Why John Carpenter turned down ‘Top Gun’, and how he’d have made it: “It’s such a weird movie”
Few blockbusters epitomise the 1980s better than Tony Scott’s Top Gun, a movie with cheese dripping from its every pore that still holds up as a nostalgia-tinted exercise in high camp. Would that have been the case if anyone else directed it, especially John Carpenter?
The answer is most likely the firmest ‘no’ imaginable, since Scott’s visual style was tailor-made for the Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson-backed orgy of extravagance, which catapulted Tom Cruise from fast-rising star to the tippy top of the A-list, and 40 years later, he still hasn’t come down.
That doesn’t mean it’s not fascinating to think about those what-ifs, though, especially when Carpenter wasn’t the only ’80s auteur synonymous with horror who turned it down. David Cronenberg also rejected the opportunity, and either of them taking the reins could have potentially rewritten modern cinema history.
If that sounds hyperbolic, it isn’t; had Top Gun turned out differently or been less successful, then Cruise may not have reached the lofty pedestal he remains perched upon. It also launched Scott to the position of one of action cinema’s most in-demand auteurs, and since Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China and Cronenberg’s The Fly were released in the same year, the potential domino effect is fascinating to think about.
Top Gun wasn’t an overly expensive production at around $15 million, but Carpenter had never, and never did, direct a glossy, breezy adventure flick in his entire career. It would have broken new ground, opened up fresh doors, and potentially saved him a lot of the hassle he experienced working with major studios in the years that followed, but he simply wasn’t interested.
“Top Gun? Come on,” he scoffed to Entertainment. “They fight Russians in the third act? Come on now. There’d be World War III. Stop that. Come on.” Clearly, he wasn’t sold on the concept, which explains why he turned it down, but, hypothetically speaking, what would his version have looked like?
“There’s nothing I could do with that movie,” he replied. “I have no idea. It’s strange, have you seen it recently? It’s weird. It’s such a weird movie. It is so strange. I don’t know. They’d all be naked. They’d all be naked in the jets.”
Carpenter’s Top Gun doesn’t sound like it would be too different from Scott’s, apart from the obvious fact that Maverick, Iceman, Goose, and the rest of the gang would be careening around in their fighter jets wearing only their helmets, which probably would have made the volleyball scene less effective, but that’s another conversation for another time.
That would have guaranteed an R-rating, since everyone’s danger zone would be on full display, and we can only lament the fact that we never got to see Carpenter’s nude Top Gun in the exposed flesh.
