Editors Billy Weber and Chris Lebenzon spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about their Academy-nominated work editing Top Gun (1986), throwing light on some of the challenges they faced dealing with the aerial sequences, the love story, reshoots, and notes from the studio and distributors.
I thought this was a fascinating insight into how, regardless of the budget and the names attached, the job of the editor (or editors in this case), stays the same: how do you make sure the audience understands what’s going on, and cares about the characters?
Shooting the Aerial Sequences
The initial difficulty with the flight sequences involved actually capturing the right shots.
Billy Weber: “When the pilots who had to do the flying read the script, they told Tony, “This reads really great. But of course we can’t do anything that’s written here.” He said, “What do you mean?” And they said, “The planes don’t do this.” And so Tony called and told us what they told him. And we said, “Well, go shoot and see what happens.” And it was incredibly boring because the cameras were on the ground and the planes were way up high in the air and they couldn’t get near them because you couldn’t shoot from a helicopter because they’d just get blown right out of the sky.
Tony called and we talked about it. We had just seen the first day’s dailies, and we said, “You can’t get closer to the plane. Do you think there’s any way that their planes can get closer to you?” They found a hill that they could get up to with vehicles and camera trucks and they showed the pilot where they were talking about shooting from and said, “Could you fly right over this?” So that’s where they started to shoot a lot of the flying footage.“
Editing the Aerial Sequences
After the aerial shots were done, the Editors sat with Director Tony Scott to review and select footage, making decisions as they watched on which scene each shot they liked could go into.
Chris Lebenzon: We cut just the aerial stuff together without any [shots of the actors in the aircraft] and put music on and it looked great, but it had no story.
Weber: And no closeups in the cockpits.
Lebenzon: Then they shot great-looking [shots of the actors with helmets on a gimble], but when it came in, it had no dialogue. Maybe there wasn’t really a script yet. So we put that in these really great-looking aerial scenes that meant nothing. And it still meant nothing, but it all looked good!
Writing Dialogue in the Edit
Although the studio was unhappy that the actors were wearing masks in the cockpit shots – meaning Tom Cruise’s face couldn’t be seen – this was a saving grace in the edit, as it meant they could script and record any dialogue needed during these scenes.
Rather than just bringing writers in, the pilots who flew all the planes spent a lot of time in the edit suggesting dialogue and helping script the sequences. This allowed them not just to add realistic dialogue, but to shape the narrative of the sequences in the edit.
It also created an additional challenge however, that of using terminology the audience would be unfamiliar with, such as “he’s on my 6”. Weber and Lebenzon’s fix for this was to ensure that whenever they used an unusual specific term, they educated the audience by demonstrating visually what it meant. So in the case of “he’s on my 6”, they made sure to show an enemy aircraft behind the character’s plane. This was an approach they referred to as “say something, then show it”.
The Volleyball Scene
Perhaps the most famous scene in the film, the beach volleyball sequence took a whole day to shoot, and was run as a real game, with scores kept, rather than just broken down into individual scripted setups and moments. Shot like a commercial (Director Tony Scott’s background), the studio was extremely unhappy with the resources spent on the sequence.
The studio’s Head of Production wanted to fire Scott over the scene, unhappy that a single paragraph in the script had taken a whole day to shoot, until it was successfully argued that many action sequences are single lines or paragraphs in the script and can take days to shoot.
Music
Top Gun is also well-known for its use of songs in addition to score. Even those who have never seen the film can probably break into a rendition of Danger Zone or the Oscar-winning Take My Breath Away. The Editors were also involved in auditioning and selecting these tracks.
Lebenzon: We went to Oasis after work many nights and auditioned songs with Harold Faltermeyer, the composer, and Giorgio Moroder, who handled the songs. It was his studio, he won the Oscar. After working all day, we’d go — this was new to me; Billy might have done this on Beverly Hills Cop — but we’d go to this place in the Valley and put different songs up with the scenes we had cut. Don [Simpson] and Jerry [Bruckheimer] and Tony and Billy and I, and Harold and Giorgio would sit and listen and pick the songs. Tony didn’t like too many of them. I think he voted against “Take My Breath Away.”
However, it sounds like everyone got a little carried away with the music. When screening the film on the final day of the edit for the whole studio hierarchy, they realised that the film was over-burdened with music. Referred to as “the MTV Cut”, it was decided that they needed to take several tracks out, requiring an overnight remix of the film’s sound.
Characters and Performances
As is perhaps surprisingly common, there were concerns from the studio about some of the casting, mainly that of Kelly McGillis, and whether the chemistry between her and Cruise would work.
Weber: There was a scene that the studio was very worried about. That was the first scene I cut on the movie, and it’s when Tom and Kelly had dinner at her place and then afterwards he tells her about his mother, and they were really nervous about Kelly in that scene. And then I put music to it, the Otis Redding song, [“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,”] and it all turned out great. It was the studio that was so worried about her. They were nervous that her character wasn’t working and the relationship wasn’t working, but then we won them over with that scene.
A scene was also added in order to make Maverick a more likeable character. There were concerns that he was too arrogant, so a new scene was scripted and shot where he apologises to Goose.
The Ending
The film apparently went through at least three different endings. Originally, McGillis’s character did not return at the end, but there were concerns, especially when the film was screened for distributors, that the love story wasn’t strong enough. This led to reshoots months after principal photography when Cruise was in the middle of shooting Color of Money and McGillis had a completely different haircut.
Two new scenes were shot in Chicago in order to extend the love story and satisfy the distributors, the elevator scene, and the love scene. The scene at the end where McGillis’s character meets Maverick in the bar was also shot and added during post-production.
The end battle scene took months of work to get right, not unusual for complicated action scenes. Lebenzon and Weber believe that they used every usable frame of aerial footage, spending their time reworking and reshaping the final battle sequence in order to get it working as strongly as they possibly could.
The Prospect of a Sequel
Weber and Lebenzon talked about how little discussion there was of making a sequel to Top Gun despite its success, simply because the studio knew how difficult the shoot had been, and that the aerial footage had been exhausted, meaning any follow-up film would need to shoot entirely new flight scene footage.
Chris Lebenzon recalled not being particularly impressed with the script, but describes the film now as “lightning in a bottle”, one of those projects where everything just comes together despite all the challenges and low expectations.
They put some of this down to the involvement of Producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, who were in the edit most days, but had great instincts and always seemed to put the objective of making a great movie ahead of anything else.
Conclusions
What I loved about listening to this interview is that it re-iterated that whatever level and budget you’re operating at, a film editor’s concerns generally stay the same. No matter what you’re working on, or who you’re working with, your job is to solve problems.
The first time I cut a film involving action sequences, I realised that it’s a whole different skill to covering dialogue scenes. To begin with, the amount of setups you need, the time it takes to get those setups, and then the amount of time it takes in the edit just to sort through that material and to even just begin to give some shape to it is enormous. It can then take weeks of refinement to shape all the various elements of a big battle scene.
Top Gun is a classic because it successfully treads a fine balance between character drama and spectacular action sequences. Although editing these different types of scenes provides different challenges, the same core concepts are always crucial. The audience needs to understand what’s happening, and they need to care about the characters in order to engage emotionally with the story.
Visit The Hollywood Reporter to listen to the whole interview. For more links to interview articles, videos, and podcasts, check out the site’s Resources category.