Director Luca Guadagnino has explained why he thinks Top Gun: Maverick worked so well. Guadagnino is an Italian director mostly known for more arthouse-oriented cinema like 2017's Call Me By Your Name, the LGBTQ+ coming-of-age romance that starred Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer and was nominated for four Oscars, winning one for Best Adapted Screenplay. Since the success of Call Me By Your Name, he helmed the 2020 miniseries We Are Who We Are, but only one other film: the 2018 remake of Dario Argento's horror classic Suspiria, which starred Dakota Johnson as a young woman who discovers that her ballet school is run by witches, featuring frequent Guadagnino collaborator Tilda Swinton as multiple characters.
Top Gun: Maverick seemingly exists in a world entirely separate from what Guadagnino usually works on. The mega-blockbuster, which is the highest-grossing film of the year both domestically and worldwide, is a sequel to the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun, bringing back star Tom Cruise as the hotshot pilot Maverick. This time, Maverick finds himself in the role of mentor, helping train a new crop of pilots while they prepare for a massively important mission. The cast of the new film includes Jennifer Connelly, Lewis Pullman, Monica Barbaro, Miles Teller, Danny Ramirez, Manny Jacinto, Ed Harris, Glen Powell, Jay Ellis, Bashir Salahuddin, Jon Hamm, and Val Kilmer returning as Iceman.
Recently, Guadagnino sat down with Deadline for a feature discussing his upcoming cannibal film Bones & All, which reunited the director with Chalamet. During the conversation, the director discussed how repetition is a curse of Hollywood cinema, and that movies need something novel in order to make them artistically viable. He explained that this idea doesn't necessarily have to exist outside a franchise, citing Top Gun: Maverick as a film that is a "very smart, intelligent, and thoughtful way of doing business," because now that Maverick is a man rather than a boy, that adds a new spin on a property that is otherwise entirely nostalgia-fueled. Check out his full quote below:
Even Top Gun: Maverick, which is a movie that trades very deeply with nostalgia and repetition, comes with the novelty of happening 25 years later. The idea that a sequel comes after a quarter of a century is, in its way, a very smart, intelligent, and thoughtful way of doing business. Because now, even if the movie holds very deep nostalgia in the audience—the nostalgic gaze of Tony Scott and the idea of the world in the way it was in 1986—you are there for the ride of Tom Cruise’s Maverick being a man now, not a boy. So, I would say there are always ways to create something that is surprising and interesting.
Guadagnino's praise for Top Gun: Maverick is especially surprising in the current era of cinema. Typically, creators who work in the arthouse or prestige cinema space tend to look at the modern slate of blockbusters with a somewhat disdainful perspective. This has been crystallized by the frequently recurring discourse around GoodFellas director Martin Scorsese's dismissal of the MCU. Guadagnino's praise of the sequel certainly speaks to its reception overall, which has been positive across the board.
It makes perfect sense why Top Gun: Maverick would specifically appeal to Guadagnino. The director has already expressed interest in making a sequel to Call Me By Your Name, an unusual occurrence in the arthouse space, so he is hardly against franchising as long as there is an artistic spark behind the project. Hammer's recent controversies will likely prevent that film from coming to fruition, at least in its originally intended form, but that instinct is still clearly central to the director's approach.
Source: Deadline