After he’s assigned to teach the TOPGUN graduates, Maverick heads to North Island for a drink at the Hard Deck bar, where he runs into Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly) and the TOPGUN graduates he’ll be training. While it looks like the scene is filmed in a fully operational bar, it’s all just movie magic.
According to CBS 8 San Diego, the Hard Deck is based on the I-Bar, located on Naval Air Station North Island. The bar is a well-known gathering place for service members, but its size could not accommodate a movie crew, which is why it had to be replicated. “When you watch the movie, you’re in the bar, you’re in the Navy,” said Captain Brian Ferguson, the Navy’s technical advisor for the movie.
Director Joseph Kosinski told Vanity Fair that their bar set was built on the beach in Coronado, where North Island is located. The crew got a lot of the iconic elements of the I-Bar into their re-creation, like the planes on the ceiling and the bell that rings when someone puts their phone on the bar, meaning they have to buy everyone a round, a rule followed at the I-Bar. That’s a rule that Kosinski broke while at an officers club in Fallon, Nevada. “It was a really fun night,” he said. “And it showed me that I had to have an officers-club scene in the film.”
