Weekend of a Champion, a documentary about British Formula One driver Jackie Stewart, went unnoticed for about 40 years until the London film lab where it was stored was closing and asked its producer, Roman Polanski, what to do with it.
The Polish-French film-maker, 80, had all but forgotten the 1971 behind-the-scenes film that detailed a weekend he spent with his close friend Stewart as the champion driver attempted to win his second Monaco Grand Prix.
“It was an accident, a pure accident,” Polanski, the director of films such as Rosemary’s Baby and Oscar-winning The Pianist, said about rediscovering the documentary.
“I looked at the film and I liked it after 40-odd years and I decided I would give it a new life,” Polanski told reporters in New York via Skype from Paris.
Polanski fled the US in 1978, fearing he would spend years in jail for a sex crime conviction, and has never returned.
The documentary had a limited release in England and Germany in 1972 but had never been shown in the US.
With Stewart’s approval, Polanski re-edited the film which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and will be released in US theatres tomorrow.
He also added new footage showing the two friends reunited in the same hotel suite in Monaco, where Stewart had stayed decades earlier, joking about his sideburns and reminiscing about the sport and themselves.
“When I saw the film again it was like stepping back in history,” Stewart, 74, said after a screening in New York.
The documentary, written and directed by the late Frank Simon, captures the glamour and excitement of motor racing and heady atmosphere of Monaco when Princess Grace and Prince Rainier presented the winner’s laurel wreath and actress Joan Collins and Beatle Ringo Starr partied with the racers.
Polanski had unparalleled access to Stewart, one of motor racing’s most successful champions, for the film. As the camera rolled, Stewart drove the film-maker around the circuit, explaining his strategy for the race, when he would shift gears, slow down or speed up to handle Monaco’s hair-pin turns and hilly, winding streets.
I looked at the film and I liked it after 40-odd years and I decided I would give it a new life
The champion also shared his concerns about the abysmal weather, the wet, dangerous conditions on the circuit and his frustrations that his car was not responding as well as he thought it should.
In a sequence with a camera mounted on his Formula One car, viewers are shown Stewart’s view from behind the wheel as he raced at heart-pumping speed through the principality’s streets trying to shave seconds off his time.
“It was cinema verité in those days,” Stewart said after the screening. “At the time Roman called it a docudrama because it was telling a true story with death being part of our life at that time and we were losing drivers all of the time.”
In 1971, long before safety was improved to today’s standards, Formula One racing was a treacherous sport.
Stewart lost five close friends to the sport, including Briton Piers Courage, German driver Jochen Rindt and Frenchman François Cevert, his team mate who was killed in 1973 in what was to have been Stewart’s last race.
The Scotsman won three world championships and 27 Grand Prix titles before retiring at age 34.