KUALA LUMPUR, April 14 — The director of the highly anticipated Top Gun: Maverick, Joseph Kosinski said that he shot approximately 800 hours of footage for the sequel.
In an interview with Empire, Kosinski said that the number of hours he had shot for the sequel is equal to three Lord of The Rings movies combined.
“Out of a 12 or 14-hour day, you might get 30 seconds of good footage.
“But it was so hard-earned. It just took a very long time to get it all.
“Months and months of aerial shooting,” Kosinski said.
“We shot as much footage as the three ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies combined.
“I think it was 800 hours of footage,” he added.
Apart from aerial sequences, Kosinski revealed that he and the team which include producer and actor, Tom Cruise, had to teach the cast how to use the filming equipment as they needed to shoot their own cockpits scenes.
This is due to the limited space inside the cockpit which is not big enough to fit other crew members.
“We had to teach the actors about lighting, about cinematography, about editing.
“I had to teach them how to turn the cameras on and off, and about camera angles and lenses.
“We didn’t have unlimited time in these jets.
“If they were going up for 20-30 minutes, I had to make sure that we got what we needed,” Cruise said.
The sequel to the 1986’s Top Gun will see Cruise’s Captain Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell being brought in to train a new generation of Top Gun candidates ahead of a classified assignment.
The younger Top Gun graduates will be played by the likes of Glen Powell along with Miles Teller who will be playing Bradley ‘Rooster’ Bradshaw, a pilot trainee and the son of Maverick’s best friend, Nick ‘Goose’ Bradshaw.
Joining the cast are Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Lewis Pullman, Ed Harris, and Val Kilmer who will be reprising his role of Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky from the first film.
The long-awaited sequel will finally debut in theatres on May 27, 2022, following numerous delays from its originally scheduled July 2019 release date.
