by James Garner
Making Grand Prix was the most fun I’ve ever had on a movie. Hell, it was the most fun I’ve ever had, period! Six months with the best cars and the best drivers on the best circuits in the world . . . for a guy who’d always loved cars and racing, it was a fantasy come true.
We filmed at actual races at Monte Carlo, Clermont-Ferrand in France, Spa Francorchamps in Belgium, Brands Hatch in England, Zandvoort in the Netherlands, and Monza in Italy. The crowds in the movie are real. We shot before, during, and after the races and blended our footage with film of the real competition.
Formula One is the elite class of single-seater auto racing. Along with Indy Car racing, it’s at the pinnacle of motor sports. The “formula” is the set of rules prescribing weight, length, width, and engine capacity (three liters or 3,000 cc.). No two race circuits are the same; they have unique lengths, configurations, and local conditions.
The filming got off to a rocky start. The drivers were skeptical at first, and no wonder: we crowded into the pits with our cameras and lights, ate into their practice time, and were a hazard on the track. Most of all, I think they doubted whether we cared enough to get it right.
Ferrari refused to allow its cars or even its name to be used in the movie at a time when Ferrari was synonymous with Grand Prix racing. There was no way to make the film without their cooperation, so Frankenheimer cut together an hour’s worth of footage, took it to the factory in Maranello, and screened it for Enzo Ferrari, the former racing driver who manufactured the fastest sports cars in the world and founded the Ferrari Grand Prix team. He immediately gave his blessing. After that, the drivers came around, too. I guess they needed to know we were on their side and wanted to give a true picture of their sport.
If I hadn’t been an actor, I’d like to have been a race driver. I’ve always admired them because what they do takes so much courage and skill. I was especially in awe of the Grand Prix drivers. It was an honor to be on the same track, and those guys went out of their way to help me. They pointed out the correct line through corners, briefed me on what to do in a spinout, and generally showed me the ropes. Between shots, we did some impromptu racing. We’d do a choreographed shot with five or six cars passing and jockeying, and when we cut we’d all turn around and race back. Fuuun!
Frankenheimer put as many Formula One drivers in the movie as possible. Phil Hill, then the only American to have won a world championship, and Graham Hill—I called him “Mr. Smooth”—both played drivers and had a few lines in the picture. Richie Ginther, Jochen Rindt, Jack Brabham, and Bruce McLaren had walk-ons. The legendary, five-time world champion Juan Manuel Fangio came out of retirement to do a cameo and almost caused a riot when he appeared at Monza.
I started driving when I was ten years old, as soon as I was big enough to reach the pedals. I began playing “Ditch ’Em” around Norman not long after my fourteenth birthday, when I got my driver’s license. We’d line up half a dozen cars, and the first guy would take off and try to lose the rest. Or I’d be cruising around town in my dad’s Ford sedan or my Uncle John’s Chevy and I’d see Jim Paul Dickenson in his mother’s Ford V-8 or Pud Lindsay in the family Packard (with the gear shift right on the steering column) and off we’d go. No comments—you’d start driving on the other guy’s bumper and the race was on.
It was during the war and gas was rationed, so we had to steal it. We’d go up to somebody’s car at night with a siphon hose and a five-gallon can. Then we’d chase each other all over the county. It was great fun, with a lot of whoopin’ and hollerin’, but it wasn’t as dangerous as it sounds. Nobody ever got hurt—never even rolled a car, because we were all good drivers. Or so we thought.
Before I went to Europe, I worked for two months in Southern California with Bob Bondurant. Bob was a successful sports car and F1 driver who now has the largest driving school in the world, but I was his first student. I went at it like I’d never driven a car before in my life, because driving a race car is completely different from driving a passenger car on the highway.
Bondurant and I went up to the track at Willow Springs. At first, I sat in the passenger seat and watched him drive. Then we switched places and he coached me. We started slowly and gradually built up speed on each lap until I reached my limit. You have to know your limit, go to the edge of it, and stay there. But I was never afraid of it. We worked four or five days a week and every day I’d drive home on the freeway thinking it was more dangerous than the race track.
I went over to Europe early, and while the other actors attended Jim Russell’s racing school in England, I worked with some of the real F1 drivers who were in the movie. You’d be surprised how fast you can learn when you have teachers like Phil Hill and Richie Ginther. We worked in a two-seater at first, and then I’d drive a single-seater. I learned the tracks in sections, a few hundred yards at a time, and eventually memorized the whole circuit down to each bump and oil spot. I learned there’s a perfect way to drive a course, and you strive to come as close to that ideal as possible. With that car. The car dictates what you can do. Taking an 80-mile-an-hour corner at 80 miles an hour is very satisfying. Not 79, which is too slow, or 81, which will spin you out.
You don’t so much sit in a Formula One car as wear it. The cockpit was so cramped I couldn’t fit, even though I’d lost twenty pounds for the part. They had to raise the roll bar and take the seat out. I sat smack on the frame, on a little piece of leather wrapped around a towel. I’d get quite a jolt when the car bottomed out at 130 mph.
Frankenheimer was a good director. He’d begun in live television in the 1950s directing episodes of Playhouse 90 and Climax! and went on to direct feature films including The Manchurian Candidate, The Birdman of Alcatraz, and Seven Days in May. But he was a bully. If he wanted something, he made you do it. No arguments, no compromises, no suggestions, just do it! We got along okay, except for one little set-to when he was picking on somebody in the crew and I had to speak up. After that, everything was fine between us.
I don’t think Frankenheimer knew how to smile, but at least you knew what he wanted. He was trying to make a big movie under tough conditions, and I still don’t know how he managed the logistics of moving two hundred people, thirty race cars, and tons of equipment all over Europe for six months. At every stop, he had to shoot on the fly, regardless of weather or available light, with little or no chance to stage anything or shoot a scene more than once. As a result, it was an expensive movie to shoot: early in the production, we were already over budget and there were rumors the studio was about to pull the plug. On our first day in Monte Carlo I was in the hotel elevator with Frankenheimer and he said, “Well, we’ve got ’em now!”
“Got who?” I said.
“The studio. I have a five-million-dollar budget and I can’t bring in the picture for less than eight million dollars, but MGM is committed, so they’ve got to let us finish it.”
Frankenheimer wanted to put viewers in the car and give them a sensation of speed. But he didn’t cheat anything: no rear projection, no process shots, no speeded-up footage. The technology he needed to get the realism had to be invented. Special effects man Milt Rice rigged a motorized, swiveling cockpit for close-ups of spinouts, and devised a tubular catapult charged with compressed nitrogen that was in effect a cannon for Formula One cars. In a split second, it could launch a mock-up car—with or without a dummy in it—from a standstill to 120 mph.
Because Frankenheimer was obsessed with details, the movie is almost a documentary in terms of the racing. Someone called it a “porno film for gearheads,” with tight close-ups of instrument needles, spinning wheels, drive shafts, suspensions, gear changes, heel-toe pedal work. The sound is deafening, with the thundering roar of engines and cars surging off the line. Sound effects editor Gordon Daniel prerecorded a whole library of motor sounds with Phil Hill driving on a straightaway in California. Phil simulated hundreds of gear changes specific to the corners on all the circuits. Gordon then matched them in postproduction to what
the drivers were doing on the screen, so aficionados heard the exact sounds they expected at every corner of every track.
Former World Champion Phil Hill drove the camera car, a Ford GT-40, a Le Mans–type racer capable of hitting 200 mph. Some of the camera techniques invented for Grand Prix are still in use today, including helicopter shots, some of which were taken from only ten feet above the action. There were complaints about it flying too low, so they backed off for a while . . . then went back to flying low again. How low? The cameraman, John Stephens, would hang out of that chopper with his feet dangling, and at the end of the day, his pant legs would be green from brushing the trees.
Lionel Lindon was the cinematographer, but Saul Bass directed the second unit and designed the multiscreen montages. The technique first appeared in the 1960s and soon became a cliché, but at the time, it was revolutionary, and all the more striking in Cinerama, a process that doubled or tripled the size of the screen and curved it around the audience. With a high-quality sound system and the advanced cinematography, some viewers actually got motion sickness.
NASA developed special microwave cameras to be mounted on the cars. Johnny Stephens put cameras over wheels, on hoods, in drivers’ laps. Those big, heavy, 70mm cameras—housed in special glass shields to protect the lenses from kicked-up pebbles and rain— were difficult to work with. Mounted on the chassis, they upset the aerodynamics so much that the cars had to be counterweighted. Stevens rigged special remote controls for them and experimented with antivibration mounts. He finally decided to let the camera shake because it looked sexier. Today’s cameras are so tiny they can fit several in the cockpit without bothering the driver, and television viewers are used to seeing what the driver sees from the cockpit. But in those days, Frankenheimer struggled for months trying to shoot from the driver’s point of view until Bell Labs created a camera that could be strapped to a driver’s helmet.
The white “BRM” I drove was actually a Formula Three car, a disguised Lotus-Ford with a one-liter, four-cylinder engine. It was rigged with fake exhausts and carburetor stacks to make it look exactly like a three-liter V-8. It could hit 130 mph, while the real Formula One cars could do 160. Frankenheimer was so thorough, when he realized my car didn’t have enough torque to spin its wheels on the starting grid, he coated the tires with oil to make it smoke like the real thing.
I did all my own driving in Grand Prix. The other actors weren’t so gung ho. Yves Montand scared himself to death when he spun out in front of the Hôtel de Paris and almost put the car in the police station. Antonio Sabato seemed to think he was Fangio, until he spun it in the pits, and from then on he looked terrified of the car. Brian Bedford didn’t know how to drive at all before he got the part—he’d had a driver’s license for only a few months when we began shooting. Before long he said, “Look, I can’t do this. Either double me or replace me.” Frankenheimer got a stand-in who did all his driving. Brian later said, “Asking an actor to drive Formula One is like asking Phil Hill to play Hamlet.”
During practice for the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa Francorchamps in June, Lloyd’s of London found out I was running 120 miles an hour in the rain. The district manager from Lloyd’s came down to the pits and said, “We can’t have that, Mr. Garner.” We managed to calm him down. Birds were another hazard at Spa. They kept bouncing off the windshield. I half expected one to bounce off my face.
There was a sudden downpour at the start of the actual race, and the drivers ran into a curtain of rain. Half of them crashed on the first lap, including Jackie Stewart, whose BRM hit a stone wall and went upside down in a ditch. There he was, trapped in the cockpit with a broken collarbone and high-octane racing fuel leaking all over him, terrified that the car’s hot exhaust pipes would turn him into a human torch at any second. There were no marshals or emergency personnel handy, so it was fellow drivers Graham Hill and Bob Bondurant who rescued Jackie—after they pried the steering wheel off with a wrench borrowed from a spectator. By the time they pulled Jackie from the car, he was soaked with gasoline. He had to wait twenty minutes for an ambulance, his skin blistered by the additives in the fuel.
The experience turned Jackie into a crusader for driver safety, which made him unpopular with the Formula One establishment, including some of the drivers. Jackie maintained that he was being paid to drive, not to risk his life week after week.
Jackie was talented as he was tenacious. Between 1965 and 1973, he won twenty-seven races and three World Drivers’ Championships. In his spare time, he formed a drivers’ union that demanded changes and eventually got them. Because of his efforts, barriers were erected, medical support was improved, and some venues were closed, including Spa.
It was a simpler time when we made Grand Prix. Formula One racing was a lot more seat-of-the-pants. The teams were run by individuals, not giant corporations. The drivers were a swashbuckling band of brothers, and they had personalities: you could actually recognize them in their open helmets as the cars streaked by. Now the drivers look like faceless robots when they’re in the car and walking billboards when they’re not.
Though today’s Formula One cars go much faster than their 1966 counterparts—220 mph now versus 160 then—modern cars are a lot safer. In those days, safety measures were crude at best. The Ferraris, BRMs, Maseratis, and Lotuses didn’t have seat belts, because in a crash the cars would either disintegrate or catch fire or both, so drivers had a better chance if they were thrown free. Driving a Formula One car then was more physically demanding than it is now. They were hard to steer and the insides of your fingers would blister and bleed from constantly changing gears. Today drivers shift with a flick of a paddle on the steering wheel.
The old cars were slender and beautiful, but they were death traps: between 1960 and 1969, on average, two Grand Prix drivers were killed every year. In 1996, I went back to Monza with Formula One World Champion Jacques Villeneuve. He took out a restored 1963 Brabham that was older than he was. Though Jacques was used to driving a much faster car, he said the Brabham scared the hell out of him. I had the chance to drive a couple of laps myself, and as I brought the car back to the pits, I caught myself giggling.
I still have the open-face helmet I wore in the picture. At the time, I thought it was really something, but compared to what they have now, it was awful. Made of fiberglass, the only thing it protected you from was the wind. Today’s full-face helmets are much stronger and give a lot more protection. The Lexan visor protects the driver’s face from pebbles and bits of debris thrown up from the track that can travel at 300 mph, and it has multiple layers of clear film that can be peeled off as they get dirty. There’s a tube connected to a supply of drinking water—the temperature in the cockpit can reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit, so drivers have to fight dehydration, which can lead to muscle cramps and loss of concentration. Today’s helmets also allow two-way radio communication with the pits. In the old days crews had to write on message boards on the side of the pit wall and the driver tried to read it while speeding by.
At one point, the shopkeepers along the race route in Monte Carlo revolted because we’d blocked off the streets and their customers couldn’t get to them. We’d already paid them, but I guess it wasn’t enough, because one day they came down and disrupted filming. I was on a boat in the harbor, soaking wet from the previous shot and eager to get on with it. When I realized that a shakedown was in progress, I went ashore and pretended to blow my stack. Well, half-pretended. We were soon filming again.
Toward the end of the shoot, I did a fire stunt with butane bottles that I ignited with a switch in the cockpit on the final turn. When I crossed the finish line going about 120, I slammed on the brakes and threw another switch to put out the flames. But something went wrong and the car erupted in a giant fireball. I scrambled out of the cockpit as the crew blasted me in the face with fire extinguisher and smothered me in an asbestos blanket. I wasn’t hurt, but it shook me up. The producer wasn’t happy that I’d done the stunt and neither was Ll
oyd’s of London. They canceled my policy, and for the rest of the picture I drove without insurance.
One of the top-grossing films of 1966, Grand Prix won Oscars for editing, sound, and sound effects. The movie captured the beauty and spectacle of Formula One racing in its golden age, before it became commercialized and high-tech. It looked real, sounded real, and felt real. At the end of three hours, you felt you’d been in the races, not at the races. I think it’s still the greatest auto racing picture ever made.
Grand Prix was a high point in my film career, and I owe the whole experience to Steve McQueen for dropping out of the picture in the first place. Steve’s son Chad finally dragged him to see it. I ran into them on our street as they were coming home. Steve stopped and said his first words to me in two years:
“Well, we went to your movie.”
“Yeah? What’d you think?”
“Pretty good picture. Pretty good.”
Coming from Steve, it was high praise.
When you get behind the wheel of a race car, it’s just you and the car. It takes complete concentration. You can’t fake it. I wasn’t a thrill seeker, and I didn’t have a need for speed, but I liked the challenge of controlling your machine and outmaneuvering your opponents.
Making Grand Prix gave me the racing bug. After soaking up the atmosphere on the Formula One circuit and driving fast cars on race tracks all over Europe, I had to be involved in the sport.
So I formed American International Racers.
The first thing we did was buy three brand-new L-88 Corvettes. Big mistake. They were so unreliable, we raced them only once, at Daytona in 1968. We sold them and moved up to Formula A with three Lola T-70s.
In Formula A, which is just a cut below Formula One, the cars can reach speeds of 180 mph. Formula A cars aren’t easy to handle. They’re too light overall, and the weight is in the back, so the rear end swings all over the place. But the Lolas were sweet. Great race cars. What I wouldn’t give to have one now. I drove one on the street for quite a while, but the lights were too low. Totally against the law.