Ron Howard The obvious gaps on this list are a horror movie and a musical, but Mr. Howard’s newest film, “Rush,” which opens on Sept. 20 after a gala screening at the Toronto International Film Festival next Sunday, fills a much tinier niche. It’s a Formula One car racing movie, a genre that had its heyday, if you can call it one, back in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Formula One is to Nascar, the version of racing more prominent on screen these days, more or less what polo is to rodeo. The cars go faster, cost more, and the sport deliberately affects a snobby, elitist image. It’s far more popular in Europe than in America, where Formula One races are seldom held, and Europe is where most of the money for “Rush” came from. It’s the first movie that Mr. Howard, known mostly for his mainstream Hollywood hits, has made without America as the primary audience, and it shows. “Rush” is darker, sexier, moodier than any of his previous pictures. By Ron Howard standards, it’s practically an art-house film. The budget was $30 million, not a pittance by movie standards but hardly the kind of money Mr. Howard is used to. The screenwriter, Peter Morgan, probably best known for “The Queen,” said not long ago about trying to drum up interest in Formula One: “I remember the terrible looks I used to get when I said I was working on a script about Tony Blair and the queen after the death of Diana, or about Richard Nixon and David Frost. People would question my sanity. At least this one has cars, sex and death. To me it felt like ‘Iron Man.’ ” Though Mr. Howard’s first feature, “Grand Theft Auto” (1977), was essentially one long car chase, ending in a demolition derby, Mr. Howard is far from a motor head. In person, he’s boyish, modest and — despite all the attention he’s been getting lately for his appearances on the Netflix revival of “Arrested Development” — a little shy. He seems less a big shot Hollywood director than a balding, bearded version of Opie Taylor, the character he played on the Andy Griffith television show in the 1960s. While in New York recently, he admitted that for his 50th birthday, in 2004, his wife gave him a BMW 750 and after just a couple of months, he got rid of it and went back to his Volvo station wagon. “I guess you could say it’s a bit of a stretch,” he said speaking about “Rush” and its place on the Howard résumé in an interview at a Midtown hotel. “But at this point, I don’t know what does sound like a Ron Howard film. I’m just looking for interesting filmmaking challenges and stories that have a chance to surprise the audience.” He added, “When I started, I didn’t know much about Formula One, but I knew that it was cool, sexy and dangerous, and that’s a pretty good combination.” He prepped for the movie by studying “Senna,” Asif Kapadia’s 2010 documentary about the great Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna, and by looking at racing movies old and new, even “Talladega Nights.” Because “Rush” is set in the ’70s, he also watched and rewatched “Gimme Shelter,” the 1970 Rolling Stones documentary, which may account for why, in yet another departure, “Rush,” which was shot by Anthony Dod Mantle (who won an Oscar for “Slumdog Millionaire”), has something Mr. Howard’s movies, practically interchangeable in their straightforward, un-fancy cinematography are seldom known for: a look. The movie is so bright at times as to be almost psychedelic, and at others dark and muted, as if shot through a haze of dope smoke. What most attracted him to this project, Mr. Howard said, was the screenplay and the chance to work with Mr. Morgan again. (Mr. Morgan also wrote the script, based on his own stage play, for Mr. Howard’s film “Frost/Nixon,” and he and Mr. Howard agreed just recently to collaborate on a project based on Nathaniel Philbrick’s book “In the Heart of the Sea” — a whaling picture, yet another box Mr. Howard can check off.) The classic Formula One movies, like John Frankenheimer’s “Grand Prix” (1966), an early experiment in split-screen technology, were replete with racing footage (much of it real) but skimpy on plot. And in “Le Mans,” the 1971 film that is almost as long as the famed 24-hour race itself, Steve McQueen doesn’t even speak until about 20 minutes have elapsed. But Mr. Morgan wrote the first draft of “Rush” assuming that there might not be any racing sequences at all. “I wasn’t sure there would be the money,” he said recently by phone from Vienna, where he lives half the year with his wife, who is Austrian. “If you grow up in England, that’s how you think,” he added, laughing. “So I said to myself, ‘Why don’t we work on the assumption that racing is going to be impossible?’ ” Instead, he structured the whole film, which he wrote on spec, as a kind of race between the two principal characters, James Hunt (played by Chris Hemsworth, better known as Thor in “The Avengers’) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl, a Spanish-born German actor probably best known to Americans for his appearance in “Inglourious Basterds”), drivers who were real-life rivals in the late ’70s. Mr. Hunt, an Englishman, was charming and glamorous, a blond, carefree lothario, irresistible to women. Mr. Lauda, an Austrian, was socially awkward, a little ferrety looking, and obsessive about the mechanical details of racing and the risks, which he endlessly calculated and recalculated. In the script, first one and then the other pulls ahead — on the racetrack, with wealthy sponsors, in the bedroom — until finally they compete for the viewer’s affection. In that contest, the charismatic Mr. Hunt begins way ahead but, especially after a near fatal accident at Nürburgring in 1976, Mr. Lauda sneaks up. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 28, 2013
An earlier version of this article misidentified the style of racing in the 1971 film “Le Mans.” It is endurance racing, not Formula One racing.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 2, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the nationality of Daniel Brühl. He is a Spanish-born German actor, not Austrian.
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