For Joseph Kosinski, 2022 has been a successful year. The director of Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick is in charge of delivering 2022’s second-biggest box office success to date.

Following the completion of Cruise’s movie, Kosinski began work on the gripping, smaller-scaled Spiderhead, which is based on the dystopian short story, Escape from Spiderhead by George Saunders. Although the movie might be classified as a ‘sci-fi movie’ on Netflix, the filmmakers argue that everything you see there could either be happening now or in the not-so-distant future.
Joseph Kosinski

And even the 49-year-old filmmaker, who has dazzled audiences with films like Tron: Legacy and Oblivion, shared the same opinion.

Joseph Kosinski Believed Spiderhead Was ‘Challenging’

Before Joseph Kosinski even finished Top Gun: Maverick, he received the Spiderhead script from Deadpool screenwriters (Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick), which was adapted from a George Saunders story.

Tom Cruise, who broke his ankle in August 2017 while filming Mission: Impossible – Fallout, gave Kosinski the go-ahead to make Spiderhead in his spare time. The director explained to TheWrap:
“He was like, ‘Just shoot it, and then I’ll be ready.’ But it got so close, I didn’t want to risk pushing ‘Top Gun’ anymore. I walked away from it, which was hard to do because I just thought it was a very unique, special project that for me was a really interesting directorial challenge.”
Tom Cruise and Joseph Kosinski
After finishing Top Gun: Maverick, Kosinski was happy to see that “it was still there”. Fortunately, he was destined to do both films, as he acknowledged:
“It’s [Spiderhead] a challenging movie to talk about and to market.”
He further assured:
“It might be a movie that just needs to be discovered and talked about, more of a word-of-mouth thing, which is fine. It’s not a movie that has two weekends to collect as much money as possible before it disappears. It can have more of a slow burn run, which’ll be interesting.”

Tom Cruise’s Top Gun 2 Director Insisted Spiderhead Is Not Science Fiction

Spiderhead has a futuristic feel thanks to its minimal establishments and technology, but both also insist that its events are more grounded in reality. Additionally, Joseph Kosinski outlined his reasoning for not considering his Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller starrer to be a science-fiction drama:
“I don’t really think about this film as sci-fi just because I feel like there’s nothing in it that couldn’t exist. It wouldn’t surprise me if it does exist and someone’s trying to do it.”
Chris Hemsworth in Spiderhead
Moreover, Kosinski heavily credited screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick for helping him adapt that deeply unsettling scenario into an incredibly original, genre-defying style. To quote him:
“I think the script so represents what makes them so special and unique. Being able to capture George [Saunders]’s tone from his short story and expand it and do a feature film. If you had read that short story I don’t think there’s any way you would ever think it could be worthy of a film, and they wrote this thing that I didn’t put down. I read it cover to cover when I first got it, which is a great sign. And it was just, to me, an incredible challenge as a director and I thought it would be a really fun challenge for the right actors to tackle and just make something totally unique and different than anything else out there.”
Joseph Kosinski
For the unversed, critics had differing opinions about the movie, which can be streamed on Netflix.

On the work front, Joseph Kosinski is currently working on an untitled sports action drama film, which is written by Ehren Kruger. Brad Pitt plays the lead role in this upcoming movie.

Source- TheWrap