The production of Mission: Impossible - Fallout helped Tom Cruise prepare for filming of the high-flying stunts in Top Gun: Maverick. The actor reprises his role as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, the hot-shot pilot from the 1986 action-adventure film Top Gun. Mitchell is now set to train a new squadron of young fighter pilots for a special mission. This squad includes stars Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Greg Tarzan Davis, Monica Barbaro, and Miles Teller, the latter of whom plays Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw, the son of Nick "Goose" Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards), Maverick's wingman from the original film.
Although the original Top Gun film had the actors in fighter jets, the majority of the plane sequences were shot with the cast in a studio, seated in a cockpit mock-up to simulate the flying. This allowed the actors to perform to the best of their ability without having to actually be up in the sky. However, this method also sacrificed a level of realism that could only be achieved if the actors were in the air. Cruise and producer Jerry Bruckheimer aimed to change that for the sequel. Each actor was put through a Top Gun "boot camp" that gave the cast real flight training and shot their scenes inside the cockpits of real F/A-18 Superhornet fighter jets.
Cruise recently sat down with BBC Radio 1 and discussed how filming Mission: Impossible - Fallout prepared the actor for shooting aircraft scenes in Top Gun: Maverick. Cruise's latest entry into his long-running spy franchise featured an over-the-top helicopter stunt to cap off the film. The actor explained that his work on that stunt, and the technology developed for it, helped prepare him for the fighter scenes in the Top Gun sequel. Read what Cruise said below.
"You know, when I did the first one, I flew. I had no real warm up... The breadth of the film was more expansive, so how do I educate the studio, the filmmakers, the actors on what it is that I wanted to accomplish?"
"You can see in the American-made Fallout, I'm developing the technology. I'm thinking about it."
Mission: Impossible - Fallout featured two helicopters in a riveting action sequence as Cruise's IMF agent Ethan Hunt chased down Henry Cavill's August Walker above the mountains of the Kashmir. Cruise, who has a pilot's license, flew one of the helicopters during the sequence and was filmed using fixed cameras situated in the cockpit and on the chassis of the aircraft. Cruise evolved this technique to film the cast of Top Gun: Maverick while shooting within the cockpits of the F/A-18s. The actors were trained on how to handle g-forces and fly the aircraft, but also how to manipulate the professional film cameras that were rigged to fit inside of the jets, essentially becoming their own camera operators and cinematographers.
Cruise's penchant for realism in his films has pushed productions to create some of the most daring and authentic stunts on film. His Mission: Impossible franchise has had the actor hanging off the side of a plane during take-off, scaling the tallest building in the world, and famously breaking his ankle in a rooftop-to-rooftop leap. His knowledge of aircraft and dedication to realism has led to what critics have called Top Gun: Maverick one of the best sequels ever made.
Source: BBC Radio 1
