Fifty years since James Hunt won the world championship, and the story most people can tell you about him is the wrong one.
Deep Fusion began production in July on a feature documentary made with the full support of the Hunt Estate. Ben Field directs and I am executive producing. Bernie Ecclestone and Damon Hill contribute, and Sam Gale is writing an original score.
The caricature is real enough, and it is also a wall. Behind it is a man who was frightened in exactly the way you would expect someone to be frightened doing that job in that decade, and who understood the risk rather better than the people cheering him on.
What interests me is the gap between those two men, and the fact that he built the first one on purpose.
Making it with the estate’s support matters. It means we can be honest rather than either reverent or lurid, which are the two easy modes for a film like this and both of them are a waste of a good subject.
More about HUNT: We Need to Talk About James.
