But the fact that Tom had the leverage of being a huge movie star who would be vocal about his opposition if they tried to do it. He was able to persuade them this was not a good idea.

DEADLINE: Every franchise on your filmography started as original IP. When a movie like Ryan Coogler’s Sinners did well, people went, “Wow, this is an exception to the notion you’re better off relying on sequels than making originals.” F1 is original IP as well. We are in a cynical moment where everybody fixates on the budgets, on the reshoots, and the narrative has little to do with the entertainment value on screen. Why does it seem harder?

BRUCKHEIMER: It’s always been hard. It’s never been easy. Everything you mentioned has always been that way. The only difference is that with presold titles, they can estimate, even on a movie that doesn’t quite work. They know what they’re going to do on their opening weekend, and how the table will give them the amount of money to cover their production costs and make a little profit. They’re very clever. I don’t know if they use computer models or what they do, but they know what they got to bring in to be successful.

DEADLINE: You seem to be in the corner with a Tom Cruise: if it’s not theatrical I’m not interested in the movie. Why is it so important to make these films for the big screen?

BRUCKHEIMER: I love the experience, it’s why I’m in this business. I love sitting in a dark theater with my hand in my popcorn, being taken away to another place, another world and getting lost. And that’s exactly what F1 does. It puts you in that world where…I call it a process movie…it puts you in a world I’ll never be a part of, and shows you how it really works. We’ve shown it to the drivers and the drivers like the movie. We showed it to the heads of F1. They love it, so much. They all showed up for the premiere. This was a great experience for both of us.

DEADLINE: It also feels like F1 can go a long way toward proving that a hybrid release strategy can work, after streaming disrupted the film business. Apple made the film to eventually exist on its Apple TV+ streaming service. Warner Bros first will launch it globally in theaters with full P&A spend. Many felt the Knives Out films could have made hundreds of millions for Netflix before landing on that service, but they weren’t interested. Doug Liman was disappointed that after signing to direct the remake of Road House based on a theatrical release, the film went straight to Amazon Prime. Brad Pitt and George Clooney did the same with Apple on Wolfs, but after Fly Me to the Moon didn’t take off at the box office, they showed their displeasure by not promoting the film. What was the back and forth like on F1, securing the theaters, and spending the P&A necessary to have a chance to ring the Zeitgeist bell?

BRUCKHEIMER: We pitched it to nine different places. Apple was the one that came at us with the exact way we wanted to make and release the movie. They were all in, from the very beginning. They wanted a big theatrical release. They wanted to do the movie the way Joe wanted to do it. We had a phenomenal experience with that. What it comes down to is, when you work with a company that’s also tech, they took the iPhone camera that’s in your phone, they enhanced it and put it on two cars in every single race that we shot at. Some of that footage is in the movie, the actual F1 drivers going 220 miles an hour. Brad was only going 180, which is pretty fast.

DEADLINE: What about the idea of the F1 hybrid strategy being a way to balance streaming and theatrical?

BRUCKHEIMER: What I see here is that this hopefully, if we’re lucky, it will work the way Top Gun worked. I don’t know if you’ll do those grosses, because that was a sequel and we were number one on Memorial Day Weekend, we were number one Labor Day weekend, and we were already out in Pay-per-view. It was still number one at the box office. People could still buy it and watch it at home. We hope that this movie will garner the same kind of strength. What we see in the movie, it’s really entertaining based on our previews that we’ve had. I’ve never had definitely recommend as high as on this movie.

DEADLINE: What about the lot of producers, who can go years developing films and making little money until they go in production. We’ve seen packages assembled by agencies that become almost de-facto producers. You and Joe worked on this movie four years. What about the underestimation of the importance of development, with streamers needing volume more than quality?

BRUCKHEIMER: It is really tough for young producers. Fortunately, I’ve been in this business a long time, and when I was coming up, it was really tough. You always got very little development money, so you had to really struggle. I came up actually being working on movies, so I was to pull things together. So I was fortunate. I was constantly working. But developing good stuff is really hard, that’s what I learned from Don, how that’s done.

DEADLINE: It feels like a lost art. You watch a movie and too often think, “How could they not see that plot hole? More work on the script would have solved it.” Do you find that at all when you watch a lot of movies?

BRUCKHEIMER: I try not to analyze other people’s movies because I don’t know what struggles they went through, or how it got to the screen. But what I do know is, the harder I work, the luckier I get. That’s just it. And we worked for four years on this movie to make it as good as we could. Top Gun, Tom was in the script meetings, the pre-production meetings, he was involved in everything. Brad was the same way, he really gets in there. One day we spent 12 hours in a hotel room in London working with our writer Ehren, Lewis Hamilton, Brad, myself, Joe, and I think Jeremy Kleiner was there from Plan B. That’s hard work. I’m sitting there going through each line in the movie to make sure that it’s accurate, that it’s emotional. Knowing if this is going to work, it’s the emotional part of the story that makes it all work. It’s the redemption. It’s him coming in to this last place team, trying to get the one win for his buddy so he doesn’t lose his team.

DEADLINE: Brad certainly saw the benefit of not letting go until WWZ had a third act that worked. The creative solve there was kind of brilliant, despite the press on cost overruns and reshoots. It was the difference between a forgettable movie and one you could watch whenever it comes on. Have you had one like that where it seemed you’d never lick it, until you found the solution?

BRUCKHEIMER: Yes. We did a movie called Dangerous Minds with Michelle Pfeiffer. We did a preview, and I’m telling you, maybe the 10 people were left in the audience. We worked on it for a year and it became a real success. The song Gangsta Paradise was part of that. Music can be so important. Can you imagine Flashdance without the dance number to What A Feeling? You need to hang in until you capture it on all levels.

DEADLINE: F1 is another exercise in testosterone and adrenaline. What do you do to exercise your own adrenaline rush?

BRUCKHEIMER: I played hockey, until the pandemic. I still skate. I’ve been traveling for the last two years on this movie and I’ve been out of L.A. for over 200 days, both years. Hopefully when it settles down, I’ll get back on the ice.

DEADLINE: You organized those games with Hollywood people who got on the ice, mixed it up, dropped the gloves. Who’s the best actor/hockey player you watched take part in these games?

BRUCKHEIMER: That’s hard to say. Tom Cruise came to one game. He was really good. He was amazing. His schedule doesn’t afford him to get out there, but he was terrific. This has been a great ride for four years, but I can’t wait to be back out there.

DEADLINE: Last one. You made a movie with a 60-year old actor in a Formula One car. Possible you’ll get Brad Pitt back behind the wheel for another go?

BRUCKHEIMER: It’s up to the audience. The audience tells us that they want more, and then you got to see if Joe and Brad want to come back and do it again.