Getting a text from your friends can, in some cases, make a good day into a great one. No one knows this better than writer/director Edgar Wright, who recently revealed that he received what he considered to be a “dream text” in the recent past. All it took was a moment in Top Gun: Maverick, one of 2022’s new movie releases, to send Wright off on a joyful quest to make one of the film’s scenes absolutely perfect.
Wright revealed this story while promoting his BBC Maestro class in an interview with THR. Recalling a moment in 2020 when he got to watch the Tom Cruise legacy-quel before the world at large, the Last Night in Soho director was given a special task. As you can read below, it was an assignment that Edgar Wright absolutely was cut out for:
I didn’t have any [other] notes on Top Gun: Maverick. I first watched that in 2020. Chris McQuarrie and Tom Cruise showed it to me, and it was pretty much the film that got released, minus the Lady Gaga song. And in terms of the Foghat thing, they needed a song. My dream text to get was Chris McQuarrie saying, ‘Hey, we need a new song for the bar scene in Top Gun: Maverick. What can you think of that’s like …?’ And it was like, ‘Oh, give me 45 minutes!’ I think I still have that playlist on Spotify; it was ‘Maverick Bar.’ So that stuff is just fun to me.
Leave it to the director who assembled the insanely rankable Baby Driver soundtrack to come in and save the day with music. With Edgar Wright consulted specifically to help boost one of Top Gun: Maverick’s scenes involving the bar run by Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connolly), he helped nail that setting as a hub for the most important characters in the film. It also helps that Wright probably made some more fans by selecting Foghat’s “Slow Ride” as one of the songs to do it.
Though in the context of this interview, the fact that Christopher McQuarrie asked Edgar Wright for notes on Top Gun: Maverick is even funnier. When he was asked for notes on McQuarrie’s previous film, Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Wright suggested 15 minutes be trimmed, much to the writer/director’s chagrin. Perhaps those sorts of critiques could have saved Kenny Loggins’ re-recorded tracks that didn’t make it into Maverick’s final cut.
With Edgar Wright watching an earlier Top Gun 2 cut, you have to wonder how blown away he must have been when hearing “Hold My Hand” for the first time. Being the musically minded man he is, he was probably doubly blown away when noticing how and where Lady Gaga’s song pops up in the score for Top Gun: Maverick. Possessing an ear and an eye for his own flights of musical fancy, Mr. Wright certainly knows his way around another creator’s jukebox, and touches like those must have made him smile.
Top Gun: Maverick may not currently be available with a Paramount+ subscription, but the 1986 original definitely is. At the moment, you’re only able to buy or rent the sequel through PVOD, or check it out in a theater near you. However, home entertainment enthusiasts will be able to get their hands on the physical copy of Maverick starting November 1st. If you want to hear more about Edgar Wright’s musical selection process, you can check out his Last Night in Soho ReelBlend interview to dig into that subject a bit more.
