After Top Gun hit the big screen in 1986 – golden sunsets, shirtless volleyball, synth-laden soundtrack and all – it took more than three decades for Tom Cruise to once again feel that particular need for speed. But after years of wheels spinning on a potential sequel, the Hollywood mega-star reunited with über-producer Jerry Bruckheimer and cooked up a new plan to bring back Maverick, and get back on the road – or rather the highway to the danger zone – for this summer’s Top Gun: Maverick, recruiting a new generation of fired-up fighter pilots and sticking them in the cockpit for more adrenaline-pumping aerial action.
In the new issue of Empire, Cruise and Bruckheimer talk exclusively about their journey back to Top Gun and rekindling their dynamite creative partnership for Maverick. “We just started talking,” Cruise says. “And I realised that there were things that we could accomplish cinematically. And I started getting excited about this big challenge of, ‘How do we do it?’ So I said to Jerry, ‘I’ll do it if…’ meaning, I’m not going to do the CGI stuff.”
As the film’s trailers have already shown, there’s an even greater physicality and heft to the flight sequences this time around – with the actors, including Cruise himself, taking to the skies for g-force-heavy action sequences. “What’s different about this movie is that [in Top Gun] we put the actors in the F-14s and we couldn’t use one frame of it, except some stuff on Tom, because they all threw up,” laughs Bruckheimer. “It’s hysterical to see their eyes roll back in their heads. So everything was done on a gimbal. But in this movie, Tom wanted to make sure the actors could actually be in the F-18s.”
Cruise made his intentions to pursue practical thrills clear to studio Paramount before the shoot kicked off in earnest. “I said to the studio, ‘You don’t know how hard this movie’s going to be. No-one’s ever done this before,’” the star laughs. “There’s never been an aerial sequence shot this way. I don’t know if there ever will be again, to be honest.”
Read Empire’s full exclusive story with Tom Cruise and Jerry Bruckheimer talking Top Gun: Maverick in Empire’s upcomingBlack Widowissue, coming to newsstands and available digitally via the Empire Magazine app from Thursday 19 March.