deja vu for me to come back and make this movie with an iconic actor
and just we had such a great time the first time but the difference the first time is we didn't
know we were making we had no clue we knew we were making a good movie but this movie took off all
around the world i mean tom tells stories where he's in in africa in the jungles and kids who walk
up to him say maverick maverick so this is all exciting stuff to come back and be maverick again
at a different phase in his life and actually be a teacher working with these young pilots
i mean to be working with tom cruise and jerry bruckheimer you know both whose films i grew up
watching is it's been an incredible honor uh i learned so much from both of them every day on
set uh couldn't ask for better partners on a film especially this one it's been it's been
amazing experience and and i feel very lucky it's a character piece it really is it it talks about
what uh individual in the military who's an aviator has to deal with in his life
the toll it takes on them the kind of excellence they have to have to deal with the physical the
mental strains and everything else that a pilot goes through you have to really take your head off
to these young men and women who actually climb in these planes and protect our country it was very
important to us that maverick still be in the navy and that the navy is really the only thing he's
ever known the navy is his family uh at the same time uh maverick has has been in the navy for 30
years and it would and it and at this point as ed harris points out in the film by now he should be
an admiral if not a senator and that really formed the backbone of the story for us
not only in terms of who maverick was as a character but what his relationship with iceman
was uh it answered the question of uh how would someone stay in the navy this long and remain
where where he is because what mattered most to maverick is that he always finds a way to fly
what that does at the beginning of our story is presents someone who is not just there
because he is a great pilot but through a certain amount of guile and ingenuity because the system
is constantly looking for ways to push maverick out to pasture and maverick constantly find ways
to avoid that the pilots in the film that was a that was a fascinating challenge we we
very much wanted to have a a a more developed group and a greater sense
of the pilots around him one of the things i said to tom in that early meeting
was that that the original top gun was not just about maverick it wasn't just about maverick and
goose it was about a culture it was about the culture of these pilots and the competition
that they all had with one another the spirit of competition that they all had with one another
and we wanted to bring some of that in but it also had to again be be its own story
and as a result all of the the pilots that were in this film uh seemed to be uh seemed to be more
richly drawn it seems to be a deeper uh a deeper bench of pilots but also a richer canvas
goose uh permeates just about every frame of this film um he's a character that everybody
loved from the first movie maverick especially and obviously his son bradley aka rooster
is a very important character in the film and it was a real challenge because again we
we didn't want to take audiences out of the movie and ask them to remember another film
so we had to reintroduce goose as a character we had to reintroduce him as a spirit in the story
and that uh that very much came through even down to the line talk to me goose uh
the decision of whether or not to use that line and uh and and whether to whether to
play with that is the reference of the film during the writing of the film also during
the shooting and in the editing of the film we were we found ourselves time and again
leaning towards recreating moments of the film leaning towards uh as opposed to creating new
ground and we found time and again that the more we let go of the original movie
and went in our own direction the film became much more true uh and and that there really was
uh the possibility to make something that stood alone it was very important to tom and i when we
when we would talk about top gun that you didn't have to see the original movie in order to enjoy
this one joke is in scare director what we went through to find the director to do this and joe
had worked with tom in the past and tom knew what an excellent director he was how he's
into the details he's he's a techno whiz with everything he's he's about character and story
and he's got this fantastic eye i've been wanting to work with joe for many years after i saw his
first movie how talented he is and you know tom picked up on that and really joe had the makings
of the idea that became the movie i mean he pitched the movie he saw in his head to tom
tom said that's what i want to do the second thing we had to do was get the cast trained to actually
be in a navy airplane so they had to go through the navy training course to be qualified to sit in
an f-18 be prepared to eject to deploy a parachute to swim in the ocean if they
happen to land in there so they had to go through all that training then tom created a training
program for them that took them from uh cessna's which is kind of a small propeller driven aircraft
into an aerobatic airplane called an extra 300 into an l-39 which is a small
jet aerobatic jet and then eventually getting them into f-18s because they need to have the
physical stamina to endure the intense forces on their body while doing some of these maneuvers
first of all we're capturing in a way that no film has ever done before we are working
with the greatest pilots in the world top gun pilots to actually fly these sequences for us
you know spent hours i've spent hours with these pilots going through the choreography of every
scene to make sure that it's technically accurate uh very exciting we're using tools
that no one's used before including a fighter jet that has a camera mounted on the nose of
it to shoot our air-to-air sequences we're using very high-tech tools but we're using
them in a kind of old-school way claudio is our cinematographer and and just to mount
those cameras the technology the things he had to figure out the right kind of cameras and work with
the various uh different camera companies to make sure he got the right ones and to make sure
they're working every time you go up there it's a it's a lot of money there better be working
he did a great job he's got a great vision a great eye he's a master cinematographer first thing we
had to do was develop a motion picture camera that could fit in the tight cockpit of an f-18 so my dp
and i claudio miranda worked closely with sony to develop a new camera system called the venice
which allows us to put very high quality motion picture cameras in fact six of them
inside the cockpit of the f-18 to capture all the action of the film so we have four cameras
uh on the actor themselves uh we have a wide angle a tight two over the shoulders
and then we have two cameras pointing forward capturing the forward view so uh we have six
imax quality cameras inside the cockpit with the actors while they run the scenes besides the six
cameras in the cockpit we're doing air to air so where you have one jet filming the other jet
then we have ground to air so we have ground we have cameras on the ground filming these jets
that are coming terribly close to them on the ground and it's how close even in the air how
our camera ship gets close to these monstrous planes that are flying you know at 600 700
miles an hour so i think it's pretty exciting the thing that has me most excited about this movie
the thing of which i am most proud is it truly is the kind of movie they don't make anymore uh
it not just in its scope and its scale but in its emotion uh in the in its in its characters
uh in its storytelling uh it's it's a it's very much a modern film but it's also very much
steeped in classic storytelling that i that i just don't see anymore
it's amazing what what we see in the cockpit and what an audience is going to experience you're
going to experience what it's really like to be a pilot a fighter pilot a top gun pilot
it's so exciting for me to watch this and you see this aerial footage which is spectacular looking
and it's such speed it looks almost unreal and it's real it's the real thing you're going to
experience aviation in a way that you've never experienced it before you're going to be lower
faster more thrilling we're really working hard to provide the ultimate big screen experience
hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look at top gun maverick it's amazing how they were
able to use a lot of old school methods of filmmaking and bring it into the new school
with a new camera the sony venice which is not exactly an imax camera but it's a sony camera
with imax format it's a format of a resolution for the imac screen but it's really cool to see them
uh place it all throughout the cockpit and how they were able to put it all together
and make incredible scenes that we see in this film so let me know down in the comments down
below if you enjoyed this behind the scenes like subscribe and i'll see you here next time later