‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Stars Share How Tom Cruise Prepared Them For The Most Intense Flight Scenes Ever
etcanada.comFor Tom Cruise to make his return to the big screen as Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell — nearly four decades after the beloved original “Top Gun” made audiences feel the “need for speed” — “Top Gun: Maverick” had to be something the cinematic world had never seen before. “I wasn’t ready to make a sequel until we had a special story worthy of a sequel,” Cruise admits in a new featurette for “Top Gun: Maverick”, which Paramount shared on Monday. “And until technology evolved so we could delve deeper into the experience of a fighter pilot.” The technology is unprecedented.
The film’s crew worked with the Navy and the Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program, aka TOPGUN, to figure out how to practically shoot the cast inside actual F-18s.
Ultimately, director Joseph Kosinski filmed the high-flying scenes using a unique, high-tech setup that featured six IMAX-Certified cameras rigged in each cockpit to capture the aerial experience like never before.
The “Maverick” cast was put through their paces as well, with three months of flight and water survival training, plus hand-on lessons on how to “direct” themselves while sitting one-on-one with the camera set-up in the fighter jets’ cramped cockpit. “It’s definitely the most amazing thing I’ve ever done,” Insecure star Jay Ellis, who plays Lieutenant Reuben “Payback” Fitch in the film, raves in the clip. “All the training 100 percent prepared us.” “It still blows my mind that we’ve done this,” agrees Monica Barbaro, who plays Lieutenant Natasha “Phoenix” Trace. “There’s nothing like it.” Plus, there was Cruise’s personal “all-encompassing aviation training,” which took his co-stars through a gauntlet of aviation experience, from a single-engine airplane, to an L-39, to the
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