Songs from the heart
TOM CRUISE AND THE CAST OF TOP GUN: MAVERICK TELL KERRI-ANN ROPER WHY FILMING IN REAL JETS WAS ESSENTIAL TO THE SEQUEL GOING AHEAD
LAST Thursday, it was really lovely to chat to Stylusboy, Coventry singer-songwriter, Steve Jones, on BBC CWR. He has a gift of being able to create indie folk music steeped in warm-hearted melodies and heartfelt lyrics.
I hadn’t spoken to Steve in nearly three years, so we were due a catch up, plus I wanted to talk to him about being a Coventry City of Culture Community Connector and his work on a songwriting project with Good Neighbours.
Good Neighbours was founded in 2016 to provide support for older people who are feeling lonely or isolated. Working in conjunction with local churches, they connect volunteer befrienders with a spare half an hour to telephone or visit an older person.
Steve has been visiting some wonderful people to hear their life stories and then used this inspiration to create a collection of brand new original songs.
It’s been a huge privilege for Steve to visit some amazing older folks and write songs to celebrate their lives. They have told him some incredible stories and shared beautiful memories, such as visiting the Queen at Buckingham Palace, singing songs during lunchtimes whilst working on war planes, and growing up in Jamaica.
Steve also spoke to an amazing man who was shot down during WWII, parachuted to safety and then walked along an old railway line for 14 days avoiding capture. A true hero, who Steve was truly honoured to write a song about.
Steve will be sharing the songs he has written at an intimate live performance on Monday, at The Welcome Centre in Coventry. Each of the people that the songs are about, Steve has invited along to an afternoon tea, together with their families and volunteers, where they can hear the songs and enjoy each other’s company.
During the evening there will be a public performance of the songs, with all the money from the ticket sales going directly to Good Neighbours, to help support the work they do.
Steve is also planning to record and release all the songs later this year through his own label, Tortoise Recordings.
WHEN your journey to work involves one of Hollywood’s biggest stars personally flying you back and forth, you could say that’s a good day at the office.
It’s something Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski got to experience.
The American filmmaker, 48, whose credits include Oblivion, Tron: Legacy, Only The Brave and more, got ferried on occasion by the star of his latest project, none other than Tom Cruise.
Arguably one of the most anticipated sequels ever to hit the silver screen, Top Gun: Maverick sees the A-lister reprise his role as hotshot navy pilot Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, a character made famous in the 1986 film directed by the late Tony Scott.
The sequel brings us a Maverick who finds himself training the latest crop of Top Gun pilots for a dangerous mission, among them the son of his late friend Nick Bradshaw, known to film fans as Goose. Enter Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw, played by Miles Teller, whose call sign Rooster pays homage to his late father.
“We want it to be an emotional experience,” says Joseph.
“It’s a character-driven story, and Maverick is in a very different place at the end of this film than you find him at the beginning, which was the journey we wanted.
“Casting is so important on a film like this, and I’m really pleased with our cast, and so proud of them for what they managed to accomplish, and their camaraderie.
“And when you see them do what they do on screen, I think it is really, really special.”
He’s referring of course to a starstudded cast that includes Mad Men’s Jon Hamm, Ed Harris, Charles Parnell, Jennifer Connelly and returning Top Gun favourite Val Kilmer in his role as Maverick’s old nemesis-turned-friend, Iceman.
For the sequel, the cast underwent months of intensive flight training, meaning the footage you see of them in F/A-18 aircrafts is indeed real and not CGI.
“I never got in an F-18,” says Joseph when asked if he did any fancy flying.
“The closest I came was Tom (Cruise) would fly me back and forth to work sometimes,” he says.
For Tom, the key to making the sequel was in the filming – and flying – practicalities.
He says: “I’d thought about a sequel to Top Gun for all these years. People had asked for a sequel for decades. Decades. And the thing I said to the studio from the beginning was: ‘If I’m ever going to entertain this, we’re shooting everything practically.
“I’m in that F/A-18, period. So, we’re going to have to develop camera rigs.
“There’s going to be wind tunnels and engineering. It’s going to take a long, long time for me to figure it out.’ And I wanted to work with Jerry (Bruckheimer, one of the movie’s producers). I wouldn’t do this movie without him in a million years.
“For years, people had said, ‘Can’t you shoot (the movie) with CGI?’ And I always said, ‘No. That’s not the experience.’
“I said, ‘I need to find the right story. And we’re going to need the right team.
I felt like I wanted to puke pretty much every time Miles Teller on riding in an F18
“This movie is like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet. I’m not playing.”’
It was an “incredible experience” coming back to the character, the 59-year-old star of films like Mission: Impossible, Vanilla Sky, Jerry Maguire and more says.
“Maverick is still Maverick. He still wants to fly Mach 2 with his hair on fire. But you see the transition that Maverick undergoes.
“The pressure of him losing his best friend, the responsibility he feels about that and how he has carried that with him – and how that incident has changed both his and Rooster’s lives forever”, Tom says.
“Maverick loves Rooster as a son. This film is about family and it’s about friendship and it’s about sacrifice. It’s about redemption and the cost of mistakes.”
For American actor Miles, 35, whose big-screen roster includes Fantastic Four, War Dogs and Whiplash, filming the adrenalin-fuelled flying scenes was “intense”.
He says: “We trained for this for a long time, Tom had us in a flight programme for several months before we ever started filming.
“But it was never something you really ever got, like, super comfortable with, at least for me. It was something that every time I went up, it really tested me and I felt like I wanted to puke pretty much every time .... ”
Miles’s upcoming projects include starring in the new Paramount+ series The Offer, which charts Al Ruddy’s journey to making the now iconic film, The Godfather.
He says of working with Tom: “I just learned that there’s always something else to be done, that it’s really never finished until the movie is coming out. His attention to detail is something that’s unparalleled.
“And this career that he has in these movies, they don’t happen by accident.
“It comes from an immense amount of work and effort and also love. I mean, Tom loves making movies, he really loves entertaining audiences and it shows.”
For Joseph, the timing is also right for the movie’s release, after several delays due to the coronavirus pandemic.
He explains: “I was a little concerned, waiting for two years, wondering... would the film feel stale, but it’s the opposite.
“It somehow feels more relevant post-pandemic because of the kind of movie we made and what we want to do.
“I’m just excited that theatres are opening up and people are going back to the movies. And I hope they appreciate how we made this film and what we did here.”
Given the rave reviews from critics so far, it’s clear audiences haven’t lost that loving feeling when it comes to Maverick.
Top Gun: Maverick is in UK cinemas now