12 minute read
INDUSTRY LENS•DAVID NOWELL ASC
AIR FORCE
By Michael Goldman
The recent $1.377billion box-office success of Top Gun: Maverick, the long-anticipated sequel to 1986’s Top Gun, is not only good news for fans of action films featuring rowdy flyboys.
The film’s stratospheric success also illustrates that is perfectly possible to make a blockbuster sequel decades after an original film’s run, while keeping the franchise’s foundational appeal intact and paying homage to the original filmmakers – in this case, the late director Tony Scott who made the 1986 movie, with Jeffrey L. Kimball ASC working as the cinematographer.
For the new film, director Joseph Kosinski, cinematographer Claudio Miranda ASC and producer/star Tom Cruise, wisely concluded that one key to the franchise’s success is the starkly real, teeth-crunching aerial cinematography that quite literally brings audiences inside the cockpit of modern fighter jets soaring around the skies.
To accomplish those aerials this time around, they returned to the franchise’s roots by bringing in David B. Nowell, ASC, to serve as director of photography on the aerial unit. Nowell previously served as aerial camera operator on
The big difference between the two films is that we could get cameras into the cockpit this time… this movie is the real thing
the original film, and since then, has become renowned as one of the top aerial cinematography experts in the world. His credit list is very long, and includes multiple movies in the Jurassic World, Pirates Of The Caribbean, Mission:Impossibe, Ant-Man and Fast & Furious franchises, amongst many others.
During a recent conversation with Cinematography World, Nowell offered fond memories of the 1985 project that helped raise his industry profile, and interesting context on the similarities and differences between how aerial imagery was captured in the first film and more recently on Top Gun: Maverick.
First Time Around
After graduating from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Nowell searched for ways to break into the film industry before getting hired as an assistant on a local production. Soon after, he met the well-known aerial cinematographer Rexford Metz who began to mentor him and suggested Nowell’s services to various contacts across the industry.
“Rex handed my name over to Continental Camera Systems, now defunct, which was in the process of building a brand-new helicopter mount,” Nowell recalls. “I happened to be at home at the right time when they called, and they invited me to take a look at what they were doing. I ended-up working for them for free for about four months, and since I was around the helicopter and mount all the time, they started sending me out on jobs.
“Until then, I really didn’t know anything about the aerial end of cinematography. Of course, back then, there were just two standards to deal with – 35mm mostly for features and 16mm for TV sports and news. People would come in and rent the Continental mount with a 16mm camera on it, but they needed someone to shoot it. The late John Carroll, the VP of the company at the time, told them I could do it, so that is what got me started. And then it progressed from there.
“Eventually, Continental Camera Systems developed an aerial periscope system called Astrovision, and eventually used it extensively on
the original Top Gun in a Learjet, piloted by aerial cinematography expert Clay Lacy. It was like a periscope in a submarine, except that it was directed through the floor or roof of the Learjet.”
In early 1985, Tony Scott’s crew was prepping the original Top Gun, working with US Navy officials to figure out what kind of planes and equipment he could use, and how to film with them. Nowell says that Scott wanted to put a camera into the cockpit of an F14 fighter jet so that it could look backwards at actors sitting in the cockpit’s backseat.
“Tony had seen a little article that was written about Continental Camera and another special little camera they had developed which had been used in the skydiving sequences on the James Bond film Moonraker (1979, dir. Lewis Gilbert, DP Jean Tournier AFC). I was asked to bring the camera down to them for testing. So I drove it down to the Miramar Air Base in San Diego, and that is where I met Tony and the cinematographer on the original film, Jeffrey Kimball ASC, for the first time.
“The camera was small enough to fit into the cockpit, but the problem was that Tony Scott wanted to shoot Anamorphic, because he loved the 2.35:1 format. At that time, nobody was using Super 35mm much, or even knew much about it. However, at the end of 1984, I worked on a movie called Choke Canyon with cinematographer Dante Spinotti ASC AIC. That was Dante’s first job in the United States and he shot it Super 35, which educated me and him about how to use that format and cover it with specific lenses.
“When Tony Scott was looking at Panavision lenses at the time, the widest lens they made was 28mm. That thing was huge, almost six inches in diameter. The problem was the close focus was only about four-andhalf feet. So to mount a camera in the plane’s cockpit, we literally would be inches away from the pilot’s face, and that didn’t work. So, I asked him about using Super 35, where we could put a prime lens in there and still shoot the 2.35:1 format, with lenses that only weighed ounces and which could focus about ten-inches away.
That introduced a whole new idea to Tony and Jeffrey, and so the original film was shot spherical in Super 35.”
As it turned out, on the original film, Nowell says that attempts were made to film Cruise and other actors in the backseat of an F14 fighter jet with cameras mounted in the cockpit, “but the problem was that none of that material could be used as nothing was scripted or matched later footage. So, everything in that film showing the actors flying in the cockpit was shot on a mock-up on a stage.”
That would change for the new film (see below). But the original film, Nowell emphasises, like the new one, did feature extensive air-to-air cinematography. For those scenes, he says the Astrovision system rigged onto a Learjet was the primary air-to-air filming solution for material shot in the airspace around both Miramar and the Fallon Naval Air Station, in Reno, Nevada, over the course of about two weeks.
“That’s how we did the air-to-air work back then. However, Tony wanted to punch the whole sequence up, and knew that we needed super-long lenses so that the jets could fly right at the camera or away from the camera, or suddenly drop into the frame, or veer left or right. We simply couldn’t do that in the air because we had to fly at the same speed. We could capture a quick manoeuvre, but to stay with them and get the idea of the tremendous speed they were flying required a long lens effect.
“So, Tony decided to put cameras on top of a mountain range near Fallon that was so high that we could film jets flying at about 3,000-feet and have them be about at our level. I remember sitting up on one of those mountains one day when Tony explained his philosophy about how the aerial manoeuvres would fit into the movie. He said he wanted to take those shots, many unscripted, and cut it all together into an action sequence that felt like a Rocky movie boxing match, complete with top-notch music.
“And that is what he did, and where I learned that idea from, and we definitely carried it on into the new Top Gun movie. For the new film, we once again spent almost a week on top of a different mountain inside of Fallon’s Military Operating Area (MOA).”
The New Top Gun: Maverick
Fast forward about 33 years, and planning was underway in 2017 for the new Top Gun: Maverick movie. The film was completed in 2019 but then saw its big-screen IMAX release delayed on multiple occasions due to the Covid-19 pandemic. By this time, Nowell was a grizzled industry veteran who already had existing relationships with Miranda, Kozinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who called him to tell him the new film had been greenlit and asked him to join discussions on how to film the new air-to-air sequences.
I had talked to Tony Scott over the years about how to shoot a sequel – in fact, I had discussions with him the Wednesday before he passed away in 2012,” Nowell recalls. “Jerry told me they wanted to bring in as many people as they could from the original Top Gun, so of course I said ‘sure’ when he asked me.”
When Nowell went to those early meetings, he brought with him “in my back pocket” details about new kinds of jets that would allow for more flexible aerial cinematography, plus all manner of camera mounts and related equipment that could work with the Sony Venice digital camera system that Miranda chose for the production.
“I had been working with a jet called an Aero L-39 Albatros, which allowed us to put a camera system on the front of the jet,” he explains. “So, by the time we went into the meetings for Top Gun: Maverick, I told them we had the ability to have a stabilised system mounted on the exterior of a jet with a zoom lens on it. Prior to that, with the Astrovision system and a Learjet, we only had a 50mm lens, but with no stability of any kind – it was just bolted to the floor of the jet. To have stability on a longer lens was something I always wanted for this kind of work.”
Nowell adds that aerial work on the film relied
heavily on the L-39 jet and a helicopter as primary aerial vehicles. But early-on in the development of equipment that would work for the film, he encountered the owner of an Embraer Phenom 300 executive jet and quickly decided it needed to be added to the mix.
“I met a guy who owned a Phenom 300 and wanted to build out the executive jet around a camera system,” he says. “We realised we could put a camera on the nose and tail and have two cameras running simultaneously inside the comfortable cabin of a jet, with the director, a technician, myself and a pilot all onboard.”
For the cockpit scenes, this time around, working closely with the US Navy, Miranda and Kosinski were able to film all scenes of actors playing pilots in the air, rather than on a tricked-out stage, as filmmakers had to do in the 1980’s. Nowell feels this gave all the air-to-air sequences in the new movie a more organic feel than ever before.
“The Shotover F1-J aerial camera mount, developed especially for Top Gun: Maverick, worked great with the Venice camera,” he says. “The F1-J has stronger torque motors that allowed us to pan-and-tilt at up to 400mph and take higher G’s, up to approximately 3.5 G’sm up in the air. But for the camera and recording system to fit on the mount, we were limited at first to the length of the zoom lenses that we could use. Claudio eventually said, let’s use Fujinon Cabrio Series telephoto lenses, 20-120mm and 85-300mm, because physically they fitted there. “Then, for a lot of the cockpit stuff that Claudio did, he was able to shoot with four cameras in the cockpit of an F18 fighter jet, looking rearwards at actors in the back performing as pilots, while the jets were all flown in actuality by Navy pilots, and two cameras looking forward over the real pilot’s shoulders. He was able to remotely mount the recording pack thanks to the Sony Rialto system, designed to work with the Venice.”
Nowell emphasises that despite the production’s seemingly death-defying aerial stunts, all aspects of the aerial cinematography were closely supervised by NAVAIR (Naval Air Systems Command) – the US Navy’s operation and safety unit.
“Safety was as real big deal with them,” he says. “They wanted to see how many G’s a camera could take, how it would be configured, and whether it would interfere with the ability of the pilot to eject, if needed, from the plane. They also approved all the mounts and helped the production come up with ways to mount cameras on the belly, forward or aft of the aircraft.
“All the actors and crew who would be involved with aerial work had to go through a safety training course and get used to pulling sustained G’s up in the air. They have to make sure you know how to use the ejection seat to get out of the aircraft if you have to, and if you land in water, that you can get into the life raft located underneath the seat you just ejected with. People were also put through hyperbaric oxygen chamber testing to make sure they could handle high altitude and so forth.”
Overall, Nowell says the biggest ways that stateof-the-art aerial cinematography work has changed over the many years between the two Top Gun movies are the cameras themselves – the industry, of course, converted heavily over to digital systems during those intervening years – and the new jets available to productions like this one.
“We basically have newer jets and camera systems we can use, but all of those have now been industrystandard for several years,” he says. “It’s really a question, both in the 1980s and now, of applying what is available in the proper way, and I’m proud we were able to do that both times.
“In terms of the footage, I think the big thing that is different between the two films is that we could get cameras into the cockpit this time, rather than relying on actors in a mock-up on a stage. This new movie is the real thing. We really are flying inside an F18, with Tom Cruise and others really pulling seven G’s while doing it – pretty much the limit that an F18 can do. It was no joke, that’s for sure.”
Safety was as real big deal… they wanted to see how many G’s a camera could take
Images: (top) David Nowell ASC inside Mitchell B-25 bomber on the aerial unit for Air Force (1997) and(bottom) working in the zero gravity unit on Apollo 13 (1995).
