This story about “Top Gun: Maverick” first appeared in the Race Begins issue of awards magazine TheWrap.
When it comes to movies released in 2022, one movie has dominated the conversation, grabbing the cultural spirit with fervor and tenacity. That movie, of course, is “Top Gun: Maverick.” Looking back, it seems that it was always destined to be a huge success and a critical and commercial darling, not only for its many technical merits but also for its artistic triumphs. But it was not always so clear.
After all, this is a sequel to a Tom Cruise vehicle from 36 years ago and whose release date was constantly changing due to the ongoing pandemic. When it was released in May, it became the number 1 film in the country. This was to be expected. What was least expected was the fact that it would stay in the Top 10 for 20 more weeks and become the fifth highest-grossing domestic release of all time.
While it may be hyperbolic to say that “Top Gun: Maverick” saved the act of going to the movies, that’s not far off either. As a cinematic experience, it was evangelized, particularly if the discussion revolved around large format screens or something like ScreenX (where the interior walls of the theater included new images, creating an immersive surround image). People watched the movie multiple times and dragged friends and family who hadn’t seen it. It was a real phenomenon.
Not that director Joseph Kosinski, whose elegant compositions and insistence on capturing much of the aerial footage for real gave the film its emotional as well as artistic weight, has had much time to enjoy success. (He is preparing a new movie with Brad Pitt for Apple). “It’s been interesting because people come up to me, not just to say they’ve seen the movie, but to brag about how many times they’ve seen it,” Kosinski said. . On a flight from Paris last week, he received a handwritten note from the plane’s pilot telling him that he was “not going to do anything crazy like in the movie.” “It’s interesting to get a handwritten note from the pilot halfway across the Atlantic,” Kosinski said.
When it comes to the most times anyone has seen the movie, a flight attendant on a different flight told the director that her son had asked her for a ride 12 times. “That’s the loudest I’ve ever heard,” Kosinski said. He feels it appropriate that all of these encounters have taken place on air.
As for whether “Top Gun: Maverick” single-handedly saved theaters, Kosinski demurred. “I think that’s overreacting,” he said. “I think there were a lot of big movies this year and hopefully next year production will ramp up even more so theaters can continue their recovery from basically being closed for two years.”
Kosinski was hard-pressed to describe the biggest challenge of making “Maverick,” a notoriously difficult shoot in which many of the actors acted as their own directors, cinematographers and scene partners while on the jets. “It’s hard to pick just one thing,” Kosinski said. “In any movie, the hardest thing is getting the script and telling the story you want to tell and making sure the scenes do it, doing the job of driving the story forward, but also investing yourself emotionally in the characters.”
But the aerial sequences still took the cake. “It was just a planning marathon, over a year of preparation and planning how to place these cameras inside and outside the planes, working closely with the Navy to choreograph all the sequences. I think I did 3,500 storyboards for this movie. The amount of planning was enormous.”
He describes a sequence that was incredibly challenging, yet felt almost light compared to other grander action sequences: the moment Penny (Jennifer Connelly) takes Maverick on her boat. “That sequence was, in some ways, the hardest to come by because it was largely out of our control,” Kosinski said. “We depend on the wind to make the sequence great, and we had to look for it.” He said they filmed it three separate times to get the version that was on film.
“I think the audience feels that effort when they see the movie,” Kosinski said. “That’s why I think people respond, because it wasn’t filmed on set. It was a movie where we went out there and tried to capture as much as we could for real. And you can feel that when you’re watching it.”
Read more of the Race Begins issue here.
