TOP GUN: MAVERICK Director Got His Camera Confiscated When He Saw Something Confidential on Naval Grounds
Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski has gone to great lengths to bring us an incredible, authentic sequel, and in the process, he hit a few funny snags that come along with shooting a movie amid top-secret military bases and classified information.
We recently reported about how Kosinski had to jump through a few hoops to shoot at a top secret hangar for the Darkstar sequence in the film, and now in a recent interview with Deadline, the director tells about what happened when he stumbled upon something that wasn’t meant for civilians to see when he was scouting out shots for the film:
The first thing I did after getting this job was, I flew out to the Teddy Roosevelt aircraft carrier. I jumped on a Greyhound, which is not the fast jet, but I did get to fly out there and catch the cable, and then I got the catapult launch off the jet. When you’re directing the film, you kind of get to become a ‘subject matter expert’, which is the Navy term—the SME—on any subject you want. So, I got to live that dream of being in the Navy for a couple years. I got to go to places that civilians don’t get to go to. I got to see things that no civilian would get to see. I had my camera confiscated at one point. Wiped clean. I took some pictures and maybe captured something I wasn’t supposed to capture, and my camera was quickly returned to me without any photos on it. I got to go to China Lake and shoot in a hangar that is top secret. And it was all in this quest for authenticity. And I think you feel it when you see it, because you don’t feel like you’re in a Hollywood-designed setting. There’s a reality to it. We collaborated with the actual engineers who make the real secret aircraft. It was just a dream come true.
That’s pretty funny that he didn’t even know enough to understand what he had captured, but they certainly weren’t going to let it go! It’s cool that he did get the chance to visit these places and draw inspiration from real life, but the military has to draw the line at taking photos of things that are classified!