Joseph Kosinski wants you along for the ‘F1’ ride

0:00KCRW sponsors include Focus Features. From the acclaimed director of Jason Bourne comes The Uprising, starring Andrew Garfield, based on the true story that inspired the legend of Robin Hood. The Uprising, rated R, only in theaters this Thursday. Discover it at Dolby Cinema. From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

0:30It's The Treatment, which you can also hear at kcrw.com slash the treatment. I got so off track talking to my guest, Joseph Kaczynski, about music that I never thought we'd get to film. But we should because I think what his affinity is in film is finding a way to sort of intersect alienation and technology through all of his films, I think. We can say that about Spider-Ed or I think about Top Gun Maverick, certainly Oblivion, and his newest film, F1. First of all, a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. We were talking about music, too, and I was thinking about the way you use music.

1:00I mean, I love the Daft Punk stuff and M83. I mean, there's a real textural thing you do with music. Yes, I think music is very much part of my creative process. And I love nothing more than being able to kind of put something on the headphones and go for a walk and just let the images just start to play. and certainly Oblivion came out of listening to M83 and walking around Santa Monica when I was unemployed my first, you know, 18 months in LA, dreaming up this story that eventually I got to make into a film, which was an amazing experience. But we were talking earlier, music has always been part of my life.

1:40My mom had me on the piano at three years old. She was a pianist. So there's definitely music has always been a part of my life since I was little. And the beauty of my job is, I get to collaborate with people like Hans Zimmer or Daft Punk or M83 and make these things. And it's been a great experience. You really use music basically as kind of an emotional metaphor for what the characters are going through. Yes. I think the soundtrack, the score, your ears almost drive emotion more than your eyes do. I think the eyes are a little more analytical, intellectual. virtual music and sound somehow can resonate deeply in a way that, you know, and when those two things are working together, you know, for me, that's kind of like my most memorable moments when I think of cinema, you know, if I think back to like Strauss and, you know, the space station in 2001, sequences like that, to me are kind of the purest form of cinema.

2:38And, you know, I love moments when I have the opportunity in a movie to be able to do that and just let it be kind of image and score. I think it's what's really fun as we're talking about this in the first sort of five minutes or so of F1, you go from a piece of music that definitely tells us where we are. Yes. It's also about a certain kind of machismo. It's also about an era that's long past. Yep. That was looking back to an era that had passed before that. Yep. And then to the textural stuff of the Hans Zimmer score. I mean, I just thought what you do in oral terms, the first five minutes of the movie is kind of extraordinary.

3:11Yeah. I wanted to find a way to teach you everything you need to know about who Sonny Hayes was as a character without having to explain that. And I think, you know, without spoiling it, the song that we drop at the opening bars of this movie tell you a lot about who this guy is and what he's about and sets the stage for, you know, him being dropped into a very different world. In this case, the world of Formula One, where, you know, it's the first time we hear a little bit of Hans's score. And what I love about Hans' score in this is it's really a little bit of a throwback for Hans to his electronic roots, which is, you know, where he started.

3:49You know, if you haven't seen the Buggles video recently, Video Killed the Radio Star, that is Hans Zimmer on the keyboard in the background. And that's where he started. And he gets to kind of flex, you know, his synth muscle in this movie a little bit. But also a lot of the music you used of the music of people who think of themselves as being kind of, you know, loners with swagger. and just using that to sort of immediately go into score, right from one of those drops to comment on what we've just heard. Yeah. I mean, I just want to talk to you about that deliberation in this, Joseph, because I think it's really impressive just, again, to use sound as a texture.

4:24So especially, like I get to see it in a great theater, so to feel that almost kind of vertiginous sort of fall from this pounding music that works almost on a sheer endorphin level to this other music that makes your heart race slightly faster. Yeah. I mean, that is the world of Formula One. It is such a... It's also the world of the kind of flying that happens in Top Gun. Yes. Given that these are both sort of Jerry Bruckheimer movies, and there's almost an archetypal relationship with audiences we have to that. You're using music to both bring us into it and comment on what it is we're watching.

4:58Yeah. You know, talking about Jerry Bruckheimer, I'm a child of 80s cinema. And, you know, we got to remember, Jerry Bruckheimer also made American Gigolo. and Flashdance and Thief, you know, Tangerine Dream which is very much the same kind of textual I mean, you can't imagine M83 or Daft Punk don't listen to that stuff yeah, without it so I think that kind of, you said melancholy that kind of textual synthetic electronic score is ingrained into my nervous system from, you know, watching all those things you know, growing up and certainly bubbles up I think in all the movies I've done, except maybe for Only the Brave.

5:40Maybe there is a little bit. No, I think there's that there too. There is a little bit at the end. Yeah, there is that kind of, yeah, it's more, I don't even know how to describe it. It is, the line between, I think, sound design and score is kind of blurry. And I think I like that area. I like it where the sound design is almost musical. I think there's something, again, it's all about getting to an emotional, getting your audience into the emotional space. And for me, music does that. And so, you know, it's a very instinctual thing. It's almost a hard thing to talk about because you really feel it rather than think about it.

6:18By the way, we're talking about something that he thinks he's not speaking well about, but he is. We're talking about sound and sound textures with my guest Joseph Kosinski. His new film as director is F1. You may have heard about it. It's The Treatment. So often you've taken what is, again, almost sort of mythic sort of masculine sort of status and making us ask questions about it in ways that are incredibly nuanced. And I think that's why I was kind of thrilled that you were doing something on F1 because it's kind of like this sort of ultimate sort of collaboration, but finally loneliness because a bunch of people get you into the car, but finally it's you in the car.

6:56That's right. I was very lucky to have the seven-time Formula One world champion and Lewis Hamilton as my producing partner on this film. And of course he was an incredible resource. And make a tiny cameo in that film. He does make a tiny, a lot of the drivers do, but you know, Lewis obviously was incredibly helpful with the technical details, but what was the most useful thing from Lewis was he gave us insight into the spiritual aspect of what it's like to be in this car and what it is he's chasing. And there's an important moment near the end of the film where Sonny finds that thing he's looking for in the moment.

7:34He's a Brad Pitt's character. Yes. And that was something that came completely from Lewis in a really kind of personal conversation with him and really unlocked the character in a way that, you know, we would not have been able to do. And having the guy who actually lives this life weekend to weekend to be a part of the process was pretty incredible. I think, interesting too, because I think there's a subtext with him talking about loneliness, and you have Damson Idris in the film, who's, like Lewis, one of the few people of color to have broken through on this. So to sort of have that, I mean, there's that sort of antagonism that both he and Sonny have because they're both loners and both people who are isolated and dealing with alienation.

8:12And I like that race is not stated, but we feel it anyway. No, I think that's not the story I wanted to tell because that's Lewis's story. And I didn't want Joshua to have Lewis's story. And that's the damn dangerous character, Joshua. Yes, but what I liked about what I was interested in exploring is the notion that Sonny and Joshua discover they are actually the same person at different points in their lives. And what I liked was casting two actors who on the outside look like they couldn't be more different. and what they discover and what Sonny realizes is that Joshua Pierce is a version of himself 30 years ago and he sees could be making the same mistakes he did and does everything he can to help him avoid that.

8:58So it was all really about, you know, these two men discovering they have a lot more in common than they think and then ultimately teaming up together over the course of the story. I think it's interesting when you mentioned only the braille to me because you've gone from a smaller stage to a bigger stage, but still these questions of alienation and loneliness play out in all the films that you've made. It's interesting, yeah. And I wonder where that comes from for you. I don't, you know, I don't know. I don't know if it's like the films that I was drawn to growing up that, you know, kind of resonate.

9:30And I'm thinking, you know, back through movies like 2001 or Blade Runner, if those are kind of an element that I'm attracted to and why that works cinematically. If that gives you empathy for the character and draws you in. It's not intentional, but I do, when I look back now that I've made six films, there does seem to be a common thread. and I promise you, I'm not a lonely person. I'm not a kid. But I just look at my own self going like, what is it that why am I drawn to these stories? As my wife would say, she's like, you make movies for dudes. Do I really? I don't see it that way. But yeah, it's interesting to look back and wonder why is it that these are stories I'm drawn to?

10:17But also, you just mentioned two films. We started at the beginning talking about alienation and technology. and 2001 and Blade Runner are both films that deal with that in story term levels. Yeah, that certainly, I mean, going back to Tron Legacy, that's very, I mean, it's pretty much right up front. I mean, literally with, you know, Jeff Bridges and his kind of doppelganger. So yeah, maybe it's because that's essentially what I'm struggling with every day in making these movies. I always seem to take on films that have this kind of huge technical challenge, you know behind the the story and that you're trying to tell and you know i've been wrestling with that my whole life and you know as a kid i was always putting together model cars or airplanes or rockets and building inventions and went to school for mechanical engineering so did you yeah so always have had that kind of technical side and then there was you know the kid who played jazz saxophone and on the other side so there was always this kind of left brain right brain thing going on in terms of my interests and um somehow found myself in a career that uses both of them every day and maybe that kind of internal struggle is reflected in the the storytelling i think interesting too because so often films ask us to judge and be afraid of the future and and you protect yourself and people have to ask themselves because they're all people who are really handy and have confidence in their hands literally in their hands they have ask themselves, do they want to stay in the past or be in the future?

11:48None of them live in the present. Right. No, it is interesting. And certainly, yeah, Sonny Hayes, in the case of this film, having to go into the world of Formula One, I have never been in a world that is more forward-looking and more technologically kind of advanced and present than this world. I mean, these cars, for people who don't know, each team designs and builds their own car. These are not off the shelf machines. They have to be built by the team that's racing it. And often these pieces come out of the factory the night before the race. So when I went to Austin in 2021 on Lewis's invitation and watched the mechanics build a car in the garage, and then Lewis climbed into it and drove it, you know, at 220 miles an hour on the track, I had never seen anything like it.

12:33And that's where I kind of said, I have to, I have to show the world what this, what this sport is like, because I certainly was not aware of just how fascinating it was. We'll take a break and talk more about Manuel Dexayor. It's my guest, Joseph Kaczynski. His new film as director is F1. It's The Treatment. There's more to come. Stay with us. It's The Treatment, my guest, who's caffeinating himself. I understand the feeling. It's director Joseph Kaczynski. His new film, you may have heard about it, is F1. You can also hit the show at kcow.com slash the treatment. But that touch is so important for these characters.

13:05At some point, almost every character in the film talks about touching something and what it feels like. Just watching it, I mean, that even is a big part of Tron. Even though it's abstract and virtual, they're still talking about getting their hands on things. Yeah. I think tactility, getting the audience to feel something has always been something I've been striving for. Even Tron was a movie that I pushed to shoot as much of it practically as possible. you would think it's a very digital world but in fact we built a ton of sets and in the suits and the lights in the suits and all of that was real and that has always been something i've been working towards on every film and obviously in this film you know we shot this film at real grand prix's on race weekend brad and damson are driving real race cars in this film this was not shot on a sound stage this was not shot on a blue screen there's not a stunt driver just off camera piloting around like you know lewis had told me that he had never seen a film that really captures the feeling using that word again of what it's like to be in one of these cars so that was my goal with this was to give the audience that sensation of what it's like to pilot one of these things which only 20 people in the world get to do i don't think there is a more exclusive sport or profession in the world, maybe like astronaut or something.

14:30I mean, there are 20 people that get to do this job. And, you know, to make a film that allows everyone who wants to go buy an IMAX ticket to experience that was a pretty cool, you know, thing to try to do. But again, we go back to isolation. I was thinking about that cockpit in Oblivion or the cockpit of the planes in Top Gun Maverick or the cockpit's here. I mean, that's sense of finally and there's a kind of that's the anxiety the music really sort of like takes us someplace it really kind of reminds us in oral terms what it is how alone these guys are and what you have to master emotionally as well as physically to compete in these worlds yeah it is ultimately you know there's a thousand people on these teams that put these cars together but ultimately it comes down to one person in the moment pushing both the machine and their bodies to the absolute limit to try to win.

15:29And the time that separates these drivers on the track is hundreds or even thousandths of a second. So they're all operating at this very, very peak of human performance. And it is. It's just a fascinating world because it's like watching these things go around in circles for hours. Like, what is the fascination? Why are we drawn to this sort of competition and watching these guys push it to the limit? I think we try to explore that idea in this film a little bit and find out what it is they are chasing. And Lewis was really instrumental in helping with that. It's interesting, too, because for people who don't watch F1 or have never been to it before, and again, one of the things you get really right about is how loud it is.

16:09Yes. I mean, you think being around fighter planes is loud. There's nothing because you feel the air rumble from the ground up in a way you don't with planes. Because one of the things you don't see really in F1 is nobody lapsed anybody. They're all really close together. And there's one scene where Sonny talks about, if we can shave this and this and this and this, that's the race. Yeah, that's the world of Formula One. It's tenths of a second. And when it comes to a race, the tenth of a second you get from the pit stop crew is just as valuable as what a driver can eek out because ultimately you need it all to work together to win this thing.

16:45So it's simultaneously a solo endeavor, but also a team sport at the same time. And I wanted to show that there is more than one person, you know, because when you watch a race or when we talk about it, everyone knows the driver's names, but no one knows the name of the mechanic on the right front tire. And their job is ultimately just as important to the victory of the team as the driver at the end of the day. And just a specialized, too. Yeah, it is. It is a very, very specialized. I mean, can you imagine training weeks, months, or years to just change the right front tire? I mean, that's your specialty.

17:23And when it comes down to a race, it's like you've got that two or three seconds to prove yourself and all the pressures on you. And, you know, even heard stories of mechanics who mess up a wheel change in such a way that they're not able to do their job ever again. It's so traumatizing, that one bad pit stop. Like, they have to walk away. And that sort of level of pressure is actually something we experienced on this film because, you know, most films you have hours or days to shoot a scene and get it right. This film, because we were shooting during real Grand Prix's, we would often only get a window of five to 10 minutes to shoot our scenes.

18:01So it was much more like a live stage play in terms of how we shot it than anything else I've ever done before. But it was kind of like a cinematic pit stop in a way and a really interesting challenge that I haven't experienced before. What's also interesting in these movies, too, is so often they kind of sort of thread the needle between the analog and the digital. Yeah. And that's certainly the part of the music, too. I mean, because, again, the opening of the movie, you go from literary and analog to digital and electronic, I mean to say. Certainly that's clearly a part of your actual life, too, playing instruments and touching them and going around them and hearing the way that this gets back to F1.

18:47I find myself thinking about the way air moves in your movies. You sort of feel that propulsion and the way air moves. And if you saw Maverick in a theater versus the way the sound is different. Yep. And I don't want to say grounded because it's not exactly what I mean, but it feels more visceral than it did in Maverick. Interesting. No, I think this was a film made to be experienced on the biggest screen possible. And I do think the sound in this film does almost play a bigger role because anyone who's been to a Formula One race, there is nothing quite like that. When you're actually in an F-18, it's almost silent.

19:26That's the truth of it. Really? Yeah, it's like flying in a commercial airliner. It's a very kind of arid, quiet world that these guys live in. So in Maverick, we almost had to kind of bump up and kind of create a sound that felt more exciting than the reality of it. And we're also hearing them breathing in the cockpit too. Exactly. It's that air. Whereas Formula One, the sound at the start of this race, when these 20 cars are all launching off, you feel the ground shake. I mean, it's a symphony of explosions all happening at once, and there's a power to it. this is something I talked to Hans about very early.

20:02This was a lot of conversations with my sound crew up at Skywalker mixing this film. We spent more time mixing this film than any film I've done. Yeah? Eight weeks of mixing, which, you know, is a lot. And I wanted to try to capture that feeling of being in a race or being in the middle of a race. And you tell me if we achieved it, but certainly that was the goal. Because I think it really is a film that demands being seen in a theater. But that's the thing that clearly, if you saw Tron as a kid, there's nothing like seeing Tron in a theater. It almost doesn't work if you don't see it in a theater.

20:40And I feel that even with Spider-Man, all these films that you've made are films you want people to experience, not just to see, but experience in movie theaters. Yeah. Well, my, some of my strongest memories are being a kid and going to the movies and looking up on that big screen, you know, in Marshalltown, Iowa and, and being transported to another place for two or two and a half hours. And, you know, we talk about chasing a feeling. certainly I think that's what I'm trying to do in making these films is try to give the audience the experience I had as a 12 year old kid you know going to the cinema on a Saturday and you know seeing the world we live in now with these portable screens that we carry around which are great but nothing matches the experience of being in a packed auditorium looking at a 60 foot screen and feeling the sound in your chest and reacting, you know, with a group of people.

21:37There's a couple sequences in this movie that are, you know, you really feel the crowd. You feel it, you know, you experience it with a group of people in a way that's just completely different than watching it on your own. So I really hope people go out and see this movie on the biggest screen possible because that's how we designed it. It's a treatment. We're talking about the community of theater goers going to see movies about loneliness and alienation with my guest director, Joseph Kosinski, whose new film is F1. In movie theaters now, you've not only done movies about our relationship to on-screen masculinity, but so often you've had these, you work with actors who are themselves kind of exemplars of a certain kind of masculinity, be it Jeff Bridges or Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, but also guys who have a sense of humor about what it is they're playing.

22:24Yes. So, I mean, they're not just doing two-dimensional versions of that, but they themselves, their careers have been sort of like these films that make us ask questions about our relationship to masculine heroes. Yeah, I've been very lucky to work with incredible people. Jeff Bridges, you know, to have him be the lead of my first film and to have it be someone who is so generous and trusting in me, a first-time filmmaker, I feel very, very lucky because a first movie, especially something of that scale for a new director, you can get swallowed up by the machine very, very easily. And because it was Jeff Bridges, he couldn't have been better to me and more trusting of me.

23:13And I think that having such a great experience on my first film really set me up in a way that a lot of first-timers in the studio system aren't set up. And so I want to thank him for that. And then obviously, same happened with Tom Cruise, Josh Brolin, And Brad Pitt, I've worked with, been very lucky to work with some incredible people and had an amazing experience with every one of them. But the great thing about having, first of all, Jeff Bridges and Tron anyway, is having an actor who's all heart. Yes. In a world that's really abstract. Yes. Damson's that person here, the person who's the audience surrogate.

23:50Yes. And having Bridges be that in your first film really gave you some place to plant your feet on the ground, didn't it? Yes, absolutely. I think you're absolutely right. You know, these films, even though they focus on technology, you know, as a theme, having a real squishy human being at the center of it, like Jeff, who is so warm and so human, was a real joy. And yeah, I think you're right. I think really influenced me in kind of my approach to how to make these things and make sure that you're keeping, you know, your feet planted when approaching these big technical concepts. I mean, I think it's kind of just between this film and the film, like Le Mans, which I like, but never has that point of audience entry.

24:36I mean, it's really, we're watching spectacle. Yeah. I mean, in its way, kind of a heartbeat away from being a video game. It's a piece of filmmaking. It's kind of extraordinary. It is. But it lacks that sense of connectiveness that we're talking about. Yeah, Steve McQueen is, there is a kind of distance that he... That he brings to it. That he brings to it, which is also what makes it so fascinating, because you kind of watch that from afar and admire him in this role. It really, that film does take you, like a time capsule, into a time and place that feels very authentic, because they shot it at the real race.

25:13so it was a big influence on me with this film of really trying to experience what it's like to really be at a race and the only way to do that is to actually be there so with all the complications it brought logistically I do feel like that is something that can't be faked I just don't think I could have with all the money in the world could have never staged these races in a way that would have felt as believable so Le Mans and also Grand Prix were certainly both touchstones for me in approaching this film. What's really fun about the films, too, is how much we feel that sort of sense of anxiety in everybody.

25:50I mean, it's certainly here. It's expressed in so many different ways, but it's just sort of intense. I don't want to say fear because it's not fear. Pressure. It's pressure, but it's also how people react to that pressure and how some people can completely externalize it and others don't. Again, it's the world of Top Gun Maverick. where it's this pressure that could crush anybody. And everybody's reacting to it in different ways. In some ways, everybody feels like they're in their own movie, but they're still living under this, forgive me for going back to this world again, bubble. And that's the fun of watching how these actors respond to it.

26:26And we know who everybody is just by the way they stand in a room. Interesting. And that's no small thing. Well, casting is the most important job of a director. And I really do believe that if you cast the movie correctly, you have a shot at making something that works. If you don't cast it correctly, I think you'll never get there. So I do want to give credit to the incredible cast and not just the main cast, you know, Brad and Damson Carey and Javier, but also the supporting cast in this film, a bunch of incredible British actors. Well, the actor who plays Damson's mom, she's just terrific in it.

27:04Yes, Sarah Niles. Oh, she's wonderful. But that young woman who's terrified doing the wrong thing in the pit. That's the part of the pit crew. Yeah, and in a proper sports movie, if you've done your job right, you feel like every member of the team, you know a little bit about them by the end of the movie. But that notion of pressure is something that very much exists in Formula One. And I think if you're making a movie with Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise, icons, the only way to get the audience to really wonder if they're going to succeed in the end is if you crank up the pressure on their characters.

27:38in every possible way you can, because these are guys who have obviously won at life and in the business. So if you're going to put them in their movie, you need to put the screws to their character right from the top. And so that's something certainly we tried to do at every point we could. I guess that Joseph Kaczynski's new film as director is F1. Again, thank you for doing that. It's great to be here. Thanks, Elvis.