How Top Gun 2 Director Made Tom Cruise Excited to Play Maverick Again
Top Gun 2 director Joseph Kosinki explains what it took to get Tom Cruise excited for the Top Gun sequel. The original 1986 action film about a hot-shot Navy pilot with an insatiable need for speed made Paramount a lot of money (it grossed $357 million a budget of just $15 million) while making Cruise an international superstar.
Cruise would of course go on to do a lot of things in the years after Top Gun, including launch his own long-running secret agent action franchise with Mission: Impossible. But Cruise’s need for speed never left him and now he’s back in the pilot’s seat for Top Gun: Maverick. Unfortunately fans are having to wait a very long time to see Cruise back on the highway to the Danger Zone, as COVID delays have now pushed the movie all the way back to summer 2022. When Top Gun: Maverick does release, audiences will be treated to a thrilling big screen experience created using IMAX cameras affixed to real planes while the real actors pulled real G-forces. And in order to assure the actors could stand the strain of riding in real fighter jets, the ever-committed Cruise helped develop a stunt training program to prepare them for the experience.
Indeed Cruise is a man who never seems less-than-committed to the projects he takes on. But apparently there was a point where he was less-than-certain about playing Maverick again, and needed some coaxing from director Kosinski. Ultimately, Kosinski found the key to making Cruise interested in revisiting his iconic Top Gun character. And it wasn’t just the chance to strap himself into fighter jets and achieve an adrenaline rush. As Kosinski explained to Den of Geek, “cracking the right story was key to getting Tom on board.” And that “right story” centered on classic themes as well as a certain central Top Gun: Maverick character. Kosinski said:
“I wanted it to be a rite of passage story like the first film. Obviously, Maverick in that film was in his early twenties and now he’s in his fifties. It had to be a different journey, but it was important it was a journey for a man at a different part of his life. We think of Top Gun as an action film, but I think of it as a drama. It has some incredible action scenes in it, but there is a drama at the center of it.”
“For me, the way into that was through this story of Rooster [the son of Goose], who is played by Miles Teller. That was the thing that felt like the storyline that we would be able to sink our hooks into emotionally and the thing that would get Tom excited about getting into this character again.”
Fans of the original Top Gun well remember the tragic event at the center of that movie: the death of Maverick’s co-pilot and life wingman Goose (Anthony Edwards). Indeed, the film could’ve been just an action movie about some hot-shot pilots doing hot-shot things in the air had it not been for the Goose storyline, which propelled the movie into its third act, giving more emotional weight to Maverick’s ultimate redemption. In Maverick, Goose's son Rooster is now a Top Gun pilot himself, and no doubt there will be some friction between him and Maverick fueled by Maverick's history with Goose.
Surely Top Gun: Maverick features its own fair share of hot-shot moments (footage released at the recent CinemaCon event previewed some of those moments, including a sequence of Maverick setting a new speed record in an experimental plane and almost getting himself killed). But as Kosinski indicates, the intent is for the film to also have an emotional core via Teller’s Rooster and his connection back to the drama of the first movie. It remains to be seen if audiences respond as strongly to this Goose connection as Kosinski and Cruise hope. But if that storyline doesn’t pay off entirely, at least Top Gun 2 will have some amazing IMAX flying sequences.
Source: Den of Geek