'Gran Turismo' Aims for the Driver's Seat This Weekend
by EG
The based-on-a-true-story sports movie Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story will try to take the top spot at this weekend's box office. The likely result, however, is that Barbie, which just took the title of 2023's biggest movie so far, will return to number one, and Gran Turismo will battle for second place with last week's number one, Blue Beetle. Read on for details.
Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story star David Harbour considers his new film to be a real-life The Last Starfighter.
In Nick Castle’s 1984 film that Steven Spielberg and Seth Rogen have both tried to remake, Alex Rogan (Lance Guest) is an aimless teenager who perfects an arcade game called Starfighter and ends up being recruited by the game’s alien inventor to help fight in an interstellar war. Well, Neil Blomkamp’s Gran Turismo tells the true story of how Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) mastered the Gran Turismo video game en route to being recruited by Nissan and becoming a professional racing driver.
Harbour’s character, Jack Salter, who’s a former driver turned mechanic, is the one tasked with actually turning Jann into a proper race car driver, and the role has shades of Robert Duvall in Days of Thunder (1990), John Candy in Cool Runnings (1993) and Emilio Estevez in The Mighty Ducks (1992). But as soon as Harbour read Jason Hall and Zach Baylin’s script, he viewed it as an opportunity to channel one of his favorite Gene Hackman performances.
“Gene Hackman and Hoosiers are part of the reason why I took this movie,” Harbour tells The Hollywood Reporter prior to the July 13 SAG-AFTRA strike. “My agent sent me the Gran Turismo script and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I get to remake Hoosiers for a younger generation.’”
Harbour was supposed to be up to his ears in work this summer, but the ongoing double strike has ultimately delayed his concurrent productions of Stranger Things 5 and Thunderbolts. At the time of this conversation on June 30, SAG-AFTRA had yet to be forced to go on strike, but Harbour was baffled by the lack of common ground regarding the threat of artificial intelligence.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.