Coming into Apple TV+’s WWII drama Masters of the Air, as a cinematographer and trained pilot, Richard Rutkowski’s goal was to capture “the excitement and drama of being a heroic flyer,” while making the audience very aware of “the ramifications of violence.”
In telling the story of the famed American Air Force unit known as the 100th Bomb Group, or “the Bloody Hundredth,” one of the DP’s concerns was the prospect of making the flyers’ work look too easy.
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“It has to seem very real and very immediate, and part of the danger is that you’re in this contraption,” explains Rutkowski. “They built these aircraft to the bare minimum needed to get the men and the bombs to the site. When the bombs were dropped, these men were in essentially a target and a death trap, so I really wanted to convey that sort of heart-pounding reality.”
Given his personal experience up in the air, Rutkowski knew that “you train yourself to stay calm and focused on mission the whole way through. An engine goes out, deal with it; that’s part of the training…You focus on predict, decide, and execute.”
The DP explains that he “really wanted that to be part of the feeling of the scenes, as well as visually that you felt the high element, that you were well over 10,000 feet, sometimes 14,000 feet in the air, where light takes on a very different characteristic.”
A companion piece to Band of Brothers and The Pacific penned by John Shiban and John Orloff, Masters of the Air is based on the book of the same name by Donald L. Miller. The show follows the men of the Bloody Hundredth as they conduct perilous bombing raids over Nazi Germany and grapple with the frigid conditions, lack of oxygen and sheer terror of combat conducted at 25,000 feet in the air. Portraying the psychological and emotional price paid by these young men as they helped destroy the horror of Hitler’s Third Reich. Some were shot down and captured; some were wounded or killed. And some were lucky enough to make it home. Regardless of individual fate, a toll was exacted on them all.
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In today’s episode of The Process featuring Rutkowski and director Dee Rees, who teamed for Episodes 7 and 8, the pair explain that they came to work together on the series after collaborating successfully on the airplane sequences for Rees’ Oscar-nominated 2017 historical drama Mudbound, released by Netflix.
In addition to sequences up in the air, the duo were tasked on the new series with designing the look for and bringing audiences into entirely new areas, including POW camps and the Ramitelli, Italy base of the Tuskegee Airmen, which were created in close proximity to one another. The aesthetic they were after, they say, was “naturalism-plus.”
Starring Austin Butler, Callum Turner, Anthony Boyle and many more, Masters of the Air debuted on Apple TV+ in January. Check out the full conversation between Rutkowski and Rees about the work that went into mounting a pivotal pair of episodes above.