Joseph Kosinski (F1) F1

Joseph Kosinski directed F1 (2025) after proving with Top Gun: Maverick (2022) that audiences respond viscerally to footage shot inside real machines at real speed. For F1, he pushed further: embedding a fictional team inside live Grand Prix weekends across two racing seasons, with actors driving modified F2 cars at 180 mph on circuits where a mistake means a barrier, not a reshoot.

Kosinski attended the 2021 Austin Grand Prix at Hamilton's invitation and knew the film had to be shot for real

Lewis Hamilton invited Kosinski to the Circuit of the Americas in 2021, where Kosinski watched the Mercedes team build a car and stood in the garage during the race weekend. The visit convinced him the film could not be faked.

"I knew Lewis was a film lover. He invited me to Austin. I stood there while they put the car together." — Joseph Kosinski, Screen Rant (2025)

"I pitched the philosophy of the film and how I wanted to make it in the most authentic way possible, and that required their participation." — Joseph Kosinski, The Hollywood Reporter (2025)

Kosinski reunited with cinematographer Claudio Miranda (F1), composer Hans Zimmer (F1), and producer Jerry Bruckheimer (F1) from the Top Gun: Maverick team. The screenplay by Ehren Kruger evolved substantially during development, with four additional writers earning "Additional Literary Material" credits. (wikipedia)

The Top Gun lesson: audiences know when footage is real

Kosinski's directing philosophy on F1 grew directly from what he learned on Maverick: practical footage creates an emotional response that visual effects cannot replicate.

"What I learned on 'Top Gun: Maverick' was that the audience does appreciate and really responds, I think, viscerally and emotionally, to footage that has been shot for real." — Joseph Kosinski, The Wrap (2025)

This commitment meant filming at live Grands Prix with windows as short as ten minutes. Kosinski directed from a base station alongside Miranda, monitoring 16 camera feeds simultaneously and calling live camera moves while the cars circled the track.

"Normally, when you're shooting a scene, you have hours or days to shoot it, but because we wanted to shoot this film live at the Grand Prix while the events are going on, we'd often only get a few minutes." — Joseph Kosinski, Variety (2025)

"We actually shot three scenes back-to-back in about 15 minutes." — Joseph Kosinski, Variety (2025)

A year and a half of R&D preceded the first day of filming

Kosinski spent eighteen months developing the camera systems and car modifications before principal photography began at Silverstone in July 2023. The modified F2 cars were shipped to Mercedes-AMG in England, where the wheelbase was stretched to match an F1 car's proportions.

"It took about a year of research and development to get all of this working together." — Joseph Kosinski, The Wrap (2025)

"There was a year and a half of preparation, and R&D, to kind of figure out how to pull it off." — Joseph Kosinski, Screen Rant (2025)

The SAG-AFTRA strike, which began the week after the Silverstone shoot in July 2023, forced the production to extend across the 2024 season to capture missed race weekends. What began as a single-season shoot became a two-year production. (wikipedia)

Kosinski built the crash sequence at Brands Hatch with practical effects and a pipe ramp

For the Monza crash that injures Joshua Pearce, Kosinski filmed at Brands Hatch with the corner repainted to match Monza's Parabolica. A pipe ramp launched the car at 120 mph to replicate the trajectory of a high-speed impact, inspired by Romain Grosjean's 2020 Bahrain crash.

"The plan was that the car was supposed to kind of come through the Rolex sign, crash against the fence, land on the tyres. We had done a lot of testing kind of dialing that in perfectly." — Joseph Kosinski, Motorsport.com (2025)

"One of the great things about live-action filmmaking is sometimes things don't go exactly as you planned but in those moments sometimes you get more than what you hope for and boy did we overachieve." — Joseph Kosinski, Motorsport.com (2025)

The most complicated film he has made

Kosinski described F1 as his most ambitious project — more logistically demanding than Top Gun: Maverick, with 5,000 hours of footage reduced to 155 minutes by editor Stephen Mirrione.

"This is definitely the most complicated, most ambitious film I've done." — Joseph Kosinski, The Hollywood Reporter (2025)

Looking back, Kosinski acknowledged the risk involved in the production approach.

"God, that was pretty reckless." — Joseph Kosinski, Variety (2025)

A sequel was greenlit in February 2026. Kosinski expressed interest in returning to the world of Formula One.

"It's fun to think about what circumstances could bring him back into the world of Formula 1." — Joseph Kosinski, The Hollywood Reporter (2025)