Top Gun's Jack Epps Jr.
A chat with the man who wrote the movie.
Haha! Let's see, can you be Kelly McGillis...
Hot or not? In the movie she's hot, yes.
Yes.
One of the reasons Top Gun's stayed around so long is because we worked with a lot of pilots. Pete Pettigrew, who was the technical advisor, was a fighter pilot and later an admiral, and there were a lot of different people like that.
So a lot of these lines came from a lot of different sources. These are things people say. The movie is based on true stories, and everything which happens in the movie actually happened to someone.
Exactly.
That military jargon, the stuff that comes out, you're going, 'OK, that's great, let's pull that in, we'll find a place for it.' Then you'll be writing at three in the morning and something will just pop up.
Part of being a writer is, you've got to get into this mindset. You've got to be the character. It's a kind of schizophrenia - you think and act and feel the character, and the lines come out. You can't force it.
Haha! Um... Yeah, you don't do that. You just sort of... It feels good. Usually these things are done late at night, when there's a certain exhaustion level, and you just go, 'That's done.'
Good writing comes out of exhaustion, when you're so tired it's just coming out of you. I'm not comparing myself to Bob Dylan, but he listens to his songs today and he says, 'Where did all those lines come from? I don't know.'
That's how it works - you write stuff and it just comes out of you, and you go, 'Wow!' Being tired opens you up. It takes a filter level away.
That's exactly it, right. And write in a bar all night long. That will help.
Don Simpson was a wild man, he really was. He lived every second as some character, depending on what he felt like at that moment. He was a larger than life guy.
I don't have any specific stories from the set, but he was just a wild man. That's all there is to it.