John Orloff, Writer of Apple TV’s ‘Masters of the Air’ on the Toll it takes to Write About Sacrifice and Death in the Skies During WWII

Writer/Producer John Orloff got his big break writing two episodes for Steven Spielberg’s classic mini-series Band of Brothers on HBO. After scoring an Emmy nomination for his work on the show, Orloff turned to film, writing the screenplay for the devastating (and painfully overlooked) A Mighty Heart starring Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl, the real-life wife of the kidnapped and murdered journalist Daniel Pearl. A Mighty Heart is an extraordinary film, and I suggest all within the vision of these words seek it out post-haste (you can thank me later). 

While Orloff didn’t work on Spielberg’s WWII follow up, The Pacific (terrific in its own right), the world’s most successful filmmaker brought him back for Masters of the Air on Apple TV, which showcases the “great war” from the viewpoint of the bombardiers, who faced extraordinary losses in the early going of the war. Led by a cast that includes Oscar nominees Austin Butler and Barry Keoghan, along with stellar work from less well known actors Callum Turner, Anthony Boyle, and Nate Mann, among many others, Masters of the Air is a riveting and emotionally bruising depiction of the air war against the Nazis.

While the effects are groundbreaking (you’ve never seen WWII air battles like this before), Masters of the Air tells a very human story too, whether in the air or on the ground. While Band, Pacific, and Masters all have their own style and POV, collected together, they tell a remarkable story of the war to save humanity. Orloff’s writing is impeccable, and in our discussion, we talk about just how hard it is to write, with accuracy, the deaths of people who were once of this world.

Awards Daily: Having been a part of Band of Brothers, which is considered one of the greatest miniseries of all time, there’s always the danger of going back to the well. World War II, bringing together these groups of soldiers and telling their story together. Did it give you any pause to think that Band was considered so great, can we replicate the quality? 

John Orloff: I think when you’re doing a Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Gary Goetzman show and financed by the fine people at Apple Plus TV, I don’t want to say quality is baked in because it never is, but whether it would be on a production level and as quality a piece of drama as Band, I was not concerned about. Would it be as emotional or as entertaining? That was more of a concern. You don’t really know until you do it, right? We never wanted to make another Band of Brothers. That was never the idea here. This is not Band of Brothers in the sky. It wasn’t meant to be, wasn’t designed to be. It’s a totally different story told in a totally different way dramatically. And same with The Pacific: an equally different show on every level and that was intentional. It’s sort of up to other people to judge it qualitatively. It’s much of the same group of people trying to tell these true stories as accurately as we can. And we hope the audience appreciates it.

Awards Daily: I think that the taking to the air part is one of the obvious differences in it, because a lot of the war films that we’ve seen tend to be at ground level. When you were thinking about how to express the drama of it in the air and the technical challenges, what was the hardest part of combining the dramatic with the technical? 

John Orloff: Well, nothing about this project was easy. I would say it was significantly more difficult than Band. I didn’t work on The Pacific. I obviously knew most of the people who did, and everybody that I know on that show thinks Masters was significantly more difficult as well, from every level. It was just a really massive project from inception. When Tom and Stephen sent me the book, what attracted me to it was the fact it wasn’t on the ground. It wasn’t a variation of Band of Brothers or The Pacific. What really excited me was two things initially. One was the scale of the air war, that we could show hundreds and then thousands of airplanes accurately and realistically in a way that has never been done ever in cinema. I would argue that it is the single most accurate depiction of air combat in a bomber that has ever been made, and that was something that we really wanted to do. Then you have the difficulties of telling a story in the air and trying to track all of these characters and these planes, and that becomes its own sort of moving target of how we can show that to the audience.

Awards Daily: When I was watching Masters of the Air, the movie that came to mind to me was Michael Mann’s Ferrari. When I was watching Ferrari, which takes place just after World War II, I was thinking how the hell did anyone ever finish a race? It is so incredibly unsafe what they were doing, and when I watched Masters of the Air, I had the same feeling. How did anybody ever touch down again? Many of the planes were mangled by the time they landed, and those are the ones that did land. So many, as we know, did not. As you were doing your research, was it just astonishing to know the death rate?

John Orloff: Yeah, it was brutal. It was also brutal to write, because almost every single day of years of work and writing and rewriting, included killing off characters, who were real people and describing their deaths in some detail. Unlike in a Star Wars film, where 20 rebel soldiers get killed, they’re not real people. Here, every single time you see a plane go down in Masters of the Air, we can tag that as an actual plane that went down in that battle, probably in the way you see it. If its number one engine is off, that’s probably because that’s what happened to that plane. That was the kind of research that I did and then was continued throughout the process of making the show–including our directors and our special effects team. There was enormous difficulty in writing about so much death and destruction every day. The first group of men that we meet, the first thirty-six crews that show up in England in the end of May of 1943, thirty-four of those planes get shot down. Thirty-four out of thirty-six planes are shot down within ten weeks. Basically everybody you meet in the first episode has been shot down by episode five. That’s just because that’s the reality of the war those men were facing. One of the things that I’m really proud of with Masters is that we could convey that. People are starting to really understand what these young men went through up there. It was really dark up there and very hard to survive. It created narrative difficulties and narrative challenges. As our audience saw, basically every single person they meet is either missing or dead or on the run, such as in Egan’s (Callum Turner) case in episode six. But that’s the reality these young men faced. So yes, it is a difficult thing to write every day.

Awards Daily: The characters who start the show are very easy to get attached to. Austin Butler just screams movie star. He’s very charismatic. Barry Keoghan is one of the best actors I think we have working right now. And then if you go down the line: Anthony Boyle and Callum Turner. I’m going to be very careful about how I state this because people consume shows so much differently now. but some of the people that you meet, who you might become very attached to and who you might also expect to live longer, don’t. Was part of your purpose in casting as you did to tell the audience that no one is safe?

John Orloff: Absolutely. In fact, at a certain point, we augmented one character when we knew who we cast. It was like a happening at once, sort of like if we leaned into this character a little bit and that actor did this character, we would really explain to the audience that nobody’s safe, and that this was real. People died, and they died very, very unexpectedly and quickly. The survivors had to deal with it, which was of its own dramatic interest to me, how you deal with your friend dying suddenly, unexpectedly. I just want to add one thing to your earlier point about our cast. The thing you have to remember about these real guys, Cleven (Austin Butler) and Egan (Callum Turner) in particular, was that they joined up because they wanted to be flyers before Pearl Harbor. And so they’re different kinds of guys. They’re guys who joined up because they wanted to fly airplanes and get laid. (Laughs). You know, they were Maverick. The lineage of the Top Gun, tough guy pilot, starts with these guys–maybe even starts earlier in World War I–but certainly goes through men like Buck (Butler) and Bucky (Turner), who had this flair, this romanticism. If you see the real pictures of the character that Austin Butler plays, it’s a toss off who looks more dramatic and sexy with his toothpick in his mouth and his hat. These guys were those kinds of guys, and then the second generation of pilots that were recruited after Pearl Harbor were a totally different breed. They joined up for different reasons. They didn’t necessarily have that swagger built into them quite the way that first generation did. 

Awards Daily: I never would’ve put that together with Top Gun. That resonates completely. 

John Orloff: Some critics gave us shit for it, not realizing that this is what they were really like. In fact, we had to underwrite some of that stuff, because you wouldn’t believe it. For example, the Callum Turner character, Egan, was a huge fan of Damon Runyon and Damon Runyon’s writing, and he mimicked David Runyon’s talk. So, it would have been actually more realistic to have him talk like he’s out of Guys and Dolls. That’s how he really spoke. You would just think it was ridiculous, and you would make fun of me as a screenwriter. 

Awards Daily: I want to stay careful here. When I was referring to  characters who die earlier than one might expect, I was thinking of one actor in Particular. Without naming him, can you tell me how you got him? 

John Orloff: Personal relationships. I’m pretty sure. I was not part of those initial conversations. I’d rather not say because if I say and I’m wrong, but it was definitely personal relationships. Also, I can’t underscore the excellent casting of Olivia Grant and Lucy Bevan. Like Meg Liberman did in Band of Brothers, they found some phenomenal, talented young men that we will only hear more about in the coming years across the board. 

Awards Daily: Speaking of casting, one of the challenges you have is that because so many of the characters that are introduced in the beginning meet an end before the series does, you are bringing in characters as you go along and the audience has to continually connect with new people. I’m thinking most specifically about Nate Mann as Rosenthal. 

John Orloff: He’s an amazing human being. I sort of think of Rosie very similar to Dick Winters in terms of two of the most amazing men who served in World War II that I’m aware of. For me, part of writing for them was just get out of the way. I like to say about Band of Brothers, one of the episodes I wrote, the D-Day episode: if you can’t make a guy dropping into Nazi Germany in the middle of the night with nothing but a trench knife and by the end of the day, he’s taken four guns and we all know what he does, if you can’t make that dramatic and interesting, you have no right being a writer. Similarly with Rosie, his mission to Munster, I don’t want to give anything away, but hopefully I got out of the way in episode five and his actions speak for themselves. Now you say that, and yet, I would actually say it’s really hard to make that stuff dramatic and interesting and part of a story. It’s not reenactment. It’s really hard to make non-fiction incredibly accurate like these three projects (Band, Pacific, Masters). I’ve done a lot of non-fiction work in my career. The degree of reality and verisimilitude in those three projects is really quite extraordinary, and it’s not inspired by a true story, it’s not based on a true story, it’s pretty much the true story told in as dramatic a way as all these people who are pretty darn good at their jobs can do, and it’s hard. This show took a long time to make. These all do, including in the writing. There’s no writer’s room. It’s a very laborious, long, detailed process where real events are accepted, thrown out, massaged, ignored, manipulated, but it’s always starting from “well, we can’t make this shit up, so somehow I’ve got to figure out how to make it work dramatically.” 

Awards Daily: Sometimes it’s harder, like you said earlier, to tell people the truth of what happened. It can feel inflated. 

John Orloff: Especially with these men and these particular stories. There’s so many things in Masters of the Air that I am sure people do not think really happened. And yet, trust me, they did. It’s kind of shocking. I even had issues with some of our technical advisors. We had this one really nice guy who was our B-17 pilot expert, and he would read scripts and he would come up to me and say a B-17 can’t do that. And I was like well, maybe you can’t get a B-17 to do that, but Rosie Rosenthal was the greatest man who ever flew a B-17 and he says he did it. So I believe him. 

Awards Daily: There are levels of horror in war that are hard to imagine because they are less obvious–that next level of horror that you can’t imagine. What made me think about that when I was watching Masters was the character who is in the air and is exposed to this 50 degree below zero weather, wets his pants, and gets frostbite from his own urine. 

John Orloff: Incredibly common, believe it or not. Especially in the early months of us being over there before we figured it out that we had to come up with solutions for that. Especially in the early days, there were a lot more frostbite wounds than shrapnel wounds. In that same sequence, somebody takes off their gloves to clear out a gun, and when your hand touches metal at negative 50 below zero, it instantly freezes to whatever that object is and now you’ve got to rip your skin off. Again, not uncommon The urine thing was a big thing because there’s no bathroom on a B-17. Also during combat, there’s nothing you can do during combat. You don’t think of these things and yet, they had a profound effect on people’s lives. 

Awards Daily: As the show goes on, and you probably seeded it by using him for so much narration, but this slowly becomes Harry Crosby’s (Anthony Boyle) story. 

John Orloff: He’s the only one that has a full arc. I mean, they all have little arcs. They all do, but they’repretty fully formed, amazing men: Egan, Cleven, and Rosie. They learn things, and their friendships deepen, and all of that. But you’re right. Crosby is the one guy who sort of starts off as a, let’s say it, a shitty navigator, which is by all accounts true, and yet by the end of the war, he was in fact the navigator for the entire forty-five airplane group, and he was in charge of the navigators for all of them. I also fell in love with him as a character, not only because he has the biggest arc, he is the glue of the show, because as I said earlier, there’s sort of two generations, that we examine, of pilots at Thorpe Abbots. There’s the original group, which had this sort of dash and sexiness, and then there was this second group kind of personified by Rosie, which is, we’re here to get a job done, and we are gonna get it done with as little fuss as possible. In real life, they only overlap at the base at Thorpe Abbots for like a month. They’re not friends. They don’t really know each other, Rosie and Bucky and Buck. And those are the kinds of things we can’t make up in these shows. 90 percent of other people making this series would have made Rosie part of the original gang that started on the first day. That’s not how this show works. So now I have to figure out how to make this into one story and not two stories. I found out through my research that Crosby was the only airman who arrived in May of 1943 in a B-17, and he’s the only guy who’s still there eighteen months later, two years later, on VE day. Everybody else has been shot down or did their tour of duty and went home. Crosby’s the only guy there the whole time, and by chance, he really was one of Rosie’s best friends. So it all worked. Crosby suddenly became sort of the heart, the foundation maybe, of the show and everything else kind of built on top of him even though you don’t meet him first or see him last because emotionally it’s a love story between Buck and Bucky. They’re separated, they get back together, separated, they get back together. All of which is true, by the way. Every one of their separations and reunions is true pretty much how we show it with one exception at the very end. Egan doesn’t come back to Thorpe Abbott’s directly. They don’t meet up again until in America, and we just couldn’t do it that way for budget reasons. Anyway, that’s sort of the emotional through line, that platonic love story, and then Crosby is this anchor of the larger story at hand. 

Awards Daily: It can be very easy to make these shows entirely flag waving, but there’s a cruelty to the number of missions that are required to go home going from twenty-five to thirty for people who may be at twenty-four missions. 

John Orloff: I would even offer another example, which is in episode five, the Munster mission, that’s October 10th, 1943. And that’s the very first time in the war and in American aviation history that we targeted the middle of a civilian neighborhood. Prior to that moment, all of American bombing was usually outside of a city. Yes, there would be civilian casualties by accident, as there was on this day on October 10th. But that was the first time the actual target was in the middle of a city, and there were a lot of flyers who were really upset about it. They went into the mission saying that was not what America did. On that day, America’s whole strategy changed a little bit. We get into it a little bit, because the men had different reactions. When Egan realized that that was what was happening, he stood up and cheered. He was thrilled to be able to take it to the Nazis and the Germans, who may have just killed his friend. We don’t get into the whole conversation about the moral complexities of daylight bombing that we did, but we examine it from the participants point of view, not the guys who ordered it, who make the decision, but the guys who had to follow it. Throughout the show, we just try to be as honest as we can, to what the men were experiencing at the time. When the mission count went from twenty-five to thirty and then thirty-five, it was horrible. They felt betrayed and they were, because at that point it was a hump. Every mission was a real ‘who knows if you’re going to make it back or not.’ By the time they upped it to thirty-five, they were in pretty good shape. Our losses by that point were such that they didn’t feel quite as jerked around as the guys who went from twenty-five to thirty. But yeah, all of it was awful. Having those two Berlin missions two days apart, Monday and Wednesday, one day off, the exact same route. It was madness. The first mission, they lose 50 percent of their planes. They lose fifteen planes, and then they’ve got to go back on the exact same route. Which means the Germans know where they’re going to be. Which means, all the German fighters are going to be up, and everything is just screwed. But that was the decision that was made, and our guys have to suffer through it as passive participants almost. 

Awards Daily: Showing the devastation on the ground in Germany, I thought was very important to remember that while these countries are at war and they’re our enemy, there’s a lot of people on the ground who really don’t want to be at war. 

John Orloff: One of the things that was a really important theme is total warfare. Right now in our day and age, and really since World War II, so five generations almost, we don’t understand what total warfare is. When your entire society is at war, and everybody is on the front lines. Now, if you were in America, you were not, because of geography. But if you were anywhere in continental Europe, or anywhere in the South Pacific, you were part of this war going on, and you could be killed at any moment, whether you lived in London, Paris, the greatest cities in the world. You were on the front lines. You were making sacrifices. You were sacrificing food so the troops could eat. You were participating in that way. You were probably building airplanes, even if you were a woman or a child. You were participating actively in this war. And so there are little bits of that throughout the show. The Germans, and the Brits, and the European Continental people we see, whether they’re French or German, are part of this world event that is going on. Everybody is an active participant. And that included, obviously, showing the devastation of the bombing on the ground in Germany from the point of view of our characters, so they’re experiencing it as they would have. I think for all of us, our bottom line on this show was to convey the visceral experience of what these young men went through. That was job number one, to give as accurate a depiction of their experience as possible through a dramatic storytelling approach with people that you cared for and loved and hoped would live.