Joseph Kosinski and his craft team tell it all

Director Joseph Kosinski and his department heads had a need for speed. Here’s how they achieved it

Director Joseph Kosinski has never shied away from a technical challenge. His first film, 2010’s “Tron: Legacy,” was at the forefront of digital antiaging by having today’s Jeff Bridges confront the version of himself from 1982’s “Tron.” “Oblivion” (2013) pioneered a technology that would later be adopted by the virtual environments of sports media company Volume. And 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick” placed actors in actual fighter jets for an almost unheard-of degree of realism.

All of this appears to be a warm-up to the challenges he faced in “F1,” the racing movie in which Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a driver hired to help rejuvenate a low-rated team. Kosinski had dreamed of making an immersive racing movie for years, but he couldn’t have shot “F1” without first making “Maverick,” the $1.49 billion zeitgeist adventure that was nominated for six Oscars, including best picture.

“What I learned on ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ was that audiences really appreciate and really respond, I think, viscerally and emotionally, to movies that have been shot for real,” he said. “There’s something that you can connect to when it’s done for real, when you know someone is really going through the experience.”

Kosinski consulted Toto Wolff, the Austrian billionaire and principal of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula 1 team, who told the filmmaker: “The thing that movies have never really gotten right is the speed. Because when you put movie cameras and batteries and the structure required to hold a camera on a car, you slow it down. So the movie can be the real environment that you’re in, but you can end up with the real speed. slow, because you won’t be able to drive with all that weight.” Wolff’s suggestion: “Start with a race car and modify it to film your movie, rather than the other way around.”