It's a motorhead's Dream Team flick: Produced by storied Top Gun/Hollywood legend Jerry Bruckheimer for Apple Originals, executive-produced by champion driver Lewis Hamilton, starring Brad Pitt and rising British-Nigerian star Damson Idris, the principal photography began on July 9 at Britain's iconic Silverstone racetrack, cameras and excellent action-man director Joseph Kosinski very much attached.

Apparently, between spates of raging British Grand Prix practice and qualifying chaos, Mr. Pitt turned in a respectable lap in the production's car in whatever moments there were at 'the circuit,' as the British laconically call their challenging hairpin-studded Northampton track, built just post-WWII on a demobilized Royal Air Force WWII bomber base. Pictured, top, in the lineup on the grid for the national anthem with the real British Grand Prix drivers — including F1's leading driver and the eventual winner on July 9, Max Verstappen of Red Bull — Mr. Pitt and Mr. Idris very much look the part.

Note Mr. Pitt's and Mr. Idris' regulation Mercedes-team fireproofed overalls: It's no accident that the workday costume for the two principals would be from the team for which the producer Mr. Hamilton, in his real racing life, drives. And, in some kind of neat, mind-blowing mix of reality and through-the-looking-glass scripted performance, the film's executive producer clocked a very tough third on July 9, six seconds and then some behind Verstappen and three seconds behind the weekend's placer, Llando Norris of Maclaren Mercedes.

The point about the production is that Messrs. Bruckheimer, Kosinski, Pitt, Hamilton and anybody else associated with the film, in front or in back of the camera, have set themselves a daunting task of moviemaking — three parts Oliver Stone's shoot for Any Given Sunday, on wheels, fueled by the world's finest E10, with a remnant of Robert Redford's underestimated Downhill Racer and a bit of leftover madness from the infamously immersive Francis Ford Coppola shoot for Apocalypse Now.

All of that complexity will have to be bolted onto and into the sport of Bernie Ecclestone, the countries themselves changing in an unending Bond-like blizzard as the teams and their cars are airmailed through the Sisyphean grind. Arrividerci, Monza, meet me next week in Singapore! The shoot will extend well through the second half of the season, and it is rumored, possibly beyond. For his part, executive producer Hamilton evinced quite some worries about his passion project a couple of days before the British Grand Prix in a televised interview with Britian's Sky Sports.

"There are nerves, naturally, because it's something we've been working on for so long," Hamilton said, "and we want everyone to love it and to really feel that we encapsulate what the essence of this sport is all about."

Obviously, the demanding auteur Kosinski will have made sure that there is a nicely dovetailed script from which to work. But we could reasonably argue that the project of cleaving that onto the F1 tour will subject whatever surface narrative there is to the forces of the F1 tour's enormous, magnetic, time-bending velocity. It's like filming on Jupiter: The atmosphere of the place may just take over.