Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Rethinking Vietnam

out his vision. In nine he brought on board the brilliant Lynn Novic, with whom he just wrapped up ten years of work on PBS's The Vietnam War. The series wades deep into every possible angle of a conflict still seared into the American consciousness. I invited them on the show to talk about Vietnam, their paths to a making,

and they're ridiculously packed production schedule. We are planned out to and we can waste most of your time telling you even the thumbnail descriptions of all the things we're doing on the American Revolution and Ernest Hemingway and Muhammad Ali in the History of Reconstruction lb J and civil rights, the possibilities must be infinite. Is budget a factor? No, who's the decider? No, I'm at work, I'm the decider. So far, how do you settle on? Hemingway is supposed

to fit general. So here's what it is. It's sort of like friends and love and intimacy. We have lots of ideas, as you're saying, the cauldrons are all boiling over with potential projects, and we think about them. We're making lists all the time, but their ideas, they're the pink bong balls of the lottery. But every once in a while, something goes down in here. So for example, Jeff Ward our principal writer, and Lynn and I've been talking about Hemingway. Jeff and I have been talking since

the eighties. Hemingway has been on shortlist of things. And then finally it's just the gut feeling it comes down and say yes, it's time to do Hemmingway. Um, now, Lynn, I want to ask you, tell me what film and you studied American studies at Yale. Yeah. Were your parents and the biz at all? No, not at all. They're both sort of more in science and math. My father's a biologist, my mother's a neuropsychologist, so I'm kind of

the outlier in the family. It was a neuropsychologist who does evaluations of kids with learning issues and tries to figure out what's going on in their brains and then helps figure out how to fix it. And you went to Yale four. I thought I was going to be premat actually, and that lasted about six weeks and I sort of checking it down. Yes, exactly. And when I sort of evolved into realizing I wanted to work in documentary film, they kept saying, Okay, but how's that going

to work? Where are you? Where are you going to actually work? Are you ever going to have a job? What are you going to do with yourself? Are you gonna move out? Yeah? Exactly. There was some of that too. So where did it begin for you in terms of when you shouted American studies at Yale? Did you go to graduate school? I didn't. I thought about going to film school, but at the time that I graduated, most film schools really focused on narrative scripted. Um you know

drogs they are now, No, they weren't there. You couldn't really study it in film school. I don't think we talk about that, but when you get out of Yale. So what's the path too? It was a very non linear path. Um. I worked for a while as a research assistant at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, and then I realized I didn't want to be a historian and work in a museum, and I wanted to work

on historical documentaries. And I eventually got an internship at w n E T here and got some some production experience. I've freelanced. I worked for Bill Moyers for several years. That was wonderful. It was I was going to graduate school basically in how to do this, And then, luckily for me, I figured out that ken Burns was working on a film on the Civil War, and I just waited until I've heard that he might have an opening, and then I applied. And that was what do you

think he hired you? Four? What do you think ken burn saw in you? That's a very good question. I guess maybe. Um, I was passionate and interested and I wanted to learn, I will say those things. And I think having worked with film Moyer's helped a little bit. So So, first of all, where I went to Hampshire College and study film and photography every single semester, every single semester, every single semester, and started we did organize a little film company in the college to do uh

completely at cost films for nonprofits in western Massachusetts. And so following that model, I started a company called Florentine Films after I graduated, and the first one was one on the Brooklyn Bridge. I moved out in Manhattan up to up to the wilds of New Hampshire then, but we were finishing the Civil War. It was done or a month or two from locking, and I had lost an associate producer who just sort of very unceremoniously left, and friends suggested that I talked to Lynn, and she said,

you know, I'd love this job. You know, all of her credentials seemed perfect and and but she was going to get married and go on her honeymoon. She wouldn't be able to start until mid July. Said that's fine, that's fine, that's fine. We take the long view this this project had taken five and a half years, and uh, she was gonna attend to some rights issues for the photographs and other things. And the previous person told me

they thought it would be done the following February. By August fifteen, she had it done and we've been working together ever since, like a month. So so Moyers was more shall we say, agit prop than a lot of other people. He was a very political guy, was the

projects I worked with him on. Joseph Campbell's series was not really political, sort of existential and really deep way about philosophical Yeah, and that was surprising to me that I when I was working on it, I thought, she, I don't know if American people are gonna want to watch six or eight hours of talking about philosophy and the meaning of life, and turned out to be a huge hit because there's such a hunger for that kind

of conversation. Um. Just watching Bill work and seeing how he related to the people that he spoke to and the kind of quality that he expected of all the producers that worked there was a great education for you. Ken, I'll go with you first, and then Lynn, what did Vietnam mean to you personally? At the advent of the project. So I always picked things I don't know about and want to know about. Rather telling you what I know,

I'd rather share with you our process of discovery. So two films Baseball, which Lenn and I produced together uh In in the nineties. I thought I knew something because I've been a wild about baseball from the moment I could remember anything, and I instantly found out how little I knew. I grew up in Antarbora, Michigan. I was present for the first teaching against the war and demonstrations,

and I had a high draft number. But it was very politically active campus, very politically active campus, and a politically active father, and you know, I was just thought, well, I know everything about it. And basically for ten and a half years, it was daily humiliation of what we

didn't know. And what's so great is that to basically lose your baggage early on, lose that conventional wisdom that actually is wrong, and then be able to avail ourselves in a very clean way of more than forty years of new scholarship in every single department, so that we got excited because we dissembled all these scholars there, and as we're working first with proposals, then with early scripts, then with advanced scripts, then with assemblies and rough cuts

and fine cuts, they're all blown away, not by what they've contributed, which is significant but what their colleagues have contributed because they don't know that stuff. And then all the other colleagues are saying the same thing about their stuff, and you begin to realize, Wow, we are aggregating in here the latest stuff. You know, the centrality of Ho Chi Minh to the leadership of the Vietnam we assume, you know, we so we we we have in episode one.

It turns out it's another guy who's really in charge, and he'll be a character in old ten episodes. But everybody presumed Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh and LF is gonna win, and nobody asked another question about that. I know Lynn will agree with me. When Americans talk about Vietnam, we just talk about ourselves, and that what what we needed to do was to triangulate with all the other perspectives, not just the enemy. This isn't just Clint eas We're

doing postcards and all of that sort of stuff. It's finding out what the civilians felt, the enemy felt, the viet Cong felt, But then our our our all the South Vietnamese who get treated like you know what all the time, and their civilians and their protesters, as well as all the servicemen that we did in the air or marines or army guys and everybody all the way out to deserters and draft dodgers across the American spectrum.

And if you then do that, then the kind of political dialectic loses its its force because you realize that more than one truth could obtain at any given moment. From my money, what I walked away with that project was that ho Chiman was a man who understood his people and what they wanted and what he needed more than his American counterparts. From the moment Kennedy is assassinated to the moment that Nixon resigns. Yes, you go, there's a line from sixty three all the way down to

seventy three. There's ten years there was out of power when he died in sixty nine, and by sixty four he had essentially neutralized himself on the Polite Bureau. From there on end he had opposed the tet offensive vehemently, and his secretary was throughout the fifties and then on in the early sixties. And you get to some point in this project and go, my god, I'm just no, My my next project is going to be about the

boy Scouts. No, Because Lynn came in and we looked at each other and realized we had to do Vietnam, inviting exactly what you just talked about. The Second World War. Our first episode is called a necessary war. But what would happen if you took a war in which there's not a positive that. You know, we didn't unite the Union and free slaves, we didn't end the world of

militarism and fascism. And Americans particularly are susceptible to the disease of argument that their Second World War they call it the good War. It's obviously not the good war. Sixty million people died, that's not a good war. You know, you can't do that. History is not a parlor game. When they're more PTSD candidates from World War Two than there are in Vietnam. We just didn't have a name

and a convenient level. You're saying in the sense that Vietnam was no worse than the other war, that's hugely important. It was divisive. I think, um, it is different than the other wars before then that we paid attention to and that we didn't win. And it was so divisive while it was going on, and we never could talk about like Kinna saying, so I always think a bit sort of like this childhood trauma, say that we never talked about and just never dealt with, and it just

keeps cooking away underneath the surface. And so that's why the film was the most challenging thing we've ever done. And like Kenna's saying, just this chance to bring people together to kind of start over. Okay, something terrible happened. We've never really figured it out. We don't know what it was, We don't know what was going on in Vietnam. Maybe if we would just let people tell us their story and put it together, we could find out some

sort of deeper truths that we've never really acknowledged. Obviously, the Vietnam War has been covered in you know, to a fairy Well and film, in books, in Broadway musicals. Do you start by immersing yourself and what other people have done or you just tune that out completely. It's a really tough one because you don't want to imitate when anybody else has done. And we've certainly carry around in all of our heads the Hollywood versions of the

Vietnam War, so we didn't have to immerse ourselves. They're just they're present health poclets now put you in the deer Hunter. We're very familiar with those. But for documentaries that have been done, and there have been some great ones, and there have been some very sort of dated things that were great at their time, we sort of check

them at the door. Our colleagues have to look at all that for for footage and stills, so for research perverses, we have to go through everything and see what's out there. I go to a monastery and take a vale of silence. I will not look at anything anywhere, nothing, and just try to make sure complete. Even though I've seen this, has lind said that, even though I've seen this stuff, I need to be free of I'm always in President Lincoln.

It's difficult. I read a lot too. I mean, I think a lot of you know, we we do have a big team of people helping us. So I've been in an interview you did with somebody where you mentioned a board of advisors that you can so describe the board of advisors and what their role is. Yeah, so we we put together the foremost experts on the subject

whatever film we're working on. So in this particular case, you have an ad hoc consultants like that people some some We have a couple of people who come on more than one project because they just understand American history and pretty much can talk about and understand. And every Bill Luchenburg is in nineties something year old, yeah year old historians, Dean of American Historians. He's we don't leave

home without him. He was with my Hue Long film back in the early eighties and I think he's just done the majority of the film since. But for this case, we also wanted um veterans, we wanted Vietnamese historians, we wanted military storms, you wanted social historians, pop culture, Hispanic American, African American presidential audio. Right, So it's it's a wide range. Actually, probably twenty people by the time we collect all these

different experts. Some of them read scripts and then don't come to screenings, some kind of screenings and haven't read a script. Some are there every step of the way, and their roles kind of evolve over time as the

film evolved. You you remember in another interview you will also reference how you had the Vietnamese producer Ho Ho dang Wa, and you mentioned said in another project you did where you were interviewing the famous Japanese baseball player, and you couldn't keep up with him, and you couldn't that you're a follower, so you decided you wanted to

approach things differently. But but you also mentioned that you were talking to some of these men in the Vietnamese counterparts, and you were kind of taking with how gracious they were talking about people you knew they hated in a despise and had fought in war. Very different from the American point of because when Americans talk about these things it's often very heated. We had both, you know, we had people on both sides that talked about their hatred

for the enemy. But it's interesting now that they're at the age that they're at and many of them are grandfathers and have survived, they're most curious. Like we we were able before the film came out to share with Center McCain, who we did not interview, and consciously told him early on in the project we weren't going to interview him, or carry or Kissinger or heroes. That wasn't been a big because no, no, no, because they're still polishing their apple in the public sphere, and we didn't

want any of that. We want people that you didn't know, and then they would be characters carry and and McCain and Kissinger and and but they couldn't try to put their thumb on the scale in anyway. He got it immediately. But when it was done done, he invited us in for what was just going to be a few minutes. All he wanted to watch, and he kept extending it in the aids said no, you've got to go. Was

he wanted to watch them the other side. And what you begin to realize is that at that point of combat, which is where human beings are at their very worst, they're really good at killing the other people and avoiding being killed or all this stuff happens. But it's hell, and we couldn't even possibly imagine what it's like. And we've tried so hard in so many films, from Civil

War through World War Two into this. But they recognize each other, and they that recognition has transcendent, and so he wants to see what they're saying, and what they're saying sounds so exactly like our marines and our army guys. And so you have a marine, for example, Karmar Lantis who says you know, we're not the dominant species on the planet because we're nice, right, And people complained that, oh, the military turns young men into killing machines. I'd suggest

it's only finishing school. On the other side, we have an n V a young soldier now kind of beloved, David McCullough, Yoda uh figure in in in their culture, and he says, um, humans are the only animal the kill when they're not hungry. I've been in the jungle. I spend time in the jungle. Even the tiger does not kill when it's not hungry. And so what you find on the front line is a kind of similarity.

And so for the North Vietnamese, nobody had asked them these questions before, because I remember, this is the singular victory of the people capital p So they've never heard about losses. They've never seen their dead bodies scooped up with uh you know, you know, bulldozers and things like that, and no one said, what did you feel, who did you lose? What did your mother worry about? Which is the questions we in a kind of egocentric, narcissistic Western

society kind of promote. And so when you hear them they break down and cry just like our guys do, and they get outraged just like our guys doing. It's a pretty it's a wonderful affirmation of what we sort of loosely talk about and don't really believe is a

common humanity. I think, as this is evolved in my life, I'm somebody that as a boy on Long Island, they named an award my high school, uh for the most improved athlete that was called the Roland Floria Award, who died two weeks before he was meant to come home. He was all ready to get discharged. And he was the brother of a family that lived down the block from us, and the and the sisters in the family

were our babysitters. And as this is evolved in my life watching films which Full Metal Jacket is my favorite because you distill it down to the the indefective ability of the of the enemy. It's a girl with a gun in a building and just she's gonna take it all the way down the line and kills many of her enemy as she can infend. And you met her in real life in the Ted Offensive a couple of times, right, I mean, you met that counterpart from full matile jacket,

but it really a real person. But for me, what we would I arrived at the point I arrived at is not just Ellsberg, Pentagon papers McNamara. We knew was wrong at the time, not in hindsight. We knew it was wrong. They knew it was a mistake in the middle of it. When it also takes me to us is the evolution of the MA are in military. People are embedded. It's a limited transparency, there's no draft, it's

a professional military. The ten part documentary I'd like to see Lennovik and ken Burns do is the history of the U. S Military and how we've arrived where we are now. We're on one hand, you believe even though a hornet's nest has been kicked, maybe we kicked it, Maybe we should have, maybe we shouldn't in the Middle East, But the point of the fact matter is we've kicked its kicked and if we walk away, we can't walk away. We have to engage somewhere, some where we engage and

how is always the question. But the idea that we can just hold the bartend to come home is ridiculous. But but but I want to ask you both back to one thing that I just in this question of heroes, because it's come up a few times about what's the hero, and this film taught us that there's lots of different ways to be a hero in a situation like this. And they're certainly incredibly heroic soldiers on both sides, and you know, sacrifice for other people and are brave and

do incredible things and sometimes suffer terribly for it. But they're also the heroes who went to Canada and the heroes who protested the war, and the heroes who revealed what was wrong about the war, you know, and the reporters who tried to cover it, and the Vietnamese who didn't believe that what their government was doing was right. So it's just it's sort of up ended our no conventional wisdom of what's the hero, which may deal with

this really horrendous tragedy over ten years inspiring for us. Actually, I was overcome by a Rory Kennedy's movie Last Days of Vietnam, which he talks about that guy that was the guy that got everybody out of thereon Yeah, he's tortured, Stewart Harrington by the people they left behind. To this day, you know and and like he personally feels he's carrying the weight of the decisions made by people in Washington. My next question for you is, um, are you a

filmmaker or a journalist? And an easy one, I think yeah. I think we definitely in ourselves filmmakers and not journalists. But have you picked up some kind of you Obviously you've acquired some journalistic education along the world, trying to be really scrupulous about what we think is true and what the facts are the way of journalist would, but we really want distance to be able to evaluate which

facts are important. So Philip Graham, who owned the Washington Post, um said that journalism is the first rough draft of history. It's a great thing. But what history is able to do is come back and triangulate, take advantage of the perspective. The passage of time has permitted us to get uh clearer sources. So we do participate in certain journalistic ethics, but we're filmmakers. We are interested in telling a story.

Have you ever had a situation where you're doing a project and you have someone who is significant to the project, even integral, and then you find out that they weren't necessarily on the up and up with you and what do you do in war? You have to be particularly careful because the fish gets bigger the farther away from the lake you get. And there are people who feel a certain amount of survivor's guilt who then have to

expand their story. And because war is tenent combat and the rest is support, people who were in support often guildlily a little bit. So we always make sure that we can at least place them at the place where they are based on their military record at that day. Then we have to look him in the eye and say, is this story believable? And that's why one of the things the veterans do, the advisors do is they go, oh, that's bs that that that debt didn't happen, And we

do it. And sometimes we've found people that were, as you say, central parts of our narrative that we just felt that we felt more comfortable if we could pare them back a little bit. Well, people who come right out and say John carry lied, he didn't do any of the things he did that one in the Purple Heart. Some people argue it cost him the presidency, that he didn't respond adequately to that nothing happened. Well, this is

what happens when we politicize. We permit that relatively superficial but so intoxicating and so seductive world of the buying area of the yes and no. And so you can't do that with Vietnam. You can't do that intel an accurate story because it just sort of sets itself against itself, you know. So it's we That's why we took ourselves out of that contemporary debate about say carry it's interesting to hear you talk now about you know what the political DNA is or isn't in some of these projects,

and you privately have been somewhat politically. You've given money to the Democratic Party. UM. In mid June of I came out warning people about what I felt were the supreme existential dangers of the then presumed Republican nominee. And that was the first time I've ever done it that kind of went viral. Did the video for Teddy Kennedy's memorial correct, Yeah, but completely anonymously and didn't charge a cent and didn't want to be involved in anything other

than somebody that I had known and respected. I don't list that film on my resume. I just it was something that I'm say, you have a democratic political DNA, but what I would think it's masterful. This may be one of the greatest things about ken Burns is filmmaking, because you've kept the politics out of it. I think the integrity of the films is inseparable from our collectively,

not just Lynn, but the films I do with other producers. Um, we've we've made that decision to leave it out of it because it is so binary, it is so superficial, it is so easy to just it's it's it's in the end it is. I mean, there's a place for political films, and that's an important part of the tradition of documentary films that we have advocacy. We still have a First Amendment. People can say, I believe it's this way I'm trying. There's too much pluribus, Arthur Sassenger Jr. Said,

and not enough unhum. So we actually just started a website called Unum, which is trying to curate and take the scenes from all these films to say, look, we have shared stories. We're not trying to exclude anybody. When you add an African dimension to a civil war story, you're not excluding other people. Well, I mean, this can't be helped your ken burn, so you must walk around old day people going excuse me, could you do a story on the history of pizza. I think that people

don't understand how important pizza is. But you know, getting to this idea of your own personal ethic, did you have to do some kind of political lobotomizing in order to do the work you do? Affective? What happened for you when you're a politize? You know, I feel very grateful that my parents gave me a great education. Being credit and thinking about what happened and being honest are important, and that's been a huge sort of existential challenge to sit down people. You do it all the time. A

lot of people don't do it. Talk to someone that you don't necessarily agree with, and here where they're coming from, think about why, think about who they are. Understand the documentary character. Look, you want a narrative character. The minute you look at that character in in in literature, whether it's Williams or Faulkner or Shakespeare, and you look at them and you study and they go, wow, that's interesting. You meet the person in real life, feel like, get

away from me. You mentioned round the Board of Education. I can't help but suggest that would be a really great topic of the Supreme Court. The Court. So sometimes these uh formulations get a little bit expository into dactic. So what I often say is that a lot of times our films will cover this, like we've got obviously the Dreads got Decision in this film, We've got plus the versus Ferguson in five films, We've got you known.

So what happens is instead of just segregating it into Philadelphia with the with the wigs and the green felt tables with the white quill pens, exactly what you you have the Constitution operating in all of the stories that we're telling, whether it's Jackie Jackie Robinson, our film on Jackie Robinson that I made with my daughter Sarah Burns and her husband, the filmmaker David McMahon a few years ago, that is as much the story of Jackie Robinson taking

away some of the myths that everybody has promoted. Even so, he was an amazing Lincoln was Lincoln during the Civil War and in the Civil Rights movement. You said Jackie Robinson was the Lincoln. He's a Republican who can't stand Jack Kennedy, won't look him in the eye. Kennedy says, well, you know, we don't know too many negroes, and he goes, you're gonna have to know negroes, and then Kennedy has

his come to Jesus. By the time of the Civil Rights Act, Jackie's with Rockefeller are still a Republican, but watches the Goldwater Tide votes for Johnson. And you can see in the arc of part two of Jackie Robinson the whole history of modern political America, which is the switch of the Republican Party founded in eighteen fifty four and rip on Wisconsin with one thing in mind, the emancipation of the slave hypocrisy that cannot exist any longer

in this Republic. And now they become the harbor, the safe haven for white supremacists and racists. And and it is just it's a stunning flip. And the Dixiecrats, who the Northern Democrats look the other way and counted on their votes and to carry us ali itself went the other way. But the Democratic Party has been liberated from the tyranny of those people. Does he call you up at three o'clock in the morning and do this. I got this idea and it's like a twenty minute, one

breath monologue. We're try not to send text before six am. At the core of Burns and Novic's documentaries is a belief in listening deeply and understanding all sides. But, as Burns said, activist filmmaking has its place too. One of the best examples, to my mind is Josh Fox's gas Land, about fracking for natural gas in Pennsylvania. I spoke to Josh after the release of the film. Their priorities are not about protecting groundwater or keeping this situation non toxic.

That couldn't be further from their priorities. Their priorities to get the gas out of the ground and make their money. Here the rest of my interview with Josh Fox at Here's the Thing dot org. When we come back, Ken Burns and Lynn Novik on Vietnam, Trump and why he'd never leave PBS for Netflix. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. One of Ken burns few overt activism projects was lobbying presidents to pardon the Great

boxer Jack Johnson. Burns thinks the conviction was driven by racism, but after over ten years he much gave up. Then, advised by Sylvester Stallone, Donald Trump made it happen. In May two eighteen. You mentioned Jack Johnson, and I'm going to think you must be a huge Trump then, Now, didn't you lead a movement. I've been working with Sander McCain since two thousand and six and we couldn't get w to move And for very obvious Truss, we tried

really hard. And and then for Obama, you know, I put I lifted up on the accelerated because I knew it was a no win situation for him. What this black president is going to pardon an African American who married white women and beat them? Explained that people, what what what Johnson's would need to be pardoned? Four yea. So Johnson is the first African American heavyweight champion, which was kind of He won on a mistake. Nobody had intended to ever allow a black man into the ring

to possibly show. In those days, the superiority of the races was determined in some ways by who was the most powerful. So this is a real, just mono amount of thing, and he won great hope, and then they sent a series of white hopes up against him. And then on July four they sent up Jim Jefferies, the greatest of all white hope, and John Just Johnson demolished him, and there were white on black um riots all across

the United States. So then there are a few more fights, but basically everybody said, how do we stop this guy. This is a decade nineteen o five nineteen fifteen when war African Americans were lynched that in any other time, and yet he's living exactly the way he wants to, dating women and multiple women and marrying white women. And

so they hooked. They got him expost facto, meaning they apply to law that had passed after he'd done this thing, which is illegal, constitutional on on the Man Act and basically for crossing state lines with a moral purposes. So she wasn't underage, she wasn't under age. She was a prostitute.

Of course. For people who are not familiar with the Mayor film called Unforgivable Blackness, The Rise and Fall of Jack Lola Johnson, which is from a quote by W. B. Two Boys, a great black scholar, who said, look, you know boxing is in disfavor, and Johnson hasn't done anything that other ball players and sportsmen, meeting boxers and even senators haven't on it all comes down then to his unforgivable black So in this is so at least in

the context of the single issue thing with Jack Johnson, Trump, as far as you're concerned, is the greatest president of the modern century. So let me put this very delicacy. We support the pardon, but let's understand that the underlying issues about Jack Johnson are about race, and we're dealing with the human being who has a dismal record on race. We actually made a film on the Central Park five in which these are five innocent children, children, right, that

did not commit the Central Park jogger. Right. We know that they've been exonerated, but they went to jail, and he took out full page ads saying bring back the death penalty and double down on it the day of the Access Hollywood tape. So this is, you know, a tweet from he has a conversation with Sylvester Stallone. If he does it, that's great. You want justice to prevail, to get behind the Central Park five. Yes, and then he could call Trump. We'll be done. Now here's my

big gooey deep fried smother than cheese. Larry King question, what's a Ken Burns movie? Because I have Michael want to give him my answer. Yes, Sir Burns, his films are He's like Spielberg. You're the Spielberg of documentary film, big canvases, big themes, big budgets. Comparatively speaking, you think about Spielberg, you think God doesn't even want to do a movie for like two million bucks, and it's Edward Norton and Refines trapped in an elevator. It's like one

set great dialogue. Which one do you want to make that you can't? You're right, we do bite off. And I have had many opportunities to talk to Steven Spielberg about this, and we look at each other and we go we do the same things. You can make stuff up. I can't. What's a VIC movie? I think we're plowing

in the same field. It's too we could pick something very small, but it ends up that these projects take a long time, enormous amount of effort and sort of psychic energy, and so you want to pick something that you're going to really care about spending time on. So it's American history for sure, but it's also these sort

of deep questions about the human condition. That sounds very pretentious to say that, but when you're looking at individual artists like Time Away our Frank woid right, it's how do people create and live and get their work done.

I think what we're really interested in ultimately is our country stands for something really profound and inspiring and beautiful, which is that we're all equal and we have this capacity to be great, and yet from the day we were founded, from before that we are so far away from that thing. And in that space is where we want to hang out and explore, and it's very painful

and it's also really inspiring. I would just suggest too that these big themes, these big stories, the constituent building blocks, are these intimate, bottom up stories, more often than not, of people that you don't know. And so like William Blake, we're finding the world in a grain of sand, and that changes, particularizes, literally atomizes the way you tell these stories. So it isn't just the thirty thousand feet Great Man

history of the presidency in generals and wars. It's something that is bottom up and you and you touch on the African American experience, which is in almost every film we've made, and the failure, as Lena is talking about, to live up to our creed. And when you learn from so called ordinary people, then it sort of mitigates the tension of the big idea, right and somewhere and there you can begin to negotiate some of these bigger questions about who we are, where we fail our promise,

where that exceptionalism is. So it's possible in Vietnam, which is a horrible failure to find unbelievable pockets of love and beauty and redemption. And how the political climate in this country now make you feel about that. I think we're right now in the greatest existential threats, certainly since World War Two and the Depression. I would just find

that an assault on institutions and values. And because of the way media is and the Internet, which we thought of our as our friend, now we don't know what's true, and the ability to manipulate images and voices now and video give us the possibility for a kind of say whatever you want to disseminate into. And we've stayed in public broadcasting consciously a kind of Some people would suggest some creaky old form, but in fact is extraordinarily was

changed during the ark of your career. Not much we what I happened to know what I mean, everybody knows who studied this, that Reagan stacked the CPP with more conservative people. Do they wanted doing? They had documentaries about the oil business. Yeah, but one of his appointees is the long time ahead of it now and she's been one of our greatest supporters. And the last thing they want to do is cross over any kind of line,

which is why I've stayed there. The unstated agreement is you don't make me look bad, I won't make you look bad. I wouldn't even say that. I mean, I came out with a film called called Unforgivable Blackness, and they swallowed hard. They wanted to be called Jack Johnson, The Rise and Fall of an American, you know, like that. But but but but so I feel sort of fortunate. I think we all feel very very grateful for it. But we're able to make the films that we do.

And look what happened with Vietnam. We accumulated, just in the fall its first sets of showings, thirty nine million people, and then they had thirteen million streams, which means this makes it one of the biggest things to pass sue the PBS system. Ever, this is a truth of people

don't understand. After the big three networks plus Fox, the next highest network trading with Fox News PBS, which means we're already able to activate a huge segment of the American population, which means old media is not so dead. We're actually able to approximate the unum that we all just talk about in Wanna and Wanna, you know, not our head to it. Actually we can in a documentary film like this, you can have people have a conversation

that you can't really put in a room together. You couldn't, you know, that they would argue, so they'd start yelling at each other. And in a documentary, we can interview you, and we can interview you, and then we can put you together and you can have a civilized conversation. And we're kind of modeling a kind of civil dialogue or discourse that our country really lacks. It's not Jerry Springer. It's not Jerry Springer. And PBS is where people kind

of come. They're expecting that people and I'm assuming there must have been many, many times that the Netflixes of the world and these other independence have said, you come with us, come work with us, you leave pps that's your childhood. Well it's been throughout networks, studios more a lot of money in your face. Yeah, but you know what it is is that I moved out of New York in seventy nine, the summer seventy nine, because I had finished most of the shooting on my first film.

Brooklyn Bridge had no idea how he's going to make it into a film. But I realized I needed to get a job to survive in New York, like a real job, and that if I put that film away, I'd still be in New York. And you know, like the ad guy who woke up and didn't write the novel that he always wanted. So I moved to this tiny, little world town where I could live for nothing. And that model has informed the spirit at least, if not precisely the letter, of what we've done ever since that

we've had a kind of independence, we've stayed there. Yes, that all that is attractive, but it comes with certain things. Suits can come in and say longer, shorter, more sexy, less sexy, more violent, and it's just do not want to ever say, even when somebody even has the whiff of wouldn't it be better if you didn't do it?

This no focus because and you know what, I'm not good at us because I also get in a separate way like people I really admire, like Errol Morris and Spike Lee who do commercials like I would shrivel up to nothing if someone said we want you to do like a commercial for X y Z and the ken Burn style and we're gonna pay you this. You don't do this, Fort Knox, I cannot problem. I cannot. I've got four kids. I'm hosting a game show Friday. Yeah, I admire you for that ability to do that. I

can't do that. But I live in New Hampshire and we're fine. Ten and a half years somebody was sitting with Richard Plepler and me and saying he's the head of HBO. He said, well, why don't you fun Ken And he stops and I said, because Richard wouldn't give us thirty million dollars and ten and a half years

to do this. The model they're as generous and elastic as it is at HBO doesn't permit even though the PBS brand is no less quality wise, it's just a little more obscured because of the marketplace is so diverse now and so fractured. Just as our Civil War came out in nineteen ninety when there were maybe twenty other stations, right, and then we've gone through all of this cable revolution

and then the Internet revolution. So we've got fifteen hundred cable channels and millions and millions of Internet possibilities at anything in a moment. And what is that that bit of audience marching through from thirty nine million people for civil wars? But what did we get in in the aggregated of a few different showings in the fall of Vietnam thirty nine million is Florentine headquartered up in New Hampshire. That is that where the I L M is. Does

all the stuff flow through there? That's where you cut you do You have some superspace station set up there where you cut everything and do it. We have a little house off the town green that we got in, but there's at us. It's the former knitting mill that you as a doctor's house. You're you're contemplating or you're gonna do ali What do you think you're going to bring to I mean all, he's like the Beatles, He's been covered from every angle. What are you gonna do?

We're gonna bring a lie, right, because here's I made a film on Huey Long in the mid eighties, right, And part of my proposal was, we're going to intercut pieces of Roderick Crawford's performance in the Academy Award winning motion picture All the King's Men. We put him next to the real speeches of Huey Long. It just diminished. Now, I thought, Will Smith, that was a you know, that was not a perfect film. The first twenty five minutes is one of the greatest openings of a modern American

movie that Michael Mann did. It's just it's but here's what happens in all the Ali stuff, and there's lots of Ali stuff. It's basically this fight or it's that fight. But we want to start, as we do with the French coming in eighteen fifty eight to Danang, Let's tell the whole story. So we want to start in Louisville and and and tell the whole story up to the end.

That's what my podcast is about, Origins, is you have to do this and what happens is we are now, you know, biting off smaller and smaller chunks and sometimes doing extraordinary things with it. I'm not proscribing any other way of doing it. We just think that there is room for us to learn a lot more about, as you say, a person who would be impossible to duplicate,

So why try to duplicate him. Let's just go to the archives here and spar with Cosell see the fightstial, you know, and people at the end who were there when you know most of us were not. You know, we understood the power of that shaky lighting of the torch in Atlanta, But but who was there who went back to the hotel room with him that night? You know? Um, I have for Lynn? How does the me too movement play out for you? I mean, I don't mean to be so topical, but are you any thoughts about that

in terms of making a film? Well, I mean, it's been really overwhelming to see what's happened in our world in the last year and a half and how much the stories we've been hearing resonate for everyone. I know, just the wide range being interrupted, just not being taken seriously, having people comment on how you look. We've had I've had all kinds of inappropriate comments in my time, and

I've never talked about it. Sure, even in public television, even in public television, perfectly, the men in public television are like the men everywhere else. It's shocking to say, but yes, I think it's part of human relations and how we've all been. I think conditions should just ignore that and just keep going. And I frankly would take offense at someone saying, oh, you know, what does it feel like to be a woman filmmaker. I want to

be taken seriously as a filmmaker. Was it hard for you to be as a woman filmaker in the beginning, No, it really wasn't. No, I don't think so. In the documentary world, even before landed in Florentine, What was it like in the early days. Yeah, I don't I really don't have any mess came on this show and she was, I don't want to say, in the extreme on Mike

in the show, she was very forthcoming. She said, the guy put his hand in the sixties or whatever, the late sing she goes, the guy put his hand on my on my leg right, So I mean their generation. I think really paid their dues. To be honest, She's quite a bit older than me, and I think in that time there were very few women in the world of news and journalism. And right, so Dickerson Right's mom exactly, um, and what's her name? Povitch Shirley Povid should be interviewed

for Baseball film. His daughter Lynn Povish was a pioneering reporter in news Day Newsweek, who sued. I mean, I've heard these these pioneering women, and even the women ten years older than me working at CBS sixteen minutes. I've heard incredible stories. I really have not experienced anything criminal or regious or anything I would call harassment, but I've certainly been objectivided. I think every woman who walks the

earth has been. And the way I was brought up and the way I just sort of functioned was Okay, I'm gonna do my job and I have I mean, you know, and I think for women coming after me, though, and I have a daughter who's twenty five, almost twenty six, I don't want that to be her world. In the best no, she wants She's getting out of lost medical school. Major parents happy for healthy granddaughter. Well but anyway, you know, I just I think it's an exciting time actually that

some of this kind of conversation is happening. I think that's healthy. I think it has gone way too far in some ways of convicting people without any kind of do process, And I think that's the problem. Did you want to say something, Well, I have four daughters, so you know, we're working with one of Lynn's counterparts, another producing partner, Dayton Duncan, and I've been working for many

years on a film about country music. And what's so interesting is that women from the very very beginning to take a central role in this story, well before Rock and roll was dealing with some issues about sort of spousal abuse and marital rape and divorce and taking the pill. Loretta Lynn is in the mid sixties. This is stuff that Grace Slick is not doing or Joni Mitchell is not going to do for another decade. But there she is, and you've got Passy Klin before her, and all of

these stories are there in American history. It's what we choose to show, and that the ability for the patriarchy to limit and narrow the story, We've just widened the story and nothing's diminished. He gets more dimensional. And the same with race, the same with labor, the same with you know, complications. There's undertow and my real brother from

another mother. When Marsalis said in our Jazz film said that sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time, and we have been, we've been, we have been working on trying to honor that in all the situations since he said that in the mid nineties. Cust Now are you ken Burns? Are you a collector? Privately? What does ken Burns collect? Quilts?

American quilts by women who tell the story I think of in an elemental way who we are, the warp and the wolf, and in that these are sometimes anonymous or collective efforts. An Amish piece from the eighteen thirties. A hundred years later, piet Mondrian is doing these geometrical, loud, geometrical, bright colors, which is the epitome of modernism. And I go, excuse me, I've got a shaker quilt from a hundred years before that can sit next to any Piet Mondrea painting.

And let me show this to you. It's like on fire. And then it just the lies the kinds of borders that we ach, they don't exist for the artists, and the borders we make between people based on color of the skin or regions, or whether they're blue voting or red voting, or whether they're gay or they're straight. All of these superimposed distinctions don't actually exist, and it is

possible to embrace a complex narrative. I have been immersed in the world of documentary film for the past almost decade because David Nugent, the artistic director of the Hampton's Film Festival, and I are partners. But docs have become so ubiquitous now and so it desired, you know, it's thrilling. I remember an article that Vincent can Be wrote in five about the releases of documentary that year. The Way I had a film out on Huey Long Uh. Fred

Wiseman had a cinema very Tay. There was a thing called street Wise which was really flirting with a dramatic films uh and using real people. And Ross mckaway did Sherman's March, self referential film. He said the documentary was too arrow word and I think why we're drawn to it today is that we have all these outlets that need to fill stuff out. But more importantly, our plots are not tired anymore. Right, Steven's gonna invest everything with

the meaning. But these plots we know what. You know what it's like to go into a movie and go, she's dead. She's not gonna survive this film and and documentaries, even when you know it's gonna turn out the way you know it did. You don't think it's gonna happen. Right, you go to Ford see or anything. Maybe this time the gun's gonna jam. Have you ever put yourself in anything? Done?

In one film? In baseball, I was interviewing Billy the Spaceman, the Boston Red Sox pitcher who know people when he was traded to Canadian team, he would find, uh, you know tin foil? I said, why are people throwing tinfoil at me? And it was hash But anyway, I said, what's your best pitch? And you needed it to set up his onlie. You put yourself Yeah, and you felt you had to do it. Yeah, it was just really necessary. We debated about it though. We had a big, huge conversation.

Do you have one? Well, I have one. It's a World War two veteran said Phillips, and I was asking him, um, you know, did you have a hard time kind of keeping your language clean when you came home, because you know how Marines talk. And here was this very courtly, southern gentleman and he said, you know, in the Marines, we only use but one adjective, and when I came home, it was really really hard to not use that adjective at the dinner table. And so you hear me say

what was it? And he says, I can't tell you. My wife will come down and Heaven and hit me on the head. But it's kind of a conceit if you think about it. I mean, we were doing an event the other day and someone said, was it intentional when you cut to this picture? After that person said something and as if it was some kind of accident that these things happened. I mean, every single thing in the film is intentional. Right, So we don't put ourselves

in but we're in every frame. Filmmakers Lynnovic and Ken Burns. Their latest documentary is The Vietnam War. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing