It’s a bit lost to time (or short-term memory, as everything is on the internet these days), but circa 2013, filmmaker Joseph Kosinski was once set to make a racing movie called “Go Like Hell,” with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise attached. The project eventually fell apart — getting two megastars in the same film at that moment ballooned the budget beyond what the market could justify. The material later resurfaced as “Ford v Ferrari,” starring Matt Damon and Christian Bale, and directed by James Mangold.
In the end, the abandoned version still left tire tracks everywhere. Michael Mann revisited the project in the years that followed and ultimately made “Ferrari” with Adam Driver. And Kosinski, for his part, went on to collaborate with both stars separately on “Top Gun: Maverick” and “F1: The Movie,” the latter grossing $631 million worldwide and becoming the ninth-highest-grossing film of 2025.
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In a recent interview with Deadline, Kosinski explained how that earlier “almost” fed into the DNA of “F1,” why Pitt felt like the right engine for this kind of story, and how their shared history started in the wreckage of “Go Like Hell.”
“I mean, this is a role I always wanted to see Brad play,” he said. “I think it’s a movie he always wanted as well. I think, you know, we both flirted with ‘Go Like Hell,’ which became ‘Ford Ferrari’ in 2015, so that’s actually where he and I first met.”
And when it came to the version that never made it off the starting line, Kosinski offered the kind of Hollywood image you don’t forget: two A-listers, casually, improbably, reading a script together like it was no big deal — even though it absolutely was.
“So, I knew [Brad] was interested in this type of film and this type of story, so he was the first person I went to, and you know, lucky for me, he said yes,” Kosinski said. “In 2015, actually, I had Brad and Tom reading the script together at Tom’s house, which was pretty surreal.”
However, the dream didn’t survive the reality check: the economics of that era, combined with the industry’s then-stubborn belief that racing movies were a tough sell.
“And so, yeah, I mean, I would love to see those two in a movie together,” he said. “At that time in that market, we couldn’t make it happen. And also, there was a time in 2015 where they said racing movies don’t work, you know, so….”
That skepticism clearly stuck with him and became a kind of doubt fuel that sits in the back of your head every time you’re trying to will a movie into existence.
“That was another thing in the back of my mind making this film,” he said. “God damn it, I’m gonna prove those guys wrong.”
And while “Go Like Hell” never happened in the Pitt/Cruise configuration, Kosinski’s point was that it still mattered — the connections, the creative meeting point, the alternate-history version of the movie that helped set his later work in motion. Watch the Deadline interview clip below.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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