Filmmaker Joseph Kosinski (“Oblivion,” “Only The Brave”) is having a hell of a year. His first film of 2022, a little movie called, “Top Gun: Maverick” had been the number one movie in the world at the box office, and is currently the #1 domestic movie of the year, having grossed over $400 million stateside, even beating out Marvel’s “Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness.” Having grossed $755 million so far and maybe on its way to cracking $1 billion, Kosinski has yet another movie on the way. This one, “Spiderhead,” a dark, twistedly funny dystopian sci-fi thriller, is radically different from ‘Maverick,’ and Kosinski wouldn’t have it any other way.
Starring Chris Hemsworth, Miles Teller, and Jurnee Smollett, “Spiderhead” centers on a state-of-the-art penitentiary run by brilliant visionary Steve Abnesti (Hemsworth) wherein inmates wear a surgically attached device that administers dosages of mind-altering drugs in exchange for commuted sentences. Playing an amalgamation of tech billionaires with a sinister edge and an affable smile—a “charismatic sociopath,” Kosinski says—Hemsworth plays against type, a likable villain who wants to be everyone’s best friend and truly thinks his method-of-madness approach is going to “save the world.”
Teller and Smollett play inmates trying to atone for their sins, but unaware of the full designs and nefarious plans for Abnesti’s experiments. Written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, known for the “Deadpool” films, and adapted from a sci-fi short by Geoge Saunders, “Spiderhead” has a twisted, dark comedic edge that applies to every little moment in the film, including the music.
For Kosinski, it’s a total gear shift, a smaller, more intimate film where he has to focus on performances, architecture, small spaces, and anything but jets rocketing across vast landscapes, and to hear the director tell it, he loves these different challenges.
I spoke to Kosinksi recently by phone and he told me about the several draws of the film—the twisty comedic tone he’d never tried before, the shrewd script, the opportunity for both Hemsworth and Teller to try something different—working on “Top Gun” vs. “Spiderhead,” and a little tease about the Formula One racing movie he’s going to do with Brad Pitt next. In short, he hopes to do for racing cars what ‘Maverick’ did for fighter jets and push the envelope again with the visceral experience.
I feel lucky, I’m talking to the man of the hour right now.
Yeah, I’ve got this three-week window where I’ve got two movies coming out, which is pretty weird, but I’m excited to be talking about “Spiderhead” because I’ve been on the “Top Gun” train for the last six weeks.
That’s a lot! Though a lot of people are going to probably think you made these movies back-to-back, which maybe in some sense you did. But two movies in six weeks is pretty rare, so what is the timeline there?
Yeah, it is crazy. So, the timeline, I started “Top Gun” in May of 2017 and I finished it in August 2020. Then, I flew to Australia in October of 2020 and finished “Spiderhead” in March of this year. So, yeah, I went straight from “Top Gun” to “Spiderhead,” but because of the pandemic, instead of releasing “Top Gun” in 2020 or 2021, like we would’ve expected, it’s just come out now. So, they’re being released three weeks apart, but “Top Gun” was shot first.
Well, that seems to have worked out ok. At least the first one is pretty popular I think. [laughs]
Yeah, exactly. And you know, it’d be one thing if they were both competing for screens, you know? Right. But they’re not, they’re in different mediums and totally different films in every way. So, in some ways, they’re complementary to one another in an interesting way.
For sure. What’s really interesting is that I’ve seen three of your movies in the last two, three weeks because I actually hadn’t seen “Only The Brave,” and I went back to catch up with it, it’s great little character drama.
Well, I’m glad you went back and watched it.
I heard so many good things about it right around “Top Gun Maverick.” So you do that little drama, then ‘Top Gun,’ then this more intimate, smaller-scale dystopian movie, “Spiderhead,” and I wonder how much of that is intentional?
I personally like going back and forth from big to small. For me, it’s like a nice way to appreciate the opposite side and to be able to maybe focus, for something like “Spiderhead” to really put a lot of effort into the performances. And be able to tell a story that doesn’t have to appeal to everybody on the planet. It can be a little more niche, a little more idiosyncratic. You can try something completely different tonally, you can work with actors and try something they’ve never done before. That was the draw of something like “Spiderhead” because it’s kind of a refreshing change. Then for the next one, I’ll dive into something big again. If I could keep doing that back and forth like that I would, I think I’d be very happy.
Do you think one informs the other? Obviously, you have to rethink a visual style cinematically in this one vs. ‘Top Gun’ because you’re mostly in rooms, right? And, you’re just focused on people essentially.
Totally interior. ‘Top Gun’ is not about architecture at all. ‘Top Gun’ is about shooting fast-moving objects in the air or attaching cameras to them. So, it’s more about landscapes, like where are you going to put these jets? Whereas “Spiderhead,” the building itself becomes another character in the film. Every film certainly informs the next; there is no ‘Top Gun’ without me doing “Only The Brave” before that. Each one informs the next choice and you learn and then there’s also this urge to try something different. For me, it’s all about the creative process. It’s like, what gets you excited to, to get up early and go stand on stage for 14 hours and do something. For me, it’s about a new idea and trying something I haven’t done before. So, that’s the draw.
Makes sense. Tell me more about the draw, specifically, the writers, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the short story, the dark themes, and the humorous tone too.
It was the script. It really was, Rhett and Paul’s script. Which was different than anything else out there. From a tone point of view, it was darkly funny and it felt very relevant to the times we live in. This notion of using technology to somehow fix ourselves. I just thought it was a great commentary on the kind of world we live in right now without making a movie about the internet or social media. And, I loved the challenge of getting performances out of actors that were completely at odds with the context of the scene.
I thought for an actor, what a great challenge that would be because it’s kind of against everything you learn about acting. Just this character of [Chris Hemsworth’s] Steve Abnesti, just the complexity of this guy being this kind of charismatic sociopath. So, what a great opportunity for an actor, particularly an actor who maybe people know for something completely different. This is why I was thrilled when Chris [Hemsworth] responded to it, because this is the guy who is Thor. This is the guy who’s in “Extraction”— hugely successful films, mind you. And to have him pull off this role, I think is something that people are going to be really surprised by in a really great way.
Yes! I really wanted to talk about Chris because he’s fantastic in this, I love him. They’re both playing against type in a way. Miles Teller often plays a very cocky kind of character and is sort of more the straight man here, more internalized. And Chris is so affably devious.
Yeah, for Chris, it’s the comedic chops we know he has, and we’ve seen glimpses of but it’s also the darkness. We haven’t seen him play a villain quite like this. The vulnerability he brings to it, this kind of idea of a damaged kid being inside this guy. He’s not a two-dimensional villain, there’s a real human being inside this guy and he truly does believe that what he’s doing is the right thing. He really thinks he is changing the world and trying to help people, but his methods have kind of gone astray. Then for Miles, as you said, it’s a character who’s much more impressionable than the other characters we’ve seen him play— he’s not a Navy pilot, he’s not a firefighter, he’s not taking charge of the narrative. He’s really being manipulated by the charisma of this guy for the first two-thirds of the film and only when he finally finds out what’s going on, does he turn the tables on him, and then it becomes just a great conflict between these two men. To be able to do a George Saunders story as a film is an incredible opportunity, you know, and something that I think is a great argument for Netflix to be able to tell a story like this, that would be hard to do in a typical theatrical model.
Right, right. You’ve worked with Miles, what is it? Like three times in a row now?
Yeah, this is my third film with him.
I don’t want to be reductive about it, but Miles’ role is definitely the less sexy of the two, but actually, the degree of difficulty in that sense is harder because it’s more minute. I wonder if part of him taking it is like, “well, I’ll do that for Joe.”
I mean, you’d have to ask him if I had anything to do with it. What I said to him was “this will be different than anything you’ve done before and it’ll be a very unique challenge” because it is a much more impressionable character. It shows how much range he has as an actor, you know? Between “Only The Brave,” “Top Gun,” and “Spiderhead,” the films show a wide range of what he’s capable of. He can do big movies, he can do small movies. There’s always an emotional truth to him, no matter what the role he’s playing and that makes him, I think, very special. And it’s fun to see! With “Top Gun” to see people really discovering him again, because to me and a lot of people who work in the business, we all know Miles is a huge talent, but it’s, it’s fun to see him kind of break out. He’s like all the rage of TikTok at the moment, which I just think is hilarious.
Ha! That’s awesome. I love the music choices in this, the Yacht Rock that takes on a kind of gleeful sinister edge in this context. Tell me about where that came from.
I just love the idea of Abnesti, you know, he wants to control everything, right? It’s clear in the design of the “Spiderhead,” it’s clear in the way he dresses and carries himself, and the technology itself is all about control. I like the idea that he’s creating the soundtrack of this world he’s created, and it’s a wonderful counterpoint to the true nature of what’s happening inside. So, I love the idea that he’s kind of filling it with this music that represents relaxation and everything’s going to be okay when the truth is the opposite of that.
So, you know, it’s kind of inspired by like the music you hear in the dentist’s office when you’re about to get your tooth drilled out [laughs]. It’s like Chris’s office, so that was the inspiration. I love the idea that it’s his playlist. Then at the end of the film, when everything goes wrong, it’s like the last thing you’d expect to be a soundtrack to it, to an escape scene is Hall & Oates. It’s just something you can do in “Spiderhead” that you wouldn’t be able to pull off in any other film.
I imagine the dark and twisted tone of it all was appealing too as you hadn’t really done that before?
For sure. For me, this is only it’s my fifth film, so it’s about trying not to repeat myself and look for something new in every project, something exciting creatively to explore, and just keep stretching the envelope of kind of what’s out there. So that was what I was really drawn to, something completely different.
I like what you said before, kind of about indirect commentary on the world. You’ve got the prison industrial complex, and pharma companies, Steve Abnesti is a mélange of many of these billionaires in the world. Tell me about all that. Also, don’t you think we’re at the point now when someone says they want to “change the world” it’s a red flag?
[Laughs], yeah. I think a lot of that commentary comes from George’s story. What makes his writing so brilliant is that the stories are very creative, idiosyncratic, funny, and shocking, but always certainly have things that feel like a commentary on the world we live in. I wanted the film to capture and maintain that. This fascination we have with our devices as being things that can improve our lives, make us better, make us look better, or make people like us, or make us happy. It just felt like a really interesting way to analyze that and look at it in a way that, as you said, doesn’t hit it on the head too squarely, but does it in a very different way and very emotional way. The end of the film is a very positive message, I think, and a good reminder for all of us coming through the two years of what we’ve all been through with the pandemic. It’s like redemption and forgiveness — these are really powerful qualities that we all need to embrace in order to move forward.
I like the whole ethical and moral kind of idea of improvement and betterment. You want to change the world, great, but how are you going about it?
At what cost? Yeah. The cost of individual rights or freedoms or free will, right? It’s a topic that we debate every single day and, is it okay to take the rights away of these 30 prisoners in an effort to try to improve the lives of the world? That’s certainly Steve’s point of view. He’s like “we break a couple of eggs, sure, [laughs] but look what we’re doing, we’re changing the world here, buddy, stick with me.” I’m sure it’s what a lot of people who get in trouble with these kinds of ideas convince themselves of. In order to improve the lives of the greater good, a couple of individuals might get hurt along the way, but it’s worth it.
It reminds me of what Theranos did a little bit—lying about the short-term data because they were convinced the long-term of it all would save lives.
Yeah, I think Abnesti is an amalgamation of a lot of those sorts of characters that we see in the film, and in the news that we all know about. At the same time, Chris is creating this character that’s very entertaining and oddly endearing in many ways.
Absolutely. Yes.
I said to Chris, I was like, ‘Man, I’d love to cast Steve in some other films, you know, he’s such a fun character. It’d be great to see him in some other places.” Because, I think, Chris just had a blast playing him, honestly.
I like how he thinks he and Miles Teller’s character, Jeff, are best friends, the delusion of that power inequality between them. And then when Miles is high he’s still coherent enough to know they’re not the same. “Well, you know, I couldn’t walk outta here if I wanted to.”
And Steve says, ‘Well, neither could I.’ He is a slave to his own ideas, which is pretty crazy. I think, what I like about Steve is you feel like he really is looking for a friend, even though he is using Jeff, he is looking for some human connection. He’s a damaged kid like Jeff is and they have a lot of similarities. So that’s one of my favorite scenes in the film as just watching those two guys connect.
So big movie, small movie: a big one would be next, what would that be?
I think it’s going to be a movie set in the world of Formula One.
Oh yes, right. With a small little actor, I think his name is Brad Pitt?
Yes, he and Mr. Lewis Hamilton, who is a seven-time world champion, as a producer, as well as Jerry Bruckheimer. So, it’s kind of a dream team of people to dive into this fascinating world. So, that’s what we’re working on right now.
Getting the band back together a little bit with Bruckheimer who knows from a big film. Are you doing for Formula One what you did for jets for ‘Top Gun’?
Yeah. The idea is to capture that world in the most authentic way possible, to shoot real cars in real races and really give the audience the sensation of what it’s like to be one of those cars. There are only 20 formula one drivers in the world; it’s gotta be one of the most exclusive clubs that exist. So, it’ll be a fun world, a really unique challenge to figure out how to do that. But certainly the experience of working with Tom and making “Top Gun” will apply.
I was going to say you kind of, in some ways, you already beta-tested the visceral experience with “Top Gun” so you already have that going for you.
[Laughs]. Yeah, well, it’s going to be hard to top those jets because those are amazing, amazing machines. But Formula One’s a very different world. It’ll be fun. It’ll just be a fun challenge for me.
Cool, can’t wait. Congrats on all the success so far. Thanks so much.
Thank you. I really appreciate it, man.
“Spiderhead” debuts on Netflix, globally on June 17.