Kentish Express Ashford & District - What's On
GUNNING FOR TOP STUNTS
When I was a little boy, Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em went through a brief resurgence. The TV show about hapless Frank Spencer and his disastrous attempts to get a job/move house/look after his daughter/do woodwork etc... was originally broadcast between 1973 and 1978, but had a boost in popularity in the mid-1980s (at least in my school) when it was repeated by the BBC.
No conversation about Some Mothers was complete without someone chiming in with: “My dad says Frank Spencer does all his own stunts.”
Frank Spencer was played by Michael Crawford, and the kids in school (and their dads) were right: Crawford did do his own stunts.
Whether it was dangling from a building, driving a motorbike across scaffolding or rollerskating through a plate-glass window, the star of the show did his own dirty work.
Even watching it now, it’s pretty impressive. Nobody does that kind of thing any more. Well, almost nobody.
Mission: Impossible Fallout was released earlier this year but filming in 2017 was delayed by more than two months when the film’s star, Tom Cruise, broke his ankle performing a stunt. There was quite a cool moment in the final version of the film when Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt leaps between two buildings and you see him land awkwardly. Hunt gets up and hobbles away, and then the camera cuts and he’s busy sprinting away as usual. But it was actually the real moment that Cruise landed badly, broke his ankle, then hobbled away.
It was a clever move by the director and editors. For those of us who knew that Cruise broke his ankle, it was obvious when you saw it, and it was interesting to see. For people who didn’t know, it just looked like the character had stumbled and regained himself. The film is incredibly tense in places, because we know it’s really Cruise doing that mad stuff himself. The camera doesn’t need to obscure Ethan Hunt’s face when he’s racing through traffic because he momentarily looks like a stuntman and not Tom Cruise, because it genuinely is Tom Cruise. And it’s terrifying to watch.
What I’m saying is, Tom Cruise is our Frank Spencer.
No matter the danger, Cruise does the job himself. And it doesn’t seem like there’s a limit. As you know, a sequel to Top Gun is being made. The original film was known for its use of real fighter planes in the flight sequences. The sequel wants to do the same thing. Tom Cruise is in the sequel... do you see where I’m going here? Apparently, production on the sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, is going on hold so that Cruise can learn how to actually fly the planes.
It’s just a rumour right now, and it sounds bonkers, but we’re in a world where it could be true. Isn’t that insane?
The original Top Gun was able to get the actors like Cruise and Val Kilmer into the air to film scenes on board actual fighter jets, but in those scenes somebody else was actually piloting the plane; the actors just pretended to be doing so - like they should be. Tom Cruise previously said that one of his requirements for making a new Top Gun would be that he got to get up in the air and fly again.
I assumed he meant that the same shooting methods would be used again, but maybe that’s not the case at all.
It’s not within the realms of possibility that Cruise is going to do all the flying in the film. That would clearly take too long and be way too dangerous. The shots of the planes dogfighting and doing ridiculous acrobatics will 100% handled by professionals, but there’s a real chance that some of the shots of Cruise/maverick in the cockpit will show him actually flying the plane.
If the story is true, it’s not clear whether this pause in production will be significant enough to delay the release date, which has already shifted from July 2019 to June 2020.
I don’t know how long it takes to teach an actor how to fly a fighter jet, but it’s probably not a weekend course.
Top Gun: Maverick will see the titular pilot as an instructor at the Top Gun school where he becomes mentor to the son of his dead friend Goose, played by Miles Teller. Jennifer Connelly and Jon Hamm are also on board to co-star in new roles.
I want this rumour to be true so much.
The flight sequences in the original Top Gun were so exhilarating because it was all real, and models and CGI wouldn’t have looked right. Seeing pilots doing these things for real is the key, and if one of those pilots is one of the biggest movie stars in the world, then it’s even better.