Top Gun: Maverick Scene Narrowly Avoided Causing International Incident
The Top Gun sequel filmed by Joseph Kosinski and starring Tom Cruise is a very special movie.
It has mind-blowing dogfights, sexy fighter jets, navy pilots and fantastic stunts, which look almost impossible to make. But the film also stands aside for one particular reason – it could have caused an international incident.
In his interview with Collider, the filmmaker has revealed how certain foreign countries used their satellites to spy on them when the crew was shooting at a secret US Navy location in a desert. The spies apparently had no clue there was nothing secret going on but shooting of an action movie with Tom Cruise.
"I went to China Lake Naval Air Station, which is a Navy base out in the desert. I was doing a tour of the base looking for a hangar for the Darkstar sequence. And they said, 'You can take pictures as long as you don't point your camera over there'," recalled Kosinski saying that he was banned from taking pictures of a "hangar with a tower and barbed wire around it and a blue door."
The director was told that he would never be allowed to shoot there, but was allowed to drive by though. Kosinski said that the hangar was just perfect because it looked like a top secret hangar inside a top secret base.
"And I'm like, 'We have this sequence where we've got this secret airplane that they pull out at night, and it just looks like that's the perfect spot for it'," he said, adding that he would "die" to shoot the sequence there.
In a couple of days Kosinki got a call and the military told him that if he wanted to shoot there they need to "take what's in there, and move it out a few days before." So they did, and Kosinski was able to shoot the Darkstar sequence at an actual, very much real top secret hangar.
The director was later told that once they started shooting, "certain satellites owned by other countries actually moved in space to take pictures of it." Sounds like a scene out of a spy thriller! The very fact that these satellites managed to track it down was "amazing." If they zoomed in, "they'd see Tom Cruise is in the cockpit, which is pretty cool," Joseph Kosinski told Collider.
Top Gun: Maverick has become a smash hit once it hit the big screen in May 2022. The movie, which is the highest-grossing film of the year, earned almost $1.5 billion at the box office internationally and brought Tom Cruise some $100 million making him the highest-paid actor of 2022.