How Brad Pitt Designed His Dream Watch for F1: The Movie

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To create the new movie F1—which director Joseph Kosinski describes as “the most authentic, realistic, and grounded racing movie ever made”—no shortcuts were taken. Stars Brad Pitt and Damon Idris both drove their own cars, and the film’s crew integrated themselves into the actual Formula 1 season. That painstaking attention to detail also extended to the watch Pitt wears as the racer Sonny Hayes. The actor was extremely exacting about the timepiece he wanted to wear, its backstory, and many of the technical details, including the movement and thickness.

Our story begins, oddly enough, with David Fincher. The Oscar-nominated director and Pitt are longtime collaborators and pals who share a love of making awesome movies—Fight Club and Se7en, anyone?—and, apparently, equally awesome watches.

A few years ago, Fincher, a big watch guy in his own right, learned of Cloister Watches—a small, New York-based outfit that customizes vintage watches using tools and processes from their respective eras—through an episode of Hodinkee’s “Talking Watches” video series. Soon after his episode was posted, Cloister founder Cooper Zelnick received a message from a Yahoo email account. “It said, ‘Hi, David Fincher wants to talk to you,’” Zelnick told me over Zoom this week. Zelnick began making watches for Fincher that caught Pitt’s attention. So when the actor needed a timepiece customized for F1, he told IWC—the film’s watch sponsor—that he wanted Zelnick involved.

Sonny Hayes really likes that shade of green, huh?

I knew Pitt liked watches—his collection boasts some tasty vintage pieces, like a Vacheron Constantin 222 and a Patek 3800/1J—but I wasn’t fully aware of just how deeply he’s into the game. “He knows a lot about watches,” Zelnick says. “You could say to him, ‘Hey, man, how many tenths of a millimeter difference in thickness is a Patek 3700 versus an Audemars Piguet 5402? And he’ll tell you it’s six tenths.”

Pitt was very precise about what he wanted his character to wear in F1. He knew he had to wear an IWC, but rather than go with one of the brand’s standards, like the Big Pilot or Portugieser, he dug into the archives. Zelnick says that Pitt and Fincher together came up with the idea to go with the Ingenieur ref. 1832, a watch from the ’70s designed by Gérald Genta, the man behind the AP Royal Oak and Patek Nautilus. “Brad’s a Genta guy,” Zelnick says, because of course he is. Pitt even concocted a backstory for the watch, imagining it as a piece his father passed down to him. The watch is so precious to Hayes that after he wins the Rolex 24 at Daytona race, he turns down the Rolex Daytona offered as a prize because, as he says in the movie, he already has a watch. The watch hardly leaves Hayes’s wrist, even joining him in the shower.