The man who put the audience in the pilot’s seat

Real fighter jets, unprecedented aerial scenes, real G-forces: Cinematographer Claudio Miranda talks to Jen Yamato about what made Top Gun: Maverick so spectacular.

Before filming Top Gun: Maverick, with actors taking real G-forces in Boeing F/A18 Super Hornet fighter jets sporting Imaxgrade cameras, cinematographer Claudio Miranda pulled a Tom Cruise and climbed into the cockpit himself.

Running months of camera tests and experimenting with in-cabin rigs, the Oscarwinning Life of Pi director of photography was searching for the right combination of technology, precision and artistry to capture the visceral effects of high-intensity aerial flight on the body. He wanted to put the audience in the pilot’s seat like never before as Cruise’s Maverick took to the skies again.

So he strapped into an L-39 Albatros jet, the same aircraft Miles Teller, Glen Powell and their cast mates trained in to prepare their minds and bodies for the real thing. ‘‘I only went four Gs and that was enough for me,’’ said Miranda, smiling at the memory of his own flight missions.

In the films Miranda and director Joseph Kosinski have collaborated on to date (including Tron: Legacy, Oblivion, Only the Brave and the upcoming sci-fi thriller Spiderhead), they’ve used green screen and seamless VFX to fantastical effect. He watched how his own body reacted in the test film and learned some invaluable lessons.

‘‘Because we were doing experiments with cameras I was reading menus and I realised that’s a terrible idea – as you’re spinning, I’m in the plane trying to reset the camera,’’ he said. ‘‘Anyway, I didn’t feel very good after that.’’

The experimentation proved how filming actors practically in actual flight could create a sensory, visceral connection with the audience. He even got his pilot’s licence in the process.

Speaking over video chat from Australia, he went into how – and why – the Top Gun: Maverick team went to such great lengths to push the limits of action cinema. (Caution: Mild spoilers for Top Gun: Maverick follow.)

Miranda, Kosinski and star-producer Cruise worked closely with the Navy to develop the cinematographical approach to Maverick, shooting a test of Maverick’s rogue practice run after which he devised a months-long training programme to get his younger cast mates up to speed. A setup of six cameras each was installed in two F/A-18s flown by actual pilots.

Making precious space in the cockpit by removing unnecessary hardware, the film-makers installed 6k Sony Venice digital cinema cameras with lightweight lenses and the new Rialto system extending the camera’s sensor blocks, allowing for film to be shot over the actors’ shoulders and in towards the plane.

Cameras had to clear the ejection path, run on batteries so as not to tap into the plane’s power, and safely and securely withstand shocks, vibration and more than 7.5 Gs. Once Miranda made it through the exacting trial-and-error and approval process, he was good to go.

The result? The film-makers were able to capture not only character performances but the real effects of flight manoeuvres in their actors’ faces, a quality that Miranda believes makes a perceptible difference. For example, Miranda points to Cruise’s catapult launch from the deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

‘‘You see Tom taking off from the aircraft carrier and you see him do that drop. In most movies all they do is [jerk backwards] and then they take off. But when you see Tom, what’s exciting is that there’s another little drop when he leaves the deck.

‘‘For some reason when you see that, you go, ‘We’re really with him’,’’ he said. ‘‘I think that is what makes this movie really special.’’

In his own test flights, Miranda also played with how speeding vistas visible in the background during low-altitude runs – like the dangerous route Maverick trains his hotshot class of aces on, below the safety standard ‘‘hard deck’’ – enhanced a sense of cinematic excitement.

‘‘It was great to have foreground mountains and canyons, whatever made it feel exciting,’’ said Miranda. A wide-angle lens mounted on an inwardfacing camera was perfect for showing the ground on both sides of the jet, with Cruise centred.

‘‘Normally it’s not a flattering lens because if people get off to the side, they get stretched in a funny way. But since Tom stays mainly in the middle of it, it doesn’t hurt and looks kind of bad ass to see all this ground around him,’’ he said.

‘‘The great thing that you see on the F/A-18, the wings actually bend,’’ said Miranda. ‘‘They flap back and forth. You see those wings when they’re pulling the Gs and you see his face, and you see the wings bending in the other direction.’’

After extensive flight training and on-theground preparation, actors joined professional pilots to hit the skies for 90 minutes at a time, a few times a day – and had to hit their marks, check lighting and makeup, remember their eyelines and turn on the cameras themselves while airborne.

That meant that Miranda, who relied on the sun as his primary light source, prepped each day by studying flight paths and weather patterns to set camera exposures before liftoff. With no live film feed to track on the ground, it made for some nervous waiting periods for Miranda.

‘‘It got really nerve-racking because it’s really hard to predict,’’ he said. ‘‘I had to set one exposure basically, because we’re not auto exposing the cameras and they’re really specific.

‘‘So I’d have to look 50 miles [ahead] where they’re going and know the terrain, how deep they’re going to go, and then set the exposure and hope on the way over the weather doesn’t change.’’

From actors’ bodies conveying the strain of sustaining G-forces in the air to jet wings flapping realistically and beyond, the practical imperfections captured on film give the cinematography of Maverick its unique texture and power. ‘‘Sometimes you’d try to keep it in shot and the mess of what it is had more energy, so a lot of what we wanted was using long lens and trying to keep in the frame but not doing a good job. All that makes it much more exciting and real and human,’’ he said.

Miranda cited the visceral pre-CGI clunkiness of stop-motion animated AT-AT walkers of Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back.

‘‘Now everything is gazelle-like and [missing] human imperfection, which is what I think gives the energy to [Top Gun: Maverick], and I think that’s what people are responding to.’’

As such, the film-makers decided not to clean up one aspect of their aerial photography that keeneyed viewers might notice: the barely perceptible reflection of the cameras in some shots.

‘‘There was talk about, do we get rid of them? But that would have make it more synthetic,’’ he said. ‘‘We worked so hard to get it in camera that we left them in there a little intentionally, because we’re really capturing this.’’

‘‘Since Tom stays mainly in the middle of it, it doesn’t hurt and looks kind of bad ass to see all this ground around him.’’

Claudio Miranda