While finishing Mission: Impossible – Fallout in 2018 Eddie Hamilton, ACE, got a call from his agent about a Top Gun sequel. The editor was in Arizona at a test screening for the latest installment of star and producer Tom Cruise’s MI franchise but rather than interview over the phone, he jumped on the first plane out to Santa Monica.

“I read the script in Jerry Bruckheimer’s office and met [director] Joe Kosinski. He said, ‘We’re all here to make Tom’s movie.’” Cruise had been reluctant to make a sequel to the film that propelled him to superstardom in 1986, only agreeing when he felt the audience would get everything they wanted and more in the story, written by his collaborator Christopher McQuarrie with Ehren Kruger and Eric Warren Singer.

His instincts were correct. At press time, Paramount and Jerry Bruckheimer Films’ Maverick had already become the year’s biggest theatrical release with $1.1 billion and climbing. Hamilton, who also worked with Cruise and McQuarrie on M:I – Rogue Nation and upcoming Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Parts One and Two, relates that from the start, the team agreed that the key was delivering authentic aerial sequences. “Everyone knew this film would live or die on whether audiences feel the emotion of the characters in their F-18s. Everything was shot for real and built in the edit. Because there was so much material to work through it was a gigantic mountain to climb – the hardest thing I’ve ever done by several orders of magnitude.”

Hamilton remembers when Top Gun became a massive cultural milestone. He went to see it six times in the cinema. “It was like a real world Star Wars,” he says. “The film’s style felt groundbreaking even if, as a 14 year old, I didn’t understand why.” The 1986 film’s director, the late Tony Scott, and DP Jeffrey Kimball’s aggressive use of gradient filters and long lenses, and bold cutting by Billy Weber and Chris Lebenzon, ACE, templated action movies for the next decade. “When you understand how hard it is to create those textures in the film you gain a massive level of respect for what they achieved,” Hamilton says.

Top Gun: Maverick begins with a montage in deliberate homage to the original. It features the same Harold Faltermeyer music and title fonts, the same heavy filters casting a romantic glow over aircraft landing and taking off from a U.S. aircraft carrier, the same cutting style. The sequence was the first to be shot in summer 2018, and the first Hamilton cut, designed to show Paramount what they were getting.

“We wanted [the audience] to understand right from the start we weren’t going to break their trust,” says Hamilton. “From two minutes in they could relax and get on board.” It was also a harbinger for the rest of the shoot since those two minutes were culled from 15 hours of footage. “I felt the weight of expectation every day for the year it took to film, and another year to finalize editorial.” This ambitious undertaking also involved bringing back Top Gun’s Lebenzon and enlisting Stephen Mirrione, ACE.

While the ground-based story was covered with the usual 2-3 cameras the aerial work was astonishingly complex. Each twin seat F/A-18 jet had six Sony Venice cameras fitted inside the cockpit – four trained on the actor seated behind the pilot and two over the shoulder of the pilot.

The pilots wore the same wardrobe as the actors they were flying (identifying each character with a different helmet, colors and insignia). Sometimes jets were fitted with additional cameras outside the craft and an F-18 would fly the route the actors wereflying for POVs and shots looking backwards and sideways.

They would make four flights a day often with a ground-to-air unit shooting simultaneously. One day, DP Claudio Miranda, ASC, was rolling 27 cameras. The actors who portrayed pilots – including Miles Teller, Glen Powell and Monica Barbaro in addition to Cruise – were responsible for turning the cameras on in mid-air, perhaps 20 minutes into the flight when they’d reached their filming location.

They were also charged with directing themselves in the air as well as making sure the sun was in the correct place for the shot, at the correct altitude. “The skill of the pilots is extraordinary when flying so close to mountains or the bottom of a canyon at 700mph,” says Hamilton. “The margin for error is incredibly thin. You can see the adrenalin pumping through the actors. Their fear and excitement is real.”

A typical filming day would begin at 7 a.m. on the naval base (one of six used during the shoot: China Lake, Fallon, Lemoore, North Island, Whidbey Island and Norfolk) for a two-hour briefing. By 9:30 the planes would be in the air, landing an hour later having recorded 20-40 minutes of footage.

Meanwhile footage from the six camera cards was copied to the DIT rig and transcoded into files for Hamilton’s Avid laptop. “One thing we discovered was that the cameras weren’t producing much visual energy. They were bolted rock solid (for obvious safety reasons). One way we could generate energy was by having the actors move their heads more when looking around the cockpit,” Hamilton explains. “Some were being super cool and taking cues from the fighter pilots by doing as little as possible to conserve energy. After the first week of aerial filming Tom invited everyone into his room on the carrier and explained to the actors why they had to exaggerate their movements.”

Another technique was to choose shots with a moving horizon. “Jet pilots are trained to fly level to the horizon but we asked them to break that rule so that there’s always movement behind the actor. In the film you’ll notice we picked shots with good energy where possible,” says Hamilton. In the air, the actors were lit only by the sun meaning the ideal position for the shot was for the pilot to orient the plane so the sun was over their shoulder. Flying into the sun would shine hotspots onto their faces. All of these details went into the daily briefings during which Hamilton showed footage to explain what they needed.

The amount of footage shot is staggering: over 813 hours.There was simply no way one editor could even review all the footage on their own. Helping him refine and annotate the material were his team of assistants: Matt Sweat, Laura Creecy, Travis Cantey, Emily Rayl Russell and VFX editor Latham Robertson who all had their own Top Gun callsigns.

First, all camera footage per flight was synced with timecode. Then the team would review and log every significant detail, from  marking-up lines of dialogue to when an actor’s head moves – and in which direction. “It meant that Joe could ask to view all the line deliveries for a particular moment and I could jump to that bin and play back. But what it doesn’t do is necessarily tell you if you’ve captured a character’s emotional reaction for the story.”

During production, Hamilton was working out of an edit trailer in the same hanger as the F18s. He says at the end of eachday, he’d review all the footage on a split-screen playback “to see if we’d got the emotional intent of each story beat.” He notes that editors like to keep up with camera but that wasn’t possible here due to the volume of footage being generated. Also, at this point, there were no exterior shots of the jets for Hamilton to cut into the sequences and show the geography of action in the sky.

“Joe prepped meticulously with storyboards and we did previs some dogfights; this was a useful thought experiment, but it’s hard to film a real jet to match the previs closely. I’d often repurpose a previs angle into an action sequence until the actual shots were available to cut in 4-5 months later. The process was very time consuming and very slow but we gradually chipped away.”

From each 20-minute flight recording (x 6 cameras) only a few seconds made the final cut. “You start with tons of material and whittle it down and the very, very best footage rises to the top. Hand on heart, every great shot is in the movie. We were incredibly disciplined about this.”

Hamilton likens the first dogfight sequence to the montage of racetracks and driver rivalry in Tony Scott’s Days of Thunder (which, like Top Gun, was edited by Lebenzon and Weber). It started at 15 minutes, then compressed to 12 and then 8 minutes. In fact, the sequence was only finalized in the final week of the sound mix two years into the process when they swapped out the music and trimmed it even more.

“It was a never-ending pursuit of quality and excellence, making sure the film never outstayed its welcome. We were always putting our foot on the trash can to make sure every frame earned its place in the film.” Hamilton relates that the final aerial combat mission, lasting around 30 minutes, took him three months just to build the first pass working flat out 12 hours a day.

“I’d spend entire mornings looking for the perfect shot of a jet turning left – or flying inverted through a narrow canyon. Sometimes I’d add only a few seconds to my timeline each day. You can’t put average shots in Top Gun. You are constantly combing the dailies looking for something better.

As editorial proceeded he admitted he was drowning in hundreds of hours of footage. “I told Jerry I was going to failif I did it on my own. I couldn’t even watch everything let alone begin to put it together. Every single element required detailed attention.”

He continues, “It was an honor to collaborate with Chris [Lebenzon]. His sense of action, timing and pace is exquisite.” Lebenzon says, “There [were] a lot of story beats to juggle and duck in and out of ” in the final mission. The final mission run had a complex sequence of story elements, from the F-18s leaving the carrier and flying low to avoid radar, to Maverick being shot down over enemy territory, along with the character drama between Rooster (Teller) and Maverick.

Lebenzon adds that working on Maverick “brought back a flood of memories. It was the most emotional editing experienceI have ever had.” Of Mirrione, Hamilton adds, “Stephen’s great contribution was figuring out the tone of the end of the second act, when the pilots are being briefed for the mission and this is intercut with Mav inspecting his F-18.

“Stephen worked on this intercut for a long time, and found a great piece of temp score. That section didn’t change much in the months of editing that followed. He really shared the workload for a while and allowed me breathing room to catch up on the aerial sequences.”Top Gun: Maverick’s ground coverage was more conventional but not without its challenges. “There was a huge amount ofexposition that required a delicate balancing act editorially to make sure the audience connected subjectively with Maverick as he meets Penny (Jennifer Connelly) and the young pilots in the bar,” Hamilton says. “You need to convey each character’s unique personality and their hierarchy in the story very efficiently. You have to make sure Rooster gets a little more screen time for example and everything needs playing from Maverick’s point of view. Plus, in the training sequences we had to teach the audience about the stakes of the final mission so when parameters change they understand the consequences.”

Since the film is made for IMAX, Hamilton would place X-Men action figures against his 65-inch monitor to get some sense of big screen scale. “It’s a trick I learned from Walter Murch,” he explains. “It helps you imagine you’re in a cinema. I wasn’t necessarily cutting slower for anIMAX presentation.

Each shot has its own life and you cut when the energy expires. Every single angle had to look amazing.” Maverick was scheduled for a summer 2020 release but the pandemic prevented that. It also shut down filming on Mission: Impossible 7 (directed by McQuarrie and edited by Hamilton) but that turned out to the benefit of Maverick. Admits Hamilton,“The extra time the pandemic afforded us definitely resulted in a better movie.”