How Top Gun: Maverick editor Eddie Hamilton has curated “spicy, exciting” series

For the 1986 sequel bossDirector Joseph Kosinski challenged editor Eddie Hamilton to compress more than 800 hours of footage into a film just over two hours long. Top Gun: Maverick follows Maverick (Tom Cruise) who returns to Top Gun Flight School to prepare a new class of pilots for a dangerous mission. His job becomes more difficult when his late partner’s son, Rooster (Miles Teller), joins the class. After shooting the jets’ exteriors, Hamilton had to sort through the footage to assemble the final product, which required a lot of editing to create tight, action-packed sequences.

DEADLINE: When you started working on the latest version of Top Gun: MaverickHow many hours of footage was it?

Eddie Hamilton: 800 to 814 hours. To be honest, it was very overwhelming at times. There was a day in March 2019 that had 27 cameras going because there were four jets with different cameras in the air and two units on the ground making up 27 cameras. And I remember the next morning I got so much footage and I thought it was going to be very difficult. The days we shot the aerial scenes were also very long, it was just very intense. And the thing is, if you have a lot of such shots and a film bossit has to be great from start to finish because the whole audience wants it to be great.

So I broke down all the footage and tagged it so I can find things super fast. But the most important thing is to try to stay calm and not get overwhelmed. But to be honest, there were months when I didn’t sleep very well and only dreamed of close-ups of Hangman and Phoenix and Rooster and Maverick. Literally every night I went to sleep and all I saw were their faces in my dreams. This is exactly how you become immersed in the raw material and in the project you are doing. Add to that the immense pressure of delivering this sequel after 30 years and wanting it to be brilliant.

DEADLINE: What was it like composing footage for the beam camera scenes?

HAMILTON: You know, they filmed the interior months before they filmed the exterior. So it was very difficult because I had to imagine what the outside would look like. Very often we would have these model jets on sticks and we would literally move and film the jets with our phones and then post that footage as an exterior shot of a jet just to show what it is. will do For centuries it was very difficult to look at and required a lot of imagination. Months later they went to film the exterior shots and slowly we filled in and refined the jigsaw a bit.

Each air series originally started much longer. The first dogfight scene, where Maverick shoots the pilots and they do the push-ups, started after about 15 minutes. In the finished film, it’s about four minutes and fifty seconds long, so you can imagine it’s just compressed and compressed and compressed and compressed, leaving only the very best shots at the end. We always wanted it to be such a fast-paced, exciting, dynamic, fun and entertaining series. I’ve been editing this sequence for about a year, I’d say, off and on almost every day. And that was the last thing we finished in the last week of the final mix.