Joseph Kosinski is holding a very hot hand in the movie business. His sequel Top Gun: Maverick, 32 years in the making, not only became the highest-grossing movie of Tom Cruise’s career but also was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar and earned Kosinski a DGA nomination. His latest film, F1, has become top-grossing movie of Brad Pitt’s career, as well as setting records a 100-plus-day theatrical run for an Apple Original Film (Warner Bros distributed), defying the norms for a movie produced by a streamer.
With an impressive filmography that also includes 2010’s Tron: Legacy — his first studio film — another one with Cruise in Oblivion, and the emotionally charged firefighter movie Only the Brave, Kosinski has proved to be as much in demand as any director working today. He joins me for this week’s edition of my awards-season Deadline video series Behind the Lens to talk about all this massive success and much more.
Among the highlights of our conversation, Kosinski says that although people think of him as an action director, he is really more interested in the human drama of his films and that is his first priority. He talks about the challenge of making a Formula 1 racing film with seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton serving as consultant. He says John Frankenheimer’s 1966 Cinerama race film, Grand Prix, was a key inspiration, and with F1 he has taken it next level. But like with Grand Prix, he was under heavy pressure to get right at the live events he shot it at around the world. He also reveals it was not the first race film he dabbled with because in 2015, he was thinking about trying to do Ford v Ferrari; he even had Pitt over to his house to do a reading of the script with Cruise. The timing was not right for that project, but it was for F1 — even if the film had to shut down for six days due to the actors strike. He talks about how that, in retrospect, turned out to be a very good thing for the quality of the film itself.
And as for the future, he tells us he has high hopes to do a feature version of Miami Vice and is also working with his Top Gun: Maverick and F1 producer Jerry Bruckheimer on a new project about the hot topic of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). The script is being written now.
To watch our conversation and to go “behind the lens” with Joseph Kosinski, just click on the link above.
Join me every Monday during Oscar season for a new episode of Behind The Lens, and every Wednesday for a new edition of The Actor’s Side.