I was just sitting and watching the monitor because Tom,
he's just so good.
And it's amazing how much he can
kind of summarize and he can take all everything an audience is feeling.
And he can he can answer it in a look.
You know, I saw Top Gun when I was 12 years old on the big screen.
I remember my impression of it and
you know, as I started working on the film,
I definitely got a sense of what it meant to people
because they were coming up to me and asking me questions about it
and asking me if there's going to be a volleyball scene.
And so you start to feel the pressure of the expectations.
I mean, yeah, it feels it feels good.
It feels Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!
Yeah. Yeah, it feels good. Yeah, yeah.
And people have kind of been, been asking me about that.
And I if anything, I'm just really excited for the fan base.
36 years later, we're here.
I definitely felt that and felt
beholden to the fans and, and to Tom
and Jerry and, you know, people involved in making the original movie.
As soon as I got cast, then I was very, very aware that they've been waiting
you know, there is there as passion as Marvel fans
or any fans in the world about about this movie.
And I'm just really excited for them to see it
because I know we worked really hard and based on the first reactions,
it seems like we you know, we did a pretty good job.
A) to be able to be here with these guys and do it to get to work
with Tom, to get to fly an F-18, to bring this movie back
and be a part of it, you know, all these years later is,
you know, to to Tarzan's point is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!
And what makes it even better
We all get to be here together and ping pong off each other.
So it's amazing.
Yeah.
As daunting as it was for people like me who weren't in the first film.
I think it was probably even more so for Tom and Jerry Bruckheimer
and everybody else to revisit those very familiar things.
And yet they're so far away.
So I certainly haven't had the experience of
I don't think many people have working on something
that has this much time between the first chapter and the second.
But it somehow works.
It provides of a real sense
of nostalgia while also continuing to tell the story.
I didn't I never I mean, I've certainly
without, I think the juxtaposition of, you know, goose and then how I walk,
you know,
in the frame in this movie, I've never had people
tell me like, oh, you look like Anthony Edwards or you look like Meg Ryan.
But Tom, when I did the first hair
and makeup test with really the first camera test,
and I came out and I'd been growing the mustache
and we lightened my hair and I had the tan and I was in my flight suit.
He was like, oh, my God.
He's like, you look so much like Meg Ryan and Anthony's kid.
This is this is definitely going to work.
By the time we ended up acting in the F-18s, Tom built such a great program
that we weren't just Ping-Pong up in the air,
like bouncing off the walls, but rather
he gave us the confidence to be able to make choices in the air and start.
He just gave us freedom up there through the beginning.
But at the at the start, I was afraid of flying, so I was like,
I have to get over that fear before being able to even have confidence.
But by the end, we were all just of the static.
From the beginning, Tom and I said, We don't want to do the cover band.
Version of this film.
We got to tell, it is Maverick.
It is his story.
It's a new story.
There's gonna be a lot of new characters.
We're going to we're going to it's going to feel like a Top Gun movie,
but it's going to be shot with the latest technology.
We're going to raise the bar in a lot of different ways.
It really our camera department and you know, Claudio Miranda,
who was our cinematographer, being able to get these cameras in the cockpit
and to be able to capture footage
in that environment, but also that space,
and for those shots to be able to also be used in IMAX.
I mean, really, they invented these these cameras to be able to do it.
And the Navy didn't think that we'd be able
to get one camera in there and we got six cameras in there.
It's wild. It's wild.
And Tom is so good at that.
And like working on developing that kind of technology to be able to
capture extraordinary stunts and action sequences.
So I don't think anyone does it any better than him.
Mostly it's just being around his energy and his enthusiasm for
not just not just this film
but the the general process of making movies is really infectious.
I really enjoyed the process of watching the way Tom works and
you know, the way he
how smart he is about story and how much he works
to kind of find and refine, find and refine the story as we go.
So it's very much a kind of, you know, work in progress and living thing.
You know, the story.
It's a real thrill to get to work with Tom Cruise,
especially on a franchise that so clearly means so much to him in his career.
And, you know, essentially the start of his career,
you know, made him a global box office megastar.
He does what he does very well.
Every single day.
We'd be sitting there and you just like look out and there's like eight F-18s
just there and Jon Hamm is there and Ed Harris and Tom Cruise,
you know, what is this crazy thing of like everything?
And then you turn around and Jerry Bruckheimer is standing behind the camera
with you talking about something in Claudio's, like tweaking a light.
And every single day
was this thing of like Oh, wait, we are really making this movie right now.
It was a dream team.
Yeah, it was a dream. Yeah.
Normal day of the office.
Normal day at the office! It the then became normal.
But then at that point, we were not operating on a normal rate.
We were then like we met them were there excellently,
which was what the exciting part was because you look back,
it was all incremental growth.
But I like the I like the bar.
It was a great they built that bar for the for the film.
It didn't exist and it was built on the beach.
And it was a great set.
It was so good that a lot of the people in San Diego that I spoke to were
campaigning to keep it there.
And so I thought I had that the set was great,
and I thought I it felt like I like the atmosphere of the place.
And I think it
you know, you felt like Penny as a character had created
this really warm community there.
There is a moment where we're. All.
On the carrier and there's a moment with with Maverick
that I was just sitting and watching
I was just sitting and watching the monitor because Tom,
he's just so good.
And it's amazing how much he can
kind of summarize and he can take all everything
in audiences feeling and he can he can answer it in a look.
The first day.
It kind of hit me because I was standing out on the runway.
We had the, the ninja there idling.
We had an F-18 Super Hornet on the runway ready to take off.
The sun was about to set car pulled up.
I was told, you know, someone wanted to see me.
I go over to the car, I get in the back seat
and there is Maverick for the first time just in his full gear.
And I think that's when it hit me that we're actually making this.
Like every department head was the best at what they do is unbelievable.
You know what it's like.
Have you ever watched any of those, like, ping pong tournaments?
And then you're like, how do they move that fast?
Like, how are they so good? And you're like, I could never do that.
It was that like, it. Wasn't by the air.
We're just like ten feet away from the table.
Just making fun of all these crazy Forrest Gump.
You folks
we all felt it making this movie, you know,
Tommy, Jerry, everyone on the cast and crew, you know,
we want to live up to the legend of that first film.
I thought it was a nice place to meet, an interesting place to meet Maverick
at this point in his life.
I thought that,
you know, I like Penny's character a lot.
Um, I think that the character
journeys are really, were really well structured, but.
It's, it's a, it's a really wonderful
balance between nostalgia and looking at the first one
and paying homage to the first one that Tony Scott did on the first film.
And continuing the story.
And I think what people are genuinely emotionally responding to in the movie
is that obviously the movie doesn't take place the day after the first one ended.
It's takes place 36, whatever, however many years afterwards.
And Maverick has grown up, Iceman Man has grown up, and we've
all grown up in the ensuing and the ensuing years.
And I think that that's where you get a lot of the
the real emotionality coming from the story.
Part of the I mean, that's part of the visceral experience that you're getting.
You know, with this movie.
And there's some there's theaters now that are like 40 x
where the chair is moving and it's, I don't think it's for cinephiles, but
I think for this movie it's I mean,
I think it should be pretty, pretty fun.
We're going to, we're going to, it's going to feel like a Top Gun movie,
but it's going to be shot with the latest technology we're going to raise the bar
in a lot of different ways.
And, you
know, it's meant to be seen on the big screen.
It's a real movie movie, you know, meant to be seen with an audience
packed screenings.
Good morning, Aviators.
This is your captain speaking funny.