'Masters of the Air', Cinematographer, Richard Rutkowski

0:08Jawad MirYeah, I'm not gonna... Because I'm not sure right now when we're gonna air this episode, so I'm gonna try to keep the details kinda, like, quiet, unless you wanna talk about them. Like, I'm, I'm not gonna really say anything particularly openly about a scene. Just a kinda heads-up. So, but I know you direct… you edited, sorry, you shot, episode seven and eight, right?

0:32Richard RutkowskiThat's right. So those'll come out in early March, if I understand the way Apple's releasing. They're gonna do two episodes on the 26th, so then three, four, five, and six should fill February, and early March should be the ones, that D. Rees and I both did, episode seven and eight.

0:51Jawad MirYeah. So episode seven and eight, among, I mean, among... There were, like, nine episodes. Among the four or five favorite that I had, I really liked episode seven and eight for the reason of the s…

1:05Richard RutkowskiOh, you've already seen the whole series?

1:08Jawad MirYep, I've seen the whole series.

1:09Richard RutkowskiYou're one of the very few people to have access to see the whole thing. There are some very big writers in the United States who have only seen three, I believe.

1:20Jawad MirI guess thanks to Apple, that's all I can say.

1:25Richard RutkowskiWell, that's great. I'm so glad you've seen it in total. So you saw all the way through the finale, nine?

1:30Jawad MirYeah, I did. I did.

1:32Richard RutkowskiNine was originally gonna be two episodes. Nine was originally supposed to be nine and 10, but even at the production level we were working, the decision got made to, curtail, to combine. And so Tim Van Patten and his camera person, David Franco, completed one sort of more, you know, enormous episode.

1:56Jawad MirYeah, and it's funny you mention that because when I saw the number of episodes, before I even started watching them, you know, I saw nine. Normally it's, like, you know, eight or 10, maybe even 12.

2:09Richard RutkowskiThat's right.

2:09Jawad MirBut, like, you know, normally, like, miniseries are around eight and 10 episodes, even way before Netflix days, like, you know, when, Band of Brothers came out and The Pacific came out. But, great series. You know, I spoke to, the author, Donald Miller, maybe about a month ago. Really had a great chat with him. I spoke to Captain Dale Dye

2:31Richard RutkowskiWell, he's, he's enormously in…

2:35Jawad MirYeah. I spoke to Ca…

2:37Richard RutkowskiYou go ahead.

2:37Jawad MirI spoke to Captain Dale Dye, twice, once last year and then one just last week, which we're gonna put up sometime next week or probably is already up by the time this airs. And had a great conversation. I'm a, I'm a huge fan of Band of Brothers. Pacific is not for me as high as Band of Brothers, but I think Masters of Air is kinda now at the level of Band of Brothers for me. And it was such a great series, you know, especially keeping in mind that there's a lot of visual effects, but what's so amazing is that the story keeps everything grounded.

3:14Richard RutkowskiThat's a great way of putting it, and it's very close to intention, especially when it came to D. Rees, my director, and myself. We believe that no visual effect could be impactful unless it actually was grounded in the reality of the story of the flyers and what they were going through, and an understanding of just how, just how bad it was. Because from the position of being filmmakers in 2021, leading, you know, very comfortable lives with a comfortable schedule to work on and an enormous production, incredibly well put together by Gary Goetzman and David Coatsworth and Apple, it can be easy to forget that these are real hardships and real deaths and real mutilations and real, trauma. And we, owe a great deal to the people who the story's based on, and I think Donald Miller did an amazing job in that book, an amazing job. And it really inspired me after reading it to do my best to bring it, you know, to the screen in full detail and in full realization that these are real lives and real occurrences.

4:19Richard RutkowskiAnd in fact, the book has even more to offer, because you can't, you couldn't cover everything that's in the book even in a 20-part miniseries. So I learned so much and was just so grateful to the op… opportunity to combine history, the authenticity of being in England to film it, and the enormous attention to detail that the producers brought to it and the enorma… enormous verisimilitude. Their authenticity level was incredibly high. No shortcuts.

4:49Jawad MirYeah. And that goes to the, to the level of detail, and obviously in the, in the costumes, in the locations.

4:57Richard RutkowskiChris Seagers, our production designer, deserves a, an enormous tip of the hat. They, worked quickly and they worked well and they were dogged in getting all the details right. The set dressers, the leadmen, the art directors were all extraordinary. And then Colleen Atwood. When you, when you mention Colleen Atwood, it's, it's very easy to forget that the costumes had to undergo enormous transformation to accurately reflect the existence of the fl… flyers, being months in a prisoner of war camp. And the, you know, the Stalag Lufts, the ones run by the Luftwaffe, were a far better deal than winding up in a POW camp if you were an infantryman. There was a level of respect from the officer to officer, flyer to flyer. But still, it was not a great existence. We had the great fortune that Alexander Jefferson, one of the Red Tail flyers, had been a draftsman and drew extensively his experience of the Stalag Luft, and his drawings become part of the plot in episode eight.

6:00Richard RutkowskiHis drawings allow you to understand how they mapped their escape, mapped the idea of how to, how to get out of the predicaments they were in, and also he just, he captured literally some of the angles that we then recreated inside the barracks. From his bed in the barracks, he would draw, and we would try to recreate that experience visually, and try not to make it too nice. There's a habit in doing war films, period war films, where things can sometimes seem like, oh, that's not so bad. So I commend, the film All Quiet on the Western Front for making it look just as bad as it was. I also think we did a good job making sure that the Stalag Luft did not look like a fun time, did not look like a recreation zone. It was, it was hardship. And, there were many things about the war and the experience of these young flyers, some teenagers and some in their early 20s, that defy description to a present-day, member of, you know, Gen Z.

7:03Richard RutkowskiThe truth is, and Tom Hanks talked about this at the premiere event, if you survived to age 25 or 26 in the Bloody Hundredth, you were considered a veteran. You were, you were probably already a major, and you were considered a significant veteran if you'd made it to that point in your, in your time flying missions. And the other s… flyers, younger flyers, would call you Pops. You'd be called Pops, and you'd be 26 years old.

7:34Jawad MirYeah. No, that... Thanks for sharing that. That's, that's pretty... I didn't… I know Tom Hanks at the premiere talked about a lot of stuff, but that I didn't know. That's something quite amazing to hear. And one thing I would love to know, I mean, you and I are, you know, we come from a different time era in terms of not the Gen Zs or the millennials, but at the same time, like my... I've, I've mentioned this a few times on my, on this podcast to Donald and to Captain Dale, right? Is that I come from m… military family, like back home where I am originally from. And so the appreciation of... I've always… I've seen a lot of war movies like Bridge Over River Kwai, Juan Ron's Express, The Great Escape, The Eagle Has Landed. Like, ridiculous amount of war movies growing up, like at the age of 10, 11, 12. And up until the first Top Gun, but specifically up until the second Top Gun, there hadn't been any particular Air Force realistic, you know, focused on Air Force that much. This is the first time, to my knowledge, at least in a serious fashion and done properly.

8:37Jawad MirDid you re… if that there was…

8:41Richard RutkowskiWell, there is, there is the movie Twelve O'Clock High. There is a movie called Twelve O'Clock High.

8:46Jawad MirOkay, I haven't seen that. Maybe I have to check that out.

8:49Richard RutkowskiThere's a movie called Twelve O'Clock High, which is quite good. And then in your list of movies very specific to this enterprise, you left out Saving Private Ryan.

8:58Jawad MirOf course. That's a…

8:58Richard RutkowskiOne of the most impressive battle scene sequences. You know, I mean, I mean, Saving Private Ryan, it really changed the idea of…

9:07Jawad MirOf war movies

9:07Richard Rutkowski... What the level of engagement should be between the viewer and the battle. And the sound was very important. The idea that you could hear the bullets whizzing by your ears and pinking off of things near you, including potentially your fellow soldier's helmet, and that was, really quite astonishing when seeing that. I remember going to see it, and then I talked to a friend of mine. I was making a short film at the time with this friend. And, I said, "Let's go see it again." And we just went out and saw it the next day. And we knew who, you know, Robert Capa was and everything. We knew this history. But to see it sort of e… enabled in that way, really strong work. But there have been some other aerial, movies. And in fact, one of the reasons I was on with Dee Rees is when she made a film called Mudbound, and she had to show her lead characters having had action over Europe in the air. I shot those sequences for her.

10:03Jawad MirOh, okay.

10:03Richard RutkowskiHer cinematographer, Rachel Morrison, wasn't able to come back and do the visual effect sequences that could, you know, establish that they had an air war over Europe. And so I was fortunate that Rachel referred me, and that's how I met Dee and started working with Dee, which has been an exceptional c… collaboration. Dee's very smart and very intelligent. Those are the same things. That's how I met Dee Rees, was working on Mudbound's aerial sequences. And one thing I can say about her, besides being smart and very nice to everyone, she's enormously prepared each day, and that makes her really a joy in filmmaking, and also allows things to advance to a higher level because she's so ready right from the first minute of the day. It's, it's, not always the case, and she's a terrific director. One thing I'll say about, the Saving Private Ryan, you know, having been in the background of this, Saving Private Ryan feeding directly into Band of Brothers, and then this being a franchise, a natural result of it, you have this legacy of their incredible attention to authenticity and the fact that when they make these films, or series I should say, they make coincident documentaries at the same time.

11:17Richard RutkowskiThey'll go and find every person that is an eyewitness to the events described, and they'll research through them. But then they'll also talk to them about these experiences so that the viewer can have that, ontology of seeing the actual person, not just the movie star or the actor who has to, you know, work with fake controls and a big open video screen and try to pretend they're flying. You actually meet the people who did this work, and it's impressive.

11:44Richard RutkowskiAt the premiere event in Westwood a few weeks ago, a couple weeks ago now, they had four of the original members of the Eighth Air Force squadrons stand up and be applauded in the room, and it was quite moving. And… Tom Hanks was very accurately humorous, but also you could see the, you know, the amount of dedication he had for it. He said, "They're not 19 anymore. Picture them when they were 19, but give patience now because they will stand up." And sure enough, one by one with some help, each of these, veterans stood up, and it was quite something. Quite something.

12:24Jawad MirRight. Has, working on this series, m… I'm, I'm su… I'm assuming it was already there before, but has it increased your level of understanding of what people, like, what, you know, young soldiers went through and how they fought to keep things the way, the life that we are living now?

12:44Richard RutkowskiYou know, I'm a bit of a historian, and I'm also an amateur pilot.

12:48Jawad MirOkay.

12:48Richard RutkowskiAnd when I fly a plane, sometimes my favorites are the ones that are older, that are just pure analog gauge, analog controls, maybe a digital radio to work with. But I even have learned in my flight teachings over the years how to work with VOR navigation, which is very analog, and how to work with analog radios. So I've, I've obviously come to this project with already some appreciation of history, a lot of reading prior to this, and some examination of aviation during World War II. The biggest and most interesting, revelation was the role of the P-51 fighter, the Red Tails in particular. I didn't know their specific history. I didn't know that they had flown, escort and flown in support of the very last years of the B-17 missions. I didn't know that history as well as I should have, the Tuskegee Airmen. I have since learned more and more, and it's been very impressive.

13:51Richard RutkowskiI even met one of the Tuskegee Airmen by chance after doing this project. Flying from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Dallas, I was on a plane with a man named Enoch Odell Woodhouse II. And Enoch was a surviving Tuskegee Airmen, proudly, displaying the pin on his lapel, the hat, and he had a card that he handed me, and we stayed in touch.

14:17Jawad MirNice. So that must have been like a playing ground for you, your interest in planes and then just to be involved in a series like this. Did you, did you spend some time, you know, aside from obviously being the DP on episode seven and eight, just kind of exploring the interiors of the planes?

14:38Richard RutkowskiYeah. We, Dee and I had very little, material inside the B-17s.

14:44Jawad MirYep.

14:45Richard RutkowskiJust, really these two scenes. And more of our material was inside the P-51s and the P-40s. And the B-17s, Chris Seagers and his art department, along with the people that can make these things in England, which is already extraordinary, spent two years creating to the inch accurate interior cockpit, midsection, tail section, nose, you know, lower nose of the B-17. They were entirely accurate. And in their accuracy, it's, it's, it's very dangerous. It's, it's like a death machine. And it's very physically impressive to step in and realize how small that space is and how it is there for one thing, which is to get hundreds and thousands of miles through the air, drop munitions, and get back if at all possible. Very intimidating. The P-51, experience was incredible. I got to film air to air with P-51s over the skies of England for two days, two s… really special filming days where we had a under the wing camera on a French turbo prop. It was important that the plane that you're in with the camera could keep pace with the Mustangs, because the P-51 Mustang needs to fly at a certain speed, to be maneuverable.

16:01Richard RutkowskiIt becomes less maneuverable, less safe at a slower speed. And it's a, it's a very overpowered aircraft. Now, I'll tell you the story that when I flew with these P-51s, very impressed, very interested. The owner-operators were in the seats flying them. One of them was a trainer. It was a two-seat aircraft as opposed to one seat, extended canopy. The only one that was working in all of the UK. At the end of my time filming, I was able to fly that plane. Of course, the owner was in the front seat managing everything. Your controls in the back are the same controls. You don't have the radio. They've got the radio. It was spectacular. That was a really, a lifetime thrill, and I'm very grateful to the show for that opportunity. I also just felt enormously, informed by being on the show about the legacy of this 76-year-old aircraft. And it is noisy, and it is powerful.

17:01Richard RutkowskiAnd when you land, you look at the side of the aircraft and there's streaks of oil and streaks of fluids coming down the side of the aircraft, but it is clearly the most, maneuverable, easiest, best airplane I ever flew for the first time. There was no breaking in period. You could push the stick and work the rudder, and the plane just knew exactly what to do. We even flipped it over.

17:25Jawad MirOh, God. That's so cool. That is so cool.

17:28Richard RutkowskiIt was, it was unbelievable. But more to the point, that experience at the end of the shooting was really, part and parcel and enabled by the work of studying the Red Tails, learning about the raids they made, learning about how life-threatening it was, learning about how lucky some of the Red Tails that we filmed were to have ejected and landed in German soil, but then been brought to the Stalag Luft III. So I was very, I was very impressed by the levels of authenticity in our plane mock-ups. And we filmed, you know, we filmed our... Like, Josiah Cross is photographed in a P… You know, a true and accurate to-the-edge replica of a P-51 interior. It didn't have all the, all the parts to the cockpit. There were some parts that were not there, but for our purposes, it did the job extremely well.

18:22Jawad MirThat's amazing. One thing that I really felt watching the entire series, not just episode seven and eight, but just, like, any time there was a sequence of, you know, in B-17 or P-51s, whatever it was. You know, when you see enemy planes or enemy fire coming at the plane and y… the camera is, like, behind the pilot, and you could see in the sky all this gunfire or, you know, all the, whatever, all the ammunition coming at you. I was just trying to figure out, putting myself in that pilot's seat, not just during that time in the, in the war, any ti… any war there ever has been, that you're flying in the air and you have a mission and you've got all this stuff coming right at you. And to be able to make those decisions. I mean, Top Gun was one of those films which was more entertaining, like, you know, it was a little bit different than Masters of the Air or any other, Air Force movie or series. To be able to make those quick decisions, like split of a second, and also thinking that, "Am I gonna be alive in the next, you know, five seconds or la… you know, one second?"

19:31Jawad MirMust be incredibly difficult at the time.

19:35Richard RutkowskiIt's, it's clear that it's been many years since anyone's experienced something like that, and it's clear that the motivation and the design and the development of weaponry is now for planes to engage things at distant range, that you know your enemy is miles away and you target, missiles at them. The days of firing machine guns at close range are pretty much over, although there are ground assaults where, airplanes go in and strafe parts of the ground. And I'm sure that the people on the ground can suddenly figure out that they're being fired at from that airplane in that space. But I don't believe that modern aerial warfare resembles this at all. And it really comes down to this commitment level that the flyers had. They were all volunteers. It became known pretty quickly what your odds were, and your odds were bad. And I think it probably only takes one time of watching out your window a fellow aviator blow up in the air or lose a wing or lose the tail stabilizer and have to try to get out of that airplane before it just spins itself into a death spiral.

20:50Richard RutkowskiAnd I think that's super important to understand. Despite the odds, these men, and they were men in the air, supported, on the ground with females, but the pilots were all young men. Did what they had to do and did it because that's what they'd trained for and that's what they were told was the right thing to do. It's very interesting. And also…

21:13Jawad MirYeah

21:13Richard Rutkowski... Well told in Donald Miller's book. It's, in the middle of our series, there is a section where the flyers, Rosie and Crosby and people go off to the, recuperation centers and try to essentially get over it or put it into some context of a therapeutic environment. That isn't really how it unfolded for a lot of people. I had a great uncle who had been a tail gunner in World War II, and it was well known at family gatherings that you just didn't discuss it. He didn't wanna talk about it, and you didn't talk about it. God only knows what he saw. God only knows how it felt to land after that prolonged, period of mortal terror. I do know that when you step in the plane, there's an immediate feeling of how dangerous the space is. It is, it is not space for comfortably flying to a destination. It's space for survival, and it's so thin.

22:13Richard RutkowskiThe walls are so thin. The plexiglass is clearly going to succumb to anything that touches it, and I think it's, think it's a testament to people's dedication and bravery at the time that they stepped back into it over and over again. The rules of how the B-17 best worked were also very much against the flyers. The B-17 was supposed to fly straight and level and without evasive maneuvers during the approach to its target. The bombardier took over the aircraft for one reason, to put it on a direct course to where the bombs would drop, safe and level. And once the bombs were out, they could maneuver and try and save themselves from enemy fire. But during that whole process, they just, they counted on the plane's, own protections to ward off attack. They counted on luck, and they counted to some part on their spirituality to say, "I will get through this." I think this series tells that pretty well. There's even a s… a part during the two episodes we did where the, people, Curtis LeMay and other generals in the Air, Corps, had decided that they, the B-17s were bait.

23:27Richard RutkowskiIf you flew a bunch of B-17s at a target, you were gonna lure the Luftwaffe up to attack them, and then the Luftwaffe could be picked off by the accompanying P-51 Mustangs. And they knew that they had to have air superiority for January. Or sorry, they ha… they knew they had to have air superiority for D-Day to work. For June 6th to work, you had to have air superiority, and the way they wanted to do that was lure the Luftwaffe up into the air with these stable, lumbering B-17 flights in big formations, knock them off with the guns from the B-17 or the accompanying attack aircraft. And by the time they got to the P-51s, they had an aircraft that could beat the Luftwaffe.

24:10Jawad MirWow. Incredible. What was... Going back to the series, and I don't… If you cannot, disclose a scene or anything by me asking, what was the most challenging thing or s… on the set of whether it was episode seven or eight that you had to go through to figure out that this is, you know, as a, as a DP, that this is how we should do it or shouldn't? Any kind of story without revealing the scene.

24:38Richard RutkowskiWell, I think what was most interesting to me was that four excellent episodes had been begun by, Adam Arcapa. And Adam Arcapa is a very brilliant cameraman, and I respect his work. I didn't want my work to deviate. At the same time, our stories had different elements. Our stories had the POW camp in large measure, which we were essentially…

24:59Richard Rutkowski... Establishing the different spaces within the POW camp. We also had Ramitelli Air Base, the Italian air base where the, Tuskegee Airmen were supposed to fly out of. And look, England doesn't look a lot like Italy. So…... We had to figure out a way visually to change it up and show that Ramitelli was its own space, launching its own aircraft with different flyers, and that you weren't confused when you went into a briefing room or the, officer's club at Ramitelli. It definitely had a different Mediterranean, Italian feel to it. And even the grounds outside, the way that the production design staged smaller towers, the P-51s and the P-40s were staged very near the officer's club. The briefing room was smaller and was attached. Out the windows, you could see the airfield that they were flying out of. It was essentially a dirt airfield. These things helped you. We had a lot to establish.

25:59Richard RutkowskiAnd then East Ang… or East, Prussia there, the Luft, Stalag Luft III had its own, issues in that we were only working with about five or six actual buildings. Everything else was an extension, a VFX extension. So sometimes we'd have to put up enormous amounts of blue screen attached to, Manitou trucks or, you know, the, attached on the sides of things so that you could present the blue screen needed for VFX to extend the base. And they weren't just extending the base with buildings and smoke out of chimneys. They were extending it with people back there, too. One of the most incredibly difficult sequences was at night, where we had to fill an entire field, like the size of one and a half soccer fields, with men for appel, and they wanted to search their barracks while they had them all counted out in a field. And that was a big terrain to light for night, and it's not supposed to be bright and cheerful like that. There are searchlights that we used from the towers, and that was effective.

27:03Richard RutkowskiBut otherwise, the amount of light had to be meager enough to still make it feel like this is, you know, this is Eastern Germany near the Russian front. This is, not, you know, an urban part of the world. And we had to give room for that to extend, and I think they did an incredible job with that night extension at the POW camp. I'll also say that I knew f… from reading and I knew from photographs and I knew from the drawings that, A… Alexander Jefferson, one of the Tuskegee Airmen, had done that the interior POW barracks were small, dingy, gloomy. The brightest light bulb they would have is a 40-watt light bulb. The Germans were not spending a lot of money on nice lighting or bright lighting for these prisoners. They were in dim and dank conditions, and they were, as you see in the film, not eating well. Their clothes were falling apart. The amount of things that were available to them for creature comforts were very few.

28:06Richard RutkowskiSo Hollywood has this way that everybody should look good all the time, and we had great-looking actors, but we also had this verisimilitude to deal with. They should look weakened. They should look hungry. They should look like they've lost weight. They should look like nothing of the Thorpe Abbot's base bravado remains among them. They are struggling to survive psychologically and physically in this cold, gray space. And so we reestablished the look within the greater look of the series. We reestablished the look to reflect those conditions. I really commend, again, Colleen Atwood. I watched her hand work, you know, pant legs and boots and socks to make sure that they looked as distressed as would be reasonable. Some boots were just falling apart or created half out of a burlap bag. I thought it was a remarkable achievement. And yet, you know, from what I, from what I can see, and perhaps from what you've seen, the actors still look good and still occupy these roles well.

29:10Richard RutkowskiSo it was, there was a little bit of that push-pull to make something that was ugly and dark and grim and decrepit and poorly lit at the same time acceptable to an audience to say, "Hey, I like looking at this."

29:25Jawad MirIt's interesting you mention that because when I was watching those scene insid… scenes inside the barrack, which were, for the lack of a better word, not lit up properly for purpose, but obviously lit up to be able to see it, I was reminded of, The Great Escape, you know, the film, where you would, inside the barracks, you would actually see everybody completely lit up. You know, even the back… background. Every, you could see every crisp detail. And when I, when the first time you see the characters in that situation... So, when I was watching it, I mean, I, normally, you know, depending on what I'm watching, I would like to watch it in pitch black. And when I was watching that episode, it was in pitch black, and that scene came, and I couldn't make out anything. And then I had to go back completely, like, pitch black, and then I saw. And it made sense to me that how important that was to have to be able to make you, as an audience member, feel where they are and what they're going through.

30:27Richard RutkowskiWell, we knew we'd be cutting from the POW camp back to action at Thorpe Abbotts.

30:33Jawad MirYeah.

30:33Richard RutkowskiWhere you see the people that are struggling at Thorpe Abbotts to get ready for D-Day.

30:37Jawad MirYeah.

30:37Richard RutkowskiAnd we'd be cutting to the love story of, Crosley, Crosby and the, you know, the, female,.. I shouldn't reveal too much details, but…

30:49Jawad MirYeah

30:50Richard Rutkowski... Crosby finds a girlfriend, and she's an interesting girlfriend it turns out. And their encounters in London look entirely different, and her travel to Paris looks entirely different. So it's important to me that an audience member feel the texture of the location in the photography so that they know where they are. They know that, oh, we're not in, we're not in, Silesia here. Now we're in Paris.

31:14Jawad MirYeah.

31:14Richard RutkowskiBut wartime Paris. Now we're at Thorpe Abbotts, you know? Now we're in the headquarters, which of course has more light, open windows, ability to see people walking around outside. The windows are not grimy. The lamps are brighter. So it was important to Dee and I, you know, and she's a very conscious researcher. She does a lot of research ahead of time, and she has a wall filled with images that really tell a story before you even begin filmmaking. And it was just very important that the... While you see the faces of the people and you understand what they're going through, you are not trying to over-pretty or take away the grit of the situation, and I believe we did a good job with that because I would feel bad if every last part of the frame were filled and lit like old school filmmaking. There's a reason that happened. Film stocks were unforgiving, and, producers wanted to see the talent that they had hired.

32:16Richard RutkowskiWe're episode seven. You've seen many close-ups of Callum and Austin. You know, y… you've seen, Matt, who's, brilliant in it. Y… you've seen these characters. It's time to see them in a different, stage of their experience of the war. And in nine with, you know, the long walk, the forced march out of the camp, it becomes even more grim and even more difficult…

32:42Jawad MirYeah

32:42Richard Rutkowski... To understand what's going on.

32:44Jawad MirYeah.

32:44Richard RutkowskiSo I just, I just feel like we owed that to their experience and also to the realities of war to make sure that it didn't look too inviting. The food not too good. The grounds not too pretty. The situation, of even the cold, it has an impact.

33:04Jawad MirYeah. I'll give you a little compliment. There was a scene, a shot I would say, which is part of a scene in episode seven or eight I think. I'm guessing it's seven if my memory serves me right. The, one of the female characters, the girlfriend, she's walking in a small alleyway and you s… you have a full body shot…

33:24Jawad Mir... From behind her. That was such a beautifully lit shot. I mean, I... That... You know, if I think about the entire series, aside from the s… action sequences, the stories, and everything else, that one shot just stands out like razor knife in my head. I mean, it was beautifully lit. I just wanted to give you a compliment on that.

33:45Richard RutkowskiThank you. Well, you know, we worked together. So Chris Seagers and his art team…

33:49Jawad MirYes

33:49Richard Rutkowski... They didn't have much time to put that together. We shot it right in central London about a block from Fleet Street, and the VFX department painted in backgrounds that you could believe that didn't o… overly tell you that you were... You know, there's no Eiffel Tower…

34:03Jawad MirYeah

34:03Richard Rutkowski... To tell you're in Paris.

34:05Jawad MirYeah.

34:05Richard RutkowskiBut there's plenty of other items to tell you. And, Bell worked with the Steadicam operator, Ross Koshy, very carefully to get those shots to work out, and then we transfer after her hand pushes open that wooden door. By the way, that wooden door in the street of Paris is actually a fake. That was a build-on from the art department. Now we cut inside and we're on a stage, and again, we're, we're with the French Resistance and we have to keep the light levels down. It can't be a situation where it's just a little bit too ornate or too nice. We're not doing a James Bond movie here, where every time he goes through some secret doorway he's just in an even more elaborate, beautiful space. We wanted it to... We wanted you to believe that she had entered a clandestine spot where people told secrets and communicated secrets.

34:53Jawad MirYeah. Yeah. And the French Resistance, part kind of reminds me, I don't know if you've seen the series on Netflix that aired, a few months ago. What was it called? All the Light We Cannot See based on a book.

35:06Richard RutkowskiOh, yeah. That was totally beautiful. Beautifully shot. Tobias Lindholm.

35:10Jawad MirYeah. Yeah, I really enjoyed that series.

35:12Richard RutkowskiTobias did a great job on that.

35:14Jawad MirYeah. That just kind of, triggered, the series in my head when you mentioned the French Resistance. But, you know, kind of going off topic from Masters of the Air, y… y… you know, you talked about you just did a short film when Saving Private Ryan came out. Obviously, that's been like, it's gonna be 26 years this June. So, you know, the career's kind of spanned over a long period of time, and I was going through your IMDb and everything. Would you consider Masters of the Air to be your, one of the, one of the biggest projects you have worked on, or has there been anything else? Or is it one of the best projects you have worked on? Not to undermine anything else.

35:55Richard RutkowskiWell, you know, you start to categorize things. Biggest and best in certain regards. Now, I can say without doubt that some of the best writing and best acting I've ever worked on was the show The Americans.

36:09Richard RutkowskiWhich was, Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, and they wrote a very good set of scripts about a very cleverly imagined situation that was based on real life, where you had Soviet agents that were embedded in the United States… Told to wait and then they will do something. Well, for reasons of television, our Soviet agents are doing something all the time, and it's on… You know, there is a certain, you have to suspend disbelief to think that their children don't notice that they're out with these missions all the time. But the way the writing brought the Cold War down to a philosophical argument in which you can have, as parents, philosophical arguments about how your children are raised, and here, that transformed up to a philosophical argument about which view of humanity's systems of living is going to prevail and is the best one. And that was very interesting writing with beautiful acting. The whole cast, I mean, I don't wanna leave anyone out.

37:12Richard RutkowskiThe entire cast is great, but of course, the leads are Keri Russell and Matt Rhys. And I became friendly with them and like them and respect them very much. They had a lot of hard work to do. We had not a lot of time and not a lot of money for that show. Now, I also, just prior to this, was doing the Jack Ryan series epi… seasons one through three. And Jack Ryan had an enormous international ambition. We were sometimes shooting on three continents at the s… you know, working our way around where you'd prep one continent, be shooting another continent, and be designing the stage for a third continent. And I think that was a really ambitious, excellent project that reimagined how big you could make television, and some of the sequences in that I'm incredibly proud of. They are hard-fought, some of the, some of the work that gets done in Jack Ryan. I, didn't do season four. Season followed right on three, and I was, by that time, on Masters. I've had a lot of fun with all kinds of projects. And like, if I was to, if I was to select any one out as being more fun than another, it would be, unfortunate, sh… because y… you meet interesting people along the way in all kinds of situations.

38:24Richard RutkowskiAnd even before I began doing s… you know, network and then streaming television, I was making these short films and little films, little features, and I had enormous, enormously good times working with actors before they were really discovered. I did work with Michael Shannon on a little film called Blackbird. I'm still very proud of how that film looks. We shot it on Super 16. I worked on a mini DV film called Homework with a very young Paz de la Huerta, and that film, when it went to Slamdance, it won awards, and it was just because we were just doggedly, you know, s… six of us or something, making, as well as we could given the format of visual experience. So, I guess what you're asking me to say is this is the biggest job of my career. The truth is, on a scope version, you could say that, but on other, on other directives, I've had more complex jobs to do, and thus been happier when they came out well. I'm very happy this came out well. It was incredibly well-funded, well-supported, and obviously very experienced producers, and we were provided the things needed to accomplish big things.

39:33Richard RutkowskiThat's often the struggle, is you're asked to do something big and the resources aren't there, and

39:38Jawad MirYeah

39:38Richard Rutkowski... You're, you know, having to try and make visual shortcuts to imagine it.

39:45Jawad MirYeah. No, I did not know of the series called The Americans, and now I would like to see it, in the next coming weeks.

39:53Richard RutkowskiOh, you really should.

39:54Jawad MirYeah, I would…

39:55Richard RutkowskiYou enjoyed the first three seasons of The Americans, and we had exceptional showrunners. We had exceptional producing directors, and really an as… astoundingly good cast. And, you know, it took a little bit of settling in time. By the time we got to episode three, I remember Jean de Gonzac, directed episode three. Episode one was directed by Adam Arkin. But, oh, and Tommy Schlamme d… directed episode two. He went on to do a show that I worked on that was also World War II period called Manhattan, which was about the atom bomb and the Manhattan Project.

40:28Richard RutkowskiThat's a show that should have had a larger audience. That show's wonderful. Very good cast. Very good writing. Two writers, Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason. They do, they did a fantastic job, and the idea of getting into the heads and the lives of the, s… scientists while they were trying to do this amazing feat, which is build an atom bomb from scratch, accomplished in 27 months, all in secret. Quite an incredible story to tell. I was very happy with that one.

40:59Jawad MirOh, I'll check that out. Now, by the way, I did, I did see Jack Ryan season one, which I really enjoyed. I haven't seen season two or three. And, you know, growing up, the Ryan series with Harrison Ford and of course Tom Clancy was something fun to watch, but I'll check those out. Just a one last kind of thing on Masters of the Air from a technical standpoint. Do you guys shoot the series on Aries or Red or...?

41:26Richard RutkowskiNo, Sony Venice 2. Look, I don't, I don't have, I prefer working with the Arriflex system. I've done it basically my entire career. You know, I shot films on movie cams. I began assisting, I was on Panaflex. I like Panaflex optics, and we had great optics for this ha… sort of handcrafted and worked out by, Dan Sasaki and Adam Arkapaw, and they were exceptional. And there was a need to have multiple cameras in multiple configurations to be able to run a volume unit where cameras were being attached to or held next to the fuselage parts of the aircraft in a huge volume, like a horseshoe-shaped, enormous, pixel map screen. And then, also break it into the, mode where you just have the sensor and the lens up near the actor, and the works of the camera are hidden down below or attached by an umbilical cable. And, the crew on the volume, by the time I arrived, had gotten to work that out pretty well.

42:29Richard RutkowskiSometimes there were Filming with five or six cameras at a single time on the volume. Because quite frankly, the volume was a time, a real-time consideration because getting the right material on screen, getting the performers into their seats, strapped in appropriately, looking like they were flying, masks on, all of that. And then it was on a big articulating base, which needed to then have been programmed for shake and tilt so that it seems to be, you know, moving in concert with the controls and with the action described. So we used the Sony Venice IIs. I am excited about Sony's new products. They've come a long way. I think that for me, there's sometimes a, just a question about the humanity of something. I can totally get behind cameras that do an incredible job with high data rates, high, resolution. But I like, I like to find the human element where you connect with the face and the eyes of the performer, where you feel a certain, a certain handcraft to the whole thing.

43:32Richard RutkowskiAnd I think it's very interesting how as soon as digital cameras became as good as they are, people started looking at older glass with imperfections and various little flares and, you know, micro adjustments at the edge of frame to where the focus falls off or sometimes dramatically falls off, to make up for the fact that in the digital world, nothing changes if the camera doesn't move. I mean, that pixel is gonna remain exactly where it is the whole shot. There's no gate weave. There's no, like, analog nature to this. The micro adjustments of chemistry in the laboratory are not present. It's a very, cold and very accurate, rendering machine. We've all gotten to like them for various things. At the same time, I keep sometimes suggesting film for projects. And I think that, Succession captured entirely on film shows that you can do this and come away with an excellent result.

44:26Jawad MirYeah, I'm a huge fan of film and, you know, I enjoy watching movies from the ni… obviously '90s and early 2000s. And even having shot six… on 16 millimeter myself and then processing it and then flatbed editing it's such a, you know, like the word you use, it's such a hu… like a personal experience that you feel that you are kind of, you belong to this stock of film or the foot, you know, one foot or 100 feet of a film as opposed to like a digital card. But yeah, it's crisp and everything. But yeah, again, the grain, that little texture that you... I ac… you know, you feel it when you're watching on the screen. Like if you're watching a film, a movie that was shot on film, you feel, like you can touch it, you know, tangible. It's, it's such a beautiful feeling.

45:18Richard RutkowskiWell, I, when I was in college, we edited on a Steenbeck, you know, a flatbed editing system.

45:23Jawad MirYeah.

45:24Richard RutkowskiAnd you learned what 24 frames was, and the term footage is now an anachronism.

45:29Jawad MirYeah.

45:29Richard RutkowskiBut you did think about footage. You thought about your 100-foot spool inside a Bolex, or you thought about your 400-foot magazine inside another 16 camera. And a second was really quite tangibly this. And then when you started thinking about I really only need a half second, or I need a third of a second to interrupt these two pieces of action.

45:49Jawad MirYeah.

45:49Richard RutkowskiAnd then you really had this other experience, this almost, architectural experience of time, which I refer to again and again in my head. Music and architecture are very much part of my thinking as a director of photography.

46:06Jawad MirYeah.

46:06Richard RutkowskiAnd I don't think that's just, I don't believe that's just affectation. I believe very fundamentally that when I'm operating a camera, when I see cameras flowing with action, I feel the musical background to that. I feel the undertone, and I feel the overtone. And I think it's very important to keep on that pitch when you're, when you're working, with digital because it can be so alluring to just say, "Oh, you know, just this," but it's another thing.

46:34Jawad MirYeah.

46:34Richard RutkowskiThen the other thing I would mention is, I've used film often for contrasting imagery. At the end of Manhattan where we blew up the atom bomb in the last act of the last episode of Manhattan where we had Trinity, you know, there was this, known footage of the atom bomb going off, and that's, that's a documented thing. In black and white, people have seen it and they've seen it with all the scratches and the various like antiqueness of film. And the scientists themselves had written books about just how bright that was, just what that was to witness, and they had glasses and everything. But what they said that so impressed me was there was not a shadow in the valley because the light hit the atmosphere, like the atmosphere was one big reflector or umbrella reflector, and then beamed it back to the Earth, eliminating all shadow.

47:29Richard RutkowskiIt was that bright.

47:32Jawad MirWow.

47:32Richard RutkowskiAnd that impressed me a lot, and I said to the producers and the director who's, thankfully amenable to it, "We should switch to film for this last section, the dawn moment when the light's barely coming up and when everybody is wondering what this is gonna be. Is it gonna end the world as we know it, or is it gonna advance life, the far, furthest advancement that science has known?" And I also said, you know, we wanna film these faces of them watching at high speed, 120 frames, and it still has to get five and six and seven stops overexposed on their faces, and that just isn't digital's forte. The super overexposure of digital just looks bad and starts to look digital. On film, it can be incredibly lovely. So that's what we did, is we used it for those, purposes and I'm very happy we did. One last thing to reference about film legacy and Masters of the Air. When, the director and Adam started their research and started to figure out, well, how should this look, they, They looked at a film called The Cold Blue, and The Cold Blue was, I think it's William Wyler, who I'd be very bad if I was wrong, but I believe it's the director William Wyler doing a documentary in the B-17s over Europe with cameramen that he brought with little Bell and Howell wind-up cameras.

48:56Richard RutkowskiOf course, they couldn't bring a real movie camera of the day. Very enormous and draw of power. So they used these personal wind-up 35 cameras with small lenses, and the footage they got is incredible, and they shot it on color reversal. So a lot of the aesthetic in the early design of the motion picture or the series was to emulate the kinds of color and falloff and contrast they saw in The Cold Blue. And again, not like the best operated footage of enemy aircraft coming at you firing their guns, but I don't know if I would get you a very good shot if I was under mortal peril…

49:37Jawad MirYeah

49:37Richard Rutkowski... And I'm looking out a plexiglass window or just an open side of the aircraft where the side gunners are, and you're dealing with that moment. I mean, really incredible to watch. You know, just an amazing thing for them to be able to channel for the source of inspiration visually for this show.

49:56Jawad MirY…

49:56Richard RutkowskiVery impactful. I watched it a couple times.

49:59Jawad MirYeah, and it shows throughout the series the amount of research, not surprisingly, that has gone through, gone into this. You, it comes across in every frame. It comes across in every costume. It comes across in every dialogue, performance. You know, great series, and thank you so…

50:16Richard RutkowskiCan I, can I tell you one little anecdote along... Can I tell you one anecdote?

50:19Jawad MirPlease. Please.

50:19Richard RutkowskiAnd maybe you saw this or maybe you didn't.

50:22Jawad MirPlease.

50:22Richard RutkowskiWhen we're talking about flyers who went down on their first mission or their second mission, people who had just arrived at Thorpe Abbotts, and it was getting to be where they couldn't really make friends with new flyers because they thought, "Well, this person could be gone in a couple days." And you had the thing where they're bringing in new recruits to fill the beds of men who have died or gone into POW camps or otherwise been lost. There was a moment where we were setting up a shot outside the barracks, and I noticed these footlockers, rows of footlockers stacked up outside. And they had names on them, each one stenciled. Accurate font and stenciling to the World War II period. And some of the names, you know, certain people's names can be funny, you know. Frylooker. Frylooker, you know, and you're like, "Well, that's a funny name." And I'm looking at it, and the military, consultant overhears me. It's probably Dale.

51:23Richard RutkowskiAnd he walked over… ... And he says, "Those are the real guys." And I said, "I'm sorry, what?" And he said, "We researched who would have been a casualty the days before this moment during this episode. This timeline…

51:38Jawad MirWow

51:38Richard Rutkowski... Has dates, and these would be the footlockers that would have been out for people to pick up and return to their families."

51:46Jawad MirWow. Wow, that is incredible. Thanks for sharing that. That is awesome. That is crazy.

51:53Richard RutkowskiNo, it's very mo… you know, obviously moving. But what I…

51:58Jawad MirYeah

51:58Richard Rutkowski... Found interesting is having seen that, I then just wanted to do the best job I could.

52:05Jawad MirYeah. Awesome. Just last question, Richard, if you are able to talk about it. Anything exciting coming up next for you?

52:16Richard RutkowskiI have another show for Starz, that I begin literally tomorrow. Every job is exciting. Every circumstance offers something. It's part of the reason I've stayed in this business, now 34 years, and I love it. I love it. It can be overwhelming on personal life, and it can be overwhelming on your body, and you can be... It can seem overwhelming when you're into your fifth night, and it can seem overwhelming when something that was supposed to work didn't work. But you figure it out, and you keep moving forward, and people say, "What's your favorite shot?" And I'm always, "The next one."

52:55Jawad MirThat's the way. That's the way. That's awesome. Like, the key thing is in this industry, even if you think that you're not getting what the dues that you should be deserving, just keep moving forward, 'cause that's where it's at. You just gotta keep moving forward.

53:11Richard RutkowskiYeah. And also a gratitude to the people that help you create. I…

53:16Jawad MirYeah

53:16Richard Rutkowski... I've talked endlessly about prop persons, the importance of the prop person, the set dresser. I've talked endlessly about on-set dressers who, when I notice that person's shirt, I still see the folds 'cause you took it out of a bag just, like, 12 minutes ago. And they're like, "Yes, I'm gonna get a steamer." You know, or you look at, you look at the work of the drivers. Sometimes locations are challenging to get all those trucks into. They go in the night before.

53:43Jawad MirYeah.

53:43Richard RutkowskiThey get very little sleep to achieve that, and they still have a sort of, you know, can-do attitude when you see them at 6:00 in the morning. You know, I really, you know, I love my camera crews. I was a camera assistant myself for many years, and as a result, I feel a certain camaraderie to the work that the camera crew has to, has to, very repeatably and very reliably do before you even turn the camera on. So.

54:12Jawad MirYeah. Well said. Well, thank you so much, Richard, for your time.

54:15Richard RutkowskiYeah

54:15Jawad Mir... Wishing you all the best on the next project, and I'm gonna check out Americans, and perhaps we can chat about that in the near future.

54:22Richard RutkowskiSame here. I can't say enough good things about working with Apple. I did a show thereafter called Sugar with Colin Farrell… ... And maybe we could do a talk about that. That was, Fernando Meirelles, the first director. Adam Arkin, second director. We did… Get it right. Eight. We did eight episodes of that one, and, very interesting writing, very interesting performance. Colin Farrell is a very knowledgeable person about every aspect of movie making, and, he had his own opinions. And, we did, I think, some really beautiful photography. I worked with a fellow cameraman named Cesar Sha… Cesar S… Colon. Cesar Colon, and he and, Fernando had done City of God together.

55:07Jawad MirAh, I love that movie.

55:08Richard RutkowskiChalon. It's not with a C… like, it's a C-H. Cesar Chalon. He's from South America, as is Fernando. In any case, I really l… I really like the Apple productions I've worked on, and I was, of course, enormously impressed and inspired working with Gary Goetzman, David Coatsworth. Mr. Hanks and Wilson, or Mr. Hanks and, Mr. Spielberg didn't really come to England, but obviously their spirit of keeping it at the best production level imaginable was there, and it was fantastic.

55:38Jawad MirYeah. No, I... And that's what I've heard from so many other people that I've talked to in Apple production, especially Apple and Netflix. Like, those two… ... Platforms, everybody, like, you know, whether they're DPs or directors or production designers or costume, they rave about Apple and Netflix and how they gave them, you know, sort of complete freedom and great budget and just, you know, not like your typical studio kind of an approach.

56:04Richard RutkowskiYeah. They seem to understand that if you're taking it to the limit you want, if you're taking it to the space you want it in, you're probably gonna create a superior product. And heck, Netflix flew, David Friend, or no, who is it? The guys who did, the guys who did All Quiet on the Western Front. German director Ed Berger…

56:30Richard Rutkowski... And his cameraman. I think it's David Friend. I didn't know Friend. Jim or James Friend. Yeah, James Friend. So Berger and Friend, I saw, you know, James Friend and he's like, "Oh, yeah, Netflix flew us over from London in their jet." And I'm like, "What?" And it was just amazing.

56:47Jawad MirYeah. Well, enjoy…

56:48Richard RutkowskiLet Netflix know. Let Net… Net… Let Netflix know next time they wanna fly a jet, I'll be the co-pilot. I'll be thrilled to just handle the co-pilot.

56:56Jawad MirThat would be awesome. For sure. Absolutely. Sounds good. I'm looking forward to Sugar as well. I didn't realize it's a show in the, in the process of coming out, so we'll talk about that, too. I'll, I'll, I'll stay in touch directly with you, too, as well, Richard.

57:08Richard RutkowskiSee you later.

57:09Jawad MirPerfect. Thank you so much. Take care. 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.