Maverick will be an action movie

Joseph Kosinski doesn’t think “Top Gun: Maverick” is an action movie.

The 48-year-old director helmed the hit sequel to the 1986 action film, but he explained the story was an “emotional” tale with Tom Cruise’s Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell at its heart.

Joseph told Vulture: “I still stand by the original intention of the film, which was to tell a moving, relatable story about a man going through a rite of passage at a later point in his life. The first film, I’ve always said, was a drama wrapped in an action movie.

“Did I ever think of an action movie when I made it? No. The drama was always at the forefront. The execution of the flight sequences was done to support that.”

Joseph stressed that “emotion” was at the heart of every scene and that this meant that audiences frequently returned to see the film again and again.

He said: “With every action sequence, we’re always telling a story, we’re moving the narrative forward, we’re learning something about the character’s state of mind. We tried to do that not just in every sequence, but in every shot of every sequence.

“Of course, it was the action that brought people to see it the first time, but it was the emotion that kept them coming back for second, third, fourth viewings. A guy came up to me the other night and said he’d seen it 32 times!

The Tron: Legacy director continued: “It’s the emotion that brings people back. And that’s, I think, the key to great successes. I don’t know if you’ve seen Avatar 2, but I felt like with that movie, the spectacle was part of it, but there was a real emotional thread that resonated with me.

“So emotion is key, but you have to create something that the audience knows they have to see on the big screen to fully experience it.”