'Top Gun: Maverick' director reveals how he convinced Tom Cruise to make a sequel to one of his most beloved movies

• For years a sequel to "Top Gun" has been in the works.
• Director Joseph Kosinski told Insider the pitch he gave to Cruise to convince him to make the movie.

In 1990, Tom Cruise made one thing very clear: he would never do a sequel to "Top Gun."

The 1986 Tony Scott-directed movie that featured a then-24-year-old Cruise made the actor into a superstar.

But it was time to move on.

"Some people felt that 'Top Gun' was a right-wing film to promote the Navy. And a lot of kids loved it," Cruise said four years after the release of the movie in a Playboy interview. "But I want the kids to know that that's not the way war is — that 'Top Gun' was just an amusement park ride, a fun film with a PG-13 rating that was not supposed to be reality."

"That's why I didn't go on and make 'Top Gun II' and 'III' and 'IV' and 'V,'" he continued. "That would have been irresponsible."

But there's an old saying in Hollywood: Never say never.

As the decades passed, Cruise veered farther from prestige movies that garner Oscar attention — at the time of that Playboy interview, he was promoting the Oliver Stone movie "Born on the Fourth of July," garnering him the first of his three Oscar nominations — and more toward blockbusters, or as he put it, the big-screen version of the amusement-park ride.

This opened the door for a "Top Gun" sequel.

Finding the 'emotional spine' of the sequel to get Cruise onboard

Though now 59, Cruise has made himself into the biggest action star. In an industry dominated by franchises in which comic-book characters outshine the stars that play them, Cruise is very much one of the last global stars that audiences will come to see just because of his name.

Since the early 2010s, Paramount and the film's producer Jerry Bruckheimer have been trying to figure out a way to make a sequel. Even its original director, Tony Scott, was into the idea. But after Scott's death in 2012, a sequel looked uncertain again.

Years passed and Bruckheimer continued to work on the project. Then, around 2017, director Joseph Kosinski got involved.

Having already worked with Cruise on the 2013 sci-fi movie "Oblivion," he had a rapport with the superstar actor. He also felt he had a way to convince Cruise to become committed to the project.

"They had a script they were working on, they hadn't quite cracked the story yet, Jerry sent it to me to see what I thought," Kosinski recalled when he spoke with Insider over Zoom earlier this month.

"I had some very specific ideas which I shared with Jerry. He said, 'I like what you're thinking, let's go pitch it to Tom directly,'" the director added.

So Kosinski and Bruckheimer flew to Paris, where Cruise was putting the final touches on 2018's "Mission: Impossible — Fallout." There, Kosinski would give the same pitch to Cruise that he just gave to Bruckheimer.

"In between setups, I got about a half-hour of Tom's time to pitch him my take on the film," Kosinski said.

"What I led with was, 'I think we should build this movie around Maverick's relationship with Goose's son.' I really felt that is the emotional spine of this film," Kosinski said.

In "Top Gun," hotshot Navy pilot Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Cruise) is one of the best of the best. He prepares to show his greatness when he's invited to take part in Top Gun, a fighter pilot school, alongside his best friend and radar intercept officer, Nick "Goose" Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards).

But when Goose dies during the training, Maverick has to carry on without his friend. The loss of Goose is something that haunts Maverick for the rest of the movie.

"It's a reason for Maverick to come back to Top Gun and for Tom Cruise to come back and play this character," Kosinski said of introducing Goose's son. "And I think for Tom, that was the first time he heard something that really grabbed him emotionally and said to him this is a reason to make this film."

Thanks to a great story, and cameras in the cockpit, the sequel is better than the original

With Cruise now on board and Kosinski at the helm, "Top Gun: Maverick" was a go.

Miles Teller was cast as Goose's son, Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw, and Val Kilmer returned to reprise his role from the first movie, Tom "Iceman" Kazinsky, who is now a four-star Admiral. (Kosinski told Insider there were never any talks to bring the major female stars from the first movie, Kelly McGillis and Meg Ryan, back for the sequel).

And then there was the action. Though "Top Gun" was thrilling for the 1980s, Kosinski couldn't get away with shots of planes flying around and actors looking at targets to shoot at. And he could thank his star for that. Due to the "Mission: Impossible" movies, Cruise had pushed the envelope of what audiences expected of him.

However, Kosinski had thought that out too.

"The technology has advanced to the point where we can shoot this for real," he said.

Kosinski wanted Cruise, and the other actors, to really be in the jets during the action scenes.

"I had been testing this new Sony camera with my DP Claudio Miranda called the Rialto, which is an IMAX-quality camera that can get down to a very small form factor so you can get that IMAX image with a small camera," he said. "We put six of those in the cockpit. So we were able to do things they just weren't able to do before."

The result is a rare feat: a sequel that's better than the original.

In "Top Gun: Maverick," Cruise's character is still doing things his own way, but the Navy can't ignore his greatness, which leads him back to Top Gun to train the newest crop of pilots for a daring mission.

And one of those pilots is "Rooster" Bradshaw, which forces Maverick to have to deal with his past demons.

Legacy sequels often aren't very good, let alone better than the original. However, Kosinski's keeping any excitement close to the vest.

Instead, the director said he simply went about making the project as its own standalone movie and a partial love letter to Scott. (Most of the movie has the look and feel of the original, right down to the opening text and the use of Kenny Loggins' hit song "Danger Zone.")

"Just as Maverick is going back to Top Gun, I wanted the audience to feel like we're going back to 'Top Gun' as well," he said. "It had to feel like a 'Top Gun' movie, but we also had to find ways to innovate and make it our own at the same time."

"Top Gun: Maverick" opens in theaters on Friday.