Jodie Foster Says Brad Pitt’s F1 Was ‘Made by AI’
· Thought Catalog
Updated 59 minutes ago, July 3, 2026
Speaking with former Sony boss Michael Lynton on Tuesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Jodie Foster turned the conversation to what AI is already doing to filmmaking — and singled out one recent blockbuster as an example of what a machine-built movie looks like to her.
“I don’t say this disparagingly, how could I? This movie went on to make millions of dollars but look at a movie like F1. I’m, like, F1 was made by AI,” she said. “Wasn’t it? The structure was exactly the structure that you would learn in school. The actors say the lines exactly the way it would be written if a computer was writing exactly what would be the right thing for that time. And they were able to dominate the technology to make something big and beautiful and, potentially, where a lot of the information comes from other places.”
“If we are able to dominate AI consistently over time, yes, we will make things that reflect us and we can make things better,” Foster told Lynton. “Will we be able to dominate technology? That particular technology longer than a couple of years? I don’t know.”
Asked whether AI could replace writers or actors, Foster said the replacement of actors is already underway. “Face-swapping and all the things you guys can do on your iPhone, we can do them even better with real fancy people,” she said, per The Hollywood Reporter. She then reached for F1 as an example of a movie that felt to her like it had been built by a machine.
Foster seemed to be using the film as an illustration rather than a literal accusation, but the pedigree cuts against the charge. F1 landed four Oscar nominations including Best Picture, won Best Sound, and pulled in $634.1 million on a $200 to $300 million budget. Joseph Kosinski directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Oscar-nominated writer Ehren Kruger. The producing team included Jerry Bruckheimer, Kosinski, Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Chad Oman and seven-time F1 world champion Lewis Hamilton.
THR’s making-of report described a production that “relied as much as possible on practical effects” while using digital work for specific sequences. VFX supervisor Ryan Tudhope told the outlet the team ran two or three APXGP cars on real tracks and filled in the field in post: “We would replace those and add other cars in the background to make it feel like they were within the race.” For crashes considered too dangerous, Tudhope said, “we’d use a smaller vehicle, an F3 car, and a stunt driver would do the stunt and we would later replace that with our APXGP car.”
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