How They Made Top Gun: Maverick | Top Gear

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, meanwhile, had been in contact with director Joe Kosinski (Tron: Legacy, Oblivion). The pair flew to Paris while Tom Cruise was filming there, and Kosinski made his bid. “In a very smart kind of producing move, Jerry didn’t really say that Tom did not want to make the movie,” he tells me. “He’s resisted doing a sequel for years, but he let me have half an hour out of his day to make my pitch. And at the end of it he picked up the phone, called Paramount Pictures and said, ‘We’re making this movie’. It was a surreal meeting. It’s like the Superbowl. On the films I’ve made, there’s always a moment where you have to make the case to the star. This was one of those.”

There’s an emotional arc to the new film that Kosinski reckons got Cruise over the line, a depth to the character that gives it a surprisingly tender tone. But there’s also a whole new group of hotshots, in thrall to Cruise’s (clean-shaven) high-altitude Gandalf and plunged into a crazy high-stakes mission, and most of all there’s the ACTION. Cruise likes flying planes almost as much as he does hanging off the side of them, and the aerial combat sequences are astoundingly realistic.

“Maverick is still Maverick! He’s still the same guy,” Bruckheimer says. “He’s older and wiser – a bit wiser – but he still bucks the system. He’s brought back to train a bunch of pilots, but the movie is really about the love of aviation, the love of flying. That is a character as much as Maverick is. And that’s what this is about, getting Maverick back up in the air – getting Maverick back to doing what he does best. To do so he has to go back to Top Gun, to where he was all those years ago.”

And how. There’s no CGI going on here. Says Kosinski, “I showed Tom some YouTube videos of navy pilots with GoPros in the cockpits of their jets. I said, ‘If we can’t beat this then there’s no point making this movie'. There was also the challenge of what Maverick is doing 35 years later. I was kind of obsessed with the notion of him being a test pilot in the darker areas of naval research, like Chuck Yeager...”

Kosinski got to work, a gargantuan task lying ahead. As well as directing a team of young actors and some older hands – Ed Harris and Jon Hamm are both brilliantly irascible in it, and, yes, Val Kilmer reprises the role of Iceman – he had to figure out how to capture F/A-18 Super Hornets in excelsis. He and his team managed to fit six IMAX quality cameras into each cockpit.

Cruise also personally devised a three-month training regime for the actors. In the original film, he was the only one who could live with the intense g-forces, which meant that most of the scenes were shot on a giant gimbal rig. This time everyone did it for real, and trained until they could cope as their real life navy pilots put them through the wringer. That also meant getting to grips with the camera equipment and learning about the light, as well as remembering their dialogue. “We rehearsed it over and over until it became muscle memory,” Kosinski says. “Things would go wrong, maybe they’d forget to pull their visor down. We’d review the footage immediately, then in the afternoon go up and do it again. We shot more than 800 hours of footage. It was painstaking but it was the only way to get what we got. I think Tom did three flights one day...”

Greg ‘Tarzan’ Davis, who plays Coyote, remembers the drill well. “We weren’t acting, we were living it,” he tells me. “I’m not saying we’re going to be navy pilots but we experienced what they experience. We learned to look at the horizon when you’re pulling gs, how to breathe properly. We learned not to look out to the side, because we needed to keep facing the camera. Tom kept saying, ‘We need to see your face, this is the money maker...’

“And yes it got competitive. I’m not going to puke, I’m going to pull the most gs, you did an hour in the air so I’m going to do an hour and 15... I want to give a big shout out to Monica Barbaro (who plays Phoenix), she really held it down!”