Tom Cruise will once again take to the skies as ace pilot Maverick this summer, in the new sequel to Top Gun. But has recently admitted he never thought the film would happen.
Speaking to Empire, Cruise and producer Jerry Bruckheimer said the project almost didn’t happen because they couldn’t figure out a cohesive way to do it.
“Everywhere I went, people would be like, ‘Do Top Gun’, and I’m like, ‘Guys, I don’t know how to do it’,” said Cruise.
“I don’t know what the story is. I don’t make movies just to make movies. I was like, ‘Jerry, it’s never going to happen’. I honestly never thought I would make it.”
Apparently, it was Bruckheimer’s tendency towards blockbuster special effects that got Cruise over the line.
We just started talking. And I realised that there were things that we could accomplish cinematically.
“And I started getting excited about this big challenge of, ‘How do we do it?’ So I said to Jerry, ‘I’ll do it if…’ meaning, I’m not going to do the CGI stuff.”
To be expected from a man who does all his own stunts, Cruise flies his own jet in the movie. In the last Top Gun project, the actor admitted he experiences some serious G-Force during filming. This time around, he wanted every other member of the cast to know what it was like.
“What’s different about this movie is that [in the original Top Gun] we put the actors in the F-14s and we couldn’t use one frame of it, except some stuff on Tom, because they all threw up,” admitted Bruckheimer.
“It’s hysterical to see their eyes roll back in their heads. So everything was done on a gimbal. But in this movie, Tom wanted to make sure the actors could actually be in the F-18s.”
According to Cruise, “I said to the studio, ‘You don’t know how hard this movie’s going to be. No-one’s ever done this before.’ There’s never been an aerial sequence shot this way. I don’t know if there ever will be again, to be honest.”
You can check out some of Tom Cruise biggest and best Mission Impossible stunts below.
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