For your reading pleasure, please enjoy our Oscar Lessons interview with editor Eddie Hamilton about cutting together Top Gun: Maverick from Backstory Magazine’s issue 49 – now available to read! If you enjoy what you’ve read, we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the issue by subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
Eddie Hamilton on the long and rewarding journey of editing one of the biggest box-office draws of all time
By Danny Munso
Eddie Hamilton saw the first Top Gun in theaters six times when it was originally released in 1986, so the longtime editor knew better than most what kind of expectations were on the filmmakers to get this long-awaited sequel to live up to and even surpass the original. To say Top Gun: Maverick succeeded in that goal is a massive understatement. You can measure that in the film’s box-office total, which currently has it as the fifth-highest-grossing movie in U.S. history. You can also point to its awards-season tally (6, if you count such things), as not only was Hamilton nominated for an Oscar for his work cutting the film, but the movie got a Best Picture nod. Or you can go with that which is immeasurable: Maverickwas the first big release to succeed as Hollywood was attempting to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, and it has been credited with saving the theatrical movie experience. Despite the film’s success, it was a rough road to get it to meet the filmmakers’—and audience’s—lofty standards. “I’m not exaggerating,” Hamilton says. “Every single part of this film was incredibly difficult to get right. People find that hard to believe, because when you watch the film it all just flows. It’s a seamless emotional experience for the audience from beginning to end. But it was not like that. It took a lot of work and it was so difficult.”
Hamilton was brought onto the project only four months before filming began. He had never worked with the film’s director, Joseph Kosinski, but he is a trusted collaborator of producer/star Tom Cruise and producer/co-writer Christopher McQuarrie, as the trio have all worked together on the last few Mission: Impossible films as well as the upcoming entrants in that franchise, 2023 and 2024’s two-part Dead Reckoning. (As Backstory speaks with Hamilton, he is just returning from a long day of editing with McQuarrie on Dead Reckoning Part One in his hometown of London.) He wasn’t present for the three months of ground filming on Maverick, but Cruise insisted he be a part of the six-month aerial shoot. “Tom wanted me there so I could sit in on all the briefings and understood what they were trying to achieve with every sortie,” Hamilton says. “A sortie is when you send one or two planes up with a specific mission to film lines of dialogue or a specific maneuver. Then the planes would land, and we’d review the footage.” The team did two sorties per day, starting with a morning meeting at 7 a.m. where safety instructions were discussed and Kosinski would walk the actors and pilots through the plan. After breaking for lunch, the process would repeat in the afternoon until the day ended at 5 p.m. “So when I was watching the footage, I would understand which piece of story they were trying to capture or what emotion or behavior they were trying to aim for. It was invaluable.”
The process even allowed Hamilton to give the actors direction of his own. As he reviewed early footage, he realized the performances weren’t quite coming across. In a lot of the aerial sequences, their faces are covered by a flight mask and the cameras are locked down on the planes, which led to a lot of static motion in the frame. “Because our cameras are locked in the cockpit, we can’t move them, so any visual energy has to come from the horizon or the actors moving their heads,” he says. “At first the actors were trying to be like real Top Gun pilots, who don’t move too much and are always trying to conserve energy and oxygen. So I was encouraging the actors to be more dynamic and exaggerate everything to communicate the exact emotion we needed.” For his on-set work, Hamilton would simply work off his MacBook Pro with a massive hard drive. “An astonishing amount of Top Gun: Maverick was edited on a laptop in hotel rooms and on aircraft carriers.”
Maverick originally had a slightly different structure than the finished version. As with the final release, this early version began with a nod to the 1986 original: a montage of Air Force jets taking off set to Kenny Loggins’ classic song “Danger Zone.” After that, we cut to Maverick underneath the flight deck, where he’s looking out pensively to the horizon. He says, “Talk to me, Goose,” a line referencing his old aerial partner that will be repeated multiple times throughout the film. The movie then cuts to Maverick in his trailer, preparing to flight test a plane called the Dark Star for the military, and a title card reads, “Three weeks earlier.” The rest of the film plays out the same and catches back up to that opening of Maverick before he and his team embark on the movie’s final big mission. “The idea was when you got to end of the second act, you were supposed to realize you caught up to that, and the first two acts of the movie were Maverick thinking about what happened to him in the last three weeks,” Hamilton says. “It didn’t really work.” While that original open feels completely unnecessary in retrospect, it did lead to a key moment in the finished film. After Mav takes the Dark Star up, he has a moment of contemplation before taking the jet for an intense ride. It’s here the filmmakers reinserted the “Goose” line from the original opening, which immediately gives that moment a new weight. That entire scene also became emblematic of what audiences could expect from the rest of the film: a lot of intense action sequences but with a large helping of genuine, heartfelt emotion. “It was really difficult to find the tone of that moment, and we really didn’t find it until the last four months of the process.”
The way Cruise prefers to work as both a performer and a producer is to overshoot and give the team a plethora of options in the edit. “Tom knows you don’t ever really know until you watch the movie if something works or not,” Hamilton says. “Intellectually, it can work on the page, but even the best writers in the world will not be able to predict how an audience will react when they see the movie. So Tom always gives himself a lot of options, which we can then adjust editorially and get the maximum emotional impact from everything in the movie because we have all these different cards we can now play in the editing room.” This method of filming paid off handsomely when it came to the last moment between Maverick and Goose’s son Bradley, aka Rooster (Miles Teller). Their fraught relationship forms the emotional spine of the film and culminates in Rooster risking his own life to save Maverick after the latter crashes behind enemy territory. The pair steal an old F-14 and escape before dogfighting their way back home. All along, the filmmaking team knew the pair had to hug and make up at some point, but when that should happen kept changing as filming progressed, leading to them shooting multiple tries at the duo’s final embrace.
“Their conflict is what drives the mystery of the story in terms of what happened between them and how it is going to get resolved,” Hamilton says of the two characters. “We had them making up at several points in the final act. There was one while they’re stealing the F-14. There was one when they were in the air and thought they were about to die.” As they tested the movie with friends and family, they realized they were paying off the reconciliation of the characters way too early. “They had become this team before they got into the final dogfight, and we thought that would increase the audience’s emotional investment if they had hugged and made up. But it actually lessened it. It’s more tragic if they haven’t apologized and they’re not friends during that final fight.” In the actual film, the pair hugging is almost the last thing we see in the entire movie after Mav tells Bradley, “Thanks for saving me,” to which the kid says, “It’s what my dad would have done.” For Hamilton, the exchange is a keeper: “That line always gets me. It’s one of those changes that seems obvious now, but it took us a while to get there.”
Another scene they filmed multiple times was the long-awaited reunion of Maverick and Iceman (Val Kilmer), Mav’s antagonist in the first film who is now an admiral and close friend. Due to the real-life medical complications in Kilmer’s life that have left him unable to speak, Ice talks to Maverick only through a computer—and text messages earlier in the film. Still, the scene is one of the high points of the entire film. Hamilton can’t pinpoint a specific issue with the first few times they tried the scene, but when they finally got it right, they just knew. “It just wasn’t working the first two times,” he says. “It has to be a slam dunk. Everyone is waiting for that scene.” Even after filming what would end up being the final version, Hamilton says every moment of the scene was examined closely. “It took days and days of work to edit a scene that looks relatively simple. It’s only a few minutes but emotionally, everything lands perfectly. We just kept refining it. Every nuance of this movie was interrogated and stress-tested and refined and refined. Some things we would watch 20 times a day to make sure every single beat of every emotion was landing.”
Though it wasn’t part of the plan, the editing process went all the way up until the last week of work. During the sound mix—the final stop for a film in postproduction—Kosinski, Hamilton and the sound team were watching what many would see as one of the best sequences in the film: Maverick’s first real day of teaching, where he instructs the pilots how to use their new aircraft by outflying them and targeting each for a “kill,” with all of the defeats resulting in the pilots having to do 100 push-ups when they got back to the aircraft carrier. As the sequence played, Cruise arrived to watch, and when it ended, he offered a blunt assessment. “He said, ‘That’s not good enough, guys,’ ” Hamilton recalls. “And I knew he was right. I was feeling it, too. Tom said we have to take another crack at this.” This was on the Tuesday of the last week, and the mix was due on Friday, giving Hamilton a short time frame to recut the scene. The sequence the group viewed was about six minutes long and featured multiple music cues. After taking a day, Hamilton got it down to 4:50. “What happens is you interrogate every single shot and every line of dialogue and ask, Is this essential? Can it be better if I remove this? You’re assessing every shot and asking if it’s a 9 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10. And, really, Top Gun: Maverick should only have 10 out of 10 shots in.”
After Hamilton removed what he felt was excess from the scene, there was now the issue of finding the right song to play over it. A year earlier, when the sequence was a lot longer, the filmmakers tried using the Who’s classic “Won’t Get Fooled Again” as one of the cues. But when it was trimmed to six, that song no longer worked because it was too short. Now that Hamilton had cut it to just under five, he tried the song again and found it perfect. In fact, the song is slightly longer than the scene, which gave the team an opportunity to edit the song as they saw fit, resulting in the ingenious choice to move singer Roger Daltrey’s iconic scream from near the end to the very beginning as Maverick splits two jets with his own. “Tom saw it and said, ‘This works, it’s awesome.’ Everyone worked late conforming all the sound on Thursday night, and then Friday morning we did the final mix. That scene came together in the last day of a year and a half of work. It was extremely challenging, but we got there.”
That change made at the last second is emblematic of the care put forth by everyone involved with Top Gun: Maverick. It’s why the movie became one of the rare follow-ups to surpass audience expectations. “We were so desperate not to let the fans down,” Hamilton says. “It was an enormous weight of expectation we carried for two years. It was just the pressure of wanting to deliver something fantastic that lived up to the legacy of the original and didn’t let the audience down.” Mission accomplished.
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