Joseph Kosinski on putting Brad Pitt in the driver's seat for 'F1'

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NEW YORK CITY — Director Joseph Kosinski hadn’t even finished giving Brad Pitt his spiel for a movie he wanted to make that would be set inside the world of Formula 1 racing. When the Oscar winner heard Kosinski’s outline for a story about race cars and second chances, he was immediately hooked.

In F1, which is now playing in theatres, Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a washed-up racer who is given a second chance when he’s hired by his old friend (Javier Bardem) to mentor a hot-shot rookie driver (Snowfall’s Damson Idris) on a last-place team.

“I was probably five minutes into my pitch before Brad said he was going to do it,” Kosinski, 51, tells Postmedia in an interview in a midtown Manhattan hotel. “He was at the top of my list for actors to play Sonny Hayes.”

Made in collaboration with well-known names from the Formula 1 community, F1 boasts Pitt, Hollywood icon Jerry Bruckheimer and seven-time F1 champ Lewis Hamilton among its producers.

Filming for F1 took place in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators at actual Formula 1 races like Silverstone — home of the British Grand Prix — and at the Hungaroring near Budapest, as well as the Circuit of Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium, Japan’s Suzuka track, the Vegas strip, and Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina circuit.

In a virtual event earlier this year that Postmedia sat in on, Hamilton promised that F1, which was written by Top Gun: Maverick scribe Ehren Kruger, “will be the most authentic racing film you will ever experience in a cinema.”

Kosinski, who wowed moviegoers with sequences filmed using actual fighter jets for Maverick, was able to ensure the verisimilitude of the movie by collaborating with Sony on a brand-new camera  to capture scenes inside real-life race cars.

“We took those Top Gun cameras and we worked closely with Sony, sizing them down to something about a quarter of the size,” he says.

Just as Cruise and his castmates needed to learn how to pilot planes to perform some of the high-flying stunts in Maverick, Pitt and Idris had to become proficient drivers to film F1’s racing scenes, which find them both going at speeds of more than 290 km/h.

Making a racing movie had long been something Kosinski had yearned to do. Before James Mangold directed Ford v Ferrari with Christian Bale and Matt Damon, Kosinski had wanted to make his own version of the story that would have featured his Maverick star Tom Cruise alongside Pitt.

Looking ahead, the filmmaker, who has also directed Tron: Legacy and Cruise’s sci-fi thriller Oblivion, has spoken in other interviews about wanting Sonny’s story to continue in a crossover with Cruise’s 1990 racing drama Days of Thunder.

“Well, right now, it’d be Cole Trickle, who was (Cruise’s) Days of Thunder character, we find out that he and Sonny Hayes have a past,” Kosinski said about his dream pitch in a recent chat with GQ Magazine UK. “They were rivals at some point, maybe crossed paths … who wouldn’t pay to see those two go head-to-head on the track?”

But before that storyline becomes a reality, Kosinski lifted the hood on his latest starry vehicle with Pitt in the driver’s seat.

F1 is many things, it’s an underdog tale, it’s a sports drama, it’s about second chances. Tell us how you found your way into the story?

I’ve always been interested in racing and machines. I did my undergrad in mechanical engineering. So I was always a project-oriented kid; building cars, rockets, airplanes, so it was a world suited to my interests. But it was that first season of (the Netflix docuseries) Drive to Survive that hooked me. That season they focused on the last-place team. The team that doesn’t win every weekend. The rookie trying to prove himself in a car that’s just not as fast as everyone else’s. To me, that was a way into this world. Telling the story at the back of the grid, and a racer who was once thought to be the next world champion that lost his way and gets one more chance to prove he belongs there. That was my way in from a story point of view. Then it was about building the ultimate team around me to make it. Luckily, I was able to do that.

In Maverick, you had six cameras inside the cockpit. When people watch F1 they’re going to wonder how you got all the cameras in the cars. Tell us about the technical challenges you faced making this movie.

Working with cinematographer Claudio Miranda, who also shot Top Gun: Maverick, we wanted to take everything we learned and push it further. So the first thing we had to do was take that camera system and miniaturize it and make it much smaller. We worked closely with Sony to develop a whole new camera system that was a third of the size and much lighter. Then we worked with Mercedes and Formula 1 to design a race car that had 15 different mounting positions built into the chassis that had space for a camera, recorders, batteries, transmitters and receivers built into the car itself. We were able to mount four cameras at a time in those positions and then we developed a panning camera mount, so we could control the movement of the camera and move it left to right while we were shooting, which is an innovation beyond anything we could do on Top Gun. It allowed us to connect the action to the actor and give you a perspective of what it feels like to be in a Formula 1 race. That was the challenge Lewis (Hamilton) gave me from the beginning.

Was it easy to sell Brad on this movie?

I knew that he was interested in racing … Driving a real race car, going to real events, capturing it during race weekends, those were all things Brad was up for doing.

How do you get the buy-in from Formula 1?

Luckily, F1 is run by Stefano Domenicali, who is a man that has a real vision for the sport. In our first meeting with him, he instantly got what we were going for. We also showed him Top Gun: Maverick to show him what it meant to capture it for real versus CGI. So, he understood the vision and opened the doors for us. All the teams and drivers embraced us as the 11th team on the grid for two years and made space for us and provided their feedback and expertise. Without that collaboration we wouldn’t have been able to make it the way they did.

Brad and his co-star Damson Idris are driving 290 km/h. How did you keep it all from falling apart?

Luckily, they are both very talented athletes, naturally. That’s a big part of it. Given that great starting point, they had three months of intense training working their way up from sports cars to Formula 4 and Formula 3 to these modified Formula 2 cars they are driving in the film going (290 km/h). They had great training. It was still nerve-wracking as we were shooting it, because one mistake can mean you spin off the track. But they’re both professionals and they had a great team around them and, luckily, we made it through.

F1 is now playing in theatres.

mdaniell@postmedia.com