Jann Mardenborough can vividly recount the first time he played Gran Turismo, the popular racing video game that would completely change his life.
While seeking refuge on Bonfire Night, a British holiday filled with fireworks celebrations, an 8-year-old Mardenborough boy stumbles upon the game at his neighbors’ house. He chose a violet Mitsubishi 3000GT and started racing on the Autumn Ring track. Mardenborough continued to play all night, and then every day after that, showing up at his neighbors’ doors right after school.
“They got fed up with me going to their house, one day the husband came across the street, knocked on our door and held the PlayStation and GT 1, and gave it to my parents,” the 31-year- old racecar driver recently recalled in a video interview.
This is the origin story of another origin story: the true, improbable one depicted in the movie “Gran Turismo,” directed by Neill Blomkamp and opening Friday. The film dramatizes Mardenborough’s journey, from playing in his bedroom to winning the 2011 GT Academy — an annual competition that, from 2008 to 2016, pitted the game’s best players against real cars — to driving formula cars professionally.
The eight main games in the Gran Turismo franchise, which debuted in Europe and North America in 1998, are known for their carefully crafted cars and rigorous racing simulations. In the months before he entered the GT Academy, Mardenborough upgraded from a plastic PlayStation controller to a homemade wooden racing frame with a steering wheel and pedals that he bought with money given to him by his parents for high grades.
The competition was a godsend for Mardenborough, who was trying to sell car parts on eBay after losing a retail job; he dropped out of college after realizing that studying motor sport engineering didn’t mean he could actually drive cars.
However, Mardenborough said he was skeptical of his chances. He played Gran Turismo no more than a typical teenage gamer after his first fix, never competed in a tournament and had almost no experience driving a normal car. The first time he took his rickety 1991 laser blue BMW E30 on a highway he was on his way to competition.
Mardenborough’s perspective changed when he qualified for the racing camp — a stretch depicted in the film that follows the finalists practicing in actual cars — and was given his first taste of the track.
“After my first few laps, when I got out of the car, I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to go through life without going through that again,'” said Mardenborough, who served as a producer on “Gran Turismo” and as the stunt double for his own character.
Mardenborough is eager to describe the technicalities that differentiate the game from reality — the sensation, for example, of the vibration in the car seat — but says that much of the real feel and reactions mirror Gran Turismo.
“When you’re fighting real people,” he said, “everything is real.”
Mardenborough, played by Archie Madekwe in “Gran Turismo,” followed Sony through the first drafts of the script, which he noted was almost true to his life. The characters played by David Harbor and Orlando Bloom are both fictional but loosely based on real people. And there was indeed a crash involving Mardenborough in Germany that killed a spectator, although detractors complained about how the tragic event was portrayed on screen.
In the film, the crash occurs before Mardenborough returns to the track for a podium finish at Le Mans, France’s famous endurance race — back-to-back events that form an emotional arc of recession and success In reality, the Mardenborough crash in Germany came two years after that podium finish, leading to criticism already movie timeline was edited to deliver a narratively pat ending to the film.
“The sequence is the sequence, but those events happened in my life,” Mardenborough, who avoided serious injury, said in response. “This is not a documentary.” He raced at Le Mans a year after the crash, and Mardenborough says the emotional battle the film creates resonates with his feelings.
“When you believe that the reason you were put on earth was to race a race car, and then you ask yourself, ‘Do I still want to do this?'” he said. “It’s not a good question to ask.”
Mardenborough last competed in May and is in talks with teams about potentially racing in the United States next year. And occasionally, the driver fiddling with a gaming steering wheel during our interview will still be playing Gran Turismo.
If he were to take on his 19-year-old self in today’s game, who would win? Mardenborough thought for a moment.
“Me,” he said with a competitive smile. “If I put in the amount of hours I did back then, considering my experience in real life, I’m faster. But all these are times.”
