Montreal: A new imax film from The Stephen Low Co. explores the speed, science, art and passion of Indy car racing featuring the teams and drivers of the PPG IndyCar World Series, including legendary American racer Mario Andretti.

For the first time in film history, Super Speedway captures the high-gravity sensation of being in the cockpit of a 250-mph automobile, with no camera tricks whatsoever, says the film’s director Stephen Low.

‘We wanted to do this film if we could do it for real and run at actual (racing) speeds. Mario would only get involved if he could drive the car flat-out,’ says Low, son of imax/National Film Board pioneer Colin Low.

For purposes of the shoot, adjustments were made to the car to increase down force and raise the output to 1,200 horsepower, ‘so Mario could really smoke the car.’

Low is one of the leading (and more daring) names in international giant-screen moviemaking, having taken 50-pound (imax) and 300-pound (imax 3D) cameras to some of the most beautiful, hostile and strange locations on the planet. (Credits include the time-travel epic Across the Sea of Time, the Genie-nominated Titanica, Flight of the Aquanaut, and, as exec producer, The Human Race.)

In Super Speedway, Andretti drives a two-year-old Newman/ Haas car (the second-season car used by Nigel Mansell). ‘The fastest we got was at the Michigan (Speedway), about 240 mph,’ says Low.

Actor Paul Newman, the team’s co-owner, narrates the film.

Super Speedway’s cinematography captures racing action from both within the car and trackside, with each of the six camera mounts using wide-angle lenses – from 120 to 360 degrees – positioned on the roll bar, nose, side pod and over the gearbox.

The storyline chronicles the design, building and track-testing of Michael Andretti’s new car, charting the high-tech (and high-security) optimization of the car’s performance.

The 44-minute film was shot over eight months and financed largely with presales (actually, preleases make up 65% to 70% of the budget) to Imax Corp. and other large-format exhibitors in North America, Europe, Asia and even Africa, says Pietro Serapiglia, Super Speedway’s producer. Serapiglia says the 36 presales set a precedent for large-format movies.

dop Andrew Kitzanuk, another Montreal resident, used Kodak 5247 (70mm-15 perf) film stock, shooting at six or seven track locations in North America (including Toronto), with additional pickups in the u.k. The u.k. sequence includes a visit to the Lola chassis factory where the (ironically) very ‘American’ Indy cars are manufactured.

Kitzanuk has shot many of Imax’s most avant garde productions including the imax 3D film Imagine, produced for the Taijon World Fair in Korea, the imax nature film The Serengeti, the imax solido Echoes of the Sun, and the concert-performance benchmark, Rolling Stones: At The Max. Kitzanuk and imax camera specialist Bill Reeve engineered the camera-mount system for Super Speedway. James Lahti (Anne of Green Gables, The Last Buffalo) is the film’s editor.

Low and partners, Serapiglia and executive producer Goulam Amarsy, are based in Montreal. Established in 1982, the company handles international distribution internally, in measure because of Serapiglia’s 25 years of production experience.

Montreal is a great location for a large-screen producer, says Amarsy.

‘This is where imax was invented at the National Film Board 25 years ago and there is a network of people here who have worked or are working on the imax format. We have the expertise to do more films and the financing (through a production financing agreement with Banque National de Paris).

‘In addition to making films we are looking at opening large-format theaters. We’re currently looking at a couple of projects in partnership with science centers in North America. The reason is that we believe that building a theater and producing the right film for the location (e.g., a film on the Grand Canyon screened at an exhibition center in the park) go hand in hand,’ says Amarsy.

New projects for Low and company include a film on high-speed trains and Mark Twain’s America, a us$7 million imax 3D journey-in-time.

Low will use locations across the u.s. this year for the new Twain film, part of a $50 million output agreement between the company and Columbia Pictures and Sony New Technologies.

Super Speedway is slated to premier at The Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, or in Houston, in late March. The 1997 PPG IndyCar World series opens in Florida March 2.