TOP GUN: MAVERICK

Director Joseph Kosinski on feeling the need… the need to push the envelope

Under normal circumstances, Top Gun: Maverick would be just about ready for release. Now it’s a Christmas movie.

I think everyone working on the movie was looking forward to a summer release, because it really felt like a summer movie. The first Top Gun was May of ’86. But at the same time, we feel this is a movie that needs to be seen on the big screen. So hopefully, by Christmas, everything will be back to normal.

The first movie is a competition movie and it’s a sports movie. Is that the same here?

Top Gun

Yeah, it is. is a competition movie. It’s about friendship and sacrifice and family, and all of those themes play into Top Gun: Maverick. But we were able to take it to the next level. It’s a competition movie but, at the same time, a massive, massive action movie. The amount of flying in this film, even today as we’re putting the movie together, I’m going, “Did we do too much?” It’s a lot. We mounted cameras inside the cockpit with the actors and on the outside of the planes. We were able to do a tremendous amount of stuff, and live up to the very high bar that Tony Scott set with the first Top Gun. It was fun for me to do a little bit of a Tony Scott thing on this movie.

But it also looks like a very modern Top Gun movie.

It should feel like a Top Gun movie. It should look like a Top Gun movie. But at the same time it’s 34 years later. And our goal was to use all this modern technology — these cameras that we put in the planes had just been developed.

The movie’s named after Maverick. What can we expect from him now he’s in his fifties?

In so many ways he’s still the guy that we remember from the first Top Gun. He keeps that

old Ninja under a tarp in the hangar and still wears those Ray-ban aviators. He’s the best at what he does, and he’s given his whole life to aviation. But that has come at a personal cost, and Maverick has to confront some things from his past and reconcile with them. It’s a rite-ofpassage story, much like the first film was. But this is a man now at a different stage of his life.

What can we expect in terms of the aerial sequences?

You’re really going to get a sense of what it’s like to be inside a jet and feel what I think the first movie was not able to do, which is the intense physicality of flying a fighter jet moving at these speeds. And because we shot it for real, there are things you just can’t do on a gimbal with any amount of special effects. It’s an authentic, visceral, intense experience.

Should people expect to pass out? Should they bring a sick bag?

I don’t think it’s gonna make people sick, but I think it’ll give them an adrenaline rush. If you love aviation, you’re gonna love this movie.