Top Gun: Which director made Tom Cruise addicted to piloting?

With speed intoxication, Tom Cruise already had his first Top Gun. And he only remembered Maverick and took care of going through the necessary training to be able to shoot flight scenes in the cockpit of the F / A-18. Unable to pilot it, the Navy did not want the star to play with a $ 70 million device.

The plane he takes to the end of Jennifer Connelly, the Warbird Mustang P-51 is really a mission and it’s natural for him to pilot it. But who really set foot? Tony Scott, director of the first Top Gun? No: Sydney Pollack. Based on his success at Taps, in the early 80s, the actor recently signed with the CAA (Creative Artists Agency) and met with some of their screenwriters and directors.

“I wanted (…) to make a wide range of films, from action to fantasy to musicals and dramas, but to try to evaluate and understand each of them in different ways of telling the story. “Did you get it?”Explains the actor in the Maverick press kit. “I’m watching Alan J. With Pakula Clout, cinematographer Gordon Willis, exactly in the days of the Godfather. These guys were advanced in terms of storytelling. French influences came into American cinema, but the structural sensitivity of the story remained American. These are the issues that have always fascinated me. So I met Scorsese and Coppola. The main thing for me was to master all this. “

“The first time I met Sydney Pollack, I had seen all of his films and just interviewed him. Not as a writer, but as an actor. We talked about aviation because he knew about my passion for flying and we became friends.” However, it was not until the next decade that they worked together on the film: the thriller La Firme, adapted from John Grisham’s homonymous novel and starring Tom Cruise in 1993.

And it is at the end of the footage that the actor’s passion takes the next step: “I worked on this film so much, seven days a week, that I never had time to learn to fly. So when we finished filming, Sydney offered me flight lessons and said, ‘You have to learn to fly now, or you can never do it.’ I know this is one of your hobbies, do it. He will take you away forever … “

Tom Cruise was not yet the star of Mission: Impossible at the time. But Sydney Pollack quickly realizes that he is already in the same state of mind as Ethan Hunt: “Six weeks later I took Sydney to dinner …”– Says the actor. “And he said, ‘You are a mother! Did you learn to fly so fast? “ But the game has just begun.

“Sydney was like, ‘IFR, which is the next qualifying round, it took me years, it will take you a while.’ Eat and finally, I say “pay the bill” and me. I opened my wallet, put it on the table, took out the money and looked inside: inside was my IFR license. Said, “You mother! What are you doing ?!” To which Tom Cruise replied: “What’s the matter, Sydney? It takes years … I do not have years, man.”

The fact that Tom Cruise was never filmed under the direction of Sydney Pollack obviously has nothing to do with it, especially since the two men met again a few years later: the director replaced Harvey Keitel in Stanley Kubrick’s “Whees Wide Shut” where he plays. The role of Victor Ziegler. We will see him later in several series (Will & Grace, The Sopranos and Entourage) or in films such as Orchestra Seats and Michael Clayton, before his death in 2008.