'Top Gun: Maverick' BTS video shows real flying, no CGI

Tom Cruise continues to impress fans with his commitment to perform his stunts himself, even the risky ones, including riding behind the pilot of a fighter jet going at high speed for "Top Gun: Maverick."

Skydance Media, on its official Twitter page, shared behind-the-scenes footage of the crew on a sandy location while filming Cruise and professional fighter jet pilots performing difficult manoeuvres. The amazing shot shows the jet doing a low-fly manoeuvre, as it zooms past the camera crew stirring up dust.

"No CGI here. #TopGunMaverick #behindthescenes," read the caption on the video.

The clip is further proof that those fighter jet scenes flying at top speed in "Top Gun: Maverick" are real. Practical effects were used instead of CGI, as Cruise always wanted in his films. He once stressed the importance of using practical effects to make the scene realistic and believable in a recent interview with Empire.

"I realised that there were things that we could accomplish cinematically. I started getting excited about this big challenge of, 'How do we do it?' So I said to Jerry [Bruckheimer, producer], 'I'll do it if...' meaning, I'm not going to do the CGI stuff," he said.

Before filming, Cruise made it clear with Paramount Pictures that he wants to be in the actual aerial sequence with "Top Gun: Maverick" because "no one has done it before" and "there's never been an aerial sequence shot this way."

Bruckheimer chimed in and compared the aerial sequence from the original "Top Gun" movie to the sequel. He said in the first film, they only had the actors in the F-14s and they "couldn't use one frame of it, except some stuff on Tom, because they all threw up."

"It's hysterical to see their eyes roll back in their heads. So everything was done on a gimbal. But in this movie, Tom wanted to make sure the actors could actually be in the F-18s," Bruckheimer revealed.

In "Top Gun: Maverick" the actors, Cruise himself included, experienced up to 8 Gs of force just to capture the actual distortions of the face when under extreme gravitational force. It is definitely going to be one exhilarating ride when the film opens in cinemas on Dec. 23.