‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Director Breaks Down Tedious, Intense Flight Scenes
Top Gun: Maverick has many jaw-dropping flight scenes in the movie. Part of that is because they were real, with real pilots pulling off many maneuvers. While it’s incredible to watch Tom Cruise pulling off wild stunts, it was challenging to figure out how to film these sequences. Director Joseph Kosinski breaks down the flight scenes in Top Gun: Maverick, calling them “very tedious.”
‘Top Gun: Maverick’ features amazing flight scenes
The original 1986 Top Gun already had awe-inspiring flight scenes. The aerial dogfights are intense, and the stunts the pilots execute are fantastic. Top Gun: Maverick built upon those fight scenes and upped it to 11. The main reason is that the crew managed to figure out a way to get the cameras into the planes themselves.
In an interview with Vulture, director Kosinski says the inspiration for crafting these scenes came from YouTube videos he watched from Navy Pilots who put GoPro cameras on their canopy to shoot their training. Kosinski says it was “better than any aerial sequence in any film because it was real.” However, he acknowledged that it would be complicated to put cameras into the planes to capture footage of the actors.
Joseph Kosinski explains how the cameras were used in the fighter jets
Kosinski explains to Vulture how the flight scenes were filmed in Top Gun: Maverick. The director shares that the cameras were fixed in the cockpit and would turn on and off depending on the angle they wanted to capture. He also had to rehearse with the actors to figure out which line they had to say at a specific time and at a certain angle.
“The cameras were fixed. It was six cameras in the cockpit, two facing forward over the Navy pilot, four facing backward at the actor,” Kosinski elaborates. “Different compositions, different lenses, all wired to one switch that turned them all on and off. Every morning, we’d start with a two-hour brief with all the actors, all the Navy pilots, myself, Tom, the DP Claudio Miranda, the editor Eddie Hamilton, and we’d go through every single storyboard, every single scene, every line of what we needed to achieve that day. Weather, safety, terrain, light placement. It was very tedious — it would bore you to tears. “
“Then I would take the pilot and the actor who was flying down to a mock-up of the F-18 cockpit with a mock-up of the dashboard, the switch, the camera, and everything,” Kosinski continues. “They’d sit in their positions, and I’d walk them through the day. ‘This line, you’re going to look to the right, you’re going to say, ‘Break right.’ That kind of stuff. It’s just, again, very tedious. We’d rehearse for an hour until it was muscle memory. They would go up, fly for an hour, do the footage, come back. We’d load the cards into a monitor; we’d all watch it together. Very high pressure for the actor. And every time they did something wrong, give them a note. When they did something right, we’d cheer for them. When they threw up, we’d cheer. It was a great team-building environment. And we’d send them up again in the afternoon. It felt like we did that for months until we had all the shots we needed.”
Did the actors train for the flight scenes?
Many of the Top Gun: Maverick actors prepared for the flight scenes by flying with trained Navy pilots and getting used to the forces being put on their bodies. Kosinski shares that they mainly did this because they needed everyone’s scenes to look real. He knew Cruise would be able to handle it, but he didn’t want Cruise’s scenes to look different than the others.
“It’s one thing to get Tom Cruise in a jet, but what about all these other actors?” Kosinski says. “If only Tom’s stuff were real, you’d feel the difference between Tom’s footage and Rooster’s footage or Phoenix’s footage. So getting all the pilots prepped to be able to do these sequences was a lot of work.”
Top Gun: Maverick is still in theaters.
