Nagle has hired hundreds of qualified stunt drivers over the years. But for “Ford v Ferrari,” Nagle said it was critical to move the scale to a higher rev limit. “For this movie, it was paramount to have race drivers in the cars because you can only trick the camera so much,” said Nagle.
Also, getting the most qualified drivers improved the odds of nothing going wrong, especially when the stakes are so high in a $100 million production.
“I didn’t want the drivers to be the limiting factor in any of the scenes,” continued Nagle. “I only wanted the limiting factor to be what the cars were capable of.”
Like all stunt coordinators, Nagle has to create the illusion of danger while minimizing the potential for mayhem. It’s a high-wire act without a net, especially when cars are being filmed at 200 mph and crash scenes are timed to the split second.
“I always want a 10-20 percent margin of error in case something goes wrong,” said Nagle. “Many regular stunt drivers might think they can keep up with Tony, but they may be running at 100 percent of their ability and Tony is still driving 60 percent of what he can do.
“We had guys who had driven at Indy or at Le Mans and guys who had won racing championships,” Hunt recalled. “We were so fortunate to have qualified drivers who knew the dynamics of the cars, so nobody was driving over their heads.”
The roster of stunt drivers included second-generation professional racers who played their fathers in the film, including Derek Hill, Jeff Bucknum and Alex Gurney.
The movie, which was filmed over the last three months of 2018, dramatizes the feud between two titans of the automotive industry, Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari, and Ford’s eventual dethroning of Ferrari at Le Mans by developing the potent and iconic GT40.
The plot focuses on the electrified and intense relationship between Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and British road racer Ken Miles (Christian Bale). Miles, with a jockey-like feel for race cars and an engineering mind, was largely credited with turning the original GT40 design from an ill-handling, snake-bitten machine into the most dominant sports car of its era.
To prep for the role of a race car driver, Bale took a class at the Bondurant Driving School and later drove a Miata around the Willow Springs Raceway near Los Angeles, where Hunt coached him about the racing line and braking zones.
The majority of the movie was shot at Willow Springs and at a private airport north of Los Angeles, where the production team built a three-story tall replica of the Le Mans pit lane and start/finish line. The set even included a newsroom of that era, complete with typewriters.
Daytona Int’l Speedway was recreated at nearby Auto Club Speedway where the GT40s were filmed flat out, while a two-lane country road near Savannah, Ga., was used to recreate the infamous Mulsanne straight.
Each day during filming the stunt crew gets a shot list, similar to a playbook of a football team, that tells the drivers what the scenes will be, who is in them and what the shot is supposed to look like. The drivers must hit their marks to make a scene work.
“You don’t just take off on your own,” Hunt explained. “You have to be aware of who is around you, that cars are staying together and that you are getting the shot the director wants.”
That delicate choreography requires a sensitive right foot and instinct, especially for shots that called for Hunt to thread a GT40 through a group of slower cars, such as Corvettes and four-cylinder Porsches.
“It was hard because the cars don’t have speedometers and the cars are all different,” Hunt explained. “We would go by the rpm range and watch our mirrors. You had to be on the ball.”
The film not only recreates a seminal moment in motorsports history, it also recreates the perils and challenges of driving cars of that era. Adding to the film’s authenticity, all of the cars were period-correct recreations, not contemporary replicas. The Cobra that Hunt drives at the beginning of the story, for example, had no power steering and used an upside-down leaf spring as a front-end anti-roll bar, making the car handle exactly as it did — or didn’t — in 1965.
Driving at night, in the rain at close quarters, at high speed (like 160 mph down that two-lane road in Georgia), and sometimes with cameras costing hundreds of thousands of dollars hanging on the cars, posed some of the biggest challenges, Hunt recalled.
“We would start off on dry pavement and need to be at a certain speed at a certain point,” he explained. “But at the spot where we were filming, there were huge cranes over us dropping tons of water, so you are also dealing with the rooster tail of the cars around you, not knowing if the car was going to hydroplane, and the water is coming down so hard that the wipers aren’t doing much for you.
“At that point,” he added, “you just hope your car is pointed in the right direction and it will all come out OK and you bring the car back in one piece.”
Hunt says the biggest difference between driving in the movies and on the track is how little he can control.
“As a race car driver, I try to control as much as possible, like tuning the suspension or the setup of the car,” he noted. “But you don’t have that opportunity in the film business and there’s no practice. You just adapt to the conditions and they are always changing.”
Hunt’s family racing history spans three generations and reaches back to the roadster era at Indianapolis. His father, Tommy, drove sprint cars before becoming USAC’s vice-president on the West Coast. He is now the promoter at Calistoga Speedway.
Starting in the 1950s, nearly every Indy roadster was outfitted with magnetos designed by Hunt’s grandfather, Joe Hunt, who also campaigned roadsters at Indy.
Ford vs. Ferrari won an Oscar for Best Sound Editing and Best Film Editing. It was also nominated for its stunt driving, but did not win.