Ken Burns: Finding America’s Source of Truth | Grey Matter with Declan Kelly

For nearly half a century, Ken Burns has been the keeper of America's story and the filmmaker who has done more than perhaps any other single person to help a country understand where it came from and who it has been. 

Throughout his career, he has returned to the same question: Who are we? 

He has asked it through the Civil War and jazz, through baseball and the American Revolution, through the lives of Lincoln, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, and George Washington. He has never answered it, and that is by design. The work is not an answer. It is a lifelong act of deepening, of opening doors, excavating corners, and releasing what has long been waiting to be found.

In this episode of Grey Matter, Ken sits down with Consello Founder, Chairman, and CEO Declan Kelly to discuss the intent behind the work, the philosophy that has sustained it, and what it means to spend a life in pursuit of a question you know you will never fully answer.

In this conversation, Ken discusses:

· Why the goal of every film is subtraction, not addition, and what it means to distill 500 hours of material into the truest version of a story

· How an internal compass built over decades allows him to hold a standard of craft entirely independent of outside judgment

· The difference between loneliness and solitude, and why deliberate isolation is inseparable from the work

· What the narcissism of the present gets wrong, and why a study of history is the most clarifying thing a person can do in uncertain times

· How he thinks about ideas large enough to be afraid of, and why biting off more than you can chew is the only way to grow

· Why he has made the same film over and over again for 45 years, and why that is a philosophy, not a limitation 

About Consello

Consello is an Advisory and Investing Platform with offices in New York, Miami, Atlanta, Dublin, Belfast, London, Barcelona, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh.

Consello’s distinct advisory practices provide the complete strategic counsel today’s leaders need to grow and transform their organizations. Consello’s advisory expertise spans Corporate Advisory; M&A; Management Consulting; Talent; and Sports and Entertainment. Dedicated teams operate in each practice, led by a leadership group with deep operational experience across industries, business growth stages and market cycles and with an expansive set of global corporate relationships.

Consello’s investment business, Consello Capital, identifies high-potential mid-market companies and invests capital and expertise to transform their growth.

About Grey Matter Host Declan Kelly

Declan Kelly is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Consello, one of the world's most influential boutique advisory firms. A trusted advisor to dozens of CEOs leading the world's top companies, Mr. Kelly has built or run four global consulting companies over the last three decades prior to founding Consello. Mr. Kelly also served in government as US Economic Envoy to Northern Ireland during the Obama administration.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We are in this moment just because of the essential narcissism that overtakes all of us. Certain that this is the most complicated time. With that arrogant posture, we actually diminish ourselves. And so when we go, this is the worst time, I go, actually, the revolution was much more divisive. The Civil War. The period after the Civil War called Reconstruction. World War II, you know, the greatest cataclysm on earth. What happens is that you find that a study of the past just gives you perspective.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Welcome to Gray Matter. I'm Declan Kelly, founder, chairman, and CEO of Cancelo. I've spent the last 30 plus years advising the CEOs who are leading the world's top companies. If there's one thing I've learned in that time, the best leaders think differently. That wiring, that gray matter, separates the truly exceptional leaders from everyone else. Understanding it is what allows us at Cancelo to help the best in the world be even better. This podcast exists because the most accomplished leaders agreed to sit down and talk about something they rarely discuss publicly, how their minds actually work. Filmmaker Ken Burns has spent nearly 50 years documenting the most consequential and complex chapters of America's story. In fact, to many people, he is America's storyteller. From the Civil War to jazz, from baseball to the American Revolution, he has spent years and sometimes decades searching for the best stories buried inside each of them. In many ways, these stories have shaped America's self-image. What drives his work is a belief that storytelling at its best does not tell us who we are, it helps us find out. This is Gray Matter. Ken Burns, welcome to Gray Matter. Thank you for having me. When I say welcome, I should say thank you for making me welcome, because I'm here in your house in Walpole, New Hampshire. In fact, I'm in your barn. That's right. Which is just spectacular.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

When I was a little kid, six years old, I I remember trying to draw a barn. I said to my dad, Could you could you live in a barn? Could you make the stalls where bedrooms and living room and dining room? And he said, Well, let's see. So he we worked on this drawing. I was frustrated by stairs. But when my dad passed away, I found the drawing, and he left just a modest amount of money, which I moved uncharacteristically onto like a risky thing that I would have never done. Took it out a few months before the 08 meltdown and paid for the barn. I love that. My dad's barn.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

And there's so many things in here that represent you. Yeah. And everything that is relatable in terms of the American story. When I was driving up here through this beautiful countryside, and I'm here interviewing the person who has interviewed more people, perhaps in history, and being interviewed more often than anybody else. What I'm interested in covering today in Gray Matter, as you know, is not all the stuff that everybody already knows about you because it's been documented so many times, and you're an American treasure, you're an icon, you're you're effectively uh a walking human Smithsonian. I think everyone watching this will be interested in the mind behind all the activity and the things that you do. When you drive up here, it's beautiful, but it's also extremely desolate. And I know you've talked about this many times, and it's a deliberate act on your part. You've lived here for 47 years in the same house. Yes. How does that say about how you think and approach your work?

SPEAKER_01 3:18

Well, th we we make some presumptions about all phenomena that they are this thing, and it's quite often the truth that they're the other side of that thing. And so for my work, which is wrestling gigantic stories to the ground, trying to figure out, and it's not Declan additive. You know, we're not building a house, a barn. We're subtracting. We have 500 hours of material for the American Revolution to get down to 12. So it's the process of distilling it is this process that is incredibly labor-intensive and incredibly solitary. In fact, in the midst of all of this splendid isolation, I go on a walk even further isolating every morning, rain or shine, whatever it is, with my dogs, a mile and a half out, mile and a half back. And the thought that happens, the letters that are written in my head and not sent, the letters that are written and sent, the poems that are written, uh, the solutions to the thorny problems that seemed intractable last night and this morning are suddenly there's room. And so I think there's a difference between loneliness and solitude. Solitude is a conscious decision to pursue what is very clear. I I have this huge public life, but I'm an incredibly introverted person. And I needed to come here for a variety of financial reasons. My rent in 1979 and a fifth floor walk-up on 25th Street in Chelsea in New York was going from 275 to 325. I could not make that leap. And so I moved here in August of 1979 because the rent for this entire house over there was 275. And I worried that if I got a real job and I was offered one at like an amazing salary for then, $800 a week. Like if I if I took that, then I'd take the footage that I had shot, most of the footage for my first film on the Brooklyn Bridge that PBS showed, and I put it up on a shelf and it'd still be there at 45, and I'd wake up and go, oh man. And so I came up here and figured out how to edit and how to make a film and how to find the finishing costs, and that's made all the difference. I used to say for about 20 years that the best uh professional decision I ever made was to move here. It's not. That first film was nominated for Academy Award, and everybody said, You're going back to New York, you're going to LA, and I said, I'm staying here. That was the best decision. Like to escape, to be able to do it was smart. Second best, maybe. But to stay and to do the opposite of what I was being told the first time and the opposite, particularly the second time when I had a modicum of success. I mean, I I moved up here and I think we lived on $2,500 a year. I cut the wood, we heated the house with wood. It was really to the edge. But I ended up owning my films. I ended up being able to not have a suit above me saying shorter, longer, sexier, less sexy, more violent, less violent. That's liberating. And so another way of putting it is that if you don't like any of the things, it's all my fault. And I want it to be that way. I don't want to have to be at a dinner party and say, well, they wouldn't let me use that person. I really wanted to interview him. I I I thought we could use this piece of music. I thought we could have that scene in it. It it's we're not we don't have those constraints.

SPEAKER_00 6:39

The story about Brooklyn Bridge to film resonates because I remember reading that you had a stack of binders with rejection letters on your on your desk, and you kept them deliberately. I think there were hundreds of them, and you you you just said you had $2,500 to your name. It says an awful lot about your personal resilience. That determination to not give in. It's all over your work.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Yeah. Where does that come from? Suffering, loss. I don't know how to put a, you know, my mother was sick my entire childhood until she died when I was 11, almost 12. That that is the formative thing that I think about every single day of my life. I don't know how, in some people, it leads to dissipation, to tragedy, to other things. It's actually been this engine of um not only I think creativity, but also this ability to withstand the inevitable vicissitudes. I looked 12 years old, people thought I was trying to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge, and so I really felt that, you know, George Washington was very much about he had the humility, and I realized that humility is a hugely important thing. None of us are getting out of here alive, and the only communication occurs between equals. The second I make you bigger or smaller, there's no chance at a connection between us. And so I felt that by putting those rejection letters, here I had this Oscar nomination framed in the office, but there were these two three-ring binders with hundreds of rejections that you could be reminded that none of us get out of here, right?

SPEAKER_00 8:12

Do you feel like you have uh, you know, at this stage, 40 plus years doing this and achieving what you've achieved? Are you conscious of being the guardian of history? Do you feel the weight of history on your shoulders? Do you feel like the awesome responsibility that you've created for yourself? Or are you just busy being busy doing it? Are you in, you know, I often ask musicians about this and people who are painters and artists, and you ask them, do they step back from it and go, wow, let me take a look at what I've done. Do you ever do that, or do you ever sort of sit there and say, you know what, that's great, but I'm too busy doing the next thing. You've you've you've got so much in your in your catalog already.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

There is a little bit of the red shoes ballet. That is to say, you put these gifted slippers on and you can't stop dancing. So there is this momentum to uh almost like a drug addiction to the ability to participate in process, but it is process. So you don't feel that weight of that that you're Mr. History or that you've you've got some of the thing. My own internal demands are much greater than that. But at the same time, you do have a chance. You can't be a good filmmaker, you can't be a good person without that ability to step back and have a reflective moment where you understand your relationship. A lot of it comes with interaction. You know, I people say, God, how could you work on something for 10 years? Weren't you bored? And you go, no, no, no. It's giving it up. It's so painful, it's so hard. And so the last six months, year, in the case of the revolution, is is the decompression chamber as you're proselytizing, you're an evangelist for this show. And then you meet people. Oh, you know, my dad and I watch the baseball series every January when there's no baseball. My dad just died, but I just had a chance to share the series with him. Or my great-grandfather was in the Civil War, or, you know, whatever it is. And then you realize, oh my goodness, this has been a connection. I I met a woman who, in a business meeting, uh, came up to me and said, after the meeting, I just thought I didn't want to tell you in advance, but um, 25 years ago, I went to the hospital and I was given a death sentence. I wasn't gonna live. And my husband and I went home and we put on the Civil War series. And I, you know, and she started to cry and I started to cry. And then you realize this has effect. But I don't want to dismiss that at all. That's what you want art to do. That's what you want. You want, you know, you can't build a bridge without one and one only equaling two or a barn. But you want a piece of work like this to be equaling three, that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So what is that thing? And I I don't think you can ever fully describe it, but that's what you're tilting towards always. It's in this woman's decision to look at black and white photographs from the Civil War, this bloody battle as a way to absorb her imminent mortality. It didn't happen, thank goodness something changed. It's that powerful a thing that I'm interested in, not just in my own work, but in life itself.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

You exude happiness and contentment, and you exude positive energy. And I know that's not always how you channel the way you think and the way you work. You've mentioned about your mom, of course, being such a formative part of how you grew up and you know, losing her when you were almost twelve. And it's almost like the source code for for grief is found in your work. And I was at a play in New York last night, Daniel Ratcliffe was uh was playing uh in a play about this concept of grief and found a way to even demonstrate joy in the midst of all the sadness and use it to empower the audience to see there's another way through the light. You have done this in a way for 45 plus years, where you've embraced this concept of grief in a way to enable people to see you and see what you're working on differently. How do you maintain that balance, this ability to live with this kind of feeling of grief for a very long time, but yet have this positive energy that comes through your work at the end of every piece of work you do?

SPEAKER_01 12:19

You know, I told Anderson Cooper, who is dealing with grief, you know, on a on a weekly basis, daily basis in his own life, that the half-life of grief was endless. And he started to cry. And I said I didn't think that was bad news, because half-life means there's a decaying. There is there is an improvement in it. But hanging on to that, not for fraudulent regions, not for spurious regions, but for genuine reasons, is is itself a propellant. And within all of that, the other side is always present. There's joy, there's happiness. I am the father of four daughters. That's my most important job, a co-productions, right? And you know, they range from 43 to 15 as we speak, and they are magnificent versions of human beings as distinct from one another as night is from day, and yet the same. And um I revel. The joy in that alone is beyond sustaining. And I have a I have four grandchildren too, the oldest of whom, my daughter, who of course never had a chance to meet her her grandmother, named her Lila L Y L A, after it. So the name that was draped in black black crepe is now liberated, and birds fly and sing, and flowers bloom when you mention her name. And uh these are the these are the great joys, or the far theatricals of day. There's such the things that we forget. We've we think that the pursuit of happiness in our Declaration of Independence is the pursuit of whatever we want. And for many people that translates into material things like objects in a marketplace of of things. But it's lifelong learning and learning to make you better, and learning to be more virtuous. And these are much more richer values that everybody that you've ever spoken to knows in their heart.

SPEAKER_00 14:09

You know this, of course, but the historian Stephen Ambrose said that more people have learned their history of America from you than from any other source. And it's millions and millions and millions of people, classrooms, theaters, movie theaters, books. And yet we live in this period of time where there's great tumult and unrest, and you're the greatest cataloger of uh unrest and tumult that there has ever been in this country. And I've heard you talk about the narcissism of the present, this whole concept that we're we're living right now in what must be the most tumultuous time of all. But of course, you've demonstrated that that's not accurate.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 14:50

I almost feel like there's a need to re-educate the American people and the world about that topic because that is what we're living through right now. Is that one of the things that drives what you're trying to do with all of your pieces of work or not?

SPEAKER_01 15:02

No, there's nothing that's driving me other than to do a good job of telling a story. There's this idea that you got a hypothesis about something or you've got a theory on how something should be presented. It's not it's like collecting the material and figuring out what's a good story, but more importantly, a true story, because I work in an area where, you know, it's about true stories, not just about this. In our editing room, we have a sign that says it's complicated, right? And and it means that if you've got a good scene and it's working, but you find new and destabilizing information that might make that scene lesser, you go ahead and do that, because that's the higher good. So we are in this moment because of the essential narcissism that overtakes all of us. Certain that this is the most complicated time. That because we're alive, we must know more than Socrates knew, or Aristotle, or any of those guys in togas and whatever it is, or certainly the guys in powder wigs at our at our founding. And the fact is that with that arrogant posture, we actually diminish ourselves. And so when we go, this is the worst time, I go, actually, the revolution was much more uh divisive in time. Um the Civil War, uh, the period after the Civil War called Reconstruction, horrible time. World War II, you know, the greatest cataclysm on earth, the depression before that, you know, the greatest economic dislocation, the Vietnam era, all of that is. So what happens is that you find that a study of the past just gives you perspective. It'd be like somebody who's taking different accounts that they have in a mutual fund, you know, and they're saying, you know, well, that lower performing, you know, that higher. If I go to lots of different mountaintops, I get several different perspectives. And I can now give you a version of the past that's informed by scholarship, that's informed by the passage of time, that's informed by the amount of time that public television, bless them, give me and allow me to take to tell these stories. And then I'm also confronting the moment by not saying, isn't this so much like today? Because everything, human nature doesn't change. So everything that happened, the people that you meet back in the 1780s are the same as the people you meet today. They just, you know, have different clothing and they speak a little bit differently, but it's the same quantities of virtue and venality that you would find anywhere. And that what you want to do is disenthrall the present from its naval gazing sense of centrality.

unknown 17:31

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 17:31

It's historical knowledge competing with historical perspective.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

Right. So I think what you want to do is tell a story, which is basically, Shelby Foote once said this to me, God is the greatest dramatist. So what that means is, and then and then and then and then. Right. So there's not too much to it. There are s tricks that you learn or uh sort of ideas Aristotle wrote poetics, which is still a pretty good way of how how an arc of a narrative is shaped, but you don't look it up and go, oh, I should be at this point now. You just you feel it in your bones. You watch people who come in who don't know anything about it or that aren't filmmakers and see how they react. You you do your own, wait a second, how do we know this? You you figure out what the thing needs to be better, but you are essentially using and then and then and then. And the the attempt to superimpose on it some schematic understanding, some theory, some, as the academic community calls it, historiography. You know, at one time it was Freudian, another it was Marxist, economic, another time it was deconstruction or semi-on, none of that works. You may engage scholars who give you the stories, but you'd not necessarily buying into their entire set. And I think new scholars lately today have been liberating themselves from the tyranny of any kind of historiography and are back to how do you tell a story that's complex, that's bottom-up as well as top-down. And that's, I think, what it is. And anybody who runs a company knows that it isn't just top-down.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

I think the method that you have deployed, and I don't mean just the Ken Burns method as it's become known with the scan and pan and everything that Apple did in 2003 to bring it to life. I'd love to have been a fly in the wall in 1975 when Jerome Liebling uh served as your uh inspiration in Hampshire College, and you walked out of there and you had a perspective that was radically different than many people, and still is today, and it has it has maintained itself over 40 years, 45 years. And I've read extensively about it, and I find it fascinating, where you you you see the awesome responsibility of a still photograph and it's a message, and you look at the use of a camera and what it does as being something that's an active act that somebody does deliberately to produce a result and an outcome. Exactly. There are very few people in the world who look at an inanimate object and attach a moral responsibility to it the way you do. And I think it's fascinating. Most people don't understand. That's the whole freaking point. That's the whole point.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

Well, it doesn't matter what you're talking about. It's that relationship to that thing. And that comes from Jerome Liebling. And what he did, I had a moment that was so interesting on my last film, sort of the final thesis uh that I did before I left Hampshire College. Um and he the whole project had been formed by his ethos. And and we were, we were, he was going, I was screening him, just the two of us, back in a machine room, because that was the only place that we could, the film students could find a place to set up a machine behind the main lecture hall. And we're going through it, and I'd been working there alone, solitary, and um he pushed back on something. He said, I think you should do it this way. And I went, I I I know, I th I think this is the way to do it. And he goes, I uh this. I I pushed back again, and then I watched him let go. And it was both terrifying and liberating. And liberating. It was like jumping off a clip without a parachute. I go, he just saw something in me which he was gonna let go. We stayed friends to the rest of his life. He was still a teacher, a mentor, a father uh figure in many, many ways. When he passed away in 2011, I set up a little um shrine of pictures of him and and and things of his that he gave me over time. Um, his pictures adorn many of the pictures on the wall. He's still present, and I can hear that sense of responsibility to that object, to the intention behind that object, to that, which is much more important than whatever the moment is about. And so just, I think being up here gives you a little bit of the elbow room to then not constantly do battle with the rest of the world, which doesn't wanna operate that way. What have you done me, what have you done for me lately? Judge me quarter to quarter, whatever like that. You don't still, you know, own an industry if it's just judge me to quarter. You have to have some long term vision. And more important, you have to have an internal compass. Because I think long-term vision is one thing, but internal compass is the other, that you know how to just treat these things, the ordinary, as sacred.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

And the truly great people, the truly great purveyors of any skill, and you've covered many of them. Muhammad Ali, George Washington, you can go through the Roosevelt's, you can go through Jackie Robinson, all the different people that you've featured in your diverse movies all across 45 years, they all have one central thesis, which is that if you don't obsess with what you do, you don't become the best you can be at it. And if you look at what you have done, I read an interview somewhere where a female editor said one time that you were running through a movie and you she spotted that two frames of the movie were missing, and they equated to two twelfths of one second. Yeah. And for one hour you looked at it and were able to pick that out. And the rhythm of the people's voices as the backdrop to the movie. This level of attention to detail is just as comparable as what Ali had to do to become the greatest in the world. Absolutely. And so is that a constant, constant inner fight that you have with yourself every day as you think about doing this? Or are you someone where it comes naturally to you?

SPEAKER_01 23:20

Oh, nothing ever comes naturally, but I think there's always present that kind of friction. You know, that every time the runner, no matter how practiced they are at marathons, lifts their foot, there's friction, there's gravity. So you're you I'm not conscious of overcoming it every day, but you understand that you make a decision. I'll give you an example. In the revolution, we locked it, which means it's done. Uh, you promise the editors, particularly the sound editors, you're not going to change a frame, because if you do, back in the analog days, it's a disaster because they have to change what had been five tracks now as maybe 50 tracks or 75 tracks. But we learned from a scholar that even though we had two other scholars that said it was 16, well, let's just make it up, 16 uh battleships, 16 months, 16 dead, that that number may not be true. And so the narrator, who I was the narrator, threw 99% of it, but we'd brought the narrator in, he'd read it, he'd come back for a day of rereads, everything was gone. So we searched for the word perhaps and we found a perhaps. And we copied it and we put it in front of the perhaps. Now, even that scholar who was questioning that, if he had seen us do 16, he wouldn't have written an angry letter. He would have gone, you know, I think they're not quite right, we don't know for sure. But the perhaps made us sleep at night. And there's no one on earth that we were doing it for besides ourselves. But if you do that, if you are good when no one's looking, then you are good other places, and that's what you want to be. You want to do well. I have a sign in my office that says uh from a theater director in Minneapolis, Tyrone Guthrie, long dead, had a theater called The Globe there, and he said, We are looking for ideas large enough to be afraid of again. It's not a very good grammatical English sentence, but you get it. You want to learn how to bite off more than you can chew and then learn how to chew it. And then I think we've done that either by juggling two or three or four projects at once or taking on a big subject that seems undoable. I remember when I told my dad in the Christmas of 1984, I finished a book on the on the Civil War about the Battle of Gettysburg called The Killer Angels, a novel. And I said, I know what I'm doing for my next film. And he goes, What's that, son? And I said, The Civil War. And he goes, Oh, really? What part? And I said, All of it. He walked out of the room shaking his head like my idiot, son, you know. And fortunately he lived to see that the it got okay, it it turned out okay.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

That, would you say, was really the one that changed it all for you?

SPEAKER_01 25:51

Oh, so so the first film, Brooklyn Bridge, was nominated for Academy Award. That's a big, big deal. The third film, depending on how you're counting, the Statue of Liberty, fourth film, nominated for Academy Award. That's a big deal. I felt after that that I had a kind of financial security. I thought, wow, you know, I've really got six figures in the bank. I'm I've got some insulation. I'm I'm doing all right. And then the Civil War hit, and it was amazing. And and what's so good is the insulation here. I mean, the people in this town, you know, didn't say, oh, he's got 18 Emmys or, you know, he's got two Academy Awards and two Grammys, and they'd wonder, you know, what the content of my character is. And so there's a wonderful insulation for that. In fact, I came home in February of 1982. It was, I can't remember where Amy was, but um the answering machine that would never have anything on it had like 10, 20 messages. And I noticed that the wood stove had gone out because you try to leave it so there's enough ashes, but I couldn't do it. I'd already taken off my coat. It was like, wow, darn. And so then I'm listening and it's a hang up, it's a hang up, please call the Belgian Globe, please call the Associated Press, please call this. And then lo and behold, I realize I've been nominated for an Academy Award for Brooklyn Bridge. We've been nominated. And so the stove is still out. So I run out in my shirt sleeves, a cold February day, you know, seven or eight degrees, to the big stack of wood, you know, that's two foot-length things to feed our the maw of our stove. And I come and I'm dancing, doing the happy dance, right? And I slip on a piece of ice, and I twist and turn, and I fall back, luckily, into a snowbank, fairly soft snow, right? And I'm still holding the wood. My shirt pulls up in the back, and my skin is melting the snow, and this is and and it's dribbling down my pants. And I start to laugh because I realize the gift, no nominee up to that point or ever since, and certainly not that day when they were finding out the information, ever had that I won't say humiliating, but the humbling experience of saying, still gotta let you still gotta light the fire and the stove, you still have to heat your house. That has stayed with me as this great gift. I can still remember, I know which shirt I was wearing, I I know the weight of the wood, I know the coldness of the trickle down my back. And it was the greatest gift I could possibly get. It's extraordinary. It leveled it and reminded you um of of our fragility, you know. It's these are all good things, but this was some message, you know.

SPEAKER_00 28:34

After that point, you you I think talked in the past about having the freedom to make choices and using your gut to figure out which movie you think would be the best one to make and so on and so forth. But nevertheless, I know you're working on the reconstruction period now, but if you look at the entire you know, panoply of choices that you've made, I think several of them bring up topics that are so topically uh relevant today. For example, baseball and Jackie Robinson and the whole subject of race in our society, which is still so topical and relevant today and perhaps always will be. When you were going into it, did you know that that was where this was going to end? Or did you No.

SPEAKER_01 29:11

I just knew that if you told a complete story, um we're a country born under, we know when we were born, like exactly when we were born, and what? Second sentence of the declaration. We all these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Stop right there. The guy who said that owned hundreds of human beings, never saw fit to free any of them, never saw the contradiction, the hypocrisy of it. And um so set in motion, both symbolically and literally, an American narrative that is always there. If you scratch this, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of films that don't deal with race. Not because you go looking for it, but because as you're excavating, it's always there. And I still have room enough to snap my fingers, you know. So it's it's it's an interesting thing, and I've gotten lots of criticism from critics, from even scholars, from certainly other colleagues, from friends, from people, general people who write letters and say nasty things about that. And and you know, when when Barack Obama was inaugurated, uh, people say, now will you stop talking about race? And I held up the Onion magazine, who's the satirical magazine and newspaper that said for January 20th, 2009, black man given worst job in nation. And I said, watch what happens. And to their credit, most of the people have come back and said, I'm sorry, race is at the center of this American story. It's not something you can find to February, the coldest, shortest month. It's always there. So in your excavations, in your emotional archaeology, as I've called it, you come across it and and you have to do it. And it's there in Jackie Robbins, obviously there in Muhammad Ali, it's there in the American Revolution, it's there in uh, you know, even the Shakers who were, you know, uh radically accepting of everybody. It's there in Reconstruction, this project we're working on, which is the period in which Churchill famously said that the victors write the history. Well, in the case of the United States, the losers wrote the history, that Reconstruction was a horrible period, and that our own homegrown Al-Qaeda or our ISIS called the Ku Klux Klan were the heroes. That's what Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind suggests. And then the exact opposite is true. And to get into it is to delve into dark corners of our existence that have always been there. They're there when we're founded, where they're here now as we can see them manifest, but to look at them, and it the novelist Richard Powers says, you know, the best arguments in the world won't change anybody's mind, but a good story can. And so I'm I'm interested in what a good story is, not as a to have an objective of I want to change your mind. I just want to tell a good story, knowing that as you accept it, maybe your molecules will be arranged, something will be different. I have no game plan for you or anybody about how it should be received, but I know the totality of the reception of it, if you extend to me the extraordinary gift of your attention, is that something could change in you. And it might, it might move you in some way, perhaps politically, perhaps socially, just perhaps in an awareness, perhaps just emotionally. I have felt something deeply about someone, and and that is all that matters.

SPEAKER_00 32:26

And this concept of the United States of America being an ongoing, contested, unfinished project where we come within inches of harming ourselves every day. Every day.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

Well, it's interesting. When my first uh big series, the Civil War, came out in 1990, the critics in Los Angeles at the press store said, Oh, this is so good and no one's going to watch it because everybody's watching these MTV things. Our attention span's been eroded, right? Said it about baseball, said it about the West, said it about jazz, said it about the national parks, and said it about uh the World War II film. They didn't say it about the Roosevelts because by that time it was no longer uh MTV uh videos at two minutes and a half, it was uh YouTube, you know, kittens with balls of yarn. And um, but they didn't say that about the Roosevelts or anything else, because what had happened in the tsunami of all this stuff is that people were binging, people were proving that they could uh, you know, spend lots of time in long form, that there wasn't an attention erosion, there was just, you know, there's nothing wrong with watching a cat play with a ball of gun, it's wonderful, you know. Uh there's nothing wrong with a music video, adding pictures to a great song. What that's fine. It was the idea that it had to be one thing or the other. And so all I wanted to do, in retrospect, I there's nothing I thought consciously and intentionally as I made a film, is that I think what's happened is that I just offered a kind of ballast. I walked to the other side of the boat as everybody was leaning and the boat was tilting that way.

SPEAKER_00 34:17

Do you feel like the American Revolution as a project which was over 11 years? And I I I was fascinated by how you filmed the battle scenes and I read about the angles and the four different places you did it and how you did it in each shot, and it's just mesmerizing to actually think about the level of detail. Do you think that it's different than all the rest because of the scale and the reaction? I know you don't like to compare one child or project to another, but this one certainly feels different, and the reaction has been so unbelievably overwhelmingly positive, it feels like it's already iconic and it's only been here for five minutes.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:57

It's it's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 34:59

I I'm not sure exactly how to answer it because it's still kind of unspooling in a way, uh, not only for the public, but for me as well, as a as a thing. I remember when we made a film a few years ago, it came out in 22, called The US and the Holocaust. I said I won't work on a more important film. People immediately misunderstood it. This is your most important. I said, listen to me, I won't work on a more important film. I hope that the Civil War, baseball, jazz, many of the things that we've done were are as important. When I got to Revolution, I said the same thing again, only now I went in saying, listen to me carefully. I won't work on a more important project. And a lot of it has to do with this is our founding mythology. We are a very young country and we're the oldest democracy on earth. We invented the idea, we took the Enlightenment, born in Scotland and and Europe, and applied it and created what's arguably the greatest country that's ever existed in the world with lots of flaws. And that's my beat. And I and going back to the origin story is important, and so is it for you, particularly in times when people feel that we're in these existentially threatened times. But it's also this extraordinary challenge because there's no photographs or newsreels. So you have to kind of work doubly or triply hard to bring it alive. And I think we did that in a way. I hadn't never really liked reenactments, and yet we do, we filmed reenactors, but we don't do reenactments. We we assembled over five years a critical mass of footage, hours and hours and hours, which you could pick and choose and merge them with painting. So in a fainting, a group of uh red coats fire, and then it it sort of pans into a group of live redcoats firing, or vice versa. And then there's a document that comes in and somebody's signature, and then you see the walking legs of a teenager who this whose this voice is. And then suddenly he's in the Battle of Long Island being blooded for the first time, and you understand through maps and 3D and CGI, all of that stuff, and you've got commentary in this case from Rick Atkinson. Washington immediately realizes the mistake he's made by leaving his left flank, and you're there. And then you understand it's the big you learn that it's the biggest battle of the American Revolution, and you go, as I did seven or eight years ago. What? Didn't realize nobody told me that. And then it, I mean, Washington came so close to being caught and captured, in which case we're all speaking with an accent closer to yours than mine, or French or Spanish, depending on how that upcoming World War was gonna over the prize of North America was gonna play out. Um and that's exhilarating to me. Exhilarating to try to make that come alive. And it doesn't happen in a year and a half, it doesn't happen in five years. We needed nine years and 11 months from we're doing the revolution to the broadcast date, and I'm still working on it. I am out. I thought, oh, I'd have time to breathe, I can dive back into the other projects. I'm in involved in them, but I am mostly spending my time still with the American Revolution, learning more about it, figuring out ways to communicate to my fellow citizens who are absolutely certain they're divided and don't like each other, but it's it's sort of like a mile wide but an inch thick, and being able to pierce that veil and say, here I am. You know, I went on Joe Rogan's um almost three-hour podcast, and he spent most of the time going, wow, I didn't know that. Wow, I didn't know that. And at the end he goes, You're a national treasure. And I thought, this was supposed to be this tough, all my aides were giving me these briefing things which I refused to read about how this was different. Watch out for this pitfall. And he just likes a good story the way you like a good story, the way the cameraman likes a good story, the way the sound man likes a good story, the way everybody likes a good story.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

Theoretically, if they ever made a documentary about you, just about you, I know you're recoiling in horror here, but what would the central argument be? And and not to talk about you as if you're not here, I hope you're here for another hundred years, but how would you like to be remembered?

SPEAKER_01 39:07

As a good father and a good filmmaker, very simply that. I I don't know what the secret is. It's as the sign says in the editing room, it's complicated. And so there's undertow to any story. And I think that just that we had tried sincerely to try to get to the heart of who we are. You each I've made the same film over and over again, right? It just says, who are we? And you never answer it. You deepen it, or you go to some other corner of it and you open up that, you know, attic door and you go, Oh, there's this that you let out. But at the end of the day, it's just trying to figure out every single project. How do you tell a good story? What's the best way to tell it? How do you not compromise on detail? I mean, as I I love being told in things like baseball or the American Revolution or Civil War, what we've left out. Love it. Love it. Because what they're telling you is that you're not an encyclopedia. You're not this like collection of every general, every World Series, every battle. You are, you've chosen, you've known how to make decisions. And I I mean, I had a funder uh wrote me and said, that's great, great, but I and I hope this doesn't, you don't take it the wrong way, but you left out this thing uh about New Hampshire, you know, and that's I said, Yeah, well, we did this thing in New Hampshire, and I felt that that was better and more organic to the story.

unknown 40:36

I love that.

SPEAKER_01 40:37

I told what we're missing, you know, because there's a, you know, I when we're doing, you know, an indication of your place in the society is when you have editorial cartoons. So after the Civil War, there were a handful of editorial. At baseball, the suddenly this tsunami started and has barely stopped. But I I showed my girls as they came off, my oldest girls as they came off the school bus, this one that I'd found, and it was um uh clearly somebody me, uh, and and the and walking away in the distance, and these two kids are ogling this freshly signed baseball, and they said, the bubble was, ooh, Ken Burns. My daughter said, Yes, Daddy, but look what somebody brought to school today, and it was showed a bleary-eyed man in front of a TV, and the TV has a thing over it that says, Coming soon to PBS, OJ, a 2,720-hour documentary, and his wife, who's on a princess phone in the in the hall or whatever it is, that just says, Ken Burns has to be stopped. Right? And so I just were given a thousand years to live, which I am not, I would not run out of topics in American history. And so there is a kind of urgency now, as I'm in my 70s, to be to just keep there's so many stories that you that you want to tell. And that's the animating thing. That's what gets you up in the morning and just say, how can you make something better?

SPEAKER_00 42:15

This section of the show is called the Uncharted Path. And we're actually on a path around your barn. Best piece of advice you ever got in your life.

SPEAKER_01 42:22

It's Socratic. Just be true to yourself. Who gave it to you? Everybody's given it to me. Like the sunset gives it to me, my children give it to me, Socrates gave it to me, um, my teacher Jerry Liebling gave it to me.

SPEAKER_00 42:36

And if you um can think of one piece of advice that you got, you chose to ignore it, and that ended up being a blessing. What would that be?

SPEAKER_01 42:45

Oh, it's without a doubt. Uh don't leave New York, your your your your career is over. And in fact, I never used the word career ever. Robert Penn Warren told me careerism is death. And so I only refer to my professional life, and that's all I say. And it was because I made a decision about my professional life to move up here. I wouldn't be here if my mother hadn't died. We I would just poof and disappear. And if I hadn't moved to Whalpole, New Hampshire, you wouldn't be here either.

SPEAKER_00 43:10

One historical figure that you've covered in your life that you had a view on at the beginning, and it radically changed by the time you were finished.

SPEAKER_01 43:20

Everybody. And that's because we tend to make everything about history superficial, and we've got some idea of who it is. We want everything to be a highlight reel. Babe Ruth only hits home runs. Well, Babe Ruth strikes out more times than he hits home run, and guess what? He only comes up once every nine times at bat. And as you begin to inculcate that, Abraham Lincoln changes, George Washington changes, you get to know uh Joseph Plenmartin, who's 15 years old when the revolution begins and and and signs up. So everybody has to undergo this sort of reality check that they're not as bad as their worst PR, and they're not as good as their best PR.

SPEAKER_00 43:58

What's one thing about you? That nobody would really know. But, you know, I'd like to know.

SPEAKER_01 44:06

Okay, so I think that I'm fairly OCD and superstitious. So there are huge aspects of every day of my life, and I've never said this to anybody except my closest friends, that is regimented, directed by certain things, certain way that I wash my hands, certain way that I brush my teeth, walking. I do a lot of walking. I, you know, I hate being on Zoom. I'd rather take a call so that I can walk and just continually walk. And so there's lots of little rituals that I then try to invest my attention in, because lots of things become habit and routine and you lose yourself. And so I realize that these that these rituals have to be things that you that actually wake you up. So even in the moment of brushing your teeth every day, you could find something that could be a little bell that would just you know ring.

SPEAKER_00 45:01

If you were told you had one day to live and you were going to watch one film and read, speed read, obviously, one book, and you have 24 hours to do both, what would they be?

SPEAKER_01 45:15

Seventh Samurai by Akira Kurosawa and uh 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

SPEAKER_00 45:22

Incredible choices. Historical figure you most admire. Abraham Lincoln. Why?

SPEAKER_01 45:28

He seemed to understand who we were. He came at the most important time, the most difficult crisis, and he met that crisis, and yet he spoke to the ages. You know, he's he's a he's a vivid combination of Old Testament um sort of fury uh and New Testament generosity. You know, when he's saying, if every drop of blood drawn by the lash in his second inaugural be met by one drawn by the sword, you know, is 250 years of the bondsman's unrequited toil, you know, so be it. And then he turns around, he pivots, and goes with malice towards none, with charity for all. And in every step along the way, even early in his life, he predicted what would threaten the United States. Nothing from the outside. Two oceans, two benign neighbors, north and south, nothing except ourselves, you know. And he got that and he spoke to it with a poetry when he was a young man and and just before his death, which that second inaugural is.

SPEAKER_00 46:24

Incredible. Thank you for one of the most interesting mornings of my life. It was a pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you so much to be with you. Thank you.