Ken Burns

April 2007

By Anna Carugati

From his very first film, Brooklyn
Bridge, in 1981, Ken Burns
established himself as one of the world’s foremost documentary filmmakers. He
fostered his signature style using original prints and photographs, and
produced an impressive body of historical and biographical documentaries for
film and television. He has covered a wide variety of topics in series like The
Civil War, Baseball and Jazz, the last considered by many a masterpiece of American tele­vision.
For the last five and a half years, Burns and his partner, Lynn Novick, have
been working on The War, a ­seven-part,
14-hour series about World War II that will premiere on PBS in the fall.
Through the personal accounts of nearly 50 men and women from four
quintessentially American towns, The War explores the most intimate human dimensions of the greatest cataclysm
in modern history. Burns talks about this huge undertaking and other projects
he has in the works.

TV DOCS: What
can you tell us about the series you are doing on World War II? Paula Kerger,
the president and CEO of PBS, said it’s the most ambitious project you’ve done
so far.

BURNS: Yes, I
think it might be. It was born in great reluctance, quite frankly. We’d made a
film on the Civil War. It was a huge success in 1990, and afterwards everyone
said, “You’ve got to do the Spanish-American War, or do the Mexican War, do
World War II, do World War I, do Korea, do Vietnam.” But I [remembered that] when Civil War veterans had been in combat, they said they’d “seen the
elephant,” meaning combat had an exotic “otherness” to it. After spending five
and a half years working on that film, we had “seen the elephant” and didn’t
want to go back there, to this reality of war. And I didn’t want to be
typecast. I didn’t want to be seen to be exploiting the success of The Civil
War, so for years we politely
turned away other people’s comments that we should do this or that war, usually
the Second World War.

But finally I learned in
the late ’90s that an unacceptably large number of kids think we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second
World War. These are American high school students. And we were losing 1,000
American veterans of the war each day. I realized, Oh my goodness, this is a
huge simultaneous rupture—one with what we know and one with what we’re
losing—and I set about to do an entirely different kind of film, entirely
from the bottom up. If you weren’t in that war, or weren’t waiting anxiously
for someone that you loved to come home from that war, you’re not in our film.
There are no experts; there are no historians in this film. We took 50 people
that we got to know—most of them come from four geographically
distributed American towns—and we just told the story of the Second World
War through their eyes.

We thought ours would be
the most narrow, detailed, intimate view, and it is, but it also gives a really
good overview of the war. Because you care about where these people are and you
then are committed to learning and understanding what went on. And we’ve also
tried to erase a several decades-long sense that “that was the good war.” This
was, of course, the worst war. Nearly 60 million human beings were killed. It
represented not only the actions of a great generation but also the actions of
maybe the worst generation. Maybe we can take away all the labels and just
understand it at a basic human level and try to answer the question of what was
it like to be in that war.

We spent about 80 percent
of the film in battle. [The rest is spent with the people] at home experiencing
the war through their loved ones. But you get a kind of bottom-up feel because
it’s not mediated by our tendency these days to be in love with celebrities.
There are no celebrity generals or presidents or prime ministers or field
marshalls that we really care about. We just care about so-called “ordinary”
people and, of course, learn instantly that in extraordinary times there are no
ordinary people.

TV DOCS: Along
with interviews, did you use actual footage?

BURNS: Yes,
we’ve merged a very intimate, private archive—high school photographs,
home movies, scrapbooks, and the local archives of these places and of the
people we get to know—with a larger public archive, some of it familiar,
but most of it unfamiliar to people. We’ve been able to spend so many years in
the depths of the various archives, culling them for material that is just on
the edge of watchability. We call the film The War. We wanted to give people a feeling of a war: what
it was like to be in it. [From] what we read in our papers today, and what we
see on the nightly news, and what we read from our history textbooks, this
experience has invariably been the same for thousands of years as what’s
happening today in Iraq or Afghanistan or other war zones.

TV DOCS: It’s
amazing that our leaders keep bringing us back to the same experience.

BURNS: One of
the [people we interviewed]—this was before the U.S. invaded
Iraq—said, “I don’t think there’s such a thing as a good war, there are
necessary wars.” That struck us. He’s one of the opening bites of the film and
gives the first episode its name, “A Necessary War.” And I hope that when
people see this film, one of the by-products will be that they’ll give pause. I
don’t want to be so naïve as to think that wars won’t happen, or that there
won’t even be other necessary wars, but I think given what occurs in war, that
we should be damn sure it’s the right war.

TV DOCS: Are we
losing our sense of history?

BURNS: It’s
hard to say. I swing back and forth like a pendulum on this. There are times in
which I am very, very anxious when I see that school kids are learning a third
of the history that I learned, and I wasn’t even that interested in it. And the
general public is so woefully unaware of what’s going on in the world and of
the historical tides that brought people to this moment. And then there are
other times when I find that we yearn for community, and one of the ways that
people find it is by having a shared past. Our past is not something that we
hold as our own. Of course, we have our own psychological history, but even our
own histories are so intertwined with those of our family, our clan, our
community, our state and our nation and, indeed, the world, that we are not
isolated.

You begin to see that
amidst all of this distracting consumerist clutter, that people actually
realize that if they just go along and buy things, everything won’t be all right. That what they need is something
much more sustaining, much more nutritious, and one of the ways you get that is
by having a past. Wherever I go, people want to talk to me about it and press
letters into my hands and talk about their relatives, and that’s heartening.

TV DOCS: Do you
make use of dramatizations or reenactments?

BURNS:
Throughout my films, I use first-person voices off camera reading letters or
journals or diaries and that is, to a much lesser extent, true in this film.
Tom Hanks, Eli Wallach, Josh Lucas, Bobby Cannavale and others read
spectacularly some of the newspaper accounts of the 50 people. Forty of them
are still alive and 10 have died since [World War II] began. Some died in the
war, others died, I’m very happy to say, of old age, in the last few decades.
So we bring them to life, but it’s not on-camera acting. That’s been my style.

Additionally, in only [a
few] of the shots have we done what might even be called the most modest of
re-creations. One of the most important people in our film, Al McIntosh, died
in the ’70s and his voice is read by Tom Hanks. He was an editor of the Rock
County Star Herald in Luverne, Minnesota. Luverne is one of our four
towns. The discovery of Al McIntosh’s daily columns is one of the greatest
discoveries that I’ve ever made as a filmmaker and amateur historian. Tom reads
it really well, and in the notation for D-Day, McIntosh talks about being woken
up at night. So we went to his house in Minnesota and turned on the lights in
the middle of the night and shot the outside of the house as the lights went
on. That’s it. In 14 hours of the series, I think that’s about all the
re-creation we’ve done, and that’s hardly a re-creation. There are no actors
moving through the hallways. It’s just lights coming on. I’m not ­really a big
fan of re-creation. I’ve had to do it in a few films, just moderately, and I
hope that I’ll always be able to tell you that it’s just moderate.

TV DOCS: As a
filmmaker, how do you feel reality television has altered the perception of
viewers, especially young viewers, as to what is real and not real on
television?

BURNS: Let’s
not even call it reality television, because it’s the last thing from reality.
Nobody proposes [to his girlfriend] in front of 30 million people. Nobody eats
bugs in front of 30 million people. This is not reality; this is unreality.
We’ve just found a more inexpensive way to promote consumer products and
lifestyle decisions. It has nothing to do with documentary. That of course is
the horrible news. What you are
seeing parallel to this is that [reality television] makes everybody want to be
famous for 15 minutes and sends them into—are you aware of Nathanael
West’s The Day of the Locust [a
novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch]?—a collective day of the locust. We’re supposed to be
a democracy, but we’ve replaced our democracy with the great tyranny of those
with bold-faced names over the rest of us, and that is a terrible thing.

And parallel to this, what
[reality TV] represents is the exhaustion of a lot of the old feature-film
formats. There are obviously wonderful, wonderful exceptions to this in our
world cinema, but there’s a very, very tired Hollywood, sort of limping along
in remakes of bad TV shows and formulaic plot lines that everybody gets. All
they want to do is distract you with special effects to the point where even
that becomes numbing.

Quite apart from that
so-called ­reality television is a sense that there is much more drama in
stories about what is and what was—that is to say,
documentaries—than in anything the human imagination—that is to
say, fiction—can make up. Some of the subtlest forms of communication now
take place in documentaries, and most important, a large number of people are
willing to actually investigate, find out and listen to them—not just to
political advocacy, but to all kinds of documentaries.

TV DOCS: What
other projects are you working on?

BURNS: If
I had a thousand years to live, I wouldn’t run out of projects! We’re about a
quarter of the way through editing a massive series on the history of the
national parks in America called America’s Best Ideas: Our National Parks. It’s not a travel­ogue but a history of the ideas
and the individuals and the conflict required to create these parks. It’s a
fascinating story set against the backdrop of some of the most spectacular
scenery in the world. That’s a six-part, 12-hour film. We’re also working on a
film about Prohibition. And we’re going to update a film I finished in 1994
about professional baseball, bring it up to date, with the last 12 years of
activity. And I have, literally, dozens of ideas.

TV DOCS: What
advice would you give a young filmmaker who wants to get into the documentary
business?

BURNS: Well,
the good news is also the bad news. The good news is that there’s no career
path in documentary. You have to forge your own way. It’s not like getting a medical
degree, where first you go to university and then to medical school and after
you pass certain tests you’re a doctor. In documentary you forge your own way,
and that of course is both the difficulty and the salvation—and it makes
everyone’s path unique. Therefore it requires those who set out on that path to
be absolutely dead honest to themselves about whether they have something to
say and if they have the perseverance to withstand the fact that it can be, at
times, an extremely lonely road. Not just in the familiar complaints of raising
money, but in myriad ­other ways that are unexpected and lonely but also
strengthening. I feel like I’ve got the best job in the country, and it’s been
a really, really difficult­ but wonderful ride.