‘Gran Turismo’ taught Jann Mardenborough a thing or two about filmmaking

If it was easy, Jann Mardenborough says, other video game veterans would become racecar drivers, too.

“It’s difficult,” the British driver insists. “But that’s what makes it feel like an accomplishment. I believe you can do anything if you set your mind to it.”

In the new film, “Gran Turismo,” director Neill Blomkamp shows how the  British resident went from playing video games in his bedroom to driving formula cars professionally.

“I didn’t know how I would get from A to B, but I was very much aware from an early age that that’s what I wanted to,”  the 31-year-old Mardenborough says. “I was very headstrong as a kid.” Knowing how “boys would be boys,” he never shared his goal. “I never told anybody because you have to protect that. You can’t walk around and say, ‘I’m gonna do this’ or ‘I’m gonna do that’ because people will call you out. Also, it loses the energy. So I never spoke to anybody about that. It was my inner dream.”

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“Gran Turismo” is based on the life of Jann Mardenborough.

When Mardenborough won the 2011 GT Academy (a competition that let him try his hand at driving), he was ready. “I had never driven on a track; I’d never driven anything powerful. All I had was my simulator rig. But the link is there. I feel there’s a mindset there as well. It felt normal to me to jump in a racing car and kind of play with it. Now when I look at me back then I realize I was terrible. But you need to have the mentality — ‘I believe I can do it.’”

As the film details, Mardenborough had plenty of bumps along the way.

In the car, it gets very hot and claustrophobic, he says. “You’re strapped into your seat very tightly and you can’t move. But I love that. It’s not like sitting at home and you just turn your (video game) steering wheel. Sometimes your body weighs four to five times the force of gravity, so if your head weighs seven pounds you’ve got four to five times that with a helmet on as well. Your body takes punishment the whole time, but I love the feeling of being strapped into something so powerful and having control over this beast.”

Jann Mardenborough attends the fan screening for “Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story.”

When producers started talking about translating Mardenborough’s story to the screen they included him in casting decisions. Actor Archie Madekwe was an early favorite. When he got the nod, Mardenborough talked with him on FaceTime and realized, “this guy looks like me…so that was a great start. We met in person as well and that gave me more confidence that things were going to be great.” Madekwe asked countless questions but didn’t reveal he didn’t have a driver’s license. “It was make or break,” Mardenborough says. “If he didn’t pass those tests we couldn’t have shot when we shot.”

Luckily, all went well and filming began. While characters have been fictionalized and some events aren’t in exact order, Mardenborough says “Gran Turismo” is true to his experience. An accident, for example, comes at a different point in the film than it did in real life. Still, the effect is the same. “I’ve never had a fear of getting back into (racing). Fear becomes a problem if you don’t know why such things happened. My brain doesn’t work like that. I need to know what happened.”

In the heat of an accident, however, “there’s a moment where it slows down. You know you’re going to hit something. You know you’re out of control…and in that situation your mind protects itself.”

Working as a stunt driver on “Gran Turismo,” Mardenborough learned another lesson — this one about filmmaking: “If I can’t see the camera, the camera can’t see me. And I’m the main car, so I need to be seeing the cameras all the time.”

The new skills resonated (yup, he’d do another film) but they didn’t pull him away from his main business. As much as “Gran Turismo” tracks a success story, “there’s no such thing as the perfect lap. It’s like an internal chase of perfecting your craft…and it will never be perfect. I’m still in those trenches of ‘how can I get better as a racing driver?’ That’s what gives me purpose. I need to race. I want to win. I want to do my best. I want to reach another championship. I’m always trying to be better.”

Many who have seen “Gran Turismo” have told Mardenborough he inspired them to pursue their dreams. “They won’t tell me what that dreams are…which I love…but that tells us we have to follow our passions, our purpose.”

Archie Madekwe stars as gamer turned real life race car driver Jann Mardenborough in “Gran Turismo.” 

 Bruce Miller is editor of the Sioux City Journal. 

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