Damon Hill is a legend of Formula 1 and the subject of the excellent new documentary Hill, which chronicles his journey through the sport and the impact of the legacy of his father Graham, twice World Champion in the 1960s, who died in a plane crash in 1975. Ahead of the film’s World Premiere at Glasgow Film Festival, we chatted with Damon and the film’s producer Simon Lazenby about Damon’s memories of his father, the very personal approach of the film, and his own legacy. Unusually, they occasionally flipped the script to get our opinion too.

Can you tell us how the documentary came about? Who or what were the main catalysts behind it?

SL: Damon and I started working together on Sky F1 in 2012. We obviously got on well, and have had a lot of fun on the great big fun bus that is Formula 1. We have a terrific time wherever we go and get to spend a lot of time with each other. We were at the airport in Montreal and the idea about a documentary came up. Damon mentioned that his story is pretty good. Turned out it was and it was staring us right in the face, and we pulled it together in seven years!

DH: How many films had you done?

SL: I’d done none. But I’d done three by the time I finished this [laughs]! We started this company in COVID, myself and my business partner Victoria Barrell. We set up a business on the basis of Damon’s film and it took us seven years to get the finance together to make it. We brought Alex Holmes in, a brilliant, BAFTA award-winning director, and Cinzia Baldessari who is a fantastic editor. And she pulled it all together and gave it a female touch as well as a male touch. Hopefully that will broaden the appeal outside the F1 petrol heads.

What would you say to someone who isn’t an F1 fan to encourage them to come and see the film?

SL: I think that’s Damon’s wife’s [Georgie Hill] performance in this. She’s a natural storyteller. Obviously she lived it from the other side while her husband was risking life and limb. We made the decision about halfway through the editing process that we weren’t going to incorporate any other people ‘in-vision’. With apologies to Ann Bradshaw, to Patrick Head, to Adrian Newey, to Ross Brawn, to Jackie Stewart, we left it on the cutting room floor, because we had to. We wanted it to be the unique family story that it is.

How was the filming process? You’re dealing with extremes of emotion throughout. Are those memories and emotions you examine frequently, or are they ones you’d prefer to leave to one side?

DH: I’ve been through telling this story enough times. I went through a period when I stopped racing of having therapy. I’ve been through it in detail and pretty much exorcised all of that stuff. But of course it doesn’t matter how many times you tell it. When you’re asked to go into the detail of an experience like that you cannot help but be affected.

It’s difficult sometimes to talk about things like Imola and my dad’s plane crash, and so forth. But they’re important to the overall story. And I think they’re waypoints in development in your life. You either get set back by these things or you overcome them.

One of the biggest problems was heavy rain and freezing cold weather in one of the studios which had a tin roof. To get halfway through one of those poignant moments and then having to stop… It was literally just a camera pointed straight at my face and you’re very aware that [the viewer] is getting every bit of emotion.

SL: Because Damon’s family archive is incredible, from both his father’s estate and from his personal archive, and the Formula 1 stuff we put in, we were able to just immerse people in the time. That’s part of the appeal of Formula 1, when you go back to any era, particularly the ’60s, it was dangerous. People died all the time.

Not being flippant about it, but there’s a perverse fascination with the threat that looms over people when they put their lives at stake in the pursuit of glory. And that has always been a little bit of Formula 1’s appeal. Both Damon and his father were so close to that at seminal moments in their careers and had to pick their respective teams back up from tragedy. Damon did that, and so did Graham.

What do you remember of Graham as a racer? For my generation there is far more footage of him as a raconteur on the likes of Parkinson, than behind a wheel.

DH: It wasn’t on TV every five minutes. It wasn’t broadcast live in that sense. There is a lot of lovely old footage, but putting it in context is quite difficult. The records that are of the racing are mostly just artworks really. Beautiful film footage of the cars of those days and the beautiful film stock they used as well. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a race my dad did from beginning to end.

SL: You haven’t?

DH: No, I don’t think so. You see a clip: here’s the start of the Mexican Grand Prix. You see a bit of the drama, but you never get the crucial moments. It’s there but not covered in detail like it is today. You never miss a thing today.

My experience of my dad, and I think this is something that is relevant to the film, was of a person at home. And I did go to races and I did spend some time with him. I went with him when he was starting his own team, and I went Barcelona and stuff with him as part of the team. But it was odd that I didn’t see him as other people saw him outside the bubble. I’ve always been inside the F1 bubble, except for after he died. I became a punk rocker for a bit, and rode a moped and I just was able to do whatever I liked.

SL: You were a labourer!

DH: And a labourer. And I drove for quite a few dispatch companies in London. They don’t really have them any more.

SL: He’s done The Knowledge in London!

DH: But they’ve turned all the one-way system bloody back-to-front since then, and it’s all 20 miles and hour now, so we’d all have gone bus [laughs]! I used to race bikes on the Saturday and cars on the Sunday, and be a dispatch rider during the week. My life expectancy was probably about a month! I got away with it really. I was very lucky.

What struck me as someone who remembers the on-track drama from the time is the interiority of the focus of the documentary. It feels almost like a Rocky type story. 

SL: If you put it in those terms, you’re on the canvas and you have to pick yourself back up and come back up and win.

DH: I think you’ve highlighted a very important part actually. Most people when they’re watching racing know that it’s a normal instinct to want to win. That’s understood. But actually everyone has got their inner story, their inner motivation. There’s all kinds of stories that motivate these people to take on these challenges. That’s the interesting thing.

It seemed that every event shown was about how it affected you as a person first, and as a competitor second. 

SL: What I’d like to know is what you thought about that side of things? We made a very conscious effort to focus on that. We could have got more into traction control. We could have got more into everything that was going one around that. But ultimately I think that if you want to break out of a regular Formula 1 audience you have to be able to connect with them. And the only way to connect with other humans is by telling stories that resonate with them.

And I think that hopefully through the course of this documentary, you get to know Damon. You get to know his motivations. You get to know what drove his father. You get to know what Georgie had to go through, living through all of this. That was the ultimate goal of this, to tell Damon’s story. Not to tell the story of Williams, not to tell the story of Formula 1 at that time. The racing is almost a backdrop to the family story.

Yes it really worked for me, as a fan of F1 and as someone who writes about film.

SL: That’s really nice to hear. We’re waiting to hear what happens when the F1 fraternity sees this because there are probably people out there that will go, ‘Well, they missed out everything that happened with Jordan…’ But the focus of the film is really the journey from A to B. And yes there was [Jordan’s first] win afterwards, but it doesn’t matter. We wanted to finish where we ended and begin where we did.

As the themes of the film are family and legacy, whether from your professional life or from your personal life, what would you point at and say, ‘That there, that’s my legacy’?

DH: I don’t think it’s the results. I think it was setting myself a goal, and achieving more than I ever expected. And getting out in one piece at the end!

Hill screened as part of the Glasgow Film Festival 2025