If you’ve seen Top Gun: Maverick and wondered how director Joseph Kosinski pulled off making such an incredible sequel and one of the best films of the year, you’re in the right place. That’s because shortly before the film opened in theaters and shattered box office records, I landed an extended interview with Kosinski to talk about the making of the film. During the wide-ranging conversation, he shared an awesome story about flying to Paris with producer Jerry Bruckheimer to pitch Tom Cruise on the movie, and at the end of the conversation Cruise picked up the phone and called the head of the studio to say they were making the Top Gun sequel.

Kosinski also talked about being inspired by Tony Scott, how he worked with cinematographer Claudio Miranda on the look of the film, getting to work with Val Kilmer and filming his sequence with Cruise, what it was like shooting at real locations, how they got Lady Gaga, the editing process, why val-kilmer/you’ll never see an extended cut, and so much more.

Trust me, if you’re interested in the making of Top Gun: Maverick, you’re going to enjoy this conversation. You can either watch what Kosinski had to say in the player above, or read our conversation below.

And one last thing, if you missed Joseph Kosinski explaining all the reasons you should see Top Gun: Maverick in IMAX, you should watch it. This is one of those films you want to see on the biggest screen possible.

Top Gun: Maverick also stars Miles Teller as Lt. Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw, Goose's son, Jennifer Connelly as Penny Benjamin, Jon Hamm, Ed Harris, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Monica Barbaro, Charles Parnell, Danny Ramirez, Manny Jacinto, Bashir Salahuddin, Jay Ellis, Jake Picking, Raymond Lee, and Jean Louisa Kelly. The film's screenplay is written by Ehren Kruger and Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie, with story by Peter Craig and Justin Marks based on characters created by Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.

COLLIDER: If someone has actually never seen any of your work before, what is the first thing you want them watching and why?

JOSEPH KOSINSKI: I would have them start at the beginning, just in the order I made them, because I think that's been my journey as a filmmaker. In every film I've learned something new and tried to apply that to the next one, so that's, I guess that's my answer.

Which of the films changed the most in the editing room?

KOSINSKI: You know what I feel like they're all kind of really true to the script. I mean, we certainly honed this one, because we didn't have the time pressure at the end, but they all stayed pretty true. I've never had a film that like went through a massive restructure or rebuild at the end.

If you could get the financing to make anything you want, what would you make and why?

KOSINSKI: When I was a kid in high school, I loved the book, The Fountainhead, and making that as a, like a period 1930s film would be pretty epic.

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I read that you went to Paris when Tom was filming Mission Impossible to pitch him on Top Gun: Maverick. How much had you talked previously about the project or was this like your first time actually talking to him?

KOSINSKI: Tom says we talked about it on Oblivion, but it was probably very general and very high-level. Tom was shooting Mission. It was Jerry (Bruckheimer) who called me in, and they had a script they had been working on, which I read and it, and I had some ideas about how I would do it differently, I guess I would say. When I pitched Jerry my approach, he said, "Well, we got to go, you got to talk to Tom about this directly, so let's go to Paris." He was shooting Mission 6, and we went out there and we found a half hour break in the day. McQ (Chris McQuarrie) was very generous to let Tom go for a half hour.

I think what I didn't realize, and Jerry was probably smart not to tell me was that Tom really didn't want to do another Top Gun movie. I think he walked into that room prepared to say, "Thank you for coming all this way, and I appreciate it, but I'm not interested in making another movie." Then at the end of that meeting, he picked up the phone, and he called the head of the studio and said, "We're making another Top Gun." So, that was a pretty epic meeting, and pretty amazing to see that level of power on display.

What was it like though? When you go in to sit down with Tom, and obviously you've worked with him before, are you actually like practicing your pitch on the plane when you're flying over, or are you just thinking about it and how you're going to, you know what I mean?

KOSINSKI: It was very more conversational. I had kind of my four big ideas that I wanted to talk through. I had some visuals. I had some videos. I had a poster, I had a title. I had kind of like the big stuff, but it was really, the most important thing was the story, and it was this character journey of Maverick and what it was going to be. I mean, that was the thing I think that really got him hooked, was there was finally something that he could latch onto emotionally, which was this reconciliation with Goose's son. That drew on what was most powerful, and people remembered the most from the first film, which is that friendship with Goose.

Then just like looking at that little kid with the cowboy hat, sitting on the piano in that scene in the first movie, and thinking about him growing up and what that would mean if he became a Naval aviator and Maverick had to send him into combat, what that would feel like. I think that's where Tom finally said, "You know what? That's it. That's what's worth coming back for."

You obviously had your release date punted about 27 times. I'm just curious, when you have that much more time, are you going back into the edit, like in 2021 and 2022? When did you actually finish this movie?

KOSINSKI: We finished the cut in 2020, pretty close to when the movie was supposed to come out originally. Then we all went off and made other films, which is good. We all stayed busy. Certainly, we had time to do a couple little finishing touches to the mix and the picture. We didn't have to rush anything. In hindsight, that extra time was good to just make sure it was exactly as we wanted, but the cut was locked. I mean, the movie, even from the very first preview was always, always felt like it was on really solid ground.

A lot of people are very excited about Lady Gaga contributing a song to the soundtrack. Had you gotten her for the soundtrack way back when, or was this a new edition in the last like year?

KOSINSKI: No, this was back in 2019. She wrote the song, and we heard it played at the record label, went down there and they played it for us, which is nerve-wracking as Jerry would say, because they're about to play a song from a superstar, and what if you don't like it? What do you say? Luckily, from the first time we heard it, we were like, "That's it. "Somehow she just wrote a classic melody that works. Then when Hans Zimmer heard it, he orchestrated the score, the love theme around that melody. So, it was pretty amazing to see how powerful that song is, and how he was able to weave it into the score.

Were you nervous at all, because obviously this song has been done for a while. Have you been like dreading this song leaking prior to the movie coming out?

KOSINSKI: No, because you're always sitting on stuff. You're sitting on these files and the picture and the trailers. So, no. I mean, we're all professionals. We know how that stuff needs to be handled, and you're not blasting it in your car, out in public, but I'm excited that people are finally going to get to hear it.

Yeah. I'm still waiting to hear the unreleased Draft Punk songs from Tron: Legacy. Just throwing that out there.

KOSINSKI: Next time I see you, we can listen to those together.

You and Tom clearly have a great working relationship. During the making of Maverick or even in the last year or two, have you guys had those conversations of, "So what are we going to do next?"

KOSINSKI: I mean, I'm always thinking about it. Obviously, having that relationship is a pretty amazing thing. It's just about figuring out, like what's that story? He's obviously got his plate full with Missions for the next year or two, and then I hear he is going to space after that. So, he's a busy guy, but I'm always thinking about looking for something that would be great to work with him on.

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I'm always amazed that Tom is able to get insurance on his movies. Do you get involved in those conversations with the studio and insurance or are you sort of like, "You got it, right. Okay, let's go film."

KOSINSKI: I never ask. I just shoot, and yeah, I don't ask those questions.

Obviously, Tony Scott directed the first one and you obviously have to balance the nostalgia, while also making your own movie. I'm specifically talking about shots that could be inspired by Tony Scott. So, can you sort of talk about where that line was when you were directing like, "Oh, I want to homage Tony. I want to nod Tony." You know what I mean?

KOSINSKI: Yeah, yeah. No, I've never used like sunset grads in my footage before. That's certainly a Tony Scott thing. Tony created a world. It's like the Top Gun cinematic universe, where the sun is always setting. Everything's backlit. Everyone looks great. It's like, it's a look and a feel, and I wanted this film, just as Maverick gets called back to Top Gun, I really wanted the audience to feel like they were going back to Top Gun as well. So, that first five minutes of the movie tells you're in a Top Gun film, but then we get into that opening sequence and it becomes its own thing. It becomes its own film that looks very different.

The last half hour of the film looks, takes that Top Gun aesthetic and flips it on its head and becomes something totally opposite. So, I wanted it to feel like a Top Gun movie, the first movie set the bar very, very high cinematically, and Claudio and I knew that we'd have to meet that bar and try to exceed it with some of this aerial photography. So, that's, we did our best, and I guess the audience will decide if we were successful.

The answer's yes. Talk a little bit about working actually with Claudio on the color scheme that you were going for and like the look you were going for, and just collaborating with him on the cinematography.

KOSINSKI: We wanted it to feel like, I wanted people to be able to put the first movie up and our movie, and feel like, not that it's the same. We don't want the cover band version of Top Gun, but that it feels like it's in the same universe. So, we shot with the long lenses on the ground, the wide angles up in the sky. We have those deep shadows that grade, that just feels like the first film. We actually developed a film grain that is a close match to the film stock that was used on the first film, even though we shot digitally. So, I haven't added, I haven't used film grain in a film I've done before, but for this one, it just made sense, because it didn't really feel like Top Gun until you had that on there. It just, I just wanted it to feel like a Top Gun film. There's some of those things that do that. It was fun. It was fun to live in that universe.

How did you and Claudio decide what cameras you wanted to use? Can you sort of talk about the cameras you chose to use on the film?

KOSINSKI: Claudio and I had been working with Sony on a new prototype camera. We had just shot a short film called The Dig with something new called the Sony Venice, which is a 6K, very high-quality camera that is certified by IMAX as being…it's not made by IMAX, but it's IMAX quality in that'll hold up at on 100-foot screen. Then we worked with them. They were developing a prototype, where you can take the Venice Camera and split it into two pieces, so that the sensor in the lens is one piece, and then you have a fiber optic cable connecting you to the recorder, which is separate. What that allows is, the actual sensor and camera can be a very small box that allows you to put it in very small places.

So, we worked closely with the Navy to get clearance to put...at first, we wanted to get one, then two, then four, and then we finally end up with six in the cockpit by taking out all this other equipment they didn't need. We were able to just capture all those interiors for real, which is, you just can't fake that. You can't fake the forces on your body and the way the light moves around the canopy, and the way the terrain sweeps by the lens. We got that all for real. It's just, it's an old-school way of making a film, but with new technology.

I don't know how many of these cameras are actually in existence. Do they have tons of these cameras?

KOSINSKI: They do. Yeah, we were the first to use it, but now they're widely-used. In fact, they've just come out with the Venice 2, which is a successor. So, we're going to look, obviously start looking at that, and see what that's like.

For me, seeing Val Kilmer in the movie meant a lot. Can you talk about getting to work with Val, and just making sure he was in the movie?

KOSINSKI: Yeah. We all wanted to figure out a way for Iceman to be in the film. Val came in and met with Jerry and I, and he actually had the idea of how to integrate himself into the film, which was incredible. To work with someone like him, of his caliber, some of my favorite characters, like his character in Heat is one of my all-time favorites, to get to work with him in one of his most iconic roles, and then to be able to do a scene with him and Tom together, and see that relationship, which has developed, over the last 35 years, that rivalry between the characters to become the friendship it is in this film, it was very emotional to be there to film that scene. But, it's also one of my favorite to watch in the movie.

I don't want to spoil it, but there's a great line at the end of that sequence. Who came up with that line, because it's so good?

KOSINSKI: That was a line in the script that we loved. We played around in this scene. We played with versions that had it out and had it in, and I'm so glad we put it in, because I was at CinemaCon, and it was great just to see how the audience reacted.

100%. You needed the Navy to sign off on this movie. Was it one of these things where when you guys approached them, it was it almost like, "Oh, you're making a Top Gun sequel. Yes.”

KOSINSKI: Yes. On the first movie, it wasn't that way, from what I understand with Jerry, but given how the first movie was received and what it did for the Navy, I'm the benefit of being able to walk in there and have them say, "Yes. What would you like? Where would you like to shoot? What do you need?" So, we got to shoot not only on the carrier and on the bases that you would expect, but we got to shoot in some places that people would never get to see, the public never gets to see, top secret spaces. So, it was a pretty amazing opportunity.

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Was there anything that you guys asked for that they actually said, "This is a little too top secret. We can't do that."

KOSINSKI: There were a couple times where I took some pictures that had to be erased off my camera, things like that. Wandering around some of these spaces, but they did a good job of kind of keeping the secret stuff secret, and we got to put our stuff in place.

So, you shot on the Roosevelt, and I believe that was the name of the ship.

We shot on both. We shot the Roosevelt and on the Lincoln.

When you're shooting on those kinds of ships, are there parameters before you step on the boats, that basically it's like you have three days or you can shoot this. Could you sort of explain that?

KOSINSKI: We were on the Lincoln for a few days, and then we were on the Roosevelt for two weeks. Basically, they were in the middle of doing their training operations, so there were windows during the day where they had full-on flight operations going, where we could shoot from certain places to get that footage. But between their flight operations, when the deck was quiet, was when we could go out and do our scenes that we needed to do. Then there were times where they were practicing catapult launches where we were able to get Tom in the plane, and we launched him off that carrier, I think, four or five times.

To capture that in camera, obviously, you see it in the trailer, you see it in the film. It was a very difficult environment to work in. I mean, my bunk was right under the where the wire was that catches the plane. So, all night long, and they're running night ops all night. So, you're not getting any sleep. You're working long days, but there's just no replacement for being on the real thing.

Well, the footage of Tom taking off is jaw- dropping. At what point did you realize, oh wow. This is really going to look good?

KOSINSKI: I think our first aerial test that we did with Tom. We did a test day right at the beginning of the shoot, just to kind of work out the kinks. We sent him up with a top gun pilot to fly some of the low-level training routes around Fallon, Nevada, and which eventually became that sequence in the middle of the film where Maverick flies the route alone. When that footage came back, I think we all knew we had something special.

I believe at some points you had 27 cameras going. When did you have 27 cameras? Was that on the boats?

KOSINSKI: No, that was probably out in Fallon, when we were running two airplanes with actors in them, six cameras each. So, that's 12 cameras on actor interiors. We were probably running two jets with exterior cameras, two each. So, that's another four. Then we had probably two or three ground units, which are two cameras each, shooting ground to air. Then we had an air to air unit, which is either jet to jet or helicopter to jet. Then I may have had some cameras on the runway too, doing takeoffs and landings. So, yeah, I think there was a day where, just because of all the activity that was going on, we had that many cameras, and then obviously Eddie Hamilton in the trailer, just getting that amount of footage in, it was just nonstop, just combing through it all. It was pretty epic.

That's actually what I wanted to ask you about you. I read that you had as much footage as Lord of the Rings, making this movie. How the hell do you edit something like that when you have so much footage of flying, and so many cameras capturing great looks? How do you figure that out? Like, because I'm sure you have multiple shots that look great.

KOSINSKI: You're combing through it all. You're looking for those moments. Like, it could be a second where the sun glints off the lens, on a shot on the belly of the plane, and the vapes are coming off the wings, and you just get like those moments that are so special, and you're just combing through, you find that. You put it in a bin, save it. Then you scroll through the next 45 minutes till you get another one. So, like I said, we had an incredible editorial team, Eddie Hamilton, who's just an incredible editor, spent I think, the whole summer of 2019, basically assembling that third act sequence. Just the first assembly took him like three months to put the first pass at that together.

You know I like talking about editing. I think the movie's a little over two hours. I apologize. I don't know the final run time. What was like your first cut? Did you have an original director's cut that was like two and a half hours, or was it always about two hours?

KOSINSKI: No, I didn't do a director's cut. We really just started putting the movie together as we shot it. So, I think by the time we had finished shooting, we just had a film. First pass, it was probably 2:35, I would say, to have everything in there. But very quickly we were cutting it down. So, there's a couple scenes, they're left out. There's a couple, like there's a shot in the first trailer of Maverick looking up at the F-14 on the stick, things like that, that didn't make it in. But for the most part, it was just about, the shot or the scene had to be pretty good to make it into this cut.

I would imagine that the theatrical release is your cut, your director's cut. Is there for the Blu-ray are you going to include like a longer cut of the film, or is it just deleted scenes?

KOSINSKI: I don't know if we've decided what we're going to put on the Blu-ray yet. I think there will only be one cut. This was the best cut we could come up with. There aren't multiple cuts. There's not extended versions. But yeah, I'm not sure if we're going to do those other scenes or not.

Tom has this great chemistry with Jennifer Connelly in the movie. Like it's just really good. Did you guys do some sort of rehearsals, or was that just because they're great actors?

KOSINSKI: They're great actors. They've both been working a long time. They've kind of both grew up in the business. Jen's maybe been working longer than Tom, because she started in Once Upon a Time in America. That was her first film. So, I had just done a movie with Jen, and just had an incredible experience working with her, and I thought that she would make a great Penny Benjamin. It's amazing they had never crossed paths in their careers, and yeah, from the first moment they were together. I was like, "This is going to be great." So, yeah, she's fantastic in the film.

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When you think back on the making of the film, I'm sure there was a million tough days or days where you thought, "I don't know how we're getting through this", but what's like a day or two that you really thought we're not going to get through this? Like, I don't know how we're getting these shots.

KOSINSKI: You wouldn't believe this. The aerial stuff was really, really tough and challenging to get, but one of the hardest scenes to get, because it was largely, had factors that are out of my control, was the sailing sequence with, when Penny and Maverick go out on that racing boat. The first two times I tried to shoot it we had no wind. So, it was me, Jen and Tom sitting on this boat out in the middle of the San Diego Bay with nothing happening. It was like the worst, and there's nothing we could do about it, because the weather wasn't cooperating.

So, we ended up, after two times striking out with wind, we went up to San Francisco, and shot that scene in the San Francisco Bay, where it's windy all the time apparently, and we had everything. But if you see that scene, it's the real deal. It's Jen and Tom out on this racing boat, and the water's coming up over the camera housings, and I'm on another boat with Claudio next to it, trying to film it with a big arm, and we've got a helicopter going around, and that was a challenge. But, it was definitely a memorable one for me.

When I was watching it, I was like, "Oh, those are real waves.”

KOSINSKI: The real deal.

So, I heard that you might be doing some F1 movie perhaps, down the road this year. I'm not 100%. Is this movie happening? What are you allowed to say about it?

KOSINSKI: It's really early, so I can't say too much about it, other than, I really love these kind of grounded stories that happen in our world. I'm interested in making a movie for the big screen, a movie that has to be seen on the biggest screen possible. I've always wanted to make a racing movie. I think, as I told you last time, we did one of these. I got pretty close on Go Like Hell, which eventually became Ford v Ferrari. That was always the movie, one of those that got away, and I wanted to make a racing film, a very authentic, great racing film for a long time. So, we're working on it right now, and fingers crossed, will be shooting it sometime next year.

Is it one of these things where it's going to be a beneficiary of what you learned on Top Gun, in terms of filming with the aerial sequences and the smaller cameras?

KOSINSKI: Oh, for sure. Like I said, every movie for me, is a learning experience that I can apply to the next one, and what I learned on Top Gun is incredible. So, yeah, definitely thinking about how to take all the camera stuff that we developed on this to the next level.

What's interesting is most people have a year or two break between their projects, and you have a movie coming out like weeks after Top Gun, called Spiderhead.

KOSINSKI: Yeah.

For people that are not familiar with it, what is it about? What are you excited for people to see in it?

KOSINSKI: What I like about Spiderhead is it's not based on any real known IP. It's a short story by an author named George Saunders that was published in the New Yorker. It was a movie that we shot in Australia with Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller and Jurnee Smollet. Shot right in the heart of the pandemic when everything was locked down. It doesn't fit in any box and was really fun. It's fun for me to do something big and then something a little bit smaller and a little bit more different, and that certainly checked that box.

I'm so curious about casting…going back to Top Gun for a second. How do you figure out with casting, with some of the smaller roles? I would imagine there was just a lot of interest from a lot of parties that wanted to be a part of this film.

KOSINSKI: I had a great casting director, Denise Chamian on it. She was pulling faces and people that I hadn't seen before, or wasn't familiar with. Some people dropped out when I explained to them how we were going to shoot the movie, that we were shooting it for real, and they'd be in real fighter jets. But basically, what I would do is, I would look at all the faces, read them, narrow it down to kind of my top two or three. Then I would play the sit-down with Jerry and Tom and play the tape with them when it came down the final two choices, and drawing on their combined 80 years of experience, was able to kind of get the final selections. Obviously, I think you'll agree, the casting worked out. We got a great young cast. The chemistry you feel between them was authentic. It was just like that off screen. We had so much fun making the movie

On that note, I am out of time. I will just say seriously, congratulations on the movie, and obviously I want it to be a huge hit for you, and thank you for giving me your time.

KOSINSKI: Thank you, man. Look forward to seeing you soon.

Top Gun: Maverick is now playing in theaters around the world.