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For the sequel to 1986 Top Gundirector Joseph Kosinski to the editor Eddie Hamilton The challenge of compressing 800+ hours of footage into just over two hours of film. Top Gun: Maverick Follow Maverick (Tom Cruise) back to Top Gun flight school as he prepares his new pilot class for a dangerous mission. His job is made more difficult when his late buddy’s son Rooster (Miles Taylor) joins the class. Once the jet’s exterior was filmed, Hamilton needed to scour footage to piece together the final product, which involved extensive editing to create tight, action-packed sequences.
Deadline: When you start working on the final cut Top Gun: Maverickhow many hours of footage are there?
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Eddie Hamilton: 800 to 814 hours. Honestly, it can be overwhelming at times. One day in March 2019, they had 27 cameras running because there were four jets in the sky with various cameras on them and two units on the ground filming, 27 cameras in total. I remember getting a lot of footage the next morning and I just thought it was going to be really difficult. Also, our days of shooting aerial footage were long and really stressful.The problem is, when you have a lot of footage and movies like this Top Gunit has to be great from start to finish because the entire audience wants it to be great.
So, I disassembled and labeled all the footage so I could find things super fast. But the main thing is to try to remain calm and not overwhelmed. But, to be honest, there were months when I didn’t sleep well and I just dreamed about close-ups of Hangman and Phoenix and Rooster and Maverick. Literally every night I go to sleep and all I see are their faces in their dreams. It’s your undivided attention to the raw material and the project you’re working on. Plus, there’s a lot of pressure to deliver this sequel 30 years later and hope it’s great.
Deadline: What was it like cutting footage of those scenes together with the cameras in the jet?
hamilton: You know, they shot the interiors a few months before the exteriors. So it was actually very difficult because I had to imagine what the exterior would look like. Usually what we would do is we would put these jet models on sticks and we would actually move the jets around and film them with our phones and then have this footage as an exterior shot of the jet just for show What it was supposed to do for a long time was ugly and required a lot of imagination. Then a few months later they would go and shoot the exterior shots, and slowly we would fill in the puzzle and perfect it.
Each aerial sequence initially starts with a longer duration. The first dogfight scene, where Maverick shoots down the pilot while they’re doing push-ups, starts out about 15 minutes long. There’s about 4 minutes and 50 seconds in the finished film, so you can imagine it’s just compressed, compressed, compressed, compressed, so there’s only really, really good footage left at the end. We always wanted it to be a punchy, exciting, dynamic, fun, entertaining sequence. I would say, I edited that sequence almost daily on and off for about a year. This was the last thing we did in the last week of the final mix.
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