Navy man helped make H'wood classic Top Gun

New Delhi: He's the man who commands the world's largest naval fleet. But ask him his claim to fame and Admiral Robert 'Rat' Willard of the US Navy will tell you that it's his role in the making of the iconic Hollywood film, Top Gun.

"I was responsible for all of the flying coordination in the movie and I flew almost every flight - the MiG-28, the little black airplane or in the Top Gun the A-4 Skyhawks," he recalls.

In 1986 Admiral Willard was a key officer at the Top Gun School - after which the film is named. He choreographed all the dogfights which powered Tom Cruise to superstardom as Lt Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell.

"It was a remarkable experiencejust to see what a Hollywood studio does to make a movie. We made the movie over four months' time. They shot about 2,80,000 feet of film aerial footage and left most of it on the cutting room floor," says Admiral Willard.

The shoot tested both the actors and the real Top Guns who set it up for the cameras. Cruise, the all-conquering hero who vanquishes the Soviets in edge-of-the-seat dogfights, vomited when he was first flown in a familiarisation sortie in an A-4 Skyhawk. But the real challenge for the choreographer was flying inside the frame of a camera.

"We had to fly closer, lower, slower than we were accustomed to, and as a consequence, you know we had to train ourselves to fly very close passes and fly very close to the ground," he says.

The Admiral, who still responds to the call sign 'Rat', also wore a black helmet and flew the fictional MiG-28 sortie which gets dramatically upstaged by Maverick and is famously shown the finger.

The black helmet still sits in a glass case in the Admiral's office in Pearl Harbour. So, if there's a power that the world's mightiest military bows to, it is Hollywood.

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