Director Dee Rees on Bringing the Tuskegee Airmen to Life in Apple TV’s ‘Masters of the Air’

Dee Rees, the acclaimed writer/director of Pariah and Mudbound (for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay) was given the incredibly significant task of introducing the Tuskegee Airmen to Apple TV’s Masters of the Air in episodes seven and eight. Through Rees’ work, she showcased the first true integration of military forces as the Airmen assisted the 100th division with bombing raids over Germany. Rees was an excellent choice for those two episodes. The depth of her historical knowledge as it applies to people of color in wars conducted by the United States is as deep as the ocean that separated the United States from Europe. In our discussion below, you’ll see what I mean.

Awards Daily: You’re episodes spend a little bit more time on the ground than most of the others–covering what it’s like getting shot down and getting caught and taken into Nazi custody. Did you take any kind of inspiration from any other war prison movies?

Dee Rees: The challenge of our episodes is what happens when you separate the men from their machines. What happens when they’re impotent, what happens when they’re physically grounded. I wanted to get into that and have them confront themselves. I read the graphic novel series by René Tardi: I, René Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB. I just got that graphic novel and studied that, and that was inspiration, and then just generally I was kind of referencing the Band of Brothers documentary part, where they’d have the survivors talk about it. The thing I was struck by, that was inspirational for me, is that they didn’t know they were heroes in the moment. They were just scared teenagers. I wanted to get the feeling of those teenage documentaries, that feeling of I just don’t want to mess up. I just want my folks to be proud of me. I tried to use that as my compass in terms of getting the performances and trying to mind how they might feel.

Awards Daily: I was amazed to find out that of the 35,000 United States Army Air Force personnel captured that went to Stalag Luft III, 28,000 were members of the 8th Division, which included the 100th, which is the Air Force group that Masters focuses on here. In doing some of this research and learning about what these people went through, sometimes statistics will make your eyes kind of explode and that one did it to me. Did you have moments like that when you were doing your research? 

Dee Rees: One of the surprising things is, I was expecting more cruelty from the captors. In my mind, I automatically went oh, this is going to be a work camp. This is going to be about what people do to each other. In the research, I was surprised to find the soldiers had autonomy and were generally respected and weren’t used in this cruel or harsh way. It’s more about the cruelty of the circumstance in a way, so I just shifted my whole position to whether they can survive themselves. Can they survive this winter? That’s the thing. It’s not guards beating them and abusing them. This is about being abused by their own disappointment and their own failure, this environment where there’s not really a reason to believe they’re going to make it out of there. It’s more like a psychological torture than someone riding you or targeting you. I think when it came to the Jewish prisoners, that opened up something that was more dark and dangerous and what would it be like for them? In episode seven, there’s a Jewish character who gets stopped by guards. That last name. I wanted to use that to keep what this whole war is about in the foreground and what those guys in particular went through. 

Awards Daily: It’s interesting you say that because ending up in a prison camp probably does come with a sense of failure. I’m in this position because I didn’t do my job as well as I should have, which of course, in this type of warfare, is completely unfair, but as a human being it’s completely understandable. 

Dee Rees: Right, even though it’s impossible to be perfect every time. I also looked at the sortie reports, because those were the reports that they would file after each flyer wrote here’s what we think we hit, here’s what we missed. The thing I was interested in is that the series really gets into the administration of war. You think of war, you think of the guns, you think of the blood and guts, but the thing I was interested in was getting into the bureaucracy of war and that there’s reports filed. It’s not enough to survive the thing. It’s not enough to recover from your injuries, but you’re expected to give an accounting of what exactly happened. These guys who are in the camp are living an accounting of what went wrong.

Also I was really excited about the Tuskegee airmen because I wanted to make them big and make them show how the stakes for them were even higher. If they were able to get back home, the war is not going to be over. They’re still going to be behind enemy lines. In that way, they’re more equipped to cope, in a way, in this prison camp, because even amongst their own colleagues and peers, they’re not understood. They’re not known, they’re feared. For me, the combination of all that was a chance to get into the humanism of it all and the psychology of it and to try to get behind the masks and get to their fears and their worries. Being grounded maybe confirms what they might have secretly thought the worst things about themselves were all along. 

Awards Daily: Bureaucracy can be cruel too. There’s that moment when Rosenthal comes back and he’s flown his 25th mission and he can go home. But then the United States military decides to change the threshold from 25 to 30. If you’re at 25, you know you’re still going home, but if you’re at 24, all of a sudden you go from one more survival to at least six. Showing that cruelty and also then showing Rosenthal’s desire not to leave his men and the mission behind, points a finger back on the unfairness of war, not just from the enemy but also from within. 

Dee Rees: Nate Mann who plays Rosie is amazing, and Anthony Boyle who plays Crosby too. I think it shows, going back to what you said, that it’s about statistics and about winning and losing, and being harmed all gets reduced at the end of the day to rows of numbers. And so in episode seven, with the replacements, I wanted to design that shot where we see there’s food going in. There’s materials going in. There’s men going in. To put on the same equal ground that there’s cans of beans and there’s them. It’s like they’re also there to be consumed. They’re there to be used. It wasn’t in the original script, but I added a whole sequence of all these ambulances of bodies going out, because I wanted to show that there’s a system where they’ve been used, they’ve been discarded. It was important to have the royal ambulances to visually illustrate that. Rosie sees them come in and he sees him go out and then that’s how he can’t walk away from it. He can’t let them be shipped in and shipped out and just be these consumable, expendable tools. By necessity, not just in our military but any military, the men are just an asset.

Rosie can’t reckon with that while knowing these guys and knowing their hopes and dreams. That was important for me to change that ending so that we had that feeling, to let it really land. When you see the numbers, those materials are used up so let’s send in some more, knowing that more troops are going to come in the next day. Crosby feels it when he’s figuring out the flight plans and the strategies and he’s like how are we flying the exact same disastrous flight path? He’s the guy who’s responsible for trying to ensure success, so the guilt he feels when he’s participating and putting names in boxes by assigning people to programs and to literally dotted lines. He sees them also as people and it’s hard to reconcile his own part in that. Those two characters, especially, we get to spend more time with and really get to how they struggle with it and hopefully make the audience feel, not the futility of it, but the churn of it. 

Awards Daily: With Rosenthal, a Jewish American, I think there’s a subtext there that doesn’t really get dealt with until he ends up at the camp later on, but there is that additional layer. He even makes a joke at one point in the series saying what do I know about horses? I’m a Jew from Brooklyn. It becomes very important that he’s Jewish later on, because he takes in some of the horror of what happens in a different way than perhaps other characters who aren’t Jewish might.

Dee Rees: Exactly. The stakes for Rosie are different. There’d be those at home, not part of this story, that he has contended with that say the USA shouldn’t be fighting this war. It would feel like people are saying we shouldn’t be involved, and it’s concerning your existence. Even that is something that his peers may not be as aware of. They might have thought of him as just another white guy. In that way, I feel Rosie is an interesting character because he’s not fully seen by his comrades, but respected and looked up to and held up. I love Rosie. He is one of my favorite characters. Nate was great.

Awards Daily: The Tuskegee Airmen: we’ve got to get back there. I thought the way that you chose to introduce them wasn’t overly flamboyant. The Tuskegee Airmen were largely separated out during the war from everyone else. They’re brought in to assist and integrate the group for the first time, right? When you see them come in, they have this second layer of whether they are going to be accepted by the guys who are already there. There’s this slight underlining of trepidation maybe, or just uncertainty. Was it really important to you to get that across that they weren’t necessarily going to be accepted because they were black? 

Dee Rees: It was important, first of all, to meet them in the series in the air. I wanted to have them flying this night mission and flying a very precise kind of strafing run and kind of playing on the pejorative nickname, the “spookwaffe,” that the Germans had given to them. I have them coming in at night in the dark, and then we only see them when they light it up. I was really intrigued by them, especially thinking about mission count and that’s what I wanted to start with. They’ve flown their 500th mission. The 100th is complaining about 25. These guys have done hundreds. It’s, again, about perspective. Again, think about the way they’re used by the military. They’ll go home when they’re done.

There’s no just doing five more and you can go home. The drive and the fire with which they want to fight and the drive and fire with which they want to keep going is because, at the end of the day, they understand that this is the way to prove that they deserve to be citizens. They want to prove that they deserve to have a life. They are going to go home and are still going to have to fight for that. So it’s important to meet them on a mission and not just to meet them in a camp, and to contextualize the battle they’ve been fighting and are going to be fighting versus the battle of the 100th. And the forces were segregated. Their arrival signals not only a shift in military strategy. The military realized basically we need integration to win this war, but also hopefully foreshadowing a shift in what’s going to be the national contest. As a country, we’re not going to survive unless we combine forces. 

Awards Daily: It’s a breaking of the color barrier like we would think of in baseball and Jackie Robinson. I’d like to dig a little bit more into the level of sadness in fighting for a country that doesn’t believe you’re equal. Richard D. Macon (Josiah Cross) says basically we’re fighting for what America could be. 

Dee Rees: Yeah, and a lot of that got cut. It’s important, those interrogation scenes for Jefferson and Macon, because they weren’t there. How many World War II movies have you seen with significant black characters, and of those movies how many have black characters that influence the plot? Of that, how many black characters that influence the plot speak to why they’re there and the number gets down to zero. I know they’ve done interrogations of other blacks. I was like no, for these guys, the questions are different. Using Hans Scharf as the interlocutor, he kind of knows more about these men than their own white comrades do. It’s also funny how the Germans had more intelligence and more respect for what they could accomplish than their own peers. I wanted him to really use that against him, in this kind of psychological warfare. Oh, you have all this education, when you go back maybe you get to be a janitor.

A lot of that got cut out, but I wrote this interrogation sequence to show how the enemy was able to use that racism against them and use the truth against them and it’s something that you can respond to. There was even a line I had about there’s a vote coming up, who are you going to vote for? Oh, that’s right. You don’t have the right to vote. I wanted to make that point that these men are dying for the country and they can’t even cast a ballot. Macon says we’ve got problems, but when I get back, I’m gonna make sure we’re moving it forward. That was the perspective that no other character could give us in the series. Going back to your first question, for those reasons when they’re walking into the camp, it’s like they’re walking in behind enemy lines. Macon is injured, he doesn’t feel his strongest, this is not going to be all sweet. There were these historical interviews that were done, and I relied a lot on the interviews with Macon and Jefferson. It might have been Oral History Project where they talk about their experiences in the camp, and I used that a lot as my reference for them. 

Awards Daily: Jefferson (played by Branden Cook) had written that he was treated no differently by his Nazi captors than anybody else was. What you did in showing that brought to mind your movie Mudbound, where there were black GIs who went back to Germany after the war because they felt more fairly treated there than they did here. 

Dee Rees: Yeah. In the camps, it’s like they were discriminated against more by their American colleagues than they were by the German captors. The irony of that was too rich. Also just in terms of understanding what they did and who they were and their education, by and large the Tuskegee Airmen were better educated than other groups. They had gone to college and they were older, so they had this maturity about them, intellectually and physically, that the other soldiers didn’t. They stood apart in that way also. When Jefferson gets into it, he kind of avoids talking about how he’s treated by his colleagues. He talks about the racism he encountered in training and before they arrived. I think he deliberately downplays what he experienced at the hands of his captors, and it’s kind of obvious by the ways in which his story is omitted in the main book, because they didn’t really fuck with him so they didn’t want to talk to him. I think he probably did that because he didn’t want that to overshadow the things that he did and be reduced down to just the negative things that he had to overcome. I just had this image of these guys walking into that room and what’s going to happen? They live in a segregated society and now they’re being integrated in a prison camp. What is that room going to do when they walk in, and it’s going to be tense. I wanted to take it as far as I could. 

Awards Daily: Do you think it was important to have a person of color direct the Tuskegee episode? 

Dee Rees: I think it was important to have me direct that episode, because I’m a person who has a passion about it. The black soldier is something I’ve been trying to get at and explore for a while. I had an option on Toni Morrison’s book Home a while ago. I couldn’t get it made, but it’s about this man who comes home from the Korean war, which was the first kind of integrated fighting forces. So it’s a topic I’ve been circling for a while. I got to chip at it a bit in Mudbound, so I think it was important to have someone who cares specifically about this story. In my own family, both grandfathers fought in different wars, so it’s something that I’ve been interested in. I don’t think it’s just about my race alone, but it’s about my interest in this particular aspect of history and the ways it echoes to me today in policing. 

Awards Daily: There was a pretty good TV movie in the ‘90s with Lawrence Fishburne and Cuba Gooding about the Tuskegee Airmen. Red Tails was a movie that was made not all that long ago about them as well. Watching the two episodes where they’re included in the series, I almost said it out loud, where is their nine episode miniseries? There’s a lot to dig into here. 

Dee Rees: From your lips to God’s ears. That could be a whole thing: they’re stationed in Italy, even getting there was fraught, and the mission over Toulon, where it’s like if you get shot down, just try to blend in. Like, are you fucking kidding me? The level of unthought and how they had to create that sense of worth and have that confidence for themselves. From your lips to God’s ears, may there be a mini series just about them. You could pick different wars and go through the years. Every season, just choose a different war and just go with the black officers. Start with World War I, where we’re literally fighting for the French because the Americans won’t let us fight with them.

Awards Daily: By directing episode seven and eight, you have to tee things up for the finale. As a director who’s working in an episodic medium, what is the thought process behind making sure I’m leading the person who’s picking up the baton and doing just the right handoff. 

Dee Rees: The cool thing about this series in general is all the great directors and knowing it’s going to be a cinematic thing: Cary Fukunaga, who actually is the one who brought me on, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, and then I knew it was going to be Tim Van Patten for the finale. So you know it’s going to be spectacular. For me, I think I was just trying to push certain characters forward. I wanted the Tuskegee Airmen to get more attention. It’s hard to introduce a whole group all in an hour, make people care about them, and hope they live on. But, yeah I was thinking about that.

I was also thinking that I know in the ninth episode, they’re going to be liberated, but how can I not at all make that seem like that’s going to happen in these episodes. How do I make it almost as impossible as possible? How do I make that feel like the least likely thing? How do I take these characters to their nadir? Knowing that they’re going to get out, we’ve got to take them all the way to the ground, so that when they get out it feels like this miraculous thing happened. I was thinking more in that way and trying to make our situation feel as hopeless as possible. They’re fighting amongst each other. I wanted to use my knowledge of what was going to happen against them, in a way, and make it seem like they’re never going to get out. I wanted the audience to wonder how is this going to change. 

Awards Daily: That’s such an interesting thought process to me, because what you’re basically doing is trying to take it as low as possible because it enhances the relief that follows.

Dee Rees: Yeah. It makes the wind bigger and it makes the exaltation higher, like I was hoping. A lot of the episodes I had were dealing with failure. One of the scenes I love, where they’re coming back in and counting the planes, and it’s my God, we lost almost everybody, so a lot of  low moments. They don’t know that they’re heroes. They don’t even know that they’re going to be proud of themselves when they leave this. I’m trying to use it as much as possible so that when they do get the win, we know they’re going to be different men. They’re not the cocky guys that went into this thing. They’ve been humbled and maybe they’re going to always have those scars in some way, but hopefully they’re going to be better human beings because of this experience.