“We can’t go back and just show white people saving the world”: Tom Hanks Ensured ‘Masters of the Air’ Wasn’t Just a Cash Grab After Calling its Basic Premise ‘Commercial Hollywood’

For Tom Hanks, his long-time partnership with esteemed Hollywood director and producer Steven Spielberg began as a cautionary tale. He had seen enough actors and directors starting off as friends, working together on a project, butting heads on set, growing resentful over their creative differences, falling out, and ending up in a fraught relationship. Hanks didn’t want that to happen with him and Spielberg.

However, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and that was the mentality Hanks chose to adopt in his first attempt at a collaboration with Spielberg on Saving Private Ryan. Suffice it to say, the end result was so revolutionary that the pair ended up working together on multiple projects in multiple capacities over the course of the next 26 years (and counting).

Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and World War II

Since the beginning of their working relationship, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg had been diving deep into the trenches of blood-soaked waters of World War II with Saving Private Ryan. Once the 1998 venture proved to be a success, it was not a difficult decision to collaborate on their tried, tested, and proven formulaic recipe for success while making Band of Brothers a couple of years later.

The legacy of the HBO series echoes to date as one of the most relevant, factually accurate, and uniquely detailed documentation of the reality of war. This quickly led to a sequel (or spin-off, of sorts) with The Pacific, and then another one with Masters of the Air — each venturing out into new territory, i.e. land, sea, and air respectively.

Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg continued to work on the projects in the capacity of executive producer while building out their World War II universe as a more commercially profitable franchise than any other in Hollywood.

Masters of the Air Wasn’t Just a Cash Grab for Tom Hanks

While Band of Brothers was a project of passion and a labor of love on the part of Erik Jendresen, Tom Hanks, and Steven Spielberg, the same cannot be said for the consecutive pieces of World War II history, which simply existed as an extension of the original work and not as individual pieces of the lore.

However, Hanks is insistent on the historical relevance of each piece in correlation to the cost it takes to bring each of these projects to the screen. The actor believes that the humongous budget behind Masters of the Air feels justified when one can bring the truth of the story and its socio-cultural implications to the screen.

In a 2022 interview with The New York Times magazine, Hanks revealed:

We come along and say we would like $250 million, in the case of Masters of the Air, to do a 10-part miniseries. About what? Americans bombing Nazis. That’s pretty commercial to me. But how are we going to do that? One of the things we’re going to do is show the cost of what it took in order to do that. It was brutal. The Eighth Air Force suffered half of the U.S. Air Force’s casualties. It’s not just, Yay, we bombed the Nazis. It’s, We bombed the Nazis and the pressure of doing that f**ked up so many Americans.

Then, we can’t go back and just show white people saving the world, because the Black airmen who got shot down were in these stalags, too. So you’re going to see Black people. You’re going to see these young kids who are just like their white counterparts, the same exact kind of prisoners of war, knowing that when they get home, the land they come from is institutionally racist.

Even though the era of streaming has taken over the novelty of television, Masters of the Air remains entrenched in the nostalgic feel of the past that came with HBO’s Band of Brothers and The Pacific.

Despite the decade-long gap between these projects, Masters of the Air only goes on to prove that the creative partnership between Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg is one of the few rarities that can survive the troubled waters and volatile turbulences of Hollywood.

Masters of the Air is available to stream on Apple TV+