Directing Team Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck on Bringing the War to the Ground in Apple TV’s ‘Masters of the Air’

The writing/directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have made some of the best indie films of the last twenty years. Starting with Half Nelson in 2006, Sugar in 2008 (the best baseball movie that far too few have seen), the criminally underrated It’s Kind of a Funny Story from 2010, and Mississippi Grind from 2015. Their work caught the eye of Marvel studios and the duo were asked to direct Captain Marvel in 2019–a massive success. Boden and Fleck have also been making great use of their considerable talents on TV as well, with Billions, Mrs. America, and now Apple TV’s Masters of the Air. In speaking with Boden and Fleck, we talk about how war changes people, and even how those that are your enemies can be seen differently when you come face to face with them.

Awards Daily: Masters of the Air was obviously a pretty challenging project, and I think for more than one reason. There’s been Band of Brothers, there’s been The Pacific, and now Masters of the Air. You’re not following junk, to put it mildly. When you were asked to jump into this and direct episodes five and six, were you aware of the responsibility, based upon the lore of the other two series? 

Anna Boden: Sorry, what were those other series again? Just teasing. (Laughs). 

Ryan Fleck: Right, “what are those things?” (Laughs)

Anna Boden: Yeah, no, of course. Those were such huge, important shows for so many people. Honestly, it’s so hard to go into a project with the responsibility to make something as good as these other shows that have also been produced by, you know, little known people, Spielberg and Hanks and Gary Goetzman. So for us, it was really more like a great, great opportunity to work with these amazing people who have done incredible work in the past, have amazing resources, and tell the incredibly true stories of these flyers whose stories hadn’t been told before and we didn’t know anything about before going into this. We learned about all of it in prep. It felt like an incredible opportunity to both learn about this part of the war that we didn’t know that much about, even though my grandfather-in-law was a pilot in World War II. I had heard stories from him, but still didn’t really understand what he’d been through until digging into the research on this and until getting inside one of these planes myself and seeing the reality of these kinds of situations. We kind of went into it with that spirit and felt really lucky to be working with such incredible not just producers, but cast and crew. I also had a lot of fun doing it, frankly. 

Ryan Fleck: Gary Goetzman was one of the first people we talked to, and obviously we’re Hanks and Spielberg fans, but we’re also huge Jonathan Demme fans, and so it’s just his history, his (Goetzman’s) relationship with Demme over the years. We were just dying for stories about all those movies that they made together, and Gary has them. He’s got the stories and he knows where the bodies are buried. (Laughs).

Awards Daily: It’s enough of a thing to follow two incredibly, highly heralded series about World War II, but by directing episodes five and six, you are also following Cary Fukunaga, who directed the first four episodes, and is no slouch. Were you thinking how do we maintain verisimilitude here? 

Anna Boden: We talked to Cary, somebody who we’ve known over the years and really have a similar approach in terms of wanting to tell a story realistically and for instance, when shooting in planes, making sure the camera’s in places that it could actually be in the plane–not having it fly around in the air in a superhero movie kind of a way. In terms of the way that we wanted to approach things, we have a very similar aesthetic and a similar tone in terms of how we want to deal with character and story. So it felt very natural sharing the series with him and that approach. After that, just really taking our scripts and figuring out how to make those as good as possible and going from there. We wanted to make sure that the vibe felt like we were not jumping out into an entirely different series as we got to episodes five and six, but at the same time, each episode does have its own unique kind of story to tell.

Being able to have a little bit of latitude in terms of the visual style and being able to expand the visual style in a way felt like a natural thing to do. Along with Jack Fitzgerald, our DP, we did have the ability in episode five to go for it, in terms of being very subjective with the camera inside the plane and really using a camera in a different way during that monster sequence, than was previously used in the other battle sequences. Then in episode six, we’re away from Thorpe Abbotts for the first time, and in Oxford, and in the flak house, and then in Germany running with Egan and eventually getting to the POW camp. We’re in completely new spaces, and it felt like that visual language needed to expand and change. It felt like a natural place in episodes five and six to also allow the show to become a little bit of its own thing. When Dee got to her episodes in seven and eight, she was able to explain that even more as she really dug into the POW camps, etc. That was a little bit the nature of the show, and we discussed that from the beginning. 

Awards Daily: Episode five is terrific, but there’s a lot I want to talk about in episode six, as in Callum Turner as Egan getting shot down in the bog, shooting that bog scene, and creating the suspense. What was it like shooting in that sort of swamp? 

Ryan Fleck: That was great. So, that was written as a field–a high grass field. At the time we were shooting and the locations we were finding, there was no high grass to be found anywhere in the country. At one of our locations, we did come across this little creek. We thought oh, this would be great. What if he just finds himself in there and he hides himself in the tall weeds in the water. It just becomes a lot more cinematic and harrowing to submerge himself in the water, in the weeds. It was just this beautiful little spot. We had a crane that was floating over the water. We had an operator with a wetsuit on in the water as well. The actors had wetsuits on underneath their clothing to try to keep them as warm as possible. 

Anna Boden: Poor Callum was freezing. 

Ryan Fleck: It didn’t work after a while though, their lips were definitely chattering. Hopefully you don’t see it in the finished version, but I love that opening to the sequence. And that was just one of those nice accidents where if we’d found a tall grass field, we would have shot it that way, and I’m sure it would have been fine, but I think not having the grass allowed us to discover this other location. 

Awards Daily: Did you take any inspiration from previous POW films for the prison sequences?

Ryan Fleck: There is a Russian film called The Ascent, which we stole a few shots from. The overhead shot of Egan on the cart when he becomes conscious in the cart of dead bodies, that’s a shot straight out of The Ascent. We stole a shot from Catch 22, the Mike Nichols version, when the planes are all taxiing and taking off. There’s a long lens shot that ends on the folks on the tower with their binoculars watching. We stole from there. I mean are we saying stole or are we saying borrowed? I don’t know. (Laughs).

Anna Boden: We homaged. We also referenced, in terms of visual style, Son of Saul, in terms of the way that we shot Egan particularly, specifically Egan as he was on the run in Germany and we shot very close to him using handheld cameras. We obviously weren’t as devoted to the style as they were in Son of Saul, but just taking a little bit of that energy and that feeling and bringing it to the show. There’s nothing else like that in the show really at all. But it felt like, in this storyline, there was something about being very close to him in this very foreign place where all of a sudden he doesn’t understand the language. He doesn’t understand where he is. As he’s going through this town at night and these people are yelling at him, it’s all very chaotic and focusing on the back of his head as the chaos is going on around him and then throwing focus out towards the town and then back to him. We kind of borrowed from that visually.

Awards Daily: That was just absolutely terrifying. Harry Crosby’s character, played brilliantly by Anthony Boyle, is the character who has the most full arc. He comes in with a certain sweetness, but there’s things that war does to you that will make you change your standard. Harry Crosby, while he wasn’t in physical danger after he became the ground navigator, was traumatized by the death of his friends. So when he goes off to this mansion in England for R&R, and he meets this young woman (played by Bel Powley), he has this brief affair, and he’s married back at home. It just made me think of how when you are in insane situations, your standards can change and it doesn’t necessarily make you a worse person. It just brings out parts of you that you wouldn’t ordinarily accept or choose under anything approaching normal circumstances.

Anna Boden: That’s very interesting. 

Ryan Fleck: Yeah. You kind of just said it. The show sort of presents it for you and you encapsulated it very well. I don’t know that I can articulate it better than you just said it. You should quote one of us with what you said (laughs). You got the intention. That’s absolutely true. The idea is that war changes people. 

Awards Daily: He’s also going through this terrible survivor’s guilt and there’s a desire to need to feel good about something.

Anna Boden: Also a need to find connection, because he’s so far away from his wife not just physically, but also emotionally, because she can’t understand what he’s going through and he can’t really share with her everything that he’s going through, or doesn’t feel that he can. When he is presented with somebody who he can connect with, it’s really hard for him to turn away from that. I think that that’s a little bit of what we’re seeing in episode six with him. 

Awards Daily: In episode six is where the series gets down on  the ground in Germany. It’s easier from a distance when you’re dropping bombs or if you’re shooting at other soldiers who are Nazis to see it as simply as America/good versus Germany/evil. But when you’re showing the devastation to the cities of Germany, a lot of these people are just people and they probably don’t want this war either. They don’t want to have their homes destroyed. When you were making that sequence and trying to show, on some level, the German point of view of what’s happening to them, it’s pretty harrowing.

Anna Boden: That was definitely interesting to us. When you think about the sequence in episode five, the argument they have before they set out on the Munster mission, the question of dropping bombs near this church on Sunday and you have the different flyers there arguing about whether that’s right or wrong. And they have different points of view on it. That’s something that they had to face. Egan feels very strongly about hitting them where it hurts. Then, when he gets down to the ground, he has to face actually seeing people hurt down there. Then when he pulls his gun on a bunch of kids, at the very beginning of episode six, he has to face whether he is actually capable of pulling the trigger on somebody at close range instead of just dropping a bomb and how confusing and terrifying that moment is. It brings up a lot of questions for Egan. I think it is a really interesting episode that asks a lot of big questions.