Interview: Director Dee Rees Discusses Episodes Seven and Eight of ‘Masters of the Air’

Episodes seven and eight of Masters of the Air are some of the most introspective of the series, as Gale “Buck” Cleven (Austin Butler) and John “Bucky” Egan (Callum Turner) are imprisoned in Stalag Luft III with no communication with the outside world, other than a radio they have built to listen in to the BBC. 

It’s the first moment throughout the series where these two best friends are grounded and have no chance of escaping, as the tension escalates inside the camp after escape attempts are made. For director Dee Rees, who spoke to Awards Radar during a virtual Zoom interview, helming this new chapter in Buck and Bucky’s story felt like an opportunity to question how the two protagonists’ psyche begins to fold on themselves: 

“They’re wrestling with who they are, they’re content with the idea of failure. How does that affect their friendship? Buck and Bucky are no longer airborne. They’re all out of routes. They’re literally corralled. How do you remain a leader in that context when they’re so reduced? That was the idea I started with and how they’re newly vulnerable. They don’t have the signs and symbols of authority. They don’t have a literal connection to their country and their command. Seeing how that begins to unravel, the men begin to question themselves, and that begins to target their friendship and ultimately strengthen it. 

Another big element of that episode for me was how Crosby [Anthony Boyle] questions who he is and does not want to be like his father while the toll of the war also hits on Rosenthal [Nate Mann]. It’s a nadir in terms of morale and confidence, how these guys may be doubting themselves, and how their thoughts may be turning toward the people waiting for them. I tried to embrace that and bring out those uncertain moments of vulnerability, echoing what I was struck by in the Band of Brothers interviews. They didn’t know their heroes at the time, they weren’t sure they were doing the right thing. They were doing their best. I wanted to try to insert that feeling of uncertainty, that feeling of unsureness, and remind us that these are young guys who aren’t seeing themselves as heroes at the moment, and making sure that they carry that with them through both episodes.”

Episode eight of the series introduces audiences to the Tuskegee Airmen, or the 99th Fighter Squadron, during an air mission at night, where they fly their 500th mission. With the mission count being an integral part of the development of Rosie’s arc for the show, Rees wanted to contrast this with how the Tuskegee Airmen weren’t thinking about the mission count, and instead how they could go deeper behind enemy lines: 

“In the show, the characters frequently talk about the mission count,  where “if we fly X number of missions, we get to go home.” With the 99th Fighter Squadron, there wasn’t that. I wanted to contextualize that by showing that they’ve just flown their 500th mission, and I wanted to start the episode with them hitting this milestone mission. That also shows how larger it is in terms of what the fighter jets were. It was important to meet these guys in the sky and not to meet them on the ground, raring to jump into the fight, and at this moment when they’re not thinking about the mission count. They’re thinking about how they can go deeper and find themselves literally behind enemy lines and also metaphorically amongst their own countrymen because they didn’t have the right to vote then, so they’re not seen as friendly. That was a complicated dynamic that I definitely wanted to leave in episode eight.”

Masters of the Air reunites Dee Rees with cinematographer Richard Rutkowski, whom she previously worked with on her 2017 film Mudbound, during aerial sequences involving Jamie McAllan (Garrett Hedlund), with much fewer resources than on the Apple TV+ series. Knowing his interest in aviation and how he helped her pull off the aerial scenes in one of her previous movies, Rees knew how important it was for the two to reunite on this show:

“It was important for me to call Richard back for this one because he stepped up and did this one day of shooting with me, and I knew he was interested in planes. We had this much bigger camp to work together on.

Shot listing is pretty much like most of my prep because you want to be prepared and want each angle to mean something. For me, where I’m putting the camera is not just for the benefit of the audience’s understanding of what’s happening. It’s also for the benefit of understanding the character’s mind and state. That’s how the design of each sequence is driven. 

For example, when we follow Sandra [Bel Powley] through Paris, that was an additional sequence that I wrote in because it’s important to introduce her as someone with her own operation. We want to show that she’s this double agent; she’s stealthy and a woman who can’t allow herself to be fully seen all the way. And so Richard was great in collaborating on that because we had to build new sets and had to work closely with Chris Seagers, the production designer, in terms of designing, for example, the prison bunks to be very small. We didn’t want to build extra room for the equipment and the camera. We wanted to have walls where we could put a camera over a bunk bed, but the bodies of the men needed to be stacked on each other. 

It’s very important that the men are always on top of each other, always layered, so you’re not getting a clean shot. All the shots are designed to be dirty and show that compressed feeling, so you can start to ratchet up that tension that Egan’s feeling when he’s getting antsy. This is why he’s out there playing ball and starts to feel tense. He starts to feel like he’s kind of a ticking bomb. Also, in the hallways, getting the camera down below eye level, just as the guys are being herded like cattle, tells a story. They’re being corralled and moved. These are men who no longer have their agency. For me, it’s evocative, like sending a sheep to slaughter. 

I think the shot design really helps set the mood and tone of the episodes, and Richard and I worked together in prep to shot list, maximize our coverage, and maximize the use of our cameras so that we could do it really efficiently and give each character their due, especially in the camp, where you have different men thinking different things. How do you unite them this way, especially in a place where they’re not really allowed to express it?”

One of the show’s most powerful scenes occurs in episode eight, where a German intelligence officer asks Alexander Jefferson (Branden Cook) and Richard D. Macon (Josiah Cross) why they fight for a country that treats them the way they do, to which Macon responds. In writing the scene, Rees states that she wanted to establish different stakes for both Jefferson and Macon than the rest of the prisoners in the camp: 

“I really wanted to write that scene where we would show a few things. First, the German intelligence knows more about these men than their American comrades and has more of an idea of their biography and what they’re capable of than the comrades they will meet inside the camp.

I also wanted to establish different stakes. The stakes for Jefferson and Macon are different than the stakes for everybody else in that camp because they’re allowed to put their bodies on the line, break their neck, fly, bleed, and burn, but they’re not allowed to vote when they return home.  I had that as part of the interrogation where Hanns Scharf [Saro Emirze] kind of jokes, “Who are you gonna vote for? Oh, that’s right. You don’t have the right to vote.” 

That shows the elevated stakes, where we’re able to put in our chest what these men are feeling as they’re walking into the camp because we’ve just heard this interrogation, we’ve been with them, and have seen the bitter heartbreak that they have to swallow, even as they put themselves on the line again and again, that, even as they get into the camp, they’re going behind enemy lines, even more so than their comrades.”

There was also a lot more than we discussed in our audio conversation, seen below, including her approach to shooting the battle sequences for her episodes in contrast to what previous directors wanted to establish, her familiarity with the story of the 100th Bomber Group and Donald L. Miller‘s Masters of the Air, and what she ultimately hopes audiences will grasp from them and the Tuskegee Airmen’s story.

You can listen to my full conversation with Dee below and see all episodes of Masters of the Air on Apple TV+:

[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]