Hi, I'm Tony Scott, I'm the director of Top Gun,
My first movie was The Hunger, Top Gun was my second movie,
We made it in '85, and it was released in '86,
And I'd just come from doing The Hunger,
which is a very dark ride, a very dark, esoteric ride,
And when the guys first offered me Top Gun,
I couldn't quite see it,
It took me three rounds with Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer
to get a handle on what I wanted to do with it,
I wanted to make Apocalypse Now in an aircraft carrier,
They said, "No, no, no, Think again,"
So I kept thinking, I came back, and on the third go-round,
I said, "Okay, I got it,
"This is rock-and-roll stars flying silver jets against blue-black skies,"
It was a piece of rock and roll, this movie,
And there's a pure rock-and-roll,
hand-in-the-popcorn, should-be-fun ride,
and try and put the audience into the cockpit of one of these jets,
I was about to fly back to London
because I didn't think I was gonna be doing it,
And Jerry took me to a meeting with Ned Tanen,
who was then the head of Paramount Studios,
And I was going to Ned's house to actually pitch him my vision of Top Gun,
I'd never pitched to the head of a studio before,
And I completely dried, I couldn't actually say,,,
I couldn't even remember my name,
never mind remember the title of the movie,
So it was a rather embarrassing beginning,
This opening sequence here was,
as you see, all this stuff on the aircraft carrier was all,,,
I shot it in slow motion with graduated filters,
and it was sort of artsy and dark and, again, esoteric,
Paramount saw these dailies when I was out shooting on the aircraft carrier,
and they panicked and forbid me to shoot
another foot of slow-motion footage here,
So I was very deceptive,
I shot one roll of normal footage,
and then continued to shoot all the rest of it in slow motion,
because I had a vision about how this beginning should look,
Unfortunately, they sent the wrong rolls back,
and they sent the slow-motion rolls back,
So I was fired, yeah, My contract was terminated,
But we were stuck on the aircraft carrier
and couldn't get back because the weather sucked,
so I just kept shooting,
I was fired, actually, three times on Top Gun,
One was for shooting this opening sequence in slow motion,
because they thought I was trying to do an art-house movie,
And the second was with Kelly McGillis,
I made her look beautiful
in a sort of, what's the word, whorish way, I suppose,
And the studio took away my nine-inch pumps
and they took away my makeup lady
in an effort to actually get Kelly looking a little more down-to-earth,
but unfortunately, it didn't work,
We had to go back and reshoot those scenes,
So I got fired the second time for that,
And the third firing was when I pulled the visors down
on the helmets for all the guys flying in the jets,
I wanted to see the reflections of the sky
and everything that was going on around,
But, obviously, it obscured our lead actors a little bit,
So that was another piece of deception that went south,
I shot four rolls with the visors down, one roll with the visors up,
and they got the wrong rolls,
I think the camera department was out to try and sink me,
So that was the third time they fired me, anyhow,
Funny stories, but true stories,
But once they fired me, I really did think on the last time
that was it, I was out,
And the first time and the last time I thought, "God, it's over,"
But it lasted for 24 hours, then I was reinstated,
I'm Jerry Bruckheimer, I'm one of the producers of Top Gun,
Top Gun was an article that I found in,
I think it was called California magazine,
It was about these pilots in San Diego,
The problem the military had,
at least in the beginning of the Vietnam War,
where the ratio of enemy planes going down was not what they wanted,
It was 3-to-2 or 3-to-1, and that wasn't acceptable,
So they had to figure out why this was happening to their pilots,
Why weren't they excelling the way they thought they trained them?
What they found out is that they were overly trained in technology
rather than in actual aviation and dogfighting,
So they had to figure out a way to correct that,
So they created this school in San Diego, in Miramar,
called the Top Gun school,
where they invited one member of every squadron from their carriers,
and usually it was the best pilot, to come to the school,
and they were trained by the best pilots in the Navy,
And they took them through this course on how to dogfight,
And that pilot had to go back to his carrier group
and teach his other pilots, his comrades,
on the same kind of dogfighting techniques,
And it went from 3-to-2 or 3-to-1,
to, like, 8 or 9-to-1
once they implemented this program,
So it changed quite a bit and saved a lot of American lives,
I saw this visual and these great names of the characters,
because they all had these call signs, like Hollywood and Bozo and Radio,
and just all this wonderful stuff,
And there was this great photograph, if I remember correctly,
and it was a shot in the cockpit,
You saw this huge helmet
with a reflection of a jet in the helmet and two jets behind him,
and I said, "God, this is Star Wars on Earth,"
"This is something we should get involved in,"
And we were, Don and myself, who was my partner at the time,
were under contract to Paramount,
So we took it to Jeff Katzenberg
and said, "This is an article we want to buy,"
And he was excited about it, and he bought it,
At the time, there were two writers
that Jeffrey was using quite a bit to a lot of success,
and they were Cash and Epps, very expensive,
In those days, I think we paid them $300,000-$400,000,
which was a fortune, to write the screenplay,
It showed a real commitment on Jeffrey's part
and his belief in the movie,
And so they were the initial writers on the project,
Unfortunately, a television series had come out,
after they turned in the screenplay,
that was about the Air Force in the '50s or '60s,
and it died a miserable death,
So the powers that be at Paramount
felt that this project really wouldn't go anywhere
because the public has no interest in aviation,
Don and myself were vehemently opposed to that point of view,
And after, we were told by Paramount to put the script in turnaround,
even though it was a wonderful script,
which means Don and I couldn't travel with it,
because our deal at the time meant that we were stuck at Paramount,
exclusive to Paramount, couldn't go to another studio,
Once the movie was taken out of there, somebody else would produce it,
Don and I went and orchestrated a meeting with Eisner and Katzenberg
to plead our case, to keep the project at Paramount,
so we could produce it,
And Don was so convincing to Michael,
He actually got on his knees and begged him to keep the project
and let us have one more shot at it,
And Michael said, "Fine,
"If these guys are so passionate about making this movie,
"you gotta let them have another shot at it,"
But what happened,
after we saved the project at Paramount,
Michael and Jeffrey left and went to Disney,
So we had a whole new regime come in,
And Dawn Steel was the head of production,
and Ned Tanen came in as the president of the studio,
or chairman of Paramount,
And he asked us to have lunch with him and Dawn,
and he said, "I've looked at all the stuff we have here at Paramount,
"and the cupboard is bare, What are you guys working on?"
And we said, "We have this project we love,
"It's called Top Gun, It's about these aviators,"
And we told them the story that we developed,
And he said, "Great, What do you think it's gonna cost?"
I said, "I don't know, $14, $15 million,"
And he said, "Go make it," It was that simple,
Hi, I'm Jack Epps,
My partner Jim Cash and I wrote the screenplay of Top Gun,
One of the things that we really wanted to make sure
before we took the job
is that this movie would be shot at 28,000 feet,
It could not be shot in a sound studio, There was no digital effects at that time,
It had to be up in the sky,
It had to look like something we'd never seen before,
And it did, The imagery is fabulous,
So, Top Gun was really my first skirmish,
in terms of a true Hollywood movie,
because the other movie I had shot in London,
even though it was done for MGM,
It was a whole different experience for me,
because this was Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer,
They were at the beginning of their peak,
They'd just done Flashdance and Beverly Hills Cop I
and then Top Gun,
And these two guys, they had a vision,
They had a vision about bringing a new look to movies,
And Jerry was the one who was out there saying,
"I like what commercial directors are doing,
"rock video directors,"
That's why he gave Adrian Lyne his first crack at Flashdance,
He gave me my first crack at Top Gun,
And they were unique, in terms that they trusted that we had the ability
to tell a story, as well as create different images and different visuals
from what you normally got
from what they felt were more standard Hollywood movie directors,
And that's what the boys were looking for, the boys being Don and Jerry,
They were the only guys that had the courage,
after The Hunger, to re-employ me,
because the rest of Hollywood blacklisted me,
said, "God, this guy is dangerous,"
They were looking around for some guy
that they thought could actually shoot aerial footage,
And obviously, Top Gun, so much of it takes place in the air,
And Don said the last guy that they saw
that actually directed any real aerial movies was Howard Hawks,
And, yeah, so they saw The Hunger, which is my vampire movie,
and then they saw my commercial reel,
On my commercial reel,
I had a Viggen jet chasing or racing with a Saab car,
And I think that was the only bit of footage
they could find that was contemporary that involved jets,
So that's how I got in the running for Top Gun,
Even at that stage, my process was always to do a lot of research,
so I went down to the base at Miramar,
and we found a point man at Miramar,
who was Pete Pettigrew, who was an ex-Top Gun pilot,
And I spent time with the pilots and watched and observed
and listened to and drank with a very interesting group of guys,
Pete was our point man,
And I was actually able to sit in on Top Gun classes,
just to get a sense of what these guys were about,
And it was a fascinating process, yeah,
This is Captain Mike Galpin, My call sign is Flex,
And I flew the MiG-28s in the Top Gun movie,
My name is Pete Pettigrew, Viper's my call sign,
Rear Admiral, retired, and I was the technical advisor on the movie,
Vice Admiral Mike McCabe, call sign, Wizard,
I was the Executive Officer
as we began the scriptwriting and initial discussions about the movie,
Executive Officer of Top Gun, is that right?
That's correct,
That was so unrealistic that I was happy with this,
when they finally switched it around to where he actually just went around,
That lieutenant ordered that he be launched again,
That's right,
A lieutenant ordered the captain of the ship to launch him,
Now, this is not unrealistic, though,
If you had problems with the airplanes, particularly in the old days,
when you're paired up,
the other guy would lead you back to the ship and drop you off
and stay with you on the approach to the ship, as they're showing here,
This is not all that unrealistic,
He could have vertigo or something like that, where he couldn't,,,
Either that, or he just thinks his wife is really good-looking,
I'm not too sure, but there were times when you had vertigo,
and you had to be helped because you thought you were upside down,
We had a guy one time
that thought he was hanging in the straps upside down,
He was right side up,
He was pretty screwed up, and we finally had to divert him,
Obviously, the guys doing the talking and the coaching right now
would be the landing signals officer on the ship,
Maverick would not be doing the coaching,
Now, this sort of really came out of the interviews
with the different pilots,
because they would talk about their fear of night carrier landings
and trying to put that plane down into that small little aircraft carrier,
It's a tiny place to stick a plane,
You've only got a certain amount of feet to stick the plane,
You miss it, you're going over into the end,
A little bit excessive rocking in here,
- They would've said goodbye, - I think they'd have probably pickled him
- and said, "Let's try it again," - Yeah,
He never would've gotten aboard,
But in this case, he did,
Now, immediately, all your gas problems are gone
because you're home, and the fuel gauge shrinks
from 3 inches in diameter
back down to its normal 0,5 size,
That's right,
One of the things that the fighter pilots always would tell you is that
you've got to believe, going into every engagement,
that you're the best, that you are the best pilot in the sky,
and that you are going to be able to beat that enemy,
And that's what the psychology is here,
Cougar, as a great pilot, knows that he just can't do it anymore,
He no longer has that edge that he needed,
And unless he has it, he'll never win,
Again, not unrealistic,
I had an individual in my command do just that,
Come back with his second cut pass and came into my office
when I was commanding officer and did just exactly that,
And we sent him home, off the ship that afternoon,
And, in fact, I've had that happen to me, too,
I had a kid that had trouble landing, and we sent him back,
and he ended up going someplace else,
- It's not uncommon, - Not for everybody,
When we got the script from Cash and Epps,
we felt that the perfect actor, and it really came from them,
was gonna be Tom Cruise,
They'd seen him in Risky Business,
and they felt he was the right guy to play Maverick,
We'd sent various versions of the script to Tom,
There was interest, but he would never really sign on the dotted line,
We just couldn't get him to say yes,
And he'd just finished a movie called Legend, with Ridley Scott,
and he had this long ponytail,
I called the information officer at the Pentagon,
I said, "Look, we need to close this thing with Tom,
"When are the Blue Angels gonna be around?"
And they were in El Centro for an air show,
So I got a hold of Tom's agent, who is now his partner, Paula,
and I said, "Look, we'd like to send Tom down there,
"let him take a flight,
"let him see what it's really like to be on these planes and be a pilot,"
So, here, Tom jumps on his motorcycle, drives down to El Centro
and pulls off his helmet, he's got this long ponytail,
So, right away, these pilots say,
"We got this hippie coming here,
"We're gonna give him the ride of his life,"
And so they spun him at three or four Gs, or five Gs,
and turn him upside down, I'm sure he threw up all over the plane,
But when he got on the ground, he went to the nearest phone booth,
because mobile phones weren't in fashion or around in those days,
and called me and said, "I'm doing the movie,
"That's it," So he loved the speed,
loved the excitement, loved the pilots,
When I came to Top Gun, Tom Cruise was already attached,
He was the only piece of cast that was attached,
And then I went to work with Margery Simkin,
It was the first time I'd actually worked with her,
First time I'd really been working in Hollywood,
And we just started to piece it together,
trying to balance Tom's personality with Goose's personality,
And I thought Anthony Edwards was a perfect balance,
in terms of Tom's Maverick quality and Goose's charming and sweet
and with edges that came out of his sense of humor,
So, the balance of the two, I thought, was a great combination,
And then we went to the competition, and the competition was Val Kilmer,
And Val, I thought, was a perfect foil versus Tom's character,
So, again, it's like balancing personalities,
It's like, let's say, painting was always my background,
it's like balancing one color against another,
And it's funny, when I'm actually casting,
even then I was casting Top Gun,
I'd take pictures of all the boys and get a huge wall
and just put up all the pictures of all the contenders,
and then start to shift them around on the board
and start to look at them,
and I'd almost look at them like colors on a canvas,
as opposed more to balancing personalities,
what I knew of them from other roles in other movies,
It is very unique to get picked to go to Top Gun,
A very small percentage of the fighter squadrons get to go,
Typically, it's your hardest decision, as a CO, which crew you send,
usually one out of 14, every two years,
And they'd only run, at that time, 48 students through per year,
so it's very selective,
The Top Gun school wasn't very fancy,
It was really sort of end of the runway,
All the rooms would sort of look like used classrooms,
We named Viper as an homage to Pete Pettigrew,
who was our technical advisor,
because Pete was just an amazing fighter pilot,
respected among his peers, a MiG killer in Vietnam,
and just an amazing guy,
Ran the Ironman in Hawaii before anybody knew it existed,
The real fighter pilot's fighter pilot,
When we met with the Navy,
we said we needed a coordinator to work with us,
somebody who'd actually flown jets,
Pete was considered a MiG killer
because he'd shot down one, or I don't know how many MiGs
he'd shot down in Vietnam,
And he came in and became our advisor
because he was one of the best pilots in the Navy
and had just recently retired,
but he still was flying because he was in the Navy Reserve,
So he came in and read our script,
gave us notes on how to make things more accurate,
and then he became our coordinator for everything with the navy,
Anything that went on went through Pete's hands or his eyes,
He's just a phenomenal individual
and did a lot of really hard work,
I think you can blame him or praise him for the authenticity of Top Gun
because of his keen eye
and making sure that Tony got what he needed,
but also got stuff that was as accurate as you can do in a Hollywood movie,
There really is no Top Gun trophy,
and I hope I'm not hurting anybody's feelings here,
but it's something we created
because we wanted to have a sense of competition,
that we could at some point say, "Here's who the best is,"
And ultimately, I think the best pilot here is Iceman,
He is a better pilot than Maverick,
because he is gonna go into the turns and you know what he's gonna do,
You have a sense that he's not gonna be too out of control,
Maverick becomes a better pilot
once he learns to stay with his wingman,
I think this scene is interesting, having been an instructor,
having stood in front of this crowd, it is very interesting,
because they look just like that,
And everyone there is trying to figure out
whether he is better than the guy next to him
and is he better than you and how is he gonna stack up,
So this scene is actually very realistic
with just the type of angst going on between the crews,
Who's gonna measure up, and can I come back here and do this?
If there were a Top Gun trophy, probably, these guys are so competitive
that they'd probably kill each other before the end of the graduation,
and nobody would graduate from Top Gun,
The thing about call signs, you cannot give yourself a call sign,
I remember a story, once a guy gave himself a call sign,
His call sign was Shark,
So, of course, he was known as Minnow for the rest of his Navy career,
Now, actually, we'll tell them some dirt about Top Gun,
One of our instructors, when I was there,
had a secret call sign known as the Assassin,
and when we had the class introduce themselves,
if any of the class looked like they had little bit too big an ego,,,
- An exceptional cockiness, - ,,,their first hop was
an opportunity to ride against the Assassin,
And they would be humbled to the point that they were much more pliable
the next time you got to deal with them from an instructional basis,
Jim writes great dialogue,
I mean, a lot of this dialogue here,
it just represents that great Jim Cash touch,
who has just a wonderful flair and a banter back and forth,
And he's done it time and time again,
It was such a pleasure to work with him,
The O Club was pretty wild, In the early '80s, it was really wild,
And right when we went to the base in Miramar,
they just had stopped having strippers come,
because the admiral's wife finally said, "I think it's too much," in the early '80s,
In San Diego, the O Club was a place to come,
When we were taken there,
it was a place for San Diego local girls to come out and meet the fighter pilots,
Pilots are guys that love life,
In their careers, they push it to the edge,
and outside they push it to the edge, too,
There was this club on the base called the O Club, or the Officers' Club,
There was one night a week, it was Monday or Tuesday,
I don't remember what night, where all the pilots would come,
all the Top Gun pilots and all the hot shot pilots
would hang out in their flight suits,
And our actors were right in there with them,
So they became pilots, They had their flight suits on,
and they were in there having a ball with the real guys,
Wednesday nights at Miramar were obviously very infamous,
I know something that's not necessarily that widely known,
however, is, obviously, during the class, we had rules to live by,
Twelve hours, bottle-to-throttle,
The instructors would show up, and, again, probably pretty much about 1900,
which is, again, 7:00, the staff is pretty much leaving,
and obviously, if we stayed late and drank,
then the students would, too,
obviously breaking that cardinal rule,
So, this scene right here,
with them pounding down shooters and sucking down beers,
real world, again, they'd be pretty much hightailing out,
if they were gonna get in that cockpit in about a dozen hours,
And they would not be wearing whites, They'd most likely be in khakis,
That's true, But it does make it look,,, It's a little bit of Hollywood there,
This scene I always thought was kind of interesting,
I'm sure that the concept was actually,,,
There used to be an old Ramones song that the,,,
At Miramar, again, about late Wednesday,
normally late Wednesday night, if we were still around,
read, we didn't have an early brief the next morning,
basically the whole gang would get up and change the words
to some quite rude words in sync with the Ramones song,
And that's the only way I could think,,, Maybe Grew's got more to add
on how they came up with this singing concept,
We did sing, but it was never quite as orchestrated as this,
We all talked,
and this is one of the songs that I had always loved,
I am a big Righteous Brothers fan,
It was easy to sing, and it sort of fit in,
We actually discussed it, and they said,
"Oh, yeah, we can do that, We can sing that,"
They rehearsed it a couple of times,
I think they rehearsed about four times and then just did it,
and it worked out very, very well,
Kelly McGillis,
Kelly, I'd just seen in Witness
and seen her take her top off in Witness,
That's the real reason she got the part,
And Kelly was great,
And the studio were pushing me to go with something a little more,
a little more Hollywood, a little more rock and roll,
and maybe somebody that looked a little younger,
When I looked at Kelly, I believed that she had the intelligence
and the sophistication to be believable in this role,
And they were pushing other, younger or more fashionable actresses at me,
but I thought, in the end, Kelly was believable
being able to teach these Top Gun pilots,
teach them their tricks
and teach them what they're meant to do in combat,
And I actually met a real woman in Fightertown,
in Miramar, in San Diego,
who was the role model for Kelly,
And I think she was two years older than Kelly
and had a similar sort of personality,
so she became the role model for Kelly's character,
My great scene, my 15 minutes of fame, is coming up there,
And shots are gonna come on that in just a second,
Incoming,
I'm an older guy in a very old movie,
I'm Kelly McGillis' date in the bar scene,
You'll see me come in, in a yellow shirt, and I don't spend much time,
I run to the back, My name is Perry Siedenthal,
- There's Grew, - The guy in the yellow shirt,
Actually, at the premiere in San Diego,
the first CO at Top Gun, Roger Box, fired out for the entire crew to hear,
"And Pettigrew loses the girl again,"
We encountered one major problem,
We decided to shoot the picture in San Diego,
and the base there is Miramar,
And we had to get the approval of the base commander,
So, when you think you're at the highest level,
you still have to go down to the lowest levels
and get their approval also,
So, the base commander read the script,
and he says, "I'm not gonna let you shoot on my base,
"We don't allow our officers to fraternize with enlisted people
"or other officers,"
Because we had this love affair between Kelly McGillis and Tom Cruise,
and they were both in the Navy,
So we said, "What females do you come in contact with
"that are not in the military, would be a realistic relationship?"
And he said, "We have these evaluation teams
"that come in from, like, the RAND Corporation,"
They hire these companies to come in
and evaluate their pilots and their war games,
So when they've got a war game, they have these people write up,
just like coming in and evaluating a corporation,
And they said, "We've had this one girl which we met who was very attractive,"
and she evaluated their performance,
And that's where the Kelly McGillis character changed
from an officer to a civilian,
And then it got his approval based on that,
Kelly McGillis' character here
was actually a female named Christine Fox
that works for Center for Naval Analyses,
that was doing a lot of real, real good tactical development at com-fit,
basically in terms of outer-air battle tactics
and how to defend the carrier against the Russian hordes,
Remember, this is '80, so we're still in the Cold War,
So her character is basically built, loosely, around Christine Fox,
I did take a leap of faith in terms of dressing Kelly in seamed stockings
and short skirts and makeup and stuff,
That was me, doing my thing,
trying to do a piece of rock and roll with this movie,
which the studio were very wary of,
The Navy were a little skeptical,
because they had other movies that they had cooperated with,
and their end result, they weren't very happy with,
And so the Navy were a little skeptical
about what we wanted to do with this movie,
Because they'd never seen a real aerial movie,
and I think this was the beginning of a kind,
So, the Navy themselves, the brass, were a little skeptical,
and we had to go to Washington on two different occasions
and actually pitch the story and pitch ourselves,
There was a little skepticism about Hollywood,
you know, versus the military, the military being the Navy,
But Miramar, on the base where we actually shot,
they embraced us there, The guys there were fantastic,
When I was doing the research and interviewing the pilots,
I had a hard time understanding what they were talking about,
because they kept talking in acronyms,
So I didn't want to sound stupid
and ask them what they were talking about,
because I'm supposed to know it,
They all knew about it, and they would just sort of go on
about all these different terms,
the RAG, the RIOs, all these different things,
hops, all this sort of stuff,
And so Jim and I made a decision that we weren't gonna explain it at all,
We were just gonna put it in the movie just exactly as we heard it
and let the audience try to figure it out,
And if they figured it out, they'd get it,
If they didn't, they wouldn't, But we wouldn't explain it,
And I think that authentic dialogue really plays well in the movie,
It really puts us into the world without us trying to create it,
I mean, it's their dialogue, It's how they speak,
And I think for that reason,
all those fighter pilot sequences feel really fresh,
It doesn't feel like it's canned,
I've seen a lot of things since then, I always just go, "Oh, come on, guys,
"You're trying too hard,"
Now, in truth, gentlemen,
there were some exchanges between us and the Russians
when we did join up on them, but they weren't their fighters,
They were a patrol aircraft,
And they would hold up signs or pictures or,,,
- Mostly Playboy, - ,,,make various gestures at us,
- It was always Playboy pictures, - It was always very,
again, having done the same thing, always very positive,
in terms of holding up vodka,
holding up magazines, and just basically, you know,,,
They're doing their job, we're doing our job,
We don't set the policy, We just execute it,
The movie, Top Gun, in the end, cost $16,5 million,
which was fantastic,
And I think that the budget was kept at that price
because Washington helped us a lot,
They really just charged us for fuel,
It's very expensive, I think it's $10,000 an hour to run one of these F-14s,
so I was always on a tight budget,
in terms of how many hours I could fly these jets,
What was interesting in the process was
when we went out to do aerial sequences,
I'd do a storyboard of what I envisioned this aerial sequence to be,
So, I'd storyboard it,
and let's say there were six jets flying in this one mission,
I would give my storyboards to the flight commander
who was flying the lead jet,
and we'd have these meetings at 3:00 a,m, in their briefing room,
I'd stand there with these little toy jets, saying the sort of thing I imagined,
and then the flight commander would reinterpret what I was trying to say,
and he'd take a copy of the storyboards,
and he'd gaffer-tape it onto the interior of his cockpit,
and each of the other guys would get them,
And we'd break the number of shots down into maneuvers,
and in the air he'd just call it,
So, they'd work it out in the briefing room,
who was doing what, and in the air he'd just call it,
He'd say, "Okay, and maneuver one," And then the six jets would go,,,
All different directions, And depending on the maneuvers,
we'd mount the cameras either on the nose of the F-14s,
on the wingtip of an F-14, or on the belly of an F-14,
And that took us a long time from the FAA,
just in terms of getting permission to do that,
because, obviously, it's dangerous,
There's so many G-forces when these jets are flying in combat,
even simulated combat for movies, that the cameras had to be very secure,
because it could come off and could obviously hurt somebody,
I think there were three Top Gun pilots,
they were flying these F-14s as our camera ships,
And each of them, after one mission, they'd,,,
Because these guys have such an uncanny understanding
that the F-14 becomes an extension of themselves,
They had an uncanny understanding of what the camera was getting for them
when they were flying head-on
at six feet next to another plane, et cetera,
But they learnt very quickly, Each of the three pilots
saw the first day's dailies and said, "Oh, I get it,"
And after that, I don't think they ever missed a take,
We could only afford to do two or three takes maximum,
And because we only had short film loads,
we only had 100-foot film loads
because of the size of the cameras that we could mount,
Now, this is my favorite scene, If you slow it down on your DVDs,
you can see a piece of the F-14 come off
and go right above the A-4,
- What piece was it? - Over-wing fairing, I think,
We got a lot of help with Pete Pettigrew,
in terms of trying to figure out some of the choreography
and things that would happen,
We really wanted to make this movie authentic when we were writing it,
We wanted to make it based on what's really going on with these guys
and how they really fly, so that we could put together
really good engagements,
so that each engagement would be unique and different,
What we didn't want to do was just throw down
and say, "And then something happens,"
We made sure we had this fight scene choreographed beat by beat,
The writer couldn't have asked for a more perfect plane than the F-14,
because it allowed us to have a buddy in the movie,
It allowed Maverick to have someone to talk to and think with,
as opposed to an F-18, which is a single-seat plane,
It really captured the great relationship between the RIO and the pilot,
because the back-seater is the guy who's really watching
the plane in front and telling him where he is,
since he's doing all the radar work,
In this particular sequence here, you see,
after Tom wins his first training mission, they're flying back in,
and he thought it would be an interesting or fun thing to do
to buzz the tower,
which was forbidden,
which was not liked or allowed,
'Cause it was thought to be dangerous, 'cause the tower's only 40 feet tall,
and to get down level with the tower, you're flying,,, That's dangerous,
So the guy elected to buzz the tower was Bozo, of course,
Here's Bozo coming up to be grounded yet again,
Bozo buzzed the tower at 40 feet and
blew out all the windows at the back of the chief of the base's office,
All his French windows were blown out, after he'd been told not to do it,
So Bozo is really Maverick,
Bozo, I don't know where you are today, but
you enlightened my life,
So, he was truly a representation of Tom's character in the movie,
Okay, now, locker rooms, Here's the deal,
If you're an athlete, you spend a lot of time in locker rooms,
and teams get put together in the locker rooms,
So the reason there's locker rooms is because
it's where groups come together,
It's where sports teams come together,
Guys get traded and get added to a team
just because they're great in the locker room,
because they're the ones that can inspire guys,
And also, the Top Gun school
and the fighter pilots had some pretty cool locker rooms,
I mean, there was all this neat gear around,
These guys are such,,,
They really capture this on-edge feeling here,
I think it's great, Tony Scott did a great job capturing the feeling of these guys
who are just ready to go head to head, but they won't,
because it's part of a great tradition from World War I fighter pilots,
and it continues to this day,
When this was first written, I was asked, you know,
"Viper, what's the locker room look like at Top Gun?"
And I said, "Oh, it's on a half-deck, and they keep their gear in there,"
They said, "Well, do they take showers?"
And I said, "No, they don't take showers,"
So that was really fake, but in fact, it becomes very important
because there's a lot that can be said in a locker room
that can't be said anyplace else,
Tom Skerritt was somebody I'd always loved,
because he was in Alien with my brother Ridley,
and Ridley cast him in Alien,
I thought Tom was a perfect commander of the base,
because he's got this laconic, this quiet, unruffled quality to him,
You hope you have a good eye for casting,
and even small parts became big stars,
So, in fact, one just won an Academy Award,
Each one had a certain character that we wanted to bring forth to the screen,
So you could just keep looking at actors
until you find the ones that you feel are right for those particular roles
and unique and different and look different
and have different personalities, so they'll work well and be individuals,
rather than when they're homogenous
and kind of all cookie-cutter examples of one another,
And you do that through casting,
I think it was Marge Simkin who cast the movie
and did an amazing job of finding these young kids,
Val Kilmer being somebody who'd just been on Broadway,
or off-Broadway in a play, and she was very excited about him,
as Tony was and Don and myself,
So you just keep going through these young kids who are coming up,
And we found what we felt was a great complement,
Tony Edwards, which was a character we loved,
because the character had to have a lot of humor,
had to be very likeable,
And Tony is that to a T, and he's a wonderful actor,
So we were lucky to kind of put this interesting group together,
And Anthony Edwards, yeah, Anthony,
he's got such a great quality to him, on-screen,
and he was so good as a foil to Tom's character,
And he's got such a brilliant, odd sense of humor,
and there's a lot of lines and a lot of situations
that Anthony improvised, and we capitalized,
and I used in the movie directly, or we built sequences off,
And Michael Ironside, who was really an unknown at that stage,
was, again, a perfect balance with Tom Skerritt,
'cause he's tough and angry, and he's got this scar on his face,
and he's Canadian,
Actually, there is some truth in this,
in that sometimes the people that are the best in combat
are not necessarily the people that are the best
when there's no war going on,
It seems that there are some people
that are really, really good, administratively,
and do well when we're not in combat,
and there are other people that are just not natural combat aviators,
and they're not necessarily the same,
It's sometimes hard to figure out who's who,
and when he says, "Who would you rather go into combat with?"
that's probably an actual, serious question,
It's interesting, in the earlier drafts,
we also had a lot more competition between squadrons themselves,
Because within squadrons, Wolfpack, Black Knights,
there's a lot of competition amongst squadrons,
And that sort of worked its way out,
So part of the competition between Iceman and Maverick
was really a competition between squadrons,
And also, in our earlier drafts, we had more personality in the planes,
I think that, as the pilots will tell you, each plane has a personality of its own,
and they have their own planes,
and they all do things a little bit differently,
But I think Tony Scott made the right choice
in terms of just pruning that stuff down,
So that it doesn't become about too much,
and it's more the competition among the guys,
But I always sort of liked that squadron rivalry,
because it's really one of the stronger rivalries
within the pilots in the Navy,
I find this interesting, this was probably late in the evening,
and Maverick, obviously, is depicted studying,
and that's, again, very realistic,
Again, an average day, a kid would show up about 6:30,
we'd give them academics
probably till mid-morning, 10:00 or 11:00, academics, basically,
No time in between, not very many breaks,
You're not taking half-an-hour coffee breaks here,
It's lecture, lecture, lecture, right to the flight brief, two flights,
get home at night, wolf down a sandwich, and then study,
You see Maverick kind of looks tired here,
You were by the end of that first day, The pace at Top Gun is horrendous,
and even as an instructor,
takes a while to kind of get that motor running
at that speed for that length of time,
This was when Tom really used his smile,
his smile which became infamous, in terms of his sexuality and his charm,
And Tom is not 6 feet tall, and Kelly is,
But Tom's taller than me,,, But him and Kelly walking together,,,
We actually found a pair of cowboy boots,
which, again, became infamous,
We found them,,, I didn't find them, My wardrobe lady found them,
And they're a pair of funky-looking,,,
They look like a pair of boots that Bruce Springsteen should be wearing,
And we gave them to Tom,
And Venetian blinds,
and that lighting effect you get through Venetian blinds
and fans in the ceiling,
I mean, that was all part and parcel of the base at Miramar,
but it was something that, at that point in time, was,,,
I'd begun a sort of look, especially in The Hunger,
I think that was the beginning of the Venetian blind era, and fans,
All this stuff was what I saw on the base
and what inspired me to go in that direction,
It was shot in a pretty straightforward manner,
But I think this was the right look for this movie,
because I'd say it was a movie about rock-and-roll stars of the skies,
It was a full-on,
popcorn, fun, rock-and-roll ride, you know?
And I think the style that we adopted for that vision was right,
even though it wasn't as artsy or strange or surreal as The Hunger,
They actually built a volleyball court at Miramar, set it up,
put all the people there,
and when they were done, they tore it down
and got rid of the volleyball court and left it a field,
exactly what it was to begin with,
They were required to put everything back the way it was before,
so volleyball was there for two days and then gone,
One of the other interesting things is, the guys that are actually hitting
in the volleyball are all stand-ins, and they're all real volleyball players,
And they made them up to look exactly like the real guys,
but when you see a real good hit there, that's all being done
by stand-ins that look just like them,
But it was amazing that you just can't tell the difference,
the way they edit it,
This, again, is another, I wanna say infamous,
it's a famous volleyball scene
that, to be honest, I didn't know what to do with it,
the Maverick and the Iceman team playing against each other,
And I didn't really have a vision about what to do,
But I remember, this is the scene I struggled with the most, yeah,
But in the end, it just became hunky bodies and California sun,
But it became a favorite with the women, as well as the guys,
especially the San Francisco guys,
Tony felt that he should give something for the girls, too,
And he had all these good-looking guys, they had great bodies,
and he said, "Let's give the girls something to really look at,"
And I think that was something he created
to show the competition among the guys
and also to give the girls something to take home with them and think about,
There's the boots there, You see those boots?
I've got them now,
You know, I think the actual look of the guys, you know,,,
And I kept talking about rock-and-roll stars of the skies
and this particular look,
And I kept talking about this movie, and how the guys,
I wanted them to be rock stars, basically, and I always looked for,,,
I would steal from photographers,
Helmut Newton, I stole from in The Hunger,
And then I found this book by Bruce Weber,
which is Bruce Weber's first book, a black-and-white book,
and it was, basically, guys in the military,
And there's this one centerfold, this fold-out page,
It's got this guy who looked very similar to Tom,
and in the backseat, the guy looked very similar to Val Kilmer,
And I took that picture, not similar just in terms of their haircuts
and the style of the picture,
but similar in terms of the intent of their eyes,
the intent of the characters, and I used that book as a role model
for who I believed these guys were,
So I showed the pictures to Tom and to Val and to the studio,
They got a bit scared,
'cause it was infamous in terms of the gay community, this book,
That's where all these haircuts came from,
and this hard-edged military look,
First time I met Tom, actually, I met him when he was working with Ridley,
on-stage, when he was shooting Legend,
They were shooting it at Paramount Studios,
And Tom had a great experience with Rid,
and also he'd been wooed by Don and Jerry,
and so, the combination, he really liked, He really liked Don and Jerry,
And the ice was broken for me,
And he really had a vision about this character
and how he wanted to play it,
Tom had just done Risky Business,
and I still think today that's one of his best movies,
He was fantastic in that,
And it was a really great interest, So he was on the rise,
and I hadn't even started rising,
I was at the bottom of the ladder after The Hunger,
But I think he trusted, 'cause I was a Scott,
and he had a great experience with the other Scott, being Ridley,
Two of my kids are daughters, and they thought it was really neat,,,
They thought it was neat when Tom Cruise came to dinner,
Oh, there you go,
He was in La Jolla for the whole summer, so he came over,
And I gave my kids about 15 minutes notice
that Tom Cruise was coming for dinner,
And they kind of went, "No, no, he's not coming,,,"
Well, he did, He showed up,
Very nice man, He was very young, I think he was only, like, 23 years old,
- Exactly, - Very nice guy,
We look at them now, and they're untouchable,
But at the time, Risky Business hadn't been out that long,
He wasn't a household name, Kelly McGillis had just done Witness,
so these were not giant mega-stars that they are now,
You can go, and you can say, "Well, who's the one
"that's really, really famous now that nobody knows anything about?"
And it's Tim Robbins, Tim Robbins will show up later on,
- He's Merlin, - Yeah, he's Merlin,
And then you've got Rick Rossovich, He's done a lot of stuff,
and, of course, Anthony Edwards has become very famous,
And, actually, no one paid any attention to Meg Ryan,
No, Yeah, Meg Ryan was only there for a couple of days,
She's only in about four scenes, and we'll talk about that later,
And, of course, Val Kilmer's become very famous,
So there are a lot of people that became extremely famous
out of this particular movie,
This particular piece about his father, in a way,
comes from Wizard's father,
who was a Second World War and Korean pilot
and was killed in an F-9 accident at Alameda Naval Air Station
when you were, what, five years old?
And there was just a little thought about that,
although Wizard certainly is not as Mavericky as Maverick,
No, that's just where the Hollywood people got the idea,
What was really interesting in this project
is that Jim doesn't like to fly,
In fact, he won't get into an airplane,
And so we ended up writing
one of the most famous flying pictures of all time,
and a guy who doesn't fly at all,
What's really great about our relationship
is that we wrote long-distance,
We only wrote together in a room one time over a 25-year period,
And all our work was really done on the telephone,
done by a computer or send things in the mail,
It was really a great relationship, We both would have a problem to solve,
we'd hang up the phone, think about it, call each other back an hour later,
and, virtually, both have the same solution,
It was uncanny at times,
We also had different strengths and weaknesses,
Jim wrote fabulous dialogue,
I mean, he just had a real sense of the dramatic,
and I love just story and overview and characters,
all the little sort of dramatic twists and turns of storytelling,
So it was really a wonderful combination,
He was a funny guy, great sense of humor,
just a memorable person,
And he actually never came out to Hollywood,
He stayed in East Lansing, Michigan, and I would do all the meetings,
and then I'd call Jim and tell him how the meetings went
and what the thought was and the feedback,
And many times we'd do it with speaker phones,
So he'd be,,, Jim would be in the meeting on speaker phone,
This scene was actually done about six months after we finished filming,
which we finished in August, the regular filming and production,
And, you know, she's wearing a hat,
and the reason that Kelly McGillis is wearing a hat right there
is because her hair is a different color,
She was doing a different movie, and they brought her back to do that,
You notice that Tom Cruise has quite longer hair,
'cause he was doing another movie at the time,
And the reason they did this is, they thought that the relationship
between Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis was going too quickly,
and they wanted to insert something which softened the relationship
and made the relationship look like it was a little more long lasting,
So they added this about five months later,
We put together this sequence in an elevator,
They're on base and they just happen to connect in this elevator,
And this was, like, six months later,
when Kelly had lost, I think, 60 pounds
and Tom was actually shooting Color Of Money,
so we had to move the whole crew and shoot it in Chicago,
And so that's why Kelly's wearing this baseball cap,
'cause she'd cut her hair off as well,
The movie was a difficult movie, knowing how to structure it,
in terms of shooting, so what we actually did was,
we shot all the ground story first, which I think took us six weeks,
six six-day weeks,
And then we did all the aerial stuff
and our pick-ups between the aerial stuff second,
This was when we went back,
and we needed a pick-up for this particular scene,
And we did pick-ups for the actual love scene at the same time,
And this particular sequence here,
I think this was the beginning of Meg Ryan's career,
'Cause I don't know whether Meg had done anything else prior to this,
But I thought Meg was a perfect wife for Tony Edwards in this movie,
And Meg is so unique, because she is sweet and innocent
and charming, yet has this great sense of humor,
And she has one sequence, you know, after Goose dies,
where she breaks your heart,
and I think that was the sequence when she came in, in the casting session,
And when she came in, she didn't,,,
There was no tears when we rehearsed the sequence,
but she broke my heart, whatever she did,
She just had a great handle in terms of who she was
and how strong her relationship was with her husband,
her husband being Tony Edwards,
Interesting shot there, how difficult that is to put together
and fit in the frame,
Again, obviously, both those Toms chasing those A-4s
are well in sight of any weapons employment,
This is called the TACTS trailer,
And this is part of the things that we've discovered in research,
And as I was researching the picture,
we went and saw how they debrief the flights,
Debriefing is really important,
because every fight, every engagement, they debrief, they go over it turn by turn,
They're incredibly detailed, Nothing is left to chance,
They discuss hops before they do them, and afterwards they break them down,
But it was interesting to see the depths that these guys went to
to make themselves better,
They were constantly trying to improve,
It's incredibly low-tech now, but when the movie was shot,
this was cutting-edge technology,
And that is the actual trailer that most of Miramar trained in
for most of the time we were all there,
This is the state-of-the art at the time, and we used this exclusively
throughout the Top Gun course, as well as in our fleet squadrons,
Also, you can get missile fly-out profiles on this,
so it also tells you whether a missile that you fired
was inside or outside of envelope,
And it will give you a kill if it's in envelope,
and give you no kill if it's outside envelope,
So it gives you the real envelopes for the missiles,
which are sometimes very hard to be able to perceive
at the time you're flying,
And, of course, this was all done in real time,
and then they're coming back and debriefing what was done
four or five hours earlier on the actual range,
One other thing to note is that, at Top Gun in particular,
we use a different form of debriefing,
You wouldn't look at the tape until the end of the debrief,
and we'd make the students reconstruct based on their notes and recollection,
have the Top Gun instructors give their review,
and then we'd look at the tape to try to get their skill level up
when you didn't have a TACTS range
to be able to conduct sorties with their squadrons and get quality debriefs
without having this system,
So, it's almost a dark art to be able to take notes
while you're flying or right after the engagement
that are as accurate as you get with a computer system,
And that's very important because you gotta realize that these guys,
after they graduate from Top Gun,
they're being sent back to their squadrons
to become training officers,
and so they're going to be having to do the debriefs
for people in their squadron,
And they're trying to raise the level of the expertise within the squadron,
and so the ability to debrief is very, very important,
Don and Jerry were a great balance, in terms of the work,
'cause Don was a sort of broad-stroke ideas man,
and Jerry was a great details man and a visualist
and fantastic with music,
So Jerry was really responsible for all the music in Top Gun,
And they had this guy called Harold Faltermeyer who they used,
And we'd sit in his mixing suite till the early hours of the morning,
Harold was out-and-out rock and roll and really had a great handle
in terms of writing themes for this type of movie,
There was a composer or an arranger
and an engineer that we'd work with a lot, with Giorgio Moroder,
and he was Moroder's arranger,
And we believed that he had enormous talent
and wanted to give him an opportunity,
And so his name was Harold Faltermeyer, a German,
We sent Harold the script, and Harold, in his own studio at home,
on his little computer, wrote this theme that he sent to us,
It became the Top Gun theme, It was that great guitar piece
that we got even before we started filming,
So that was the beginning of the score of Top Gun,
and we were all very excited about that,
And then, we had made a deal with, I think it was Columbia at the time,
to put out the soundtrack,
And we worked with a number of very talented people there
to get the songs, and they worked very hard,
I remember we had over 100 songs we had to listen to,
They just kept playing more and more songs to us
till we narrowed it down to the ones we felt were hits,
And Moroder wrote some of them, and one I just heard on the radio,
It's just been re-recorded by Jessica Simpson,
and that's Take My Breath Away,
which was the love theme of the movie,
Over the years, over the decades of movies,
love scenes have been shot so many different times,
and it's so difficult knowing how to have a point of view,
But it's so difficult knowing how to handle these scenes,
'cause they've been done to death and done so many times,
And I think, in the end, for these love scenes, less is more,
And I think the true strength of sexuality in love scenes
is really just before the actual, before the nasties,
and actually capitalizing on that,
This is another great sound bite from Top Gun,
"I feel the need, the need for speed,"
"I feel the need, the need for speed"
sort of just captures the essence of this movie,
It really is about living everything at high speed,
That was pretty good dialogue by Tom Cruise right there,
pretty accurate dialogue
- for describing the engagement, - Hey!
It was well written by the technical advisor,
Very, very accurate,
By the way, you wouldn't have your mask off,
The mask would've been on for a long time,
I was just thinking the same thing,
You can't take time out to put your mask on
after you get a visual,
Once again, the Top Gun trophy becomes something
that sounds like it's important,
But in reality, in the Top Gun school,
they never would have something like that,
because it's really about a learning education,
But the fun of the movie is, it's really about the competition of these two guys,
I mean, who is the best fighter pilot?
So, some way, somebody's gotta say this is the best guy,
Very difficult flying right there
in order to put those four aircraft in one piece of sky
and then get it all framed properly,
They key to that is just telling everybody beforehand,
sitting down and talking about it for a long time before you actually fly it,
And in this case, it worked out, because seemingly the choreography
was able to be given to the guys who were flying,
and they could actually fly what they thought they were supposed to fly,
And it worked out very, very well,
As we mentioned before, here, the framing
and the need for Hollywood to have all these aircraft in one frame,
Pretty hokey here, obviously,
You have gun parameters from 1,200 feet on in,
Should have taken the shot a long time ago,
Yeah, you get about maybe half a second to take a shot,
And if you don't get it, then you just can't chase people around,
You're gonna get killed yourself right away,
Between the base in Nevada where the jets were actually housed
and where we were shooting,
they had to fly for 20 minutes across country,
And Nevada has these chicken ranches, which are whorehouses basically,
so that every morning at 5:00 a,m,,
these pilots would come across in these F-14s,
and they'd buzz these chicken ranches from about 30 feet up,
And all the roofs of the chicken ranches were corrugated metal roofs,
so the sound inside must have been deafening,
So we'd sit on top of this mountain with our binoculars
and see these guys buzz these whorehouses at 5:00 a,m,
and see all these guys and these pimps
coming out at 5:00 a,m,, screaming and yelling,
Here's another great shot, This filming is well done,
This was a new first, I think, for aviation films,
A lot of the fighter rules developed even in World War I are still true today,
In fact, if you total it up,
most of the people shot down in all the wars, I think 80% of them,
didn't see the guy that shot them
until he was already in the lethal envelope,
In fact, the guy that has the most kills of all time
is a guy named Erich Hartmann,
He was a German and was on the Eastern Front,
flying against Russians towards the end of the war,
and never would engage anyone that saw him,
His whole concept was, "I'm not gonna engage anybody that ever sees me,
"If they see me, I'm leaving," And he had, like, 380 kills,
Well, in Vietnam, we lost 12 fighters to MiGs,
Only one lost a dogfight, The other 11 were surprised,
That's right, So, if you're seen, you're in trouble,
I think that, like anything you do,
with somebody who really does it for a living,
a pilot would say, "Oh, this line, this is Hollywood,"
The whole dogfight at the end they felt was Hollywood,
But when people kept saying,
"You do that, You guys actually fly those planes,"
and girls were coming on to them, they liked the movie more and more,
So, from initially saying, "This is a lot of Hollywood,"
to saying, "This is really great for my career and my life and my love life,"
So it changed their thinking, once it became kind of a cultural icon,
I might insert here, as a technical advisor,
I might be beating up on the movie a little bit,
because I know what was supposed to be reality
and what was Hollywood,
and I tend to be defensive about the whole thing,
because nobody ever listened to me,
And I was trying to make it reality,
And here's a good example of guys running around in towels,
which really isn't very realistic,
On the other hand,
my cronies here have said that I've been too hard on the movie,
In all honesty, I did enjoy it,
Although on a daily basis, it could be very difficult
when you're fighting with everybody all the time
about what should go into the movie and what shouldn't,
And again, you notice that they're saying things here
that they couldn't say other places,
So, in fact, the locker room,
although I was very much against it to begin with,
turns out to be a major part of the movie,
A lot happens here,
This is the boys in the locker room,
So this was another beefcake sequence which went down,
which got huge applause,
I remember this particular sequence,
'cause we couldn't shoot it on another location,
so we changed the schedule that morning, at the last minute,
And I remember Val was fed up,
because he hadn't pumped up and hadn't worked out
and done his preparation for this beefcake shirt-off scene,
Yeah, so Val said, "No, we can't, We can't do it,"
In the end, we pushed him to do it,
As they conclude the locker scene,
the reality was that you changed in the locker room a lot of times,
We got done so late the fence was locked,
You climbed the fence and changed clothes next to your car,
- That's true, - Threw the flight suit in,
if you were going someplace out, and you just,,,
If you came along at about 7:30, 8:00,
you'd see all the Top Gun guys stripping down,
because nobody else was on the base at that time, before they went home,
if they didn't just go home in a flight suit,
This particular sequence here is where
Tony Edwards is playing Jerry Lee Lewis' Great Balls of Fire,
But Tony had never played piano before,
and I always do my homework the morning of, you know?
So I'm up at 4:00 a,m,, and I was trying to get a handle on,
or a point of view on how can I make this scene,,,
Give it something, give a center to the scene,
And it was really just,,, It was the four of them,
It was Kelly, Meg and Tom and Tony sitting around a table, eating,
And I was sitting doing my prep that morning,
and I had Jerry Lee Lewis playing on my CD player,
And then that was the flash of inspiration that said,
okay, let's get Tony Edwards to do Great Balls of Fire,
So we sprung it on Tony Edwards, the morning, and it was good,
'cause it gave an idea behind this particular sequence,
other than Meg telling Kelly
what a checkered history Maverick had with other girls,
This, as a writer, when you see the movie
and you go, "Wow, What a great scene,"
I mean, this is something that was added later,
And it's just such a wonderful scene, I love Goose playing piano here,
It just adds so much dimension to him,
Anthony Edwards is just such a memorable Goose,
I mean, you've just got to love him,
Meg Ryan just takes a very small role and just blows it up, It's unbelievable,
It's always great when you see an actor sort of come into a movie
and just suddenly get discovered,
And she really did it in this movie,
The Kansas City Barbeque in San Diego, when we shot there,
it was a tiny little hole-in-the-wall with great fast food,
I gather now, it's actually become a Top Gun shrine,
But it's funny, 'cause we did that sequence there,
and we couldn't find a resolution to the end of the movie,
The resolution being, how are we gonna end this story?
Where was the story gonna end between Tom and Kelly?
And we shot two other ends on the base, on the runway, with Kelly,
And we cut them together, and they didn't work,
So when we went back, it was an afterthought,
went back to the Kansas City Barbeque,
San Diego here is a fabulous backdrop, it really is,
What else could you want? You fly F-14s during the day,
and then you got the town of San Diego to play in at night,
I mean, what a life! What's not to like?
I kept kidding the guys
when I was doing the research interviews,
I said, "You guys are just having too much fun,
"I'm gonna call the Pentagon and complain about it,"
And they would get real excited and go, "Oh, don't do that,"
This particular shot here, all the jets leaving early morning,
this really was early morning,
And the Navy couldn't quite understand
how I always wanted to fly my missions when the light was low,
as opposed to middle of the day,
That was always a struggle, trying to balance your day
so you were shooting your big master shots
when the light was low and the jets looked fantastic,
So, it was always a fight with production and with the Navy, saying,
"But you know, the best time you should be shooting this is
"the beginning and the end of the day,"
But the accident that we see is actually taken from reality,
from a guy I knew and a friend of Wizard's, Bean Barrett,
Bean was his call sign, Gary Barrett was his name,
A lot of people tell me,
"You made it up, That could never happen,"
And we actually took it from an actual accident,
If you notice the shaking there, if you wanna know what's happening,
- there are four guys around that,,, - The gimbal,
,,,around the gimbal, and they're shaking it,
There are just people shaking the gimbal,
trying to make it look realistic,
But you did catch the shaking
if you watch the heads in some of the photos,
you'll see how they bounce around in the actual airplane,
when you're pulling Gs in the cockpit, it does happen,
I think this is the most difficult shot in the movie, right there,
- That was difficult to orchestrate, - Oh, that's right,
You see, Maverick learned his lesson here,
He's not gonna go off on his own,
He's gonna go ahead and follow,,, "Stay with your wingman,"
As I said, the normal gunshot would be about 1,200 feet,
and right now, they're probably about 200 feet well inside,,,
If you were to take,,,
If you were to shoot the A-4 right now, the A-4 would explode in front of them,
and then FOD all of the motors on all the Tomcats,
and the whole threeship would then crash,
I remember one morning, I get a call at around 6:00 in the morning
that we'd just had an accident and lost a pilot,
The stunt pilots that Hollywood hires
are exceptionally gifted and phenomenal pilots,
And unfortunately, a lot of them have lost their lives,
because it's very dangerous what they do,
That's why they are stunt pilots,
and that's why they got paid quite a bit of money,
Art Scholl was one of the great ones,
And Art was shooting some plates for us in his plane,
He always flew with his little dog,
He had this little white dog that sat on his lap when he flew,
And it was getting really late in the day,
and the ground person or his coordinator,
because he was out by himself, we'd just give him a list of shots to do,
said, "It's late, Why don't you come in?"
He said, "Nah, I wanna do one more run,"
And that was his last run, It's unfortunate,
This is a sequence where Maverick's jet goes down,
with Goose as his back-seater,
And when the jet's spinning out of control,
we used an old plane,
And we mounted a camera on the front of that
and did these spirals,
And Art Scholl, who was the most famous
and the best aerial photographer in the history of moviemaking,
Art was actually shooting these point-of-view shots with a camera
mounted at the front of this plane,
And he was shooting in San Diego at sunset,
and he came in for his last take,
It was sad, very sad 'cause
Art did some great movies,
I mean, he did all the aerial movies that made any mark,
In terms of the movie industry, Art was the aerial photographer,
The Great Waldo Pepper being one of the most famous, yeah,
And in this particular case, I was asked by Cash and Epps, the two writers,
that I had to come up with an accident,
and Maverick had to feel responsible for what happened
but had to be vindicated by the Navy, and the RIO had to die,
So basically, all I did was go back to all the accidents
that I'd ever seen or known about,
and try to find one that fit,
And this particular one fit pretty well and was real,
I mean, it was taken from a real case,
In the particular ejection that happened in real life, nobody was hurt,
Both of them got out of the airplane,
Yeah, technically, in Bean's accident, they ejected about 10,000 feet,
and they were doing fine, He was already on the radio,
talking to them, in his parachute on the way down,
Then he looked down when the airplane hit,
saw that the wind was blowing the wreckage and debris
flat across the desert,
knew he was gonna have trouble because of the high winds,
and they suffered lower leg injuries, a broken leg on the back-seater,
and he suffered a knee injury,
But obviously much better than Goose,
- in this particular case, - Who broke his neck,
Yeah,
One thing we've learned a lot about in doing the research
was something called compartmentalization,
They teach pilots how to take their problems and put them in boxes,
compartmentalize themselves and put them into little bits and pieces,
so that they can get on with their lives,
They put their family in a little box,
They put them away somewhere so that they can do the mission,
do their job,
It's asking a lot, psychologically,
I was always really impressed that these guys could pull this off,
As writers, we did an A and B section in a sense,
There is the A movie, the A half and the B half,
The A half is the fun, wild, hair-on-fire guys, the hot pilots,
And the B side is a story about a guy who's now got to deal with
what his aggressive, sort of arrogant behavior caused,
We all want him back, I mean, losing Goose was a tough choice,
You create a character that good, you don't wanna lose him,
Sort of the rules of screenwriting is, you don't create great characters
and then kill them off early,
And there's a big hole in this movie with Goose missing,
But it gets filled up, I think, very well
in terms of the dramatic tension in Tom's acting
in the feeling that Maverick is going through,
I always felt that the critics were really harsh on this movie,
It got ripped in lots of ways,
I always felt that the critics sort of missed it in a huge way,
This movie worked in a more visceral, emotional way,
It was not a plot movie,
It's not a movie about the mission, "Here are the pilots,
"and they're gonna go save somebody,"
It's a movie about the guys, and it's really about the moments
and who these guys are and what this world is like,
rather than, let's go into some plot movie that A, B, C and D,,,
This is a real moment for a lot of fighter pilots,
A lot of these guys lose their friends, It happens,
And it is a very hard thing to recover from,
As I would interview all these guys,
I'd be struck by the fact they all lost things,
Now, when I was doing the interviews in the early '80s,
of course that was the post-Vietnam era,
so there was a lot of loss
in terms of guys who didn't come back from Nam,
Meg Ryan, she cried on cue 22 times, every time they asked her to,
They kept doing repeats and repeats,
and kept trying it and trying it and trying it,
And Tony Scott, every time, asked her to do the scene again,
and on cue, she'd cry,
It was an amazing thing to watch,
I didn't realize that actors could actually do that,
And in fact, I've lost all faith in actors and actresses since,
'cause I don't think they tell anybody the truth,
'cause they don't have to,
We can't do that kind of stuff, We always have to tell the truth,
But, you know, she could do it on a moment's notice,
The concept here, compartmentalizing, Goose is put in a box,
This is how they would do it, They would talk about it,
It was part of the process of putting him away,
is they would find a box
and they would put these things together
as a way to sort of move on with their lives,
This particular moment here, where Tom starts to go out and stops,
I think it was a moment he took from,
something to do with a moment that he had with his family,
a death in his family,
So that was where he couldn't come to terms
with going through that door to face the family,
And so we set the shot and designed the shot,
and then he went for the door
and couldn't get out the door, closed the door again,
I thought it was a really great moment,
Touching scene, but very realistic, You know, we've all lost people,
Normally, it's the air crew,
it's his best buddies that go clean up the room,
take care of the personal effects, make sure the wife's taken care of,
Yeah, one of the more difficult things you ever do,
And, like, when you're on cruise, you got to clean out all the guy's stuff
and put it in a cruise box and send it back to his wife,
- It's really very, very tough, - Yeah,
It is a dangerous job,
We've all lost people that we're very close to,
And I guess the only way to resolve it is by saying
they were doing what they wanted to do,
That's what they really cared about the most in the world,
And so, it's sort of okay, It's not okay, but it's
something you gotta learn to live with,
This particular scene, this is where
Goose's wife is waiting for Tom to come out,
and, in a way, she should have been holding him responsible,
'cause he was flying the jet,
and they got into trouble 'cause he was flying,,,
He was too avaricious,
and he was flying too close to the other jets,
That's why they got into trouble,
I thought she was,,, She breaks your heart in this sequence,
And it's by what she doesn't say, rather than what she does say,
It's just the emotion that she's feeding him
through this particular sequence
when she touches Tom on the side of the neck,
It was a very strong moment for her,
Now, this is a little bit stern, good Hollywood theatrics,
but if you have an accident,
when it's reviewed it's a little less formal,
It's certainly serious, It's called "going in front of the green table,"
because they always, in the Navy, in the old days,
covered the table with green felt for one of these things,
But you typically wouldn't be in your whites,
and typically it wouldn't be like a courtroom setting,
But what we had to do was,
we had to show him vindicated by the Navy
but still feel responsible,
And this was the only way we could do it,
It actually ended up working out pretty well,
We shot another sequence, We shot up a graveyard,
We used a Naval graveyard where Goose was buried,
but that sequence didn't end up in the movie,
We went directly from a sequence in his room
at the base to the court martial,
where he was exonerated of any blame,
But it was a little ambiguous whether he was at fault or not,
Now, I understand pretty much all the actors flew,
You got some film of them?
I won't say who,
there were one or two who decided they didn't want to fly in F-14s,
I understand they didn't want to fly, and their quote was,
"Making this movie ain't worth dying for,"
- We'll leave the names out of it, - I don't know
if that's exactly true, but that may be true,
That could be something that actually happened,
But we can vindicate Tom Cruise, 'cause I understand he went up,,,
- Yes, he did, - And, not unlike the rest of us, got ill,
but his comeback was, "Hell, I've already been sick,
"Why don't you show me what it will do?"
I think since then he's become a pilot and flies,,,
I think he owns three or four airplanes and flies his own airplane,
Yeah, and Goose, I think, was the only one
that flew and didn't get sick,
- Good for him, - That's probably true,
But again, flight line, this is not unrealistic
- that this couldn't happen, - Concur,
This is Tom's first sortie or first training mission
after Goose has been killed, after Anthony Edwards has been killed,
And he's alone in the locker room with Val Kilmer,
I was surprised, 'cause Val was very touchy in terms of
how he dealt with this moment, in terms of saying how sorry he was
that Goose had been killed,
And it was funny how Val captured that moment,
It was odd,
It was one take, and it was an odd perspective
on how to capture that emotional moment,
But it was great,
And actually, I saw how it reverberated in Tom,
It was just one take,
and it got Tom and it got me,
We worked out a story with Cash and Epps,
We had a story, We knew what we felt the movie would be,
And we pitched him that movie,
We knew what the movie was gonna be, not 100%,
Once you have that, then you gotta go through
actually trying to figure out how to make the movie,
'Cause we didn't have a lot of money, $14 million, today,
is a very low-budget film to get a movie made,
especially with all this aviation,
What we did is, we broke the movie down
into three or four segments
and we considered the ground story,
which was all the dialogue and the drama of the piece,
And then we had a carrier section where we did all the carrier work,
So we had breaks in between these,
so the actors had to be on for a very long period of time,
but they had downtime,
And then we did what we considered the cockpit work,
which came at the very end,
where we did, on a stage, put all the actors in the cockpit,
We also put them up in the air in the cockpit
and had cameras on them,
Most of it was unusable, 'cause they all threw up,
so we couldn't use a lot of it, They kept ducking,
Except for Tom, Tom had figured out how to do it,
And he was brilliant in the cockpit,
'cause he'd been in there before and knew exactly what to do,
But the footage of those guys in the cockpit was hysterical,
with their eyes rolling back into their head
and stuff splattering all over the camera lens,
It was not a lot of usable footage,
And then we did the air-to-air stuff, and that was the last part of the puzzle,
But it was done right before the stage work,
So we had all our stuff with the pilots shooting in the air,
these young hot shots,
where our camera guys were up in the air with them,
And on the ground, we did a lot of work on the ground from ground-to-air,
One of the things when we were conceiving the movie was that
every fighter pilot movie we had seen, somebody dies in the opening,
And we didn't want to do that,
With being involved with these guys,
you realize how close they are to each other,
what good friends they are
and just how much respect they have for each other,
And there's a real emotional bond with these guys,
They fly together, They fight together, They spend a lot of time together,
And the sense that one of them dies would be incredibly emotional,
So we felt, emotionally, rather than sort of throw it away or treat it lightly,
we treat it as, I think, that we would emotionally feel about it,
That became the emotional underpinning of the movie,
Is just how hard it would be to recover
from the death of somebody who's so close,
also in this incredibly dangerous, high-stakes area,
Typically, because we've invested so much money in the aviators,
by this point, and so much time,
both landing on the carrier and in this particular case,
if you have some trouble,
they're gonna go out of their way to try to get you back on track,
Either if it's landing on the carrier, day or night, usually night,
or some other performance factor that's not up to snuff,
or if you've had an accident,
Because we've invested so much money in them already,
and if they've shown that they're a good performer,
and it clearly,,,
They don't have any problems because the accident was not attributed to them,
then we'll make every effort to try to get them back up at 100%,
Grew, I have a question, I just noticed in the last three scenes,
especially at night,
or in the macabre setting that we have here,
he's wearing that black,
I've only seen this movie 1,700 times,
Was that done purposely, like A Tale of Two Cities,
- using the colors or anything like that? - Not that I remember,
I think that,,,
- That's what he had in his closet? - That,,, No,,,
Good fighter pilot, he only had one clean shirt,
Well, I wasn't the costume director,
I was the technical advisor, not the costume director,
Tony Scott was big on T-shirts and blue jeans,
The black may have just been in mourning,
- He's in mourning for himself, - He's feeling better about himself,
He's getting back on the horse, so this is the back-on-the-horse outfit,
It's interesting here, This family is really nice,
This is a real fighter pilot's family,
These guys have wonderful families, Great wives, Navy wives,
just terrific people,
They go out on cruise for six months, The family has to exist without them,
They're really fun people to be around,
The wives are incredibly supportive,
They run the household, They've been doing it for years that way,
And the guys come back in,
It's a tough life,
They all give up and sacrifice a lot,
I call that, affectionately known as the "I love me" room,
Yeah,
It's kind of interesting, the more senior you get,
when you're a lieutenant commander, you want an "I love me" room,
And then when you're finally a commanding officer,
if you got a great wife,
she kind of lets you have your "I love me" room,
And then the more senior you get, it turns into an "I love me" closet,
And then, finally goes down to an "I love me" box, stuck in the garage,
So, obviously, Viper here, he's in good shape,
He's still climbing the ladder with his "I love me" room,
I still have an "I love me" wall,
I went over to Wizard's house the other day,
and he has an "I love me" room,
He's got an "I love me" house,
He's still on active duty, though, so he can do that,
However, he's got the big picture of the airplane that we flew,
that we shot down the MiG-21 with in 1972,
And I was over at his house the other day,
and I looked and there's the big picture,
and I'm going, "I don't have one of those,"
And he said,
"You didn't talk to the guy that painted it and have him give it to you,"
He worked the schmooze, though,
Mr, Schmooze over here,
We had set this scene originally that Viper had a barn,
and actually the scene was set, and he walks Maverick into the barn
where he's built himself a biplane, a wonderful old biplane,
But he built the wings too big to get out of the barn,
so it's sort of stuck in the barn,
But, again, it's really not so germane to this movie,
but the concept we were trying to go for was a sense of a past,
Because we meet with these guys,
and they would be able to discuss in detail
different engagements from World War II, World War I,
different pilots, and they knew the pilots from all sides,
They're historians,
I like the concept that there's this arrogance,
this guy who can take on the world and really believes it,
and then just gets knocked on his ass,
And does he have the strength to get back up
and be able to power through it
and recreate himself and rebuild himself up?
And that's really what we were examining here,
I'd like to know how everybody gets all this oceanfront property,
This is hard property to get,
Tom Skerritt did a wonderful job in this movie
of being what you would wanna see in a CO,
He personifies what I think all of us, if we were JOs,
would want to have as a CO,
He has all the credibility in the world, He soft pedals it,
He's sympathetic,
At the same time, he has requirements,
And he's dealing with the problem the way it should be dealt with,
And he and Jester, Jester as the XO, play off each other very believable,
I'm sure that's a good technical advisor at work there,
- By the way, he's landing,,, - I was just thinking the same thing,
Guy's got his hook down,
He's landing on the field, which we don't do,
And landing on the field, we don't do field arrestments very often,
Actually, the way those clouds were, too,
he was actually landing to the east there,
Then, Maverick is actually looking to the,,,
He's actually landing in the west when you see Maverick,
but for the clouds to be there with the sun at that angle,
Tony Scott's working his magic again,
This is the graduation ceremony done at North Island,
That's the swimming pool at the Officers' Club
at North Island Naval Air Station,
We very proudly graduate in our flight suits,
any reason not to get in khakis or whites,
So this is very, very Hollywood,
And do you serve champagne?
Well, normally the night before there's a pretty big get-together
and champagne amongst other beverages,
After we shot this particular day,
we had a little cocktails and food for the crew around the pool here,
and Don Simpson showed up,
And, anyhow, everybody got a few drinks inside them,
and one thing led to another,
And, in the end, we started grabbing people
and throwing them in the pool, as usual,
And two of the fighter gun pilots grabbed Don to throw him in the pool,
And he put up this tremendous fight, and eventually they got him in the pool
and threw him in, and everybody thought it was a big joke,
And after three or four minutes,
we realize that Don's lying on the bottom of the pool,
not coming to the surface,
So we had to dive in and pull him out,
We discovered he couldn't swim,
His leather jacket and his cowboy boots were weighing him down,
This would never happen this way,
You wouldn't get the orders that way,
If they're at Top Gun they'd,,,
- Go back to their parent squadrons, - They go back to their parent squadron,
which would be at Miramar,
- They wouldn't be deployed, - Exactly, Probably,
And normally, in one of the early part of the work-ups,,, You're right,
these orders would go to the guys that are probably already out there,
I never understood why they used "24 hours later,"
- Because that's magic, - Yeah,
I don't think you could physically get there in 24 hours
- if you took the Concorde over there, - No, no,
The mission is fairly realistic,
One of the things you do have to understand
about the United States Navy is that we don't have a lot of airplanes
and we don't have a lot of aircraft carriers,
And when something like this happens,
you are normally going to be going up against a superior force,
And so we tend to fly in section, where the Air Force might fly in division,
And the Air Force might send in 20 airplanes,
when we can only afford to send in four or eight,
And so this would be very realistic,
going into a hostile area of a foreign country
and running up against a large number of airplanes,
One of the things you see the Navy of today pushing
is the value of the sea base,
because as you've seen in the recent international events,
oftentimes we don't have the opportunity
to employ forces that are based overseas
because of agreements with the countries in which they're based,
or other countries don't give us rights of transit,
either in the air or off the ground,
So that's where the value of the Navy comes particularly into focus
and where we find ourselves in these kind of situations,
We always knew from the very beginning
that we had to have a realistic ending,
That although the movie was based on the Top Gun school,
unless we basically had a real fight that was dangerous,
it just wouldn't finish strong enough,
So we knew we'd have some sort of incident,
The enemy at that time that they're talking about
was the North Koreans,
because they were considered a rogue state
and having a lot of problems,
There was the Pueblo incident, There was all sorts of things,
When it came time to shoot the movie, the State Department basically said,
"We're trying to normalize relationships, so we can't say it's North Korea,"
So, it's sort of vague here,
And that's really more of, nobody wanted to get anybody angry,
so they kept it very vague,
It doesn't matter,
You know what I did? I put all the principal actors,
I put into the backseat of a real jet plane
with a camera mounted in front of them,
For instance, when we got Tom flying,
it looks like he's flying in the front seat,
but he's actually flying in the backseat,
And so we could do maneuvers where they're doing barrel rolls,
You saw the ground and the sky and other jets going by,
So all the actors we put through a flight-training program
where they had to do three days of ejection training,
Just in case, when they're up in the air in the F-14, something went wrong,
they'd know how to get out, how to eject,
Tony was a young director
and wanted things done in a very strong visual way,
But we had to make sure you could tell the story,
I remember one battle we had with Tony
where the pilots flew with these visors that were mirrored,
so you could see reflections that looked phenomenal,
because you can see the clouds going overhead,
But you didn't know who the actors were,
You couldn't tell one pilot from the other,
So that became a huge battle with Tony
to try to keep those visors up off their faces
so you could see what the kids,,,
Because it's hard to act when your eyes are covered
and your mouth's covered, All you hear is a voice,
He wanted something that he felt was right visually,
We wanted something that we felt was right for the story
and for the recognition of the audience for the individual characters,
In the end, you get to see the pilots, so it worked out,
One of the criticisms we got from the studio
when we handed in the script is there was too much flying in it,
They said, "There's too many flying sequences,
"Nobody wants to watch a movie that's all these planes flying around,"
And we tried to convince them that that was not the case,
That it was something they'd never seen before,
And that it was just a look and a visual imagery
that has never been shot before,
Obviously, we weren't shooting down real jets,
So, this was Gary Gutierrez who built these model jets
and did all the effects, all the special effects for us,
but he did a great job,
I think the great job was in terms of achieving
the sense of scale and the sense of impact,
And the true strength of what we're doing then,
which you don't have the luxury today, in this digital world,,,
The true strength of making something feel real
was the speeds at which you shot these different jets impacting each other
or wings being blown off,
And Gary had an uncanny understanding of
what speeds you need to be running the cameras
to give a model the same scale that a real jet had,
But all this stuff here,
these were really,,, The Top Gun pilots were the cameramen,
They just had an uncanny sense of where the camera was,
and it's like an extension of their body,
And what that lens was getting of the other jets
when they're in these mid-aerial combats,
Now, there is a sequence coming up
in which we show a bunch of airplanes going round and round,
I'd like to call it a rolling scissors,
It was pretty hard to do, but it worked out very well,
We put an F-5 with an F-14 behind it, and then another F-5, another F-5,
and then just had them start rolling and getting out of phase,
And you'll notice that it comes out pretty good,
Of the 30 seconds we shot, we probably kept about 15 of it,
The odds of taking a hit, by the way,
from 20 millimeter or 30 millimeter and surviving,
at least the aircraft surviving, are not very good,
So when it shows bullet holes in the side of the airplane,
that airplane's probably not gonna stay in the air very long,
Now this is the part I was talking about,
And that's, I think, the only time a rolling scissors has ever been filmed,
But this is our biggest mission, this end shoot-out we had,
I think at any one time we had eight jets in the air,
but we needed to do it to tell our story,
But getting six jets in the air and trying to coordinate this all the time
was, I must say, a nightmare,
Because, on average, one of those jets would not fly,
One of those jets you'd put up that morning
and something was wrong with,
They'd have a safety factor wrong or the fuel lines wouldn't work
or the cameras would go down,
So we were continually being surprised
when you thought everything was all set and ready to go,
And things would never go the way you want it to go,
This was kind of long,
Dogfights normally don't last this long,
but what I took from it and what we need to take from it
is that if it's confusing to you, it's pretty confusing in the air, as well,
You have situation awareness, You have pieces,
But in terms of being able to come back
and really construct what all five aircraft are doing,
or even remember what you did, is a colossal act,
It is, again, one of the things
that we try to teach the students to remember
in terms of the reconstruction,
But this is a furball,
And it's interesting that these things start and end very quickly,
And they can start at 30,000 feet, go down to 10,000 feet,
and back up to 15,000 or 20,000 feet, all in about a minute and a half,
in an arena that's maybe five miles across,
So it's a very large area, both vertically and horizontally,
And you got a bunch of airplanes,
and then all of a sudden all the airplanes collapse into a furball
that may be as close as you're seeing here,
and then it may go back out,
and all of a sudden you can't find anybody anymore,
They're very interesting, the way they form
and the way they come and go,
And your goal is not to be fight center,
And you would never be predictable,
The whole idea is to remain unpredictable,
because if you become predictable,
a guy you don't see is gonna hit you and shoot you down,
There's another model being gotten rid of,
Realistically speaking, again, what you just saw,
Maverick obviously extended out and then turned back in,
he's gonna save the day,
Coming back into this fight, it would be very difficult,
because you're just gonna see lots of specks,
to figure out which one the good guys are
and which one the bad guys are,
So you'd just be very concerned
about launching an infrared missile into that fray
for fear that it'd probably get sucked off on the bigger TF-30
rather than the small F-5, excuse me, MiG-28,
The realistic part of the filming, too, is when you get the passes,
and the airplanes seem small and they pass very quickly
and then go off into the distance,
is actually the most realistic of the filming,
if you're gonna talk about comparison with reality,
And those things are staged for the frame,
Like there, where they become very small, very quickly,
The technical work in this movie is spectacular,
There were several nominations for the Academy Award,
and I was amazed that it didn't win sound and sound editing,
because the sound work in this picture is terrific,
And the dialogue, as it's done here, is fairly realistic,
This is a lot of the things that you would probably be saying,
We pride ourselves on what we call com brevity,
making very, very short and concise directive com,
where you need to tell guys, "Move your jet," and then clear the radio
so that the other guys can get their two cents in,
However, in this particular case, we had to explain what they were doing,
and so you'll see more com here than you would normally see,
which is something that we argued about,
but in fact we had to do it
so the people watching the movie
would understand a little more of, actually, what was happening,
Excellent, That's a really good point,
- See, now there,,, - That hurts,
That airplane's about ready to go down,
Probably gonna go down within half a minute or something like that,
He's just merely dumping fuel, and it looks like he's been hit,
Particularly, MiG airplanes all have big cannon,
They're shooting 30-millimeter, 37-millimeter,
lot of them have 30-millimeter cannon,
And you get hit by a 30-millimeter cannon,
it's an exploding round,
You take one and you're probably done,
They're showing 50-caliber hits,
And if you got hit like that, you're gonna go down,
By the way, those are real missile shots,
We went up to Point Mugu
and followed a missile shoot of real missiles,
And so the ones you see coming off the airplane,
that's real footage,
That's a real Sparrow right there,
I think the success of the aerial sequences
comes from the fact that my background was in advertising and in rock videos,
And then with my two editors, Chris Lebenzon and Billy Weber,
we were able to put all the coverage together
and make it exciting and dangerous and all the rest of it,
But in the end, what made it accessible and fun and rock-and-roll was
we'd cut it to music,
We'd hunt around and find a piece of music,
whether it was Kenny Loggins or Berlin
or Harold Faltermeyer,
We'd take a piece of music and we'd cut these sequences to music,
It feels like the music is almost in sync with the actions,
Then we'd get Harold to retune the music
to actually fit the beats more,
you know, right on the nose,
But I honestly believe the success of the aerial sequences
came from knowing how, through editing and through coverage,
to build a story and build energy and build speed and build danger,
In the old Howard Hawks days, those movies, it was one shot
where you flew alongside an aircraft and it banked away,
or you did a head-on pass of the aircraft,
And they really lacked that energy and danger,
But I think we really did capture the sense of a true dogfight in the air
in these Top Gun sequences,
- This is not unrealistic, by the way, - Exactly,
Not realistic? You saw this very scene, Pettigrew,
Actually, you do do a fly-by, I remember,,,
I don't care how low your gas is, you're gonna do a fly-by,
We did do a fly-by, but it was getting dark, It was late,
This is when we really had the engagement,
and then my wingman shot down one, and we shot down one,
So we ended up engaging four MiG-21s and shooting down two,
And we did a fly-by like this,
only there was a thunderstorm just ahead of the ship,
And when I did the fly-by, I did the aileron roll
and broke into the thunderstorm,
So we went IFR for a little bit, and then came around and landed,
And then they do,,, You get out of the airplane,
and there's everybody there, They're all jumping up for joy,
and everybody's screaming and yelling,
It's really wonderful, Yeah, just like this, in fact,
I think I'll brag on my two admiral friends
who were the MiG killers,
Just kind of shows you how there are not that many MiG kills,
This is a big deal,
And this is very realistic, as they said, what would happen,
Again, we're proud to have them amongst us,
because there's not that many still arcing and sparking around the Navy,
But it's funny, Val and Tom never hung out together,
because they were these young, intent actors,
so they didn't want to cloud their relationship off-screen,
So when they came on-screen, they always had these edges,
but they never spent any time together,
And Tom also did the same with Kelly, He always kept himself to himself,
He's very conscientious in terms of his work ethic,
and the same with Val,
And the only time Tom and Val and Kelly came together
was when they're on-screen,
As writers, this was our first produced movie,
And we didn't really expect it to have the impact
and be as huge a hit as it was,
And then it just sort of struck,
and once it struck, it struck such a chord nationally,
in terms of the country, and it still continues to do so,
It's really rewarding to still see that this work just sort of stands up,
It continues to be a really, sort of, interesting story
with really great characters,
I think what's exciting also is realizing
that the right people came together for this movie at the right time,
Tony Scott was the right director, Don and Jerry were the right producers,
We were the right writers,
Tom Cruise, we wrote the movie with Tom in mind, and they got Tom,
That was fabulous,
And then the great casting, everybody, Anthony Edwards,,,
It was just great elements coming together at the same time,
Great soundtrack, great imagery, the visuals,,,
And once you're around these people and around this environment,
it's so seductive you get caught up in it,
And I think that everyone shared the same vision and the same idea,
And that's why I think this movie has this lasting impression,
You see it all over,
I mean, everybody was copying Top Gun,
I mean, leather jackets,
the leather business was dead for jackets and,
all of a sudden, because Cruise was wearing this leather jacket,
it exploded,
The white T-shirts, the cowboy boots, the jeans,
that whole kind of look that Tony created
became real vogue for everybody,
I mean, you set style and fashion,
and it became very hip to be in the Navy
and become a fighter pilot,
I just remember the Navy telling us, years later,,,
No matter where I go, if I'm talking to pilots,
it influenced them going to become pilots for the Navy,
In fact, I think it was last year or the year before,
the number-one girl who graduated from Annapolis to become a pilot,
and she was the number one in her class,
they asked her, "Why did you join the Navy?"
She said, "Because of Top Gun,"
So it still reverberates today, something we did a very long time ago,
This end sequence here is at the Kansas City Barbeque,
This was our third attempt at finding an end to the movie,
And I think the way we got to this end was Jerry, actually,
We shot the end twice on the runway at Miramar, and it didn't work,
And in the end, I think what took us there was
Jerry found this piece of music, which is the Righteous Brothers,
And Jerry said, "Listen, let's reverse it and work backwards in,"
So we looked for a piece of music that we thought,,,
Well, he looked for a piece of music he thought would be a good end,
And he came up with
the Righteous Brothers' You've Lost That Loving Feeling,
And then we said, "Well, how can we work a sequence
"around this piece of music?"
And that's how we worked it,
We went back to the Kansas City Barbeque
and put it on the jukebox there,
And that's really how we came to end the movie there,
It's a corny end, but a feel-good end for this particular movie,
And it felt dead right for this movie,
I would say that I'm very proud of the movie now,
On a daily basis, as I was doing it, I was a little bit concerned,
But obviously, the movie came out very well,
and I'm very proud of the final product,
But I'm even more proud
of having been an instructor at Navy Fighter Weapons School,
We're just trying to train guys and keep them from getting killed
and trying to help the kill ratio and make us better pilots,
And little did we know what was going to end up being
and that this was going to end up happening,
But the most proud I could be is that I was actually a Top Gun instructor,
one of the great things I ever got to do in my life,
Wizard?
I had grown up always wanting to fly fighters,
and it turned out to be better than my dreams,
And the best part of that was getting the chance to be a Top Gun instructor
and get involved with that all through my career,
But particularly, all the flying that I did,
the most spectacular part of that was the chance to be a Top Gun instructor,
So it's wonderful that the movie gave the public
a chance to get into that part of a unique world
and get a pretty good look at it,
Certainly part of it's Hollywood,
because it has to be to make it a movie and make it a successful movie,
But the spirit of the place, I think, was largely captured,
even if it was a little bit of
an overblown characterization of the instructors,
But the flying, I think, was as good as you're gonna get
with photography at this point,
Great experience,
I think it's something that happened 18 years ago,
and nobody at the time, at least the people involved in that,
knew how huge the movie was gonna be,
It's a cult classic,
Again, I feel very fortunate to have been a Top Gun instructor,
I felt it put me on the,,, In terms of professionalism
and my ability to focus,
it pretty much set me on the path to a pretty nice career,
with Top Gun the movie being just the frosting on the cake,
It's hard because when you're a part of something
and you see it metamorphose as a project,
and then when it comes out, you never really gauge,,,
At least I can't gauge if it was gonna be a success or not,
I remember, we took the movie to Houston to preview it,
Unfortunately, it was the weekend that the shuttle disaster happened,
So we're sitting in an audience, and they're just dead silent,
We're looking at this movie with 600 people,
and nobody makes a sound,
And we thought we had the biggest turkey ever,
But it just hung in and hung in and hung in and just didn't go away,
And for a picture, I think it ended up doing $180 million domestically,
I can't imagine what that would be today,
That was back in, what, '85 or '86,
So it was an enormous success,
And it did the same foreign or maybe more so,,,
In today's dollars, I'm sure it's like a Lord of the Rings,
or just an enormous, enormous movie,
The movie, obviously, commercially was a huge success,
It was actually funny,
Paramount, everybody was terrified, and they thought,,,
The first screening we had at the Paramount Theatre,
and it was a rough cut,
they didn't think it was gonna do anything,
I mean, they were frightened, They just thought,,,
I'm trying to remember why there was such a negative response,
But when the movie was finally done and put out to the general public,
it had a huge response from the general public
in terms of a fun, entertaining piece of rock-and-roll,
And it made, in that day and age, 1986,
I think it was one of the top-grossing movies of all time,
But the press shredded it,
The press hated it,
After The Hunger, it took me four more years to get Top Gun,
And after Top Gun, it was a different life,
Between The Hunger and Top Gun, the phone never rang,
After Top Gun, the phone didn't stop ringing,
But life changed, definitely changed after Top Gun,
I moved to LA permanently, got a Ferrari, got another motorcycle,
lost my second marriage,
And I hope you guys enjoyed the movie, and thank you,