Top Gun: Maverick film Director Joseph Kosinski enjoyed a privileged position with the U.S. Navy for several years while making the Academy Award-nominated action blockbuster sequel to 1986’s Top Gun. This means he “got to go to places that civilians don’t get to go to” and “got to see things that no civilian would get to see.”
For example, the film director recently recalled his VIP access benefits of going to China Lake, a naval air weapons station in the Mojave Desert, shooting in a top-secret aviation hangar, and collaborating with “the actual engineers who make the real secret aircraft” in making his film. For Kosinski, working with the U.S. Navy “was just a dream come true," according to a recent report from Deadline. What’s more, for Kosinski, being immersed in these actual settings with the Navy made for a realness that audiences can feel in the emotional quality of the movie. “I think you feel it when you see it, because you don’t feel like you’re in a Hollywood-designed setting.” In an interview back in December, Maverick producer Jerry Bruckheimer even mused that Maverick’s impact in the way it was filmed might influence studios to step away from using excessive CGI.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
However, Kosinski’s “quest for authenticity” also came with military rules, and in pre-production, it seems he managed to capture something that no civilian is meant to see. “I had my camera confiscated at one point. Wiped clean,” Kosinski said. “ I took some pictures and maybe captured something I wasn’t supposed to capture, and my camera was quickly returned to me without any photos on it.” So we can be sure that no top-secret images made it into one of the top-grossing films of 2022.
‘Stuff Has to Fall Away for the Good of the Film’
Paramount Pictures
The crew had to follow strict rules for filming on fighter jets, according to Top Gun: Maverick cinematographer Claudio Miranda. Wing-mounted cameras were prohibited to protect plane performance, and dorsal and bomb mounts were allowed, according to Miranda, “as a consolation prize.” Even more limiting for Miranda, planes using these camera mounts could only fly at 3Gs. In total, six navy officers were consulted on the project, reportedly secret within the Navy itself, to ensure the film was “professional and… accurate” from the beginning. “I’m a realist with movies, I want to go in there and see reality,” explained U.S. Navy Captain J. J. “Yank” Cummings in an interview on consulting for the movie. This recalls stories of how the U.S. Navy controlled conditions to create a positive image in the first Top Gun movie, eventually boosting recruitment sign-up following the film’s release.
Ultimately, Top Gun: Maverick amassed more than 800 hours of footage that we can presume achieved clearance with U.S. Navy protocols, which Kosinski then had to cut down to a final movie. According to the director, it comes down to the “story you’re telling.” “You end up throwing out stuff that you are sure, when you’re shooting it, will absolutely be in the movie,” he explained, but “stuff has to fall away for the good of the film.” Yet Kosinski certainly enjoyed the journey. “When you’re directing the film, you kind of get to become a ‘subject matter expert,’ which is the Navy term — the SME— on any subject you want. So, I got to live that dream of being in the Navy for a couple years.”
