Director Joseph Kosinski is the director of what was the most successful movie of 2022…until a certain batch of blue people came along. He has been sharing some anecdotes from the making of Top Gun: Maverick in Deadline, including what Val Kilmer brought to the heartwarming action movie, both onscreen and offscreen.
The camaraderie among the young cast of 1986’s Top Gun is evident in Kilmer’s 2021’s documentary Val (available on Amazon Prime). Kosinski says; “Val Kilmer was the one who came up with the idea to make Iceman ill. I’ll never forget the shoot day with him and Tom [Cruise]. That scene with those two guys, two actors at their absolute best pulling off a scene like that, their first time together on camera since 1986.”
“The friendship between the two, the mutual respect between the two of them as real people very much mirrors the characters. So, I think that’s why that scene lands so well.” Another reason that the scene lands so well is the lack of music, which score producer Lorne Balfe discussed with us last year.
Kosinski continues; “When we were putting the film together, we all wanted Val to be a part of it, but we just didn’t know what was possible. So, we had Val come in and said to him, ‘We’d love to have you in this film.’ It was his idea to make it feel as authentic as possible. Once he had that idea, it opened up that whole storyline and just allowed us to tell this story in a better way. I was blown away when he offered that up.”
Kosinski concludes; “The scene was intense and very emotional, but when the camera wasn’t running, hearing him and Tom talk about the hijinks of making the first film and how much fun they had and the tricks they were pulling on each other, and just the craziness of that time and that era, was really fun to listen in on. You really felt that connective tissue to the past.”