Ben Affleck’s Prime Video Drama Seamlessly Recreates 1980s – IndieWire

The opening minutes of “Air” brilliantly establishes the world in which the movie takes place, the mid-1980s America of Ronald Reagan, “Beverly Hills Cop,” Sony Trintitrons, and Run-D.M.C. For director Ben Affleck and editor William Goldenberg, who have worked together on all but one of Affleck’s features, the goal was not only to evoke an era but also to remind audiences that there was a time when Nike was not a dominant player in the athletic shoe business — the time before Michael Jordan became a basketball phenomenon and lent his name to the company’s most famous sneaker. The solution: a seamless integration of archival footage depicting 1984 touchstones with footage shot by Affleck and his collaborators on a variety of period-appropriate formats.

“The idea was to come out of archival footage into our story,” Affleck told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, noting that he did something similar in his first feature, “Gone Baby Gone,” where he wove documentary-style footage in with introductions to his characters to lend a sense of authenticity. For “Air,” the mission was to find imagery that would take the audience back to a pre-Jordan era as clearly and concisely as possible. “We needed to contextualize that Nike is not a big basketball name. The world is different. There are a lot of frames of reference on which you have to rely in order to contextualize the story. And that was a lot of work.”

For Goldenberg, the…