Naval Officer From Sarasota Served As Adviser On ‘Top Gun: Maverick’

SARASOTA, FL — U.S. Navy Capt. Brian Ferguson loved planes as a child and was fascinated by aircrafts from an early age.

“I don’t know why,” he told Patch. “There were no pilots in the family.”

But his father was friends with Walt Walling, the owner of Walt’s Fish Market, who had a small plane he used to pick up seafood for the restaurant and market. He’d sometimes take Ferguson on short flights.

Then, in the mid-1980s, the hit movie “Top Gun” came out. When Ferguson, then 17, saw the film, it changed his life.

“I saw the movie and knew I wanted airplanes,” he said. “It crystalized things for me. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. That was the catalyst. I just thought, ‘That looks really cool landing multi-million-dollar fighters on a boat in the middle of the night in the middle of the ocean.’”

He went on to enlist in the Navy, where he became a fighter pilot, flying F-18s off aircraft carriers in the ocean, “just like the movie,” he said.

Now, Ferguson’s career has come full circle as the Navy reservist was chosen to serve as a technical adviser for “Top Gun: Maverick,” the sequel to the 1986 hit.

After graduating from Riverview High School in 1987, he studied at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach.

“That was kind of the logical path as it’s an aviation school,” he said.

Though the Navy didn’t require previous aviation experience before enlisting, it helped, Ferguson added. He went into the military with nearly 600 hours of flight experience, putting him at an advantage over others who had never even been in an airplane.

Ferguson, who lives in San Diego, spent 14 years on active duty. He’s served as a reservist for another 14 years and is also a pilot for Delta Air Lines.

Several years ago, while recalled to active duty, a three-star admiral approached him about working on the set of “Top Gun: Maverick” to advise the actors and crew about technical details, accuracy and safety issues on set.

“(The admiral) told me, ‘I need someone very senior and not taken with all this Hollywood stuff,’” Ferguson recalled.

Initially, he wasn’t interested in the job, but his wife talked him into taking it.

“Her perspective was having been influenced by the first movie to join the Navy and coming at the end of a 30-year career, what if I could help inspire young men and women just like I was,” he said. “She told me, ‘If you don’t do this and it’s fantastic, you’ll have regret. And if you don’t do it and something is wrong, you’ll have regret.’”

He also had misconceptions about what working with stars like Tom Cruise and a Hollywood movie crew would be like.

“I thought I knew what to expect. I thought all these Hollywood people have massive egos and are very needy,” Ferguson said. “That was a preconceived notion that was wrong…everybody was amazing. They were all professional and some are good friends to this day, including some actors. They were very down to earth, and it was a really good experience.”

He recalls one of the first times he spoke with Cruise, as crew prepared to film a flying scene on set, which was a lengthy engineering process, as it involved putting cameras into fighter jets.

Wearing his Navy uniform with a Top Gun patch on his right sleeve and a captain insignia on his collar, he went up to the actor and said, “You made a movie in 1986 and played a Navy aviator pilot who went to Top Gun. We’re standing here dressed the same, me and your character, basically having done the same thing because of your movie.”

Cruise paused and asked, “Did it really make that much of a difference?”

“I can find you 100 people on this base who would say the same thing,” Ferguson told him.

Filming for “Top Gun: Maverick” started in October 2018 in Ireland and “it just didn’t stop,” the adviser said.

In addition to Ireland, filming brought him all over the U.S. – Hollywood sound stages, Lake Tahoe, the Cascade Mountains in Washington, the USS Abraham Lincoln, which was on the East Coast at the time.

“We were truly everywhere,” he said. “My frequent-flyer program exploded. I was always on an airplane or in a hotel. It was a lot of moving around.”

Watching the movie filmed in person and out of sequence, Ferguson initially was skeptical about how director Joseph Kosinski and his team would be able to pull off a movie as iconic as the original.

“I was very relieved after seeing the final product after seeing every scene filmed in real time,” he said. “It’s like seeing the ingredients laid out before you start cooking. How are you going to turn this into something? I think it was amazing. I think they did an amazing job putting it together. You can’t find a bad review.”

Having never worked on a movie before, it was a learning process for Ferguson, who had a tendency to get too technical or detailed at first.

“I was really going into detail about what we do at Top Gun, but (the director) told me, ‘I appreciate your love of the craft, but I don’t make documentaries,’” Ferguson said. “He told me it needed to be easy for Joe the plumber in Kansas to understand – for Joe the plumber, a girl scout or a neurosurgeon. All people have to be entertained. I had to learn at what point so we allow the license of ‘Yeah, that’s not really realistic, but it looks really cool.’”

He took a more laidback approach to filming and focused mostly on ensuring the film was in keeping with the Navy’s core values.

“We all had to learn from each other. We were all working for the same goal – to tell the story of all the men and women in the Navy and their families,” he said. “I think we told a really good story.”

Though “Top Gun: Maverick” was released by Paramount to much acclaim last month, Ferguson’s time in Hollywood isn’t over.

He was called in to work on the historical war drama “Devotion,” about the first Black American naval aviator who was shot down during the Korean War in the 1950s. The movie co-stars Glen Powell, who was also in the “Top Gun” sequel.

Not knowing much about planes from the Korean War, Ferguson had to do a crash course on the era, working closely with historians and reviewing pictures and books about the period.

He’s proud of his work on “Devotion,” which comes out around Thanksgiving, and the story the film told.

“It really is amazing. It transcends race,” Ferguson said. “It really does represent how we are in the Navy. We don’t see color, sex, race. We don’t care about those things.”

Now with his name in the credits of two major movies, he’s not opposed to working on a film set again down the road.

“There are only so many airplane movies you can make, though,” he said. “I wouldn’t say no to anything if it was right.”

These movies are a great promotional tool for the Navy, as well as a way to pay tribute to those who have served.

“When you watch (‘Top Gun’) you’re going to see Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Glen Powell in F-18s. They’re the stars. They’re the characters in the movie,” Ferguson said. “To me, the real stars, the real heroes of this film are the actual men and women deployed downrange every day for the last 250 years.”