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Mission: Impossible - Final Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie had Top Gun 3 figured out after "one conversation," says the Tom Cruise blockbusters are not "hard to crack"
While promoting Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, director Christopher McQuarrie described the (very brief) ideation process of Top Gun 3, which he spent with co-writer Ehren Kruger
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Don't get us wrong - we have to imagine it takes a lot of effort to make a Top Gun movie. Not only is there serious planning involved with all those jets, but the filmmakers are also continuing one of the most beloved franchises in all of cinematic history. However, before all the difficulty of actually making the thing comes an ideation process - and according to the director of Top Gun: Maverick and the upcoming Top Gun 3, that process is actually pretty easy.
As you know if you've been following the Top Gun movies, that director is one Christpher McQuarrie, whose relationship with Maverick star Tom Cruise is largely defined by their collaboration on the Mission: Impossible films. While promoting the most recent chapter in that saga, The Final Reckoning, McQuarrie sat down for an interview oh Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast. At one point in the conversation, Horowitz asked the director if the third Top Gun movie was "harder to crack" than the second.
"It wasn’t hard," McQuarrie responded. "I thought it would be, and that’s a good place to go from as you walk into the room going, 'Come on, what are we going to do?' And [Maverick co-writer] Ehren Kruger pitched something and I went, 'Mhm actually,' and we had one conversation about it and the framework is there. So, no, it’s not hard to crack. The truth of the matter is, none of these are hard to crack."
Again, we want to clarify that McQuarrie is only talking about coming up with the movie not actually making it. The latter process, we'd sure the director would agree, takes a lot more crafting. And yet, it's in the former process that the germ of what brings audiences into a Top Gun movie is discovered, and maybe it's the fact that McQuarrie has such a handle on that idea that the ideation comes so easily.
"As you start to execute it," the director said, "and as you start to interrogate it, as you start [to think] why these movies are made the way they are [...] It’s not the action, it’s not even the level of or intensity of or the scope and scale of the action [or] the engineering around the action, it’s none of those things — it’s the emotion."
Huh - and here we thought for sure it would be "the volleyball scenes."
Top Gun 3 is currently in early pre-production.
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