Simon Schama

April 2008

A gifted communicator, Professor Simon Schama has instructed, illuminated and inspired through his lectures and his books. He has taught history and art history in the most hallowed halls of higher education: Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and currently at Columbia University. But it has been through television, as a writer and presenter, that he has reached his widest audiences, bringing his favorite subjects to life in groundbreaking ways. His most notable programs have been the 16-part A History of Britain for the BBC and, more recently, the eight-part Power of Art for the BBC and PBS, which examines the tortured moments of crisis of eight masters who brought about some of the major works of art. Professor Schama shares with TV Real the passion for his work.

TV REAL: In watching Power of Art, not only does the viewer learn about the works of art themselves, but also how the artists felt when they made them and the crises they had to overcome to create them. How did you decide to approach art this way?

SCHAMA: Rather indirectly, I should say. I knew there would be a lot of resistance from my colleagues in art history because it sounded a little romantic to imagine that all artists have some sort of tortured moment of desperation. Art historians always want to cool that down a bit. But I thought to myself, as extravagant as that sounds, it’s actually the truth. At least it’s the truth as recorded by the beginnings of biographical writings about artists. I had in mind [Giorgio] Vasari’s amazing account of Michelangelo’s troubles. And Benvenuto Cellini was the first person to write his own life as an artist—a kind of demonic hero—and his account of how Perseus and Medusa came about, which is one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing ever.

After A History of Britain, people wanted me to do other history series, and I wasn’t necessarily averse to that, but art history is at least as much a part of my life and career as history is. And people were whining about how not enough people watch art programs. So I thought to myself, if you could make a history of the creative moment that will be as exciting as a thriller or a crime, without damaging the truth in any way, how terrific might that be? The problem is that you are faced with the fact that you’re working with documentary budgets. Clare Beavan [producer and director of Power of Art], with whom I had worked on A History of Britain, and I said we could do this only if we have very classy drama, sometimes with actors, sometimes not, so [the re-enactments don’t] look like what Clare always calls “men with stick-on beards”—a really low-budget production.

The other issue for us was we could only do moments that were of genuine crisis and where we had a very strong sense of the artist in his own words or, in the case of the Caravaggio film, in words of court records. So, providing there are rock-ribbed documentary sources, we can establish the central presence of the artist himself.

The third ingredient is something all academics do, really, and I do it when I teach art history at Columbia. You want to say not just how did this work of art spring fully formed from the artist’s brain, but what was the kind of world that they lived in which produced this work of art. The tedious phrase is “historical context.” But if you can forget that phrase and actually just drop the viewer into 17th century-Amsterdam or 17th-century Rome or the French Revolution, that way we could do it.

TV REAL: Has your television work been rewarding?

SCHAMA: Oh yes, I’ve loved it and I love the collaborative aspects of it. I’m a big pest. I go to the cutting room. I go to hear the sound mix. I believe if I’m going to have strong opinions about the formal look of the film I needed to educate myself in absolutely everything. I don’t pretend to be a director. But if the director were suddenly hit by a truck I would want to be able to take his place, let’s put it that way.

TV REAL: What are your criteria for reenactments?

SCHAMA: I thought when we did A History of Britain there were some reenactments I really didn’t like. I was too green or I didn’t stomp my foot hard enough with the directors.

One of the films is about Jacques-Louis David. The French Revolution is all about the relationship of politicians to crowds. It is above all the eruption of very large numbers of hungry and angry people. But if you’ve got a documentary budget the temptation is to say, well, I can do that by shooting six extras very close up at knee height and mix in another six people shot at knee height or a single horse. I think the public is sophisticated enough for that to draw attention to it as half-hearted. So when we were thinking about David, I said, This is really the story of an artist whose head is turned in a Dr. Faust moment, by the uproar of the crowds. So that’s where we exploit CGI properly. The price has come down and the techniques have gone up and we had about 30 extras acting against blue [screen] pretty much the way a feature film would do it. It worked out to about $6,000 or $7,000 per shot—it was not cheap. We had our 30 extras shot close up and then as a group, and the wizardry of the CGI people took over and turned them into a packed crowd.

Every film needs a different recipe to make those worlds believable. And there are a lot of independent variables. It’s just a question of not taking reconstructions for granted ever, and endlessly fine-tuning them—storyboarding them, really. Thinking about what the shots are going to be like, what it’s going to be like to cut them against music. We spent loads and loads and loads of time just on those very issues.

TV REAL: What new projects are you working on?

SCHAMA: Maybe it’s because I’m getting old, but I never like going back to the same type of project twice in a row, although the nice people at WNET said please give us six more hours of contemporary artists in crisis!

We’re now filming for The History Channel and the BBC, commissioned by BBC News, a series called The American Future: A History. It will run on The History Channel a week before the election in the U.S. and on BBC a month before the election. It’s four programs, and each of them takes one of the huge election issues: the first one is called “American War,” the second is called “American Fervor,” about religion; the third one is called “American People,” about immigration and borders; and the fourth one is called “American Plenty,” about the relationship between prosperity and the land, natural resources and the environment.

And [all] of them are reports from now but then cut back to give the story some history which illuminates how we got to this point [today]. So, for instance, in the “American War” program, at the heart of it is the ferocious battle between Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt over the morality of the Filipino [Spanish-American] war. It’s a wonderful story. Twain comes back from his round-the-world tour rather bitter and cynical. He approves of the war against Spain because he sees it as the war that gives Cuba its freedom, which it does, sort of. And then he discovers that Roosevelt and President McKinley are really trying to annex the Philippines, and he goes public with a rather savage little booklet called To the Person Sitting in Darkness. And the two most famous Americans are at absolute daggers drawn! Thomas Edison and Roosevelt had arranged to have the Filipino war filmed—it’s the first filmed military action. So you have fantastic old footage, some of which, because it didn’t come out as well as Edison wanted, was reshot in New Jersey with National Guards pretending to be Filipinos!

What we are trying to do is a weave of now and then, of the immediate moment and then walk backwards into the American past. It’s very challenging, so it will either be stunningly original or a complete mess—and we don’t know yet! We had a terrific time in Iowa during the caucuses. Barack Obama was just perfect for us. He keeps on invoking Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. and doing this walk into history. We like him!

TV REAL: What do you think of the state of docs on television in general?

SCHAMA: Especially in Britain, there is so much talent, [although] inevitably, even in Britain, once you get a hit there is a sort of understandable craving to rest on your laurels and do the same thing over and over and over again. Obviously, I wish there were more money to actually produce original documentaries in the U.S. I do think we are suffering slightly from blockbusteritis. The big commercial sponsors are willing to sponsor the names that have become monumental in documentary-making, and that’s sort of the arteriosclerosis of the creative [process].

TV REAL: Where did your skill as a verbal communicator come from? On screen you are no boring talking head!

SCHAMA: Thank you. I have no shamelessness! My father, who was a sort of a thespian-manqué, always wanted to get into the theater but hadn’t been allowed to do that by his father. So he compensated slightly by turning me into a little debating star freak when I was 11 years old. He would stand at the back of the debating hall shouting, “Louder, Simon, louder!” [Laughs] And at home he would read Dickens out loud to my sister and myself. He did say once to me: if you choose any weapon it’s the mouth. He was a great believer in the force of the word.

TV REAL: What do you enjoy most?

SCHAMA: Cooking, and I do love writing, too. Those quiet moments, where unbeknownst to yourself a strange little stuffy closet inside of your head suddenly opens up and words spring out of it. So I do like those quiet moments, but there is also utter magic in the cutting room. I’m a very lucky boy. I’ve been allowed to get a new job in the middle of life, way into the middle of life. That’s been profoundly satisfying for me.