I know a lot of you are planning on seeing Top Gun: Maverick this weekend. And you should. The Tom Cruise led sequel is one of my favorite movies of the year, and it’s loaded with incredible visuals, great performances, and it actually makes the original film better with the way it adds to Maverick’s story.

However, while the film will be great wherever you see it, Top Gun: Maverick is one of those movies that you really want to see in an IMAX theater. That’s because director Joseph Kosinski went out of his way to make this an IMAX experience. He did this by putting six IMAX-certified cameras into the real F-18 cockpits and the footage is incredible. You’ve never seen anything like this because Cruise and the cast were really in the planes and cameras weren’t small enough to fit in an F-18 cockpit until now. Also, the film includes nearly one hour of IMAX’s Expanded Aspect Ratio, which means you see up to 26% more picture in select sequences throughout the film.

Anyway, rather than having me spouting all the reasons to see the film in IMAX, earlier today I got on a zoom call with Joseph Kosinski so he could explain it. During the interview he talked about everything he did to make Top Gun: Maverick an IMAX experience, why he only went full frame IMAX during the flying sequences, how the Sony Venice large format camera made the aerial footage possible, how he directed the actors from the ground, what it’s like mastering a movie in IMAX, and more. In addition, he talked about his favorite IMAX theater, one of his top IMAX movie going experiences, and what IMAX does to make sure every theater looks and sounds great.

You can either watch our conversation in the player above or read it below.

Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, Top Gun: Maverick stars Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer as Tom "Iceman" Kazansky, Jennifer Connelly as Penny Benjamin, Ed Harris, Jon Hamm, Charles Parnell, Glen Powell, Greg Tarzan Davis, Bashir Salahuddin Lewis Pullman, Monica Barbaro, Danny Ramirez, Manny Jacinto, Jay Ellis, Jake Picking, Raymond Lee, and Jean Louisa Kelly. The film's screenplay is written by Ehren Kruger and Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie, with story by Peter Craig and Justin Marks based on characters created by Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.

COLLIDER: The movie has literally come out last night. It's already doing pretty well. What kind of mood are you in?

JOSEPH KOSINSKI: I'm good. I'm excited. It's finally out. Waited five years for this weekend, and I'm excited for people to see it on the big screen.

RELATED: ‘Top Gun: Maverick': Jon Hamm, Charles Parnell and Bashir Salahuddin on the New Sony Camera Used on Sequel

Speaking of the big screen, I want to talk to you specifically about IMAX stuff. You've traveled the world. Do you have a favorite IMAX theater?

KOSINSKI: I'd say the one that I like going to is the one I go to most, which is the mastering theater here in Playa Del Rey, which you know well, but that's where you go to check your film and make the adjustments for IMAX. It's small in terms of seating for an IMAX, but it's in their headquarters, and it's always an exciting time to go there, because it means you're getting close.

You've obviously seen a lot of movies in IMAX. Do you have a favorite movie experience of going to see a movie in IMAX?

KOSINSKI: The one that comes to mind is one of my first IMAX experiences, which was probably at a science center in the '80s. I can't remember which film it was, but I remember the shot was like a race car going across the desert and then it cut to a POV on the front, and all of a sudden the camera went off a cliff and you were flying, and the camera like tilted down. I remember the feeling of like losing your stomach while sitting in a movie theater, and that was probably one of my first IMAX experiences, and one that certainly made a huge impression.

It's funny you say a racing car, because I think that's what you're doing next. Maybe that's been with you since you were a kid.

KOSINSKI: Yes, and finally get to fulfill yet another childhood dream.

A lot of people are going to have choices on where to see Top Gun: Maverick. There's a lot of different theaters that are showing it. What did you do to make Top Gun: Maverick such like an IMAX experience?

KOSINSKI: We have almost an hour of the film is in full IMAX format, which is mostly the flying scenes, you'll get to experience in an IMAX filling aspect ratio. So, that's going to be something you can only get in an IMAX theater.

I believe that it's an extra 26% of the screen fills in. Could you sort of talk about that?

KOSINSKI: Yeah. Most of the film is at a 2:39 to one aspect ratio, the wide screen aspect ratio, which is, I think is great for the drama on the ground. It keeps those dramatic scenes intimate. But when we go into the air, yes, you get 26% more. The black bars on the top and bottom of the frame disappear, and you get a kind of vision-filling image that will really capture the experience of being in one of these airplanes.

I believe you used the Sony Venice IMAX cameras. Can you talk about why you used those cameras?

KOSINSKI: Well, the Sony Venice is a large format camera, so it has a larger sensor than a 35-millimeter film camera. It allows them to pack more pixels into it. So, it's a 6K sensor and I found the Sony cameras, I've shot every film with Claudio (Miranda), we've always used the Sony camera, going back to Tron: Legacy. I just find that the way it reproduces color is very natural, and it's just worked for our style. This is the latest iteration and it comes in a model called the Rialto, that allows it to go to a very small form factor, so that we could fit six of them in the cockpit of the F-18 with the actors. So, what you're seeing on screen was captured for real, and the result is, you're going to not only get the sense of speed and light and sky and movement that you get from being in an airplane, but you're going to actually see the forces on their bodies as they pull G’s flying in these amazing machines.

You mentioned you have six cameras, and an F-18 cockpit is not very large. Talk about the camera and how you can actually put it in the cockpit?

KOSINSKI: Well, it, the camera allows you to separate the recorder from the lens. So, by separating it, the lens is small enough that we figured out a way to mount six of them in the cockpit and hide the recorders down in the cockpit, where typically they have other equipment. So, we had the Navy strip out all the equipment they didn't need to fly the plane and we stuffed camera gear in those places. If you look really closely, while you watch the movie, you'll see little camera wires running along the edge of the cockpit, which we just left in there, because we just thought it was cool to see the gear that we used to shoot the film.

RELATED: Miles Teller on ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ and Tom Cruise’s Work Ethic

What's funny is, most people who are going to watch it are just going to think that's part of the plane.

KOSINSKI: Yeah. Yep, exactly. So, that's why it didn't bother me, but it's proof that we did shoot it for real.

You mentioned that the dramatic scenes you wanted to be in the normal screen. Did you ever think about shooting the entire movie in IMAX?

KOSINSKI: Well, we do capture the whole film full-frame, so we have that ability to open the whole film if we wanted to, but that extra head space for those dramatic scenes to me, didn't help. It was good to kind of keep it more intimate and then open up the film for the aerial sequences. So, that's the choice we made.

So, you're saying that when you're shooting the movie in IMAX like this, it doesn't change what you're doing on set at all? It's just a question of what you're doing in the editing room?

KOSINSKI: Yeah. It's when do you want to open up and use the full frame, and when do you want to be at the more classic 2:39 aspect ratio?

The flying sequences in your movie are so incredible and I've never seen anything like it. Do you think that this film could have been made a year before you shot it?

KOSINSKI: Well, before the Rialto, I don't think we would've been able to fit six cameras. It probably would've been one or two. So, the amount of coverage would've been less. We wouldn't have had as much variety and as much choice in the edit to show different angles. It would've been harder, and I don't think would've been as good as what we were able to do with that camera.

How did you actually work directing the actors when they're in the cockpits with all these cameras around them. Was it one of these things where you're directing them before they go up, giving them instructions, and then looking at the footage when they get back down? Or how did that work?

KOSINSKI: Yeah. It's more like a play, where you're doing a lot of rehearsal and then when the performer goes up, they're performing on their own. So, we would do every flight day, we would've a two-hour brief with all the pilots, all the actors, me, Tom, Claudio, Eddie, our editor, and we would go through every single shot of the day in this long, tedious briefing process. Then I would go down into the hangar with the actor and the aviator who were going to fly, and we had a mockup of the F-18 cockpit built out of wood. That was an exact mockup, with all the gauges and had the switch for the cameras and had little mockups of where the cameras were. We would sit there and rehearse for about an hour, everything they needed to do on their flight.

Once we had that committed to muscle memory, then we would send them up in the jet. They would shoot for an hour. They'd come back. We'd load the footage in. We'd all watch it together, and we'd cheer them when they did something right. We'd give them notes when they did something wrong, and then we'd send them up in the afternoon, and do it again. So, it was a very tedious process that, over a 14- hour workday, you might just get a minute or two of usable footage, but what you did get was something you couldn't get any other way.

What is it like mastering a movie in IMAX? Can you sort of compare what is it like mastering Spiderhead to say, Top Gun: Maverick?

KOSINSKI: Yeah. Well, Top Gun is something that you will go to that theater I was talking about in Playa Del Rey, and you'll put the picture up on the 90-foot screen, and you'll make adjustments to the, potentially the color, the brightness, the grain structure, things that you need to pay attention to when you're looking at something that large. Spiderhead, I mastered that on a more traditionally sized movie screen, because that's the largest it will be seen. So, it is slightly different. But in terms of my approach to making it, I don't frame for a streaming title versus an IMAX title. I think my style is just kind of to try to tell the story with the best shots I can come up with.

What is it like after spending years making a movie, sitting in the IMAX theater, mastering the film? Do you ever second guess do I want this a little darker? Do I want this a little brighter? How much are you in your head when you're mastering a movie?

KOSINSKI: Very much. You end up doing a pass through the film, and then going away for a couple days and coming back and doing it again, because you definitely always have those voices in your head as you think about things, and always tweaking up to the last minute. That's just the nature of filmmaking.

What people don't realize, it's the director acting as a painter. You're literally painting the movie.

KOSINSKI: Yeah. You can affect it a lot in the grade. I mean, hopefully at that point, you've got a pretty good sense of what it is you're going for, even if it's a rough version in the Avid, but I like to do it with Claudio next to me, since he's the cinematographer, and we shot it together. It's fun. It's really, for me, it's a fun part of the process.

If you could ask IMAX to design a new camera or cameras to help you as a filmmaker, when you're filming a movie, what would that request be?

KOSINSKI: Smaller is always better, especially for a movie like this, for the movie I'm prepping now, which is dealing with very fast cars on a racetrack. Trying to get cameras in interesting places give the audience perspectives they've never had before. Smaller, lighter is always a good thing.

Is the 6K chip that's in the Venice camera...do you need a chip that's better quality, or is it literally just about shrinking the camera with the current chip that you're using?

KOSINSKI: I think the quality is there. The projection format now is 4K, so we're already have more resolution than we need, which is good in case you want to blow into something a little bit, you want to have that extra resolution. But it's just about getting the, if you can get it down to just a sensor and a lens, that would be ideal, because you could put it anywhere.

As you know, I love the IMAX format, and then think it's the way to watch movies. Do you see yourself in the future, with the movie you're working on now and things down the road, do you think IMAX will always be a component that you would like to collaborate with?

KOSINSKI: Absolutely. The great thing about an IMAX theater is when you walk into it, you know the picture's going to be bright enough. The sound is not going to be turned down at all. It's going to be loud. The quality of the experience is maintained across all their theaters, so you're not going to get a bad experience. You're going to get a reference quality experience, and that's what I think every director wants, is the audience to see what he or she set up during the finishing process, and that they're going to see the same thing you did.

On that note, I'm just going to say congrats on making such an incredible movie, and I really do hope everyone chooses to see it in IMAX. Because it's a spectacular experience.

KOSINSKI: Thanks man. I appreciate it.

Top Gun: Maerick is now playing in theaters.