“Masters of the Air” rose to become Apple TV+’s most-watched series ever when the first episodes were released in January. While it may seem counterintuitive that the team behind “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific” — including Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman, and John Orloff — would hit it out of the park with a new World War II. The series, however, has not been easy, thanks in large part to the coronavirus, which has led to numerous delays. “That made production very difficult,” Goetzman said. diverse Before the series was released.
But also, in keeping with Apple TV+’s low-publicity strategy, “Masters of the Air” somehow debuted on the streamer with minimal publicity, despite the fact that in the period between pre-production and post-production, Main cast, including Austin. Butler, Callum Turner, Barry Keoghan and Ncuti Gatwa have been moved from career actors to leading men.
Beyond its challenges, the series is not an easy watch, from its depiction of the pain of losing beloved characters to the moral dilemmas the story poses — and of course the mental exercise of keeping up with such massive, shifting change. He slanders. However, the audience flocked to the series.
“One of Tom and Steven’s great gifts is choosing the right story to tell,” showrunner Orloff says of Hanks and Spielberg’s decision to make a drama about the US Air Force’s 100th Bomber Group.
Before the final episode premieres on Apple TV+ today, Orlov sat down with… diverse To discuss the end of the Nazi empire and why Butler and Turner’s characters – Major Gil “Buck” Kleven and Major John “Bucky” Egan – were the dissidents of their time.
Let’s start from the end. You’ve said that the final episode of the series is your favorite – why?
It’s actually a little about how I get involved in the project. When I was asked to work on it in 2013, I was only asked to write two episodes. I read the book, and immediately said, “Yes, I would love to write an episode or two, as long as I get to write one of the last episodes.” I really wanted to explore the devastation of Germany, which hasn’t been shown much in cinema at all. And I really wanted to explore the kind of “Gotterdammerung” (twilight) of the Nazi empire.
But of course, I didn’t end up writing just two or three, I ended up writing almost everything, but not quite.
Why did you want to show this side of Nazi Germany?
I have been fascinated with WWII history for most of my life. I was particularly interested in the last days of the Reich. If you’re not exploring Hitler’s last days, people tend not to do much about it. And it was interesting, because it was that moment in the history of total chaos in Europe: there were more people on the road in the late winter and early spring of 1945 in Europe than ever before. Refugees, soldiers. No one has control over anything in a lot of parts. It’s just a really interesting time and place.
Austin Butler and Callum Turner in “Masters of the Air” (Apple TV+)
Courtesy of Apple
One particularly poignant and uncomfortable moment is when Callum Turner’s character, Bucky, is on a forced POW march through Germany as the Allies approach, and sees a German woman crying as she stands in the rubble of her home. It parallels a similar scene that Bucky witnessed earlier in London. Why did you want to include this, and how did you effectively deal with the audience’s demand for Nazi sympathy?
I think for us the guiding principle since day one of “Band of Brothers” 25 years ago has always been “let’s just tell the truth.” Because all the things I’ve brought up are meant to be in the scenes you’ve seen, but told in a way that, hopefully, allows you to draw your own conclusions about the moral choices that are made in this kind of war. What is true is that Egan was in London during the so-called “Baby Blitz” and was under bombing. We see a village called Rüsselsheim in one episode about a German town being bombed – in this case at night by the RAF – but that doesn’t matter. And obviously, at the end of the show, in Episode 9, they pass through Nuremberg, which has just been destroyed by Allied bombing. It means flat.
The audience can draw their own conclusions, but that’s where they were. This is what they saw. We wanted to make sure we saw our characters see the effects of their bombing.
The narrative is broad, and we meet many characters. Where did you start pulling all those threads together?
One of my very early big contributions was to say that this shouldn’t just be limited to John Egan, Gil Cliven, and Rosie (Lt. Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, played by Nate Mann). This was what Tom and Stephen wanted to do. I said, let’s add this other guy I found in my research, Harry Crosby (played by Anthony Boyle), who’s a boatman. He is the only man (of the original 1943 crew) still on base in May 1945. Everyone is shot down or goes home. Once I realized that, I said, “Oh, this is my foundation, this guy,” because he’s been there all the time. Now I have four main characters.
When I started the show 10 years ago, the first choice I made was: “If one of these four people isn’t in the scene, we don’t see it.” And now we deviate from that as the show progresses. But if you watch the show, we’re very close to doing that. There are some renditions – we go to the Comet Line and the French Resistance, and dive into the backstory of the Tuskegee Airmen before they meet two of our four main characters – but that was our starting point. My theory was that the audience would discover that there were only four faces they needed to keep track of.
Nkoti Gatwa in “Masters of the Air” (Courtesy of Apple TV+)
Austin Butler’s character, Buck Cliven, is obviously one of those four faces, and then the audience loses him for two and a half episodes. Was this problem difficult to solve?
No, it’s been part of the show – since my first appearance 10 years ago – “We don’t see Buck break down. We don’t know if he did or not.” We experience it through Bucky’s eyes, whether Buck does it or not, because that moment holds so much weight when they get together again. Because we miss Buck. And there’s the whole psychological drama of pilots who have the same problem. They did not know whether their friends had survived or not. It was a terrible thing they all went through, seeing or hearing in the absence that their best friend had died. I mean, what you see with Bucky and Buck has happened a thousand times, over and over again.
Why did you decide to make Crosby the narrator?
Because he’s the only guy still on base so he can talk about Rosie. Buck and Bucky only overlap by a month with Rosenthal. And those were the orders from Tom and Stephen: Make a miniseries about Buck, Bucky and Rosie. Well, two of them disappear in the episodes, pretty soon when we meet the third. That’s why Crosby becomes an even more important pillar of the entire show, because he connects these two worlds in air warfare. There is the first generation of pilots, namely Buck and Bucky.
I’ve read some criticism: “Oh, they’re so Hollywood.” Yes, because they were! They were mavericks before there was a maverick. They were really these guys with the cocked hat, the toothpick, and the scarf and talking like movie stars. Rosie is the next generation, and he doesn’t care. It’s about, “Let’s get the job done. Let’s do whatever we have to do to get the job done.” It’s not about romance, it’s not about getting laid. It’s about winning the war. It’s not that Buck and Bucky weren’t interested in winning the war, but it was about much more to them than that.
Nate Mann as Rosie and Anthony Boyle as Crosby in Masters of the Air (Courtesy of Apple TV+)
Well, Buck and Bucky embody what people think war is. Then, by the time Rosenthal shows up, they know what war is and the full extent of its horror.
exactly. I think the first four episodes of “Masters of the Air” are about exactly that. Finding out that, “Oh, this is really bad. This isn’t fun. This isn’t romantic.” There was a version of “Top Gun” in the 1930s, a movie called “Test Pilot” and another called “I Wanted Wings.” This was the first generation of modern aircraft. Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable made the film (“Test Pilot”) in 1938, and it was a huge success. These early guys, they were imitating movies. And they went there and quickly realized, “Oh, there’s nothing romantic or fun about this.” This is the first act.
We get Just A glimpse into the concentration camps, which makes sense, since Steven apparently made the definitive film about the Holocaust in “Schindler’s List.” Why did you want to include this scene?
Stephen has done it twice (in “Schindler’s List” and “Band of Brothers”). But still, it actually happened: Rosie had come across a slave labor camp and the workers had been killed before (they were freed). It’s happened over and over again, as I’m sure you know. All these camps, when the Nazis retreated and abandoned them, they left a lot of corpses in them. This is a smaller version of what happens in Episode 9 of “The Band” just to remind the audience of the real dangers.
One of the things we tried to do a little bit on this show was to show Europe under Nazi occupation and try to show what the world looked like under fascism. In some ways, the POW camp was, for me, a metaphor for what life was like in fascism. Rosie is Jewish, and he made this decision in order to fight evil. He specifically made a choice and said it very eloquently in real life, how if you see people being submissive and helpless, you have to do something about it. If you don’t, there is no civilization. This scene is just a reminder of that.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.