'Masters of the Air', Author, Donald L. Miller

0:07Donald L. MillerHello, how are you?

0:09Jawad MirI'm doing great. And yourself?

0:12Donald L. MillerPretty good. Little rough these days. Otherwise… ... Okay. Where are you coming from?

0:20Jawad MirI'm in Toronto. Yourself? Toronto, Canada.

0:22Donald L. MillerGreat. Love Toronto. Did some lectures on Masters of the Air up there at the university.

0:30Jawad MirWhich university?

0:32Donald L. MillerUniversity of Toronto.

0:33Jawad MirOh, Toronto. Okay. Cool.

0:36Donald L. MillerDowntown.

0:36Jawad MirAwesome. Was… wonderful. Was that recently or?

0:39Donald L. MillerNo, that was when the book came out. A guy named Keith Lowe had done a book on Hamburg. And we kind of did a dog and pony show, and at the university. Had a big crowd…

0:52Jawad MirWonderful

0:52Donald L. Miller... And pretty raucous. They were arguing with one another about, you know, whether there was over-bombing, and of course Dresden came up, and it was a pretty... Toronto, you know, is, as you know, a very international city, and, so you got a lot of interesting points of view, and people who've actually are still around that lived through these events and they bring a lot of ardor to the, to the enterprise. It was a lot of fun. Yeah.

1:23Jawad MirRight. Yeah, absolutely.

1:24Donald L. MillerIt was Valentine's Day, but there was no love in the air.

1:30Jawad MirIt was all discussions and, debates. Wonderful. Donald, if you don't mind me asking, if it's possible, if that it's okay, your iPad is positioned vertically. Are you able to rotate it horizontally?

1:44Donald L. MillerOh, yeah.

1:45Jawad MirThat'd be great. Perfect. That's awesome. Yeah, so thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it. Been looking forward to Masters of Air Series, for a long time now. Obviously, we're not gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about…

2:02Donald L. MillerI can talk about it. That's fine

2:03Jawad Mir... Okay. So I'll let you figure out whatever you want to talk about. I don't wanna

2:08Donald L. MillerOkay

2:08Jawad Mir... You know, put you in any kind of position because I…

2:10Donald L. MillerWe just can't talk about individual scenes to… so we don't give anything away, you know. And, but…

2:15Jawad MirYeah

2:16Donald L. Miller... Otherwise, we're okay.

2:17Jawad MirSo if I ask something, just tell me right off the bat that I can't, you know, because I don't know what limitations you may have.

2:23Donald L. MillerI don't either. They didn't, Apple didn't lay down a,.. They just said be, cautious…

2:31Jawad MirCareful

2:31Donald L. Miller... And…

2:32Jawad MirYeah

2:32Donald L. Miller... Exactly.

2:33Jawad MirGot it.

2:34Donald L. MillerNo surprises.

2:35Jawad MirOkay.

2:35Donald L. MillerThey want all the surprises.

2:38Jawad MirAbsolutely. And I don't want any spoils… spoilers either, and I'm sure people don't either. So…

2:42Donald L. MillerYeah. That…

2:43Jawad MirYou know, w… Donald, what I love to do all the time when I talk to people is that I always try to understand their journey and where they've been and where they're coming from. So, you know, your journey as an author, when did it start, and your connection with what you write. Just learning more about you, who you are…

3:03Donald L. MillerYeah

3:03Jawad Mir... And where have you been.

3:05Donald L. MillerWell, I went to graduate school at the University of Maryland, and I finished most of my work at Yale. Was living in Washington and worked for a time, short time, at the Washington Post, and, I was doing a dissertation at the time on the 1930s. And, that got the writing bug going and, writing pieces for the Outlook section, longer pieces I didn't have to do. I started out on the city desk and went over to the Outlook section, and we did features that appeared every two weeks, so we had time to do them, you know. And I kind of decided that I was more of a long distance runner than a sprinter, and maybe didn't want to do newspaper work on a regular basis. So books were the thing, but breaking through was a big deal, of course. I got my dissertation published, I think eight people read it. You know, not even all my family. But, I had a, I had a, had a book party, and, I thought, "Well, this is a great way to sell the first book."

4:05Donald L. MillerSo I bought a couple of boxes, and my friends took all the books home and didn't pay for them. And so that was my, launch into big time writing. But hit some books after that, and most of my early books were not on military history. I had never taken a military history course as an undergraduate or a graduate student. I was mildly interested in it, a lot interested in it when I was a kid. My dad was in the Air Force in World War II. I had an uncle that flew against Japan in those big fire raids, another uncle that served with the, 1st Division, the Big Red One. He was, landed in the first 10 minutes at D-Day. Grew up in a... So I grew up in a military family in an ethnic neighborhood in a little town called Reading, Pennsylvania, railroad town. It's on the Monopoly board, okay? And, one of the four railroads. And, so that was there, and our attic was always filled with memorabilia that my uncles had brought home from the war.

5:06Donald L. MillerThey all lived with my grandparents, housing shortage after the war. So us kids went in there and grabbed gas masks, and Lugers, and bomber jackets, and everything else. But then my interest fluctuated to what's called history of ideas, intellectual history, it's pretentiously called. And, I started doing books actually on cities. I did a major biography of a very important, urban critic and architectural critic named Lewis Mumford. Big in Canada, actually. Did a big series in Canadian broadcasting…

5:45Donald L. Miller... And internationally known, and that was his... That was my first shot at biography, and, it was... I didn't do an official biography. I did not want to do that, but I did have exclusive access to his papers. And then I did books on Chicago… I never lived in Chicago, but I was transfixed by the city, by its dramatic, you know, electric growth in the 19th century.

6:09Donald L. MillerAnd, saw it as the epitomization of America with, in all its splendor and squalor and, crazy place. Capital of capitalism, capital of socialism, you name it. And then did a, another large book, can't stay away from that, writing long books, on Manhattan in the 1920s. Wanted to catch the zeitgeist of the 20th century. Tall buildings, jazz music, you know, you name it. Big transportation breakthroughs, the renovation of Grand Central Station, and the building of modern Manhattan, basically central Manhattan, from the Empire State Building to Central Park. There were about two skyscrapers below 42nd Street at the time, between 42nd and Park, and there are over 300 90 years later. So the biggest building boom in the history of cities. And then I, my dad passed away, and I kinda felt really...

7:14Donald L. MillerWell, don't use the word kinda. I felt pretty guilty that I hadn't addressed his war in any way in any of my work. And, so I started a book not knowing a lot about World War II except what I saw on Victory at Sea and things like that.

7:33Jawad MirRight.

7:34Donald L. MillerI wrote a book called, The Story of World War II. Henry Steele Commager's name for some reason appears on that book. I guess we got the rights from him, but I never met him, and he didn't collaborate on the book. It was my book. I was awfully mad at my… the lawyers at Simon & Schuster for putting his name on the book. But anyway, I did that, and, followed it up with a book on the Pacific, about the, amphibious landings by the Army and the Marines in the Pacific, D-Days in the Pacific. And, then I did, a, switched to the Civil War, and, did a book on Ulysses Grant and his campaign to capture Vicksburg. I loved writing that book.

8:25Donald L. MillerAnd the book I'm writing now is a, continuation of that. I take Lincoln and Grant. They first meet right after Vicksburg, face to face, and they'd hardly even corresponded. And they form literally a partnership that brings down Dixie, brings down the Old South, including slavery. So I'm about halfway through that book right now, and I'm enjoying it a lot. And splitting my time, I do some film, and

8:58Donald L. Miller... I work with Tom Hanks on a number of projects, and PBS, American Experience did a thing on Ulysses Grant. And they also filmed my, did a weekly series on my Chicago book called City of the Cen… It's the title of the book, City of the Century. It was about 19th century Chicago.

9:19Jawad MirRight.

9:19Donald L. MillerFrom the time it was a m… a mudflat, you know, with 16 people, to the end of the century, when it was the third-largest city in the world. And there was a guy there, I found his diary in the Chicago Library, and, he lived in old Chicago in, the 1820s. And he died when Chicago, you know, was a skyscraper city, and he never moved. So, that's how fast that transformation was. And I loved writing that book because I really took to Chicago and got a lot of help from the mayor and city council about helicopters and police boats, places to go and film certain spots, and access to certain libraries that weren't open to the public. I, it was a real welcoming experience. Got to know and become friends with Studs Terkel, and it was a great, it was a great run in Chicago, you know.

10:22Donald L. MillerAs a writing experience, you know? Yeah.

10:25Jawad MirSure. That's wonderful. You know, one of the things that you talked about kind of resonated with me personally too, because my, I come from a military family as well. My dad, he served, in the army of, Pakistan, and for 30 years, and he fought two wars, and I have been so connected. And I spent 13 years of my life back home, you know, in that environment…

10:53Jawad Mir... Of the military life. And I'm, I've always been connected to war movies, like, you know, like from Bridge on River Kwai to Longest Day…

11:03Donald L. MillerYeah

11:03Jawad Mir... To Saving Private Ryan, and Band of Brothers, The Pacific. And it's just, there's just, it's crazy that, you know, I always wonder, aside from that factor of being, coming, you know, coming from military family, what attracts me to it. And it hit me about a couple of months ago. It's just the idea of, which is very obvious, right? But for me, it was a revelation about a couple of months ago, because I thought about it, is that this idea of these so-called, you know, our image of soldiers are like powerful men with guns, you know, fighting wars and... But at the end of the day, you know, you watch a film like Saving Private Ryan or, you know, Platoon, like they're just average human beings, and that resonates with all of us, and that's what works. I mean, it's, it's a very obvious thing, but, you know, I had to think about it to figure out what could possibly be the other reason for me to be attracted to that. And that's why I'm so looking forward to Masters of the Air because of that element, and obviously watching the teaser trailer, you know, it literally begins o… starts off with that human condition, you know, how they're just looking at this imagery of bombs falling, and it's like some sort of art in one way or another, not for the people who are, you know, suffering from it.

12:22Jawad MirSo I really appreciate you know, doing all these things and something that I... I'm a filmmaker myself. I make documentaries and films about social and political and

12:34Donald L. MillerYeah, I've read your biography. Yeah

12:35Jawad Mir... Okay, human rights stuff. And you know, I would love to do something similar, kind of like what you talked about, like how you never did anything military-based, you know, because of y… your father after he passed away. And I, now that you mention it, I mean, my father is alive and well, thank God, and you know, he... I've never done anything like that too, so it's sort of something that I, when you said that, it kind of hit me, like maybe I need to do something similar of some sort one way or another. But I, but I appreciate you sharing all that. So I just want to share my point of view, you know, to your connection, to the military and the life that I have come from. You know, moving on to Masters of the Air…

13:17Donald L. MillerBut you know, that's so important because you'll be bringing what I hoped I brought to your work, the, your humanistic background and your interest… ... In individual human beings. And I know when I first started writing about World War II, I was most interested in what I was interested in as a kid, the combat experience. We play army, you know, and pretend you're dead…

13:43Jawad MirYeah

13:44Donald L. Miller... And things like that.

13:45Jawad MirYeah.

13:45Donald L. MillerAnd I often wondered, I remember reading in high school The Red Badge of Courage, what would I do, under that kind of stress? Would I fake it? You know, would I fight? And it, you know, as Eric Severud, reporter pointed out, it is a willed condition, courage, you know? And you can lose it. And so I was really interested when I started Masters with what you're talking about.

14:21Donald L. Miller... The story of World War II, you couldn't get into that book. The door that allowed you into my book was you had to be at the tip of the spear. You had to have been in combat, and that includes civilians under the bombs, you know, and in wrecked villages and things like that. You had to have really viscerally experienced the war, and I was interested in the reaction, how demoralized were the British after the bombing of Coventry.

14:50Donald L. MillerHow did the Germans hold up after Dresden? How did the guys in the cockpits hold up and in the fuselages? And so when Hanks approached me about doing this film based on the book, I think he and Spielberg told me that they were most interested in that part of the story, and could we really bring that forward, take you inside the plane rather than having a George Lucas kind of…

15:18Donald L. Miller... Dog fight. And

15:20Jawad MirRight

15:20Donald L. Miller... So we're, and we even specially designed a,.. This isn't a secret, but Spielberg built three B17s for the show. They don't fly, but we simulate that. And their every screw, every dial, every bulb is exactly to specification…

15:42Jawad MirOh, wow

15:42Donald L. Miller... B17. That's the thing about this film. It has complete fidelity. Every bottle of liquor in the Officers' Club is exactly the liquor that was drank, that was being d… drunk in 1944. The cigarettes, the toothbrushes, everything, the socks, even down to our costume designer going crazy when she found out we were using the wrong shoelaces. So we were really shooting for as... I'll give you an instance. I was watching the filming of the episode where the flyers are called into the briefing room and told they're gonna bomb Normandy, and they're hooraying and standing and this and that, and I just happened to move some papers on the desk. I was sitting in an off-screen de… office that was an officer's, bailiwick, and I went to the bottom of the pile of papers, and they were really Air Force papers. He could have put anything in there. He could have put, you know, advertisements about yogurt. But…

16:38Jawad MirYeah

16:38Donald L. Miller... They were there. And…

16:40Jawad MirWow

16:40Donald L. Miller... And that's what we really tried to stress, taking you inside to such an extent that after we built the second B17, the cameramen were having trouble moving around in the very tight fuselage, much more constricted than a submarine. And it was difficult. So Spielberg built a larger one. You couldn't film from the outside. So the ca… it had more breadth, and our cameramen could move around there really well. So I think mo… almost all the combat action scenes, and it's not a film dominated by them, but all the combat action scenes take place with live actors inside the plane, and we watch their reaction. And as Tom said to us when we first started, how did they get in the planes the next day after experiencing a s… a traumatic, you know, raid where comrades were killed, lots of planes were lost, and they went back to barracks where the beds had been stripped and the belongings of the downed airmen had disappeared.

17:52Donald L. MillerAnd it was really, and you went out in the morning and there's like a softball game in your right field, the second baseman and pitcher weren't there. Well, you know, how do you... And then there's a mission that night. It's Heller, Joe Heller, who was a good friend of mine. We taught together at City University. I think Joe was after that and caught that in Catch-22, that all you had to do was say no, and you didn't fly, and you lived.

18:27Donald L. MillerNow, you got a reduction in rank. But there was no corporal punishment or jailing, and the British really stigmatized you. They called it, lack of moral fiber. Whoa. And they blamed it on their psychiatric staff, who had somehow let this guy through and not... Didn't pick up his absence of moral fiber. The Americans were much more understanding about it, and, mostly because of crew pressure. Guys understood that it can happen to anybody, and did happen to just about any type of person, the bravest of the brave.

19:09Jawad MirRight

19:09Donald L. Miller... It happens to Gregory Peck, you know, in the best movie ever made on the 12 o'clock high. Yeah.

19:19Jawad MirYeah. I mean, that, what you just said kind of reminds me of the scene, from Saving Private Ryan, where they're having this argument whether they should kill the German soldier or not.

19:29Donald L. MillerYeah.

19:29Jawad MirRight? And then, and then Tom Hank's character, you know, goes in the corner and just starts... He breaks down. Now, obviously he couldn't do it in front of his juniors because, you know, the leadership, and you don't wanna, you don't wanna, lower the morale and everything. But yeah, it's just the human condition. And like I said, I mean, from what I've seen with the teaser, just right off the bat, like, you know, instead of showing like a battle sequence to get people's attention, which a lot, normally a lot of trailers would, like, you know, to hook people, it just captured, at least for me and a lot of people, you know, just that human condition, and that's, that's the reason Band of Brothers was so successful. That's the reason the Pacific was so successful. That's the reason Saving Private was so successful. Platoon, you know, Captain... I've spoken to Captain, Dale, who was the consultant, in terms of training.

20:19Donald L. MillerDale Dye, yeah.

20:20Jawad MirYeah. Dale Dye, on Platoon, Private Ryan, Band of Brothers…

20:24Donald L. MillerYeah, we did too

20:24Jawad Mir... Pacific and this series.

20:25Donald L. MillerYeah.

20:26Jawad MirYeah, and…

20:26Donald L. MillerAnd we did Ryan

20:27Jawad Mir... And it's just, it just kind of, the amount of work that, you know, goes into this. Now, with Saving Private Ryan, I know, and with the other two series, there was a lot of, boot camp that was done. Was it similar to your knowledge with this series as well?

20:43Donald L. MillerYeah. Yeah. I used a guy from M16 and, a guy who currently works as a consultant for NATO. He's a commando… ... Lots of combat experience, and a ranger as well. And, I've toured with him, and talked with him a lot about, you know, you know, escape and evasion and things like that. What kind of tools inside your body could you call on? What kind of, psychological defenses did you have to prevent you from disclosing secrets, saying something, you know, out of, on tour that will reveal the position of your men, et cetera, et cetera. So then we got the actors and we put,.. Bob Shaw is his name, and Bob put them through a Dale Dye type of experience. You know, in Saving Private Ryan when they put... It was filmed in Ireland, and they put them out…

21:52Jawad MirYeah

21:53Donald L. Miller... In the, in the woods, and it was raining, and it was really a typical Irish day. I remember when I lived in England, I was, I was teaching at Oxford, and I... When the weather would come on, it always... You didn't have to describe the weather in Ireland. There was a big black cloud on the map, you know, over Ireland. So anyway, they're out there and, feeling like drowned rats, and they decided to quit, the actors.

22:20Jawad MirYeah.

22:20Donald L. MillerThey had enough. They couldn't take it, and everybody voted that way except Hanks. He voted last, and then they changed their mind.

22:29Jawad MirYeah.

22:29Donald L. MillerAnd what Spielberg was after is they were gonna meet Matt Damon later, and Matt didn't go through this, and he showed up the first day with a $6,000 outfit on and,... Coifed hair and everything, and they hated him immediately, which is what the idea of the film is.

22:47Jawad MirThe story was. Yeah. Yeah.

22:47Donald L. MillerYou don't want to land there and go look for some guy. You want to kill Germans and save yourself and go home…

22:52Jawad MirYeah

22:53Donald L. Miller... Your, to your family. But yeah, we did, we did do that. Te… we taught them, the actors, to be soldiers. There was nothing like what happened with Steve Spielberg when a guy came up to him, for example, and said he thought that the helmet might mess his hair up. He didn't last but an hour. We had nothing like that. And everybody kind of was... It was an amazing... We had a lot of actors, and almost all of them are young.

23:27Jawad MirRight.

23:27Donald L. MillerAnd, they're all gonna... Many of them are gonna be very famous, and some of them already are. And, yeah, they saw the opportunities, but they also bought in when they learned a little bit about, the experience. When we mentioned to them that the 8th Air Force lost 26,000 killed, and then compared that to 18,500 killed, Marines killed, in the whole Pacific War from Oka… you know, from Guadalcanal to Okinawa, just that one small outfit, that 77% of the guys who flew were casualties, that… When they're, the Air Force has often denigrated for not accurately bombing on D-Day, for hitting, for missing the German guns on the cliffs. Well, they did it to save lives. It was, it, the troops were so packed together and, you know…

24:30Jawad MirYeah

24:30Donald L. Miller... And

24:31Jawad MirYeah

24:32Donald L. MillerThey all knew that bomb, pinpoint bombing was an oxymoron, that it was, not accurate and…

24:40Jawad MirYeah

24:40Donald L. Miller... There's gonna be a lot of spillage and things. But you don't have an invasion, and I think we make this clear without doing it didactically in the film, and that's one of the things, we're not gonna point fingers and, make moral judgments. Well, the men will make their own moral judgments, and they ne… and they are myriad. But we do point out that they lost, over 18,000 pilots, and crews in the run-up to D-Day. 8,000 more men killed to prepare the beach than, you know, the 4,000 or 5,000 that were killed on the beach. So…

25:24Jawad MirRight

25:24Donald L. Miller... Yeah, you know, and appropriately, the 100th Bomb Group, and a bunch of us are putting together a monument to the Eighth, like the monument that the 100th has on the beach, an obelisk they have. We're gonna actually have a, something like the,.. I don't know if you've seen it, but the, with their own money, you know, not with RAF money or government money, the bomber crews of the, Royal Air Force put up a monument in Hyde Park. And it's spectacular. It's spectacular, and, lit up at night, and with statues of crewmen in combat outfits. And we're gonna do one of those at a place called La Fière, which is where the 82nd Airborne fought a horrible battle to keep the German tanks off the beaches when the Higgins boats were coming in.

26:29Donald L. MillerAnd we'll have a tableau with four airmen, a Medal of Honor winner who was a private, Rosie Rosenthal, who's kind of the star of our show and certainly the star of my book, and, a fi… one of the major fighter commanders, haven't quite decided, and, Jimmy Doolittle, who was the commander of the Eighth from January of '44 on to the end of the war.

26:58Donald L. MillerYeah. So we have a sculptor. We actually have the money. It's happening now, and

27:06Jawad MirGood

27:06Donald L. Miller... We should be finished next year. Yeah.

27:09Jawad MirThat's, that's great. Going back to your book, how long it took you to write the book, and what was the biggest hurdle, if you can remember, in writing the book, whether it was research or access or whatever?

27:26Donald L. MillerCompression. Compression is the biggest hurdle. I, there were a lot of books on the Eighth. Of course, you Google this stuff when you start. You don't wanna write something that's been done and done and done.

27:38Jawad MirDone before, yeah. Yeah.

27:39Donald L. MillerYeah. And when I read a lot of the books, I try to write the kind, and that's perhaps explains why I'm a kind of a professor of things in general, why I roam into other people's fields and things like this. I'm a trespasser and not a specialist. And

27:58Donald L. Miller... I'm interested in writing what I'm interested in reading, and that's the kind of book. I wanted to read a book about the Eighth, a… as I read a number of books on the Eighth, that kind of did the whole shebang, you know, did the flying and the fighting, but also did the on-base experience, the medical experiments they did with the men. And they were experiments, 'cause the whole war was an experiment. No one had ever flown this high, no one had ever bombed from this fight, no one ever fought this high. Everything was new, and they were the guinea pigs. So they invented air war… air warfare, and as they went along. And I thought that was really interesting, and I'd never seen…

28:41Donald L. Miller... A book done like that, nor did I see a book done that dealt with not just casualties, but the actual people who experience death and dismemberment and things like that. I wanted real-life characters, and I wanted to write it like a novel. I wanted it to have all the components of a novel, momentum. You know, I wanted it to have, a, the best way to describe it would be, my off mentioned thing to people, I say, I talk about the fallacy of hindsight.

29:23Donald L. MillerHow if you know what's gonna, you know what it is. You know what's gonna happen, you're gonna write a pretty bad book because everything is organized and the British are gonna, are not gonna win the Revolutionary War. Now, if you did the Revolutionary War without knowing that, it would be very suspenseful because the British…

29:46Donald L. Miller... Should have kicked the hell out of them, okay? And… ... We talk about an underdog battle or Vietnam versus the US.

29:54Jawad MirRight.

29:54Donald L. MillerSo you have to take the reader behind the eyes of the people that you're writing about at the point they make these decisions, without knowing the future. None of us knows the future. You or I do not know what's gonna happen in the next five minutes, and so it is with every historical character. So you try, you try to do that, and that was the hardest challenge, trying to do that. And, And another hard challenge was integrating interpretive material into storytelling.

30:33Donald L. MillerAnd let's... Here my guide was Barbara Tuchman, and she once pointed out, if you tell the story, you know, all its particulars, and it's actually happened, and you tell it kind of like the way it happens, 'cause you'll never get it exactly, the interpretation will kind of sneak up to you and tap you on the shoulder. It's there.

30:54Donald L. MillerIt's there. And I do find that happening when I do…

30:58Jawad MirYeah

30:58Donald L. Miller... Battle scenes now, writing about Ulysses Grant against Robert E. Lee in a place called The Wilderness, and nobody won that battle. But i… i… i… and it swayed back and forth, and till the last half hour, no one had the advantage. And, it's, it's interesting to look at it, you know, from that, perspective. As I once asked one of my stupidest questions to a B17 crewman, I said to him, and this is like a quote, I said, "Hey, how come you guys bombed Dresden so close to the end of the war?" He said, "How in the hell did we knew, know it was the end of the war? We had just buried the dead from the Battle of the Bulge. We didn't have enough powder in our arsenal to mount another offensive for another five or six weeks. The Russians had to do it, and when they began their January offensive."

31:59Donald L. MillerBut that's, that's a good point. That's a good point. So they were ch… and there's always research challenges, you know? And then you have to be very careful with, as you know, you do a lot of interviewing.

32:14Donald L. MillerAnd interviews are great, but if you get somebody talking about something that happened 40 years ago, maybe even 60 years ago, it's not gonna be exactly right.

32:27Jawad MirYeah.

32:27Donald L. MillerIt just can't be. So but you wanna capture, and people just say, "Well, then don't do those then." Yeah, you gotta do the interviews.

32:35Jawad MirYeah.

32:36Donald L. MillerHe takes you to the spot. He doesn't forget what the trees were like in the Hürtgen Forest…

32:42Jawad MirYeah

32:43Donald L. Miller... Where the Germans hit the tops of the trees and try to create tree bursts and things like that. You'll never forget that, and what that was like, or the death of a comrade or thing. But he might forget that it was the 82nd rather than the 94th that was in the next foxhole. So you check that stuff, you know.

33:00Donald L. MillerWhich isn't, isn't too hard to check. And you don't use that part of the interview.

33:07Jawad MirOf course.

33:08Donald L. MillerNot to use it…

33:09Jawad MirYeah

33:09Donald L. Miller... It is pretentious, I think. If people get real sniffy, they'll look at the book and they'll say, somebody's book and they'll say, "Oh, wow, look at all those interviews in there. That can't be any good." Well, I don't know.

33:26Jawad MirNo, I agree with you because it is the interviews give you, like even if you're d… interviewing, like when I interview people for my documentary, and even if it's like an incident that's five years ago, or two years ago, or 20 years ago, they may even have their own biases, right?

33:44Donald L. MillerYeah.

33:44Jawad MirLike we all have our own biases. But yeah, at least it gives you that human eye to kind of go into that event and try to understand it a little bit, and then you verify all the stuff, you know, by interviewing some… an expert or another expert, and then you kind of go back and forth and counter that and try to present different point of views. But, you know, that's, that's 100% true. And you know, you wrote the book, Donald, in 2007. Run By Me, when did it beca… when did it come under the radar of Amblin and Playtone and HBO…

34:15Donald L. MillerWell, yeah, the

34:17Jawad Mir... Into the series

34:18Donald L. MillerWell, not right away. I had done, I did a film with Tom Hanks called, well, l… let me start at the beginning. I knew Hanks and Spielberg from my ex… participation with the building of the World War II museum in New Orleans. They were head of our, initial push to raise money for the museum.

34:46Donald L. MillerThey were there off at the opening, et cetera, and I was a member of what's it called? The presidential counselors, which is the advisory board to the CEO. So I did get to know them and things like that, and I knew…

34:57Donald L. Miller... Ambrose very well because… ... As a historian, and we had the same editor at Simon & Schuster's, so Steve and I were old buddies. And, in fact, he gave me all of the interviews and diaries and things that he was gonna use to write his magnum opus on the Pacific, and he said, "All I ask you to do is call it D-Days in the Pacific, but you can use everything I have here." He told me that two…

35:28Jawad MirWow

35:28Donald L. Miller... He told me that two weeks before he died. He called me down to New Orleans. He knew I was working on, hey, a biography of Ulysses Grant for the American Experience, WGBH in Boston, and I said, "Why Grant?" He said, "I'm dying, Don, you know, and Grant died of what I have, throat cancer, and I wanna learn how to die with dignity." And then he took me over to his offices and showed me these files. He said, "They're yours." And he had them all photocopied, shipped, paid the hotel bill for my wife and I without telling us. We checked out. We didn't know who paid. Of course, like, you know, but he didn't say anything about it. But, so I did know these guys. And back to the point, and then I did a film for the museum… Called Beyond All Boundaries. It's an introductory film to the museum. Which had all the points we're trying to emphasize here, like contingency.

36:29Donald L. MillerLike I knew the film was at least semi-successful when I walked out and I heard a woman say to her husband, "You know, Frank, we could've lost that war. That's amazing." And that's what we were trying to convey in the film and in the museum. And then he asked me to,.. It was Dave McCullough who gave me a call. He was down at Playtone, the offices of Hank, of, Hanks, Spielberg's at Amblin. And he was with a guy named Kurt Sadowsky, who's, kinda runs the place. And, I didn't know Kurt, but of course I knew David for a long time, again from Simon & Schuster. And I had his son as a student of mine at Lafayette College. And Dave said, "I want you to meet Kurt here, and they need some help on the Pacific. And why don't you come out to LA and see if you can help?" So I got pulled into that, and it was great.

37:32Donald L. MillerIt was really a lot of fun working on that film. And on the, website as well. And then, we decided to do a film which hasn't been seen a lot be… because, you know, I don't know, I think HBO dropped the ball on it. It was gonna be the third volume, Band of Brothers, and, the, this was gonna be the third volume in a sense in that it took the veterans from, the actual veterans we filmed…

38:04Donald L. Miller... From Band and the actual veterans we filmed, Gene Sledge and whatnot, and take their stories from '45 down to the '60s and talk to their families, children, wives, et cetera, and do a film on that, on what combat does to human beings, and it's called He Has Seen War. And it's based on a documentary that the Army did. My son found it. He's a film archivist.

38:37Donald L. MillerMoldering in the archives, and they never released it 'cause they thought it was too tough. And the film says things like, "This guy ain't the guy that went to war. Beware of him around the baby." it's, "He could be, the marriage could suffer. He could have spells." They explain that, and they take you into a mental hospital, and, where airmen are treated for post-traumatic stress disorder and things like that. The f… that film w… you know, the Houston film about that, Let There Be Light, that wasn't released either. So we thought we'd do a film on that, and I thought it was terrific. I really, I think today it's, it's a terrific film. And then time went on and I just, I got a phone call. I was taking my grandkids to the library and they called me up and, from, New Orleans.

39:46Donald L. MillerAnd, no, it was from, California. And, Kurt Sadowsky got on the phone and said, "We're gonna do, we've been thinking about this a lot. We haven't told you, but we're gonna do Masters of the Air." And I said, "Oh, boy." And I'd just come out of the library with the kids, and so I pulled the car over to the curb until I'd get my breath. And my s… littlest one said, "Wh… what's going on?" I said, "Well, you gotta wait a minute before we get the ice cream because I'm talking to somebody…" "... Talking to somebody important." And she said, "Well, I'm important too, Poppy." I said, "Okay. All right, I'll get off the phone soon." "Call you when I'm home."

40:30Jawad MirShe's right.

40:31Donald L. MillerAnd then she... Yeah. And then that's when it, that's when it began. And it was, in the initial stages, it was a lonely enterprise. Because Tom did what I call his pep talk. He brought, got us all together and said, "This is the kind of thing I wanna do. First of all, no cliches. Anybody here wants to do cliches, I don't want them on the film. I don't want the pilot getting shot, falling to the floor of the plane…" "... Having a last cigarette, tell Molly I said hello, kiss the baby for me. Okay, it might have happened, but it's been done."

41:19Jawad MirSo many times.

41:21Donald L. MillerAnd we want fidelity, the thing we talked about at the beginning here. We don't have to have composite characters. We don't have to have made-up characters. Everything in the film has to have happened, or it's not gonna be in the film. And he said, "That's gonna be a challenge." And that's the way the film is. Everything... Now, everything, and this might be a spoiler, but to hell with it, everything doesn't happen to exactly the same guy, okay?

41:51Donald L. MillerAnd, mostly it does, but sometimes it happens to a different guy. But the experience, the existential experience, it, like we do a scene on the bombing of a small German city, and the airmen are attacked, and some are killed by German civilians and, Luftwaffe police. So that's another thing he said, you know, we wanna do. And he said, "And thirdly, I've seen a lot of World War II films. I want this to be the best one." And so we started talking like, "Is there a template? Is there an example?" Da. And he kept coming back to Das Boot. He thought Das Boot was…

42:35Jawad MirYeah

42:35Donald L. Miller... Supremely good. Mostly because, and you see this in his later films, on, especially on the convoys in the Atlantic, men doing their jobs. Everybody on the sub is just doing their job, with no histrionics or anything like that, no Heil Hitlers. They're just doing their job. So that, with that, we started out, and HBO agreed to do it. The way it works is HBO gives them the money since Plato doesn't have the money.

43:20Donald L. MillerEven Spielberg doesn't have the money. My God, Masters of the Air cost over $2 billion. I mean, no, well, I'm not gonna go into that.

43:28Jawad MirYeah.

43:28Donald L. MillerIt costs a lot of money. Okay.

43:30Jawad MirYeah.

43:30Donald L. MillerAnd…

43:31Jawad MirIt didn't, it didn't cost 2 billion. That's, I'll just clarify that for sure, because you p… you probably said that by mistake, but that's not the number for sure. But go on.

43:38Donald L. MillerOkay. Okay. So anyway, it, we're, we're thinking here. Now we have to decide, our small group, we brought in John Orloff immediately. Everybody loved the two scenes in Band of Brothers that John filmed.

44:03Donald L. MillerBrecourt Manor, which is early on, that firefight.

44:07Jawad MirRight.

44:07Donald L. MillerAnd h… and the film he did, on the concentration camps, you know, Why They Fight that is called.

44:16Jawad MirRight.

44:16Donald L. MillerThere's hardly any dialogue in that. And we just thought, and John had some big screen experience too, and John's immersive. John throws himself into projects. He's an enthusiast. I mean, my God, for this film, The Masters, he turned his office into... It looked like an Air Force office, planes, maps. Then John did an incredible amount of research on the 100th Bomb Group. I said, "Where'd you get this?" "Oh, look, I need..." He had a researcher. And, although we weren't able to get him up in a B-17, still haven't been able to, but John was a great researcher, and Kurt was a great researcher. And so the three of us with, at the time, a guy named John Shyban, put together what Tom wanted done first, a bible.

45:08Donald L. MillerNow, and that's the outline of the whole series. So that they knew that they were gonna have a bunch of directors, and they had to be filming simultaneously, or this thing wouldn't have come out for another 15 years.

45:24Jawad MirRight.

45:24Donald L. MillerSo director five had to know what director four was doing, and four had to know what director one, two, three had done.

45:31Jawad MirRight.

45:32Donald L. MillerSo Shyban worked, we worked hard on the bible. It's a c… it's a Kubrick idea that, Hanks was transfixed with. So we did that. It turns out we didn't use it, but we built it. God, I felt sorry for John because, you know, John would write a script, and Kurt and I would critique it, but then ta-da, it went to Hanks, and that was brutal. You know, having him...

46:09Jawad MirI'm sure

46:10Donald L. Miller... Look at everything. And Tom's not a guy who yells. He's not a screamer.

46:15Jawad MirYeah.

46:15Donald L. MillerHe's instructive in his criticism. He'll, he'll help you out. When we did that Be… Beyond All Boundaries for the museum, he narrated it, and the company we hired, a Disney company, to film it did not do a good job, and we were scared to show it to Tom when we went out there to California. And we decided to show it to him, and he came to the studio the next day and helped us to make corrections, and I think it's a pretty good film. So, but it was intimidating. And then there were the constant interruptions, COVID and AT&T's…

46:55Donald L. Miller... Efforts, successful, to take over HBO. And they pushed aside all our favorite people that we worked with on, The Pacific and Band, and decided they weren't gonna... After they told us they were gonna do this 10-hour thing, it was a 10-hour thing originally. It's nine now.

47:20Donald L. MillerAnd they're telling us, "Well, I don't know if these are in our future or not." It got, S… Spielberg made the decision on his own really, I think. "We're gonna, we're gonna move." He was moving a lot of his product to Apple…

47:35Jawad MirYeah

47:35Donald L. Miller... And was gonna do a show for Apple and has moved a lot of it. So it only made sense for him to take everything a… across to Apple, and Apple just jumped on the idea, and it's been terrific. Yeah.

47:47Jawad MirYeah.

47:47Donald L. MillerAnd the nice thing is…

47:48Jawad MirYeah

47:48Donald L. Miller... The nice thing is their executives are top people, and this happened to some extent at HBO. There were two people who were absolutely fantastic, and, But you do get unusually lawyers and people in the accounting office, and not just for the money thing, but looking at it and offering advice and pitching in and

48:11Jawad MirThat's cool

48:11Donald L. Miller... It's a big team. It is cool to have the full cooperation of an outfit like this. Yeah.

48:21Jawad MirYeah. I mean, that clearly means that… You know, o… obviously money is an important factor in life, but when there's a project that everybody believes in, there must be something right about it. Otherwise, you know, why would anybody commit to it without financial gains a… and whatnot? So that's…

48:37Donald L. MillerExactly. They kept asking, and it wasn't a pain in the neck, but they kept asking for shots, for scene shots, stills. I mean, not stills. But... And they generally liked what they saw, and they had a lot of suggestions, and so they felt that they were part of the creative enterprise.

48:58Donald L. MillerAnd sometimes that can create jarring confrontations…

49:03Jawad MirYeah

49:03Donald L. Miller... Because artists don't like to have businessmen…

49:07Jawad MirYep

49:08Donald L. Miller... You know, messing with the, with the salad, and, it's worked out pretty good. It's worked out pretty good.

49:15Jawad MirThat's good.

49:16Donald L. MillerYeah. It's been a good…

49:18Jawad MirWhat I would love…

49:19Donald L. MillerIt's been a good experience, you know. And what I have to say too is I really admire the people, the crews, who went ac… across to England. We had several locations there. Your viewers might know this, but, maybe not, that Spielberg built an entire replica of the…

49:42Jawad MirYeah

49:42Donald L. Miller... English airfield called Thorpe Abbotts, and

49:45Jawad MirYeah

49:45Donald L. Miller... In Abington, just right near Oxford, and very expensive enterprise, but it looks like a real base. And you should see the concentra… I thought when he was gonna build a Stalag that he was gonna build one barracks. I don't know how many barracks there are. Eight? And you go inside, and again, y… you have that fidelity thing, you know, the shoes, the socks…

50:10Jawad MirRight

50:10Donald L. Miller... Everything ex… exactly right. So the people who worked on that, our costume designers and things, were fantastic, e… especially the guys work… as I said, who worked on the planes. I mean…

50:24Jawad MirYeah

50:25Donald L. Miller... Building them from scratch. And it's kind of cool…

50:28Jawad MirThe…

50:28Donald L. Miller... To see a B-17 as it looked fresh off the factory floor, as ours were, because they flew over the Hundred Bomb Group in new B-17s. So they did look like this inside. Yeah. Yeah.

50:44Jawad MirYou know, it's, it's... Y… you said this, and I've talked about this on this podcast with other people. Doesn't matter if it's a war film or a period piece from the '60s or '90s, whatever it is, it is so important for actors to be in that environment which feels entirely and look like the time period they're in because it…

51:04Donald L. MillerYeah

51:04Jawad Mir... It throws off energy to them, and that comes out in their performance, you know…

51:09Donald L. MillerThat…

51:09Jawad Mir... As opposed to just building a green screen set and whatnot. It's not the same thing.

51:14Donald L. MillerThat's a great point. One of the lighting guys, I was sitting there, said he had worked at some other films and, the, a TV series on the Solomos. And, he said, "You know, we were trying to do that there but didn't have the resources to completely pull it off." But he said, "We have them here, and it's a wonder to see." And everybody's so excited that there's so much attention. That means you're paying attention to them…

51:44Donald L. Miller... And to their work, you know, and they're craftsmen, and as fully proud of their product as an actor is. Okay? And, yeah, they're rewarded for their time, but they missed their families. They wanted to go back a couple times and had to stay, because of the press of events and things. But to have that full-throated cooperation was really encouraging, really encouraging. And…

52:16Jawad MirRight

52:17Donald L. Miller... And to have somebody like the captain of the operation, the captain of the ship was Gary Goetzman. He was there the entire time anyway. Once... Not so much with the scripts, but once we got... He saw all the scripts. Once we got to production, it was his show.

52:43Donald L. MillerIt was his show, and I'm not offending Hanks or Spielberg or anybody else.

52:48Jawad MirRight. Yeah.

52:49Donald L. MillerBut Gary was the guy with editing, with working with the actors, final product. He was on set every day. He was the commander in chief. Yeah.

53:00Jawad MirAwesome. Awesome. You know, you talked about your dad being in the Air Force, and do you remember a moment on the set, it could be any day, the beginning, the middle, or the end, where you saw all this happening, you know, whatever sequence it was, and being in that environment of, you know, the outfits, the sets, the design and everything, and it made you realize at a personal level that, you know, your dad went through this? Was there ever a moment like that? I'm, I'm sure it was, but I'm just trying to... I would love to hear about it.

53:37Donald L. MillerYeah. My dad was a radio gunner. They sat, just behind, in front of a bulkhead, and behind the bulkhead was the bomb. I'm looking from the back of the plane f… forward. He's sitting in a small compartment with his radio sets, gigantic radio sets, and a machine gun that stuck out the back of a window, a plexiglass window on top. So he was also a gunner. And when they prepared to ditch, except for the pilot and co-pilot, the guys would come from the front of the plane, and everybody would gather in front of the bulkhead. That was the safest place to be. Because the impact was gonna be so severe, and you wouldn't get thrown forward and things like that. You'd get thrown into the bulkhead, okay? And if you had to ditch, the life rafts went out, o… the bomb bay door, and you could go out the bomb bay door if you wanted to parachute out. But it was the safest place. And when they all gathered there like that, I thought, "Geez."

54:55Donald L. Miller"I wonder how that felt, you know, to be going down into the North Sea." And we didn't have at the time, the Air Force didn't have, rescue crews. The British did all the, all the work in the beginning, by '44 the Americans did. But air-sea rescue was a British operation, and you depended upon the Brits, keeping radio contact with your plane as it came over across the Netherlands and toward the Cliffs of Dover, and then into the sea. And unlike the scene in, Dunkirk, the plane sinks fast. There's, there's, there's not a lot of chance, you know…

55:44Donald L. Miller... To save yourself, unless you got on one of those, one of those life rafts and things.

55:51Jawad MirRight.

55:52Donald L. MillerBut by the end of the war, they're saving a lot of these guys, and I thought of that, and I thought of the caprice. My dad's final job with the Air Force was as an air controller. Air Force, you know, didn't call them that. They were control tower operators. That's what they were called when I was a kid, and my dad was a control tower operator in the service. And the role that weather played in this thing, and the ups and downs. I mean, you have enough trauma to deal with thinking about missions.

56:26Jawad MirYeah.

56:26Donald L. MillerBut then to get called into the plane, fully dressed, go through the whole thing, the briefing, the blessing by the Catholic priest, the prayer by the Protestant priest. There were no rabbis. And it, and then to get on the tarmac, start up the engine, and to get y… y… the guys are ready to pull the blocks off the wheels, and you're gonna roll, and you sit there for three and four hours, and you're not gonna fly. It's scrubbed 'cause of storms. The weather's beautiful, but it's really bad over Hamburg, so you can't go. And then what they had to think about was the weather had to be right over England…

57:10Donald L. Miller... On the way, over the target, coming back, and over your base when you got back, and that was impossible. So you were always gonna run into lots of bad weather. And lots of planes, crashed in England, crashed on the continent, not because of enemy fire, but because of the engines froze up or, you know, mechanical difficulties caused by the weather, or fog or something like that. And when they took off, they took off every, about every 12 seconds apart. We don't do that anymore at airports. And they spiraled up and, into the c… a cloud bank of clouds and fog that perpetually hung over these bases. And sometimes it would take you over an hour, sometimes two hours, till you popped out of this fog bank like a trout in a stream popping out of the water, and everything was clean and clear and beautiful and sunny.

58:19Donald L. MillerBut then again, weather, you think, "Shit." "If the sun's out, they can see us. Better clouds," you know?

58:31Jawad MirYeah.

58:31Donald L. MillerIt's a good hunting day for the Wehrmacht, yeah.

58:37Jawad MirRight. Right.

58:37Donald L. MillerWith these clear skies. Yeah. Yeah.

58:40Jawad MirWell…

58:40Donald L. MillerSo

58:40Jawad Mir... Yeah, no, Donald, we've got just a little bit of time left, so I wanted to ask you one last question. Any thing that you can talk about, I don't even know what would that be. Any anec… any story, any experience you had on the set, without giving anything away, because I don't wanna know anything myself, you can share.

59:04Donald L. MillerWell, there is one scene, it's a little bit of a giveaway, and we were trying to get across the despair that a lot of the guys started to feel, a despair that approached mutiny on s… a couple of occasions. 'Cause after all, you're not just taking staggering losses, but you don't seem to be bombing effectively. You're, you're missing the target a lot. They have these target maps, and they're showing you that you're, we're, we're not doing the kind of damage we thought we could.

59:41Jawad MirRight.

59:41Donald L. MillerThis utility of that, and how depressing it was looking ahead, and your chances, your chances of surviving. So I actually picked this out to see a… as an example of this kind of feeling. And this is a story of a shot-up B17, and it's, limping home to England, all banged up, and it calls the control tower. Now, it's not exactly true, but things like this happened all over the place, and the story was repeated all over England.

1:00:23Donald L. MillerAnd a lot of guys believed it, 'cause it's a story that, although part not true, expressed something very important. And it goes, he calls the tower, "Hello, Lazy Fox. This is G for George calling Lazy Fox. Will you give me landing instructions, please? Pilot and co-pilot dead, two engines feathered, fire in the radio room, vertical stabilizer gone, no flaps, no brakes. Crew bailed out, bombardier flying the ship. Give me landing instructions." The reply comes seconds later, "I hear you, G for George. Here are your instructions." "Repeat slowly, please. Repeat slowly." "Our Father, who art in Heaven." And that's, that's... Yeah, that's a scene that we do in the,.. The guys talk about that, and they wonder…

1:01:17Jawad MirRight

1:01:17Donald L. Miller... If it's true or not. But they think it sure could be true, 'cause things like that happened…

1:01:24Jawad MirYeah

1:01:24Donald L. Miller... A lot with the other crewmen, a bombardier or somebody taking the plane in. Yeah. Yeah.

1:01:32Jawad MirYeah. No, I bet,.. It's been, it's been a privilege and wonderful experience talking to you. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for writing the book…

1:01:42Donald L. MillerThank you

1:01:42Jawad Mir... Which is now turning into a series. I would love, if you're up for it, to talk about the series when, as we get closer or during the series…

1:01:52Donald L. MillerYeah

1:01:52Jawad Mir... Or after. Just, you know, maybe even episode by episode. That would be... If that, again, you have time, I would love to, I would love to do that. I'm really looking forward to it, really excited.

1:02:03Donald L. MillerI really enjoyed the interview. I enjoyed your, y… y… your emotive interest in this thing, your emotional interest in this thing. You know, that really came through, and that was important to me.

1:02:16Jawad MirThank you. Thank you so much again for your time.

1:02:18Donald L. MillerThank you so much. Have a good day.

1:02:20Jawad MirYou too.

1:02:20Donald L. MillerBye-bye.

1:02:20Jawad MirTake care, Don. Bye-bye. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for watching and listening. Don't forget to subscribe, like, share, and comment, and do come back for another episode. Until then, have a great day.