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02:30So tell us about this.

02:34You worked on the previous two shows,

02:37Band of Brothers and The Pacific.

02:40Tell us about your history with this,

02:42the World War II franchise.

02:44First of all, thanks for coming out.

02:45This is incredible.

02:47I'm a little out of breath

02:54because I put myself into that a little too much,

02:56but I got my start.

03:04I'm in this business because of Michael Kamen.

03:11And one of the projects that we worked on

03:13was Band of Brothers.

03:14I was one of his orchestrators.

03:16And that was 2001, so 23 years ago.

03:22And then we lost him.

03:24And the producers came to me on The Pacific

03:27and said, would you want to do it

03:28with Hans and Jeff Snelly?

03:31I'm like, no, but okay.

03:34They're not here, are they?

03:37So I did it.

03:38And then Masters came up,

03:41and Gary called me, Gary Gutsman,

03:43and he said, how do you feel about working with us?

03:45And I said, no.

03:47And I said, dude, I just want to do this myself.

03:49I wanted to have a single voice.

03:51And yeah, I had an idea for it.

03:55And I mean, sorry to choke up,

03:58but that's a love letter to Michael.

04:08Sorry.

04:10Can we get Carlos back on the screen?

04:12He was so much more fun than me.

04:14Oh my god.

04:16So tell us, as the tension builds in the series,

04:20the orchestra grows.

04:22Yeah, it grows.

04:23So we figured out this cool thing.

04:25The B-17s in all of the action scenes

04:27have this specific hum.

04:29I think it was A-flat.

04:31I'm pretty sure it was A-flat.

04:33And so if I wanted to be more tense up there,

04:35I could write in A or B-flat,

04:37something against the key.

04:39This is super nerdy for those of you who aren't composers out there.

04:43And if we wanted to calm things down,

04:45I would just write in the key of A-flat.

04:47And they're like, oh, everything's fine.

04:49And then Crosby would throw up,

04:51and we'd go drop another bomb.

04:53So we learned stuff like that,

04:55but then what I also was experimenting with

04:57is let's, as more forces grow,

04:59and as we are more successful,

05:01let's grow the orchestra.

05:03So actually the first round of recording sessions

05:05were a few less people,

05:07and then we got more,

05:09and then we could double,

05:11and then we could double.

05:13How many times?

05:15I think the main title

05:17was probably 160 players

05:19by the time we finished it.

05:21I mean, it's not something to brag about.

05:23Sorry.

05:25It's really not.

05:27It just couldn't stop.

05:29So talk about the inspiration for the main title.

05:31Also, there aren't 160 people here

05:33and they sounded amazing.

05:35Right?

05:37Tell us about the inspiration for the main title.

05:45The inspiration, it was the first thing I wrote.

05:49I had, I like to approach new things differently, so I'd actually at the behest of my brilliant

05:55manager Ray Yee, he said go rent a house and just write, just figure it out.

06:02So I went to Kingston, Washington, this island off the coast of Seattle, and I wrote every

06:07day for three weeks, and stared at tugboats, and came back after three weeks, he goes,

06:11did you figure it out?

06:12I'm like, nope.

06:14I got nothing.

06:17And then I literally went into my living room frustrated one night, and I have this voice

06:21memo still from July 14th, 2022, and I just sat down and played the main title theme,

06:27so I figured it out.

06:28And the inspiration was, we'd been so elegiac and not safe, but just somber with the Pacific

06:36and Michael's beautiful Band of Brothers theme.

06:40I wanted to have that same nobility, but I just wanted it to launch, and the hardest

06:45thing for me was figuring out how to make it, like every pun intended, fly.

06:50And so that was the inspiration, was flight.

06:54So when you write, are you writing off of script, or do you actually get finished footage,

07:00VFX, and then?

07:02Because it's a streaming show, the cool thing is, we got all nine episodes at once.

07:06So I got to watch this entire thing.

07:07We keep referring to it as the movie, because all of us think of it as the nine-hour movie,

07:12which who wants to sign up for that?

07:14I'll do it.

07:15Sign me up twice.

07:20So I got to see the whole thing, and what's cool about that is you can write, you can

07:23like, today I'm going to do Captain Egan's story and work on that arc, because I could

07:27see it.

07:28In a lot of episodic television, you get it, you're like, what's happening to Spencer this

07:34week on All-American, and the next week you're like, oh man, I really screwed that up, because

07:37I didn't know that was going to happen.

07:40So this, we got to see the whole thing.

07:41But we worked on it for, we had months, and I had months of writing time, we had years

07:45of finishing.

07:46Yeah.

07:47I'm sad it's over.

07:50I'm sad tonight's over, but thank you so much for being here.

07:53Thank you.

07:54Blake Neely, Masters of the Air!

Masters of the Air | Sound & Screen Television 2024

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