A fallen Formula One driver returns to the highest level of the sport in Director Joseph Kosinski’s car racing drama, F1 The Movie.

Kosinski’s film tells the story of Sonny Hayes, who was the sport’s most promising driver until an accident on the track nearly ended his career nearly three decades ago. He is coaxed out of retirement by Ruben Cervantes, a friend and the owner of a struggling F1 team, to mentor his hotshot rookie prodigy, Joshua “Noah” Pearce, who will become both a teammate and a rival on Sonny’s road to redemption.

On June 17, after the DGA membership screening in New York, Kosinski discussed the making of F1 The Movie during a Q&A moderated by Director Tom McCarthy (Stillwater). He also spoke about the film  during a conversation moderated by Director Dan Gilroy (Velvet Buzzsaw) following the Los Angeles screening on June 28.

During the New York conversation, Kosinski revealed some of the challenges of directing the racing sequences.

“This is my sixth movie with [cinematographer] Claudio Miranda. I told Claudio, 'I really want to be able to move the cameras.' We couldn’t do that in Top Gun: Maverick. Those cameras were just kind of fixed. So, we developed with Panavision this servo controlled panning head that allowed us to control the panning of the camera in real time while we were shooting. So, we had a transmission, we could pull focus, and we could pan the camera in a small little unit, and we had four of them. And then two cars running simultaneously. So, I had eight cameras up in front of me and it was more like what I imagine directing a live sporting event is like. Where you’re like looking and calling out pans to these operators who are on these little nubs. Going through the sequence and trying to connect the action to the actor’s face because it’s Brad [Pitt] and Damson [Idris] actually driving these race cars in the film. This was not a stunt driver on a pod. They trained for four months to drive these things on real F1 tracks during F1 weekends.”

Kosinski’s other directorial credits include the feature films Spiderhead, Only the Brave, Oblivion and TRON: Legacy. He was also nominated for the 2022 DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Theatrical Feature Film for Top Gun: Maverick. Kosinski has been a DGA member since 2007.