Gilles Villeneuve still has a thriving fan base. At 32 years old, the Formula One legend died, in 1982, in a race car crash while qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix.

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So the Toronto Film Festival has set the turbo-charged sports biopic Villeneuve : The Rise of a Legend as its closing night movie on Sept. 19.

Son Jacques Villeneuve tells The Hollywood Reporter that the four decades that have passed since his father’s death helped in eventually capturing the full breadth of his life and career that changed F1 in the 1970s.

“Time needs to pass,” Villeneuve says after producer Christal Films in Montreal finally got Villeneuve : Rise of a Legend off the ground. “With most movies, there’s always a couple generations that need to have passed, I imagine, for the grandparents to have told stories to their grandkids and then they can view the film together.”

Villeneuve will miss the world premiere of his father’s biopic in Toronto, however, as the now-F1 pundit for Sky Sports and other broadcasters will have a microphone in hand while reporting from the paddock for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix 2026 this coming weekend.

But Villeneuve has seen a clip (below) from the director Yan Lanouette Turgeon’s Rise of a Legend, which tapped Rémi Goulet to play his late father and former Ferrari driving legend.

“I was in tears, it was so poignant,” he tells THR. “From those two minutes, it looks like the job has been really well done. I found the accents to be amazing — it felt like it was the 1970s.”

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That’s coming from a son who also shook up F1 as a motorsport legend in his own right in the 1990s, even as his father’s too-short life forever changed his own life, and that of his family.

Rise of a Legend (trailer, below) chronicles Gilles Villeneuve as an iconic race car driver rising from poor and rural roots in Quebec, where he snowmobiled his way across Canada and eventually, due to an obsession for speed and checkered flags, reached the ranks of the international racing scene. The film, with Rosalie Bonenfant playing Villeneuve’s wife, doesn’t shy away from portraying the impact of his fame and fortune as an elite race driver on his family.

It has taken time for Jacques Villeneuve to come to terms with a father whose single-minded focus on motorsports meant he was hardly present in his family’s lives before his death. “Well, he wasn’t there at all. That’s how it was back then, that was the norm. Now we judge it differently. So we have to keep that in context,” he explains.

What hasn’t changed is the legend that grew around Gilles Villeneuve long after his tragic death. “My father hadn’t won many (F1) races — but he survived for so long because he stayed in the hearts of a lot of fans for many, many years,” Villeneuve says.

The continuing appeal of the F1 circuit, and increasingly in the U.S. TV market, also explains the arrival of Rise of a Legend at TIFF. “Racing at F1 has been building up over the last five years, where everybody wants a piece of it,” Villeneuve adds.

Written by Daniel Roby and Guillaume Lonergan, Villeneuve: The Rise of a Legend is produced by Christian Larouche, associated producer Tim Ringuette and co-producer Marc Cote. Christian Simoneau, Melanie Villeneuve and Fabrice Barrilliet executive produce.

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