When Top Gun 2 was first announced last year, the report indicated Tom Cruise would return for a "small role."  Shortly after, screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie (Valkyrie) corrected that notion, asserting, "There is no Top Gun 2 in which Maverick is not the starring role."  However, McQuarrie is now busy working on his second directorial feature, One Shot, which stars Cruise.  Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz (Thor) were brought in to work on the script instead, and it is unclear how big of a role Cruise's Maverick will play in their story.Cruise has starting making the rounds to promote the December 16 release of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, and as you can imagine, Top Gun 2 came up.  Cruise is committed to the project and wants to work with director Tony Scott again, but his involvement is dependent on coming up with the right story.  Hit the jump for the interview clip and quotes.Via MTV News:It seems Cruise's primary motivation is reuniting with director Tony Scott for their first collaboration in over two decades:

"I said to Tony [Scott], I want to make another movie with him. He and I haven't made a film since Days of Thunder. Tony and I and Jerry [Bruckheimer], we never thought that we would do it again. Then they started to come to us with these ideas of where it is now. I thought, 'Wow, that would be ... what we could do now."

Cruise elaborated on the necessary conditions to make the project happen:

"I hope we can figure this out to go do it again. If we can find a story that we all want to do, we all want to make a film that is in the same kind of tone as the other one and shoot it in the same way as we shot Top Gun... We're working on it."

I don't know if Top Gun 2 will ever get off the ground, but the people involved are saying the right things, speaking with a reassuring passion.  In case you missed it, this is Scott's take on how he wants to approach the evolution of the fighter pilot:

"These computer geeks — these kids play war games in a trailer in Fallon, Nevada and if we ever went to war or were in the Middle East or the Far East or wherever it is, these guys can actually fly drones.  They are unmanned aircraft.  They operate them and then they party all night."