This story is about “Top Gun: Maverick” first appeared in the Race Begins issue of ’s awards magazine.
One film dominates the discussion when it comes movies released in 2022. It holds the cultural zeitgeist by grabbing the culture zeitgeist with passion, tenacity, and enthusiasm. This film is, naturally. “Top Gun: Maverick.”It seems like it was always going to be a smash hit and a commercial and critical darling, not just for its technical merits but also for its artistic achievements. But it wasn’t always so clear.
This movie is actually a sequel of a Tom Cruise vehicle that was released 36 years ago. The release date for this film has changed due to the ongoing pandemic. It became the No.1 movie when it was released in May. It was the No. 1 movie in the nation when it opened in May. This was not surprising. What was less expected was the fact that it would stay in the Top 10 for 20 more weeks and become the fifth-highest-grossing domestic release of all time.
It might seem exaggerated, but it is true “Top Gun: Maverick” saved the act of going to a theater, that’s also not far off. It was promoted as a moviegoing experience. This was especially true if it turned to large-format screens, or ScreenX (wherein the theater’s interior walls featured new footage, creating an immersive image). People saw the movie multiple times and dragged friends and family members who hadn’t seen it. It was truly a phenomenon.
Joseph Kosinski was a director whose elegant compositions and insistence to capture much of the aerial footage in real gave the movie its artistic and emotional weight, but he has not had much time for the glory. (He’s readying a new movie with Brad Pitt for Apple.) “It’s been interesting because people come up to me, not just to tell me that they saw the movie, but to brag about how many times they saw the movie,”Kosinski stated. On a flight from Paris last week, he got a handwritten note from the plane’s pilot telling him that he “wasn’t going to do anything crazy like in the movie.” “That’s interesting to get a handwritten note from the pilot halfway across the Atlantic,”Kosinski spoke.
The director asked a flight attendant who was on a different flight to tell him that her son requested her to take him to the movie 12 times. “That’s the highest I’ve heard,”Kosinski agreed. It’s fitting that all of these encounters took part in the air.
As to whether “Top Gun: Maverick”Kosinski singlehandedly saved movie theatres. “I think that’s overstating it,”He stated. “I think there were a lot of big movies this year, and hopefully next year the output will increase even more so that theaters can continue theirrecovery from basically beingshut down for two years.”
Kosinski struggled to name the biggest challenge in making this film. “Maverick,”This was a difficult shoot, with many actors acting as directors, cinematographers, and scene partners in this flight. “It’s hard to pick just one thing,”Kosinski spoke. “On any film, the hardest thing is getting the script and telling the story you want to tell and making sure the scenes are doing that, doing the job of propelling the story forward, but also emotionally investing you in the characters.”
However, aerial sequences still won the prize. “They were just a marathon of planning, more than a year of prep and planning how to get these cameras inside and on the outsides of the airplanes, working closely with the Navy to choreograph all of the sequences. I think I did 3,500 storyboards for this film. The amount of planning was massive.”
He described one sequence that was so difficult it was almost impossible to believe. This sequence was when Penny (Jennifer Connelly), took Maverick on her boat. “That sequence was in some ways the hardest to get because it was largely out of our control,”Kosinski spoke. “We’re relying on wind to make the sequence great, and we had to go find wind.”He claimed that they had shot the movie three times in order for the final version.
“I think the audience feels that effort when they see the film,”Kosinski spoke. “That’s why I think people respond to it, because it wasn’t shot on stage. It was a movie where we went out there and tried to capture as much as we could for real. And you can feel that when you’re watching it.”
You can read more in the Race Begins issue.
