Formula 1 has spent the streaming era mining its own past for prestige content, from grid-side reality series to a summer blockbuster that billed a fictional driver alongside the real championship. What the genre had not yet done was reach back to its most reckless chapter and hand it to a company known for software rather than archives. That is the wager behind the newest entry in the motorsport-documentary boom: the definitive James Hunt film is being built by a studio that specializes in artificial intelligence.

Hunt: We Need to Talk About James has gone into production, Deadline reports, with a widening roster of racing figures now attached to a project first unveiled two years ago. Deep Fusion Films is making the 90-minute feature in exclusive partnership with the James Hunt Estate, and the driver’s son, Freddie Hunt, sits among its executive producers — a family sign-off that carries more weight than usual given how the film intends to be made.

Deep Fusion is not a conventional documentary house. The London company built its name on visual effects and AI reconstruction — the archive-and-effects approach co-founder Benjamin Field brought to his Gerry Anderson documentary — and it has since installed Christian Darkin as Head of Creative AI to lead that work. Trained on a subject who died more than three decades ago, those tools promise something the form rarely offers: not only unseen footage, but the possibility of synthesizing what the cameras never caught. The estate’s blessing is the permission slip that lets such reconstruction read as tribute rather than trespass.

The life earns the ambition. Hunt took the 1976 world title by a single point in a season-long duel with Niki Lauda, then lived as motorsport’s golden-boy playboy before retiring into the BBC commentary box. Ron Howard’s Rush dramatized the Lauda rivalry for a mainstream audience over a decade ago; this film promises the interior version, drawing on previously unseen interviews with Lauda and Mika Häkkinen alongside friends and family.

Shot primarily in the United Kingdom, the production lists Field, Jamie Anderson and Freddie Hunt as executive producers, with Richard Wiseman attached as archive producer to organize the footage the AI work will build around.

Hunt died of a heart attack in 1993, at 45. Three decades on, a company that engineers synthetic faces has been handed the job of giving him one more lap — and the estate is betting that the technology unsettling the rest of Hollywood can, in the right garage, feel less like a deepfake than a homecoming.

Tags: production-start, Deep Fusion Films, Fórmula 1, Freddie Hunt, James Hunt