Ken Burns

to discuss our mutual interest about this country's history. So, Ken, you were, I assume now in Walpole, New Hampshire, where you do much most of your work up Walpole, New Hampshire is not known as a media center, so I'm just curious how come you happen to do all of your work there. Well. I moved here in nine forty two years ago when I realized that becoming a documentary filmmaker focusing in American history was taking a vowe of

anonymity and poverty. And though my first film was nominated for an Oscar and everyone presumed that I would come back to this it a year ago to l a. I stayed here because of the labor intensive nature of what I do, the fact that it's all grant funded, philanthropic uh, projects, and that they're very time consuming. So I keep my overhead very low here. And it's quite beautiful in southern New Hampshire. So I assume you're Walpaul, New Hampshire's most famous resident. Oh gosh, I don't think so.

You know. I always thought that if my great great great grandchildren sort of kept their heads low, they might be able to be a member of the Volunteer Fire Department. So there's a kind of a different kind of hierarchy here where any notoriety plus fifty cents get you a cup of coffee. Okay, So let's talk about most recent film that you've had on television, which is a four part series. Oh, Muhammed Ali. Why did you decide to

focus on Muhammed Ali? What was your interest in him? Well, he's one of the most compelling figures in all of American history. He's certainly intersects with all the major issues of the last half of the twentieth century. The role of sports and society, the role of the black athlete in sports, the definitions of black manhood and black masculinity, the Civil rights movement, not as a fixed thing but as a kind of ongoing, developing thing. It's a story

of politics, of course, of race, the central American question freedom. Um, it's also about faith and religion and Islam, about sex and all of these things because human nature doesn't change, or things were grappling with today. So when you have a larger than life mythic figure like Ali, he just um, he sort of lights up page after page of history. He's he's in a way irresistible. In is a way to communicate some pretty complex undertow about not just the US,

but who we are. How long did it take you to do that? Serious? We said yes to this, uh In we began work in real earnest. Production and shooting of most of the stuff began in sixteen, the year that he died. Um. So you could say that it took eight years or seven years, um. But you know, there's fundraising involved. There are other projects that you're giving

your attention to at different times. What we need, though, is that period of time in order to do the deep dive on the research, in order to do the deep dive on the archives, and to be able to come up and say that we think we really got him, or at least that we have materials that show the kind of dynamics and the dimensions, the contradictions, um, even the controversy, the flaws of a character, and not have

it merely be a resuscitation of conventional wisdom. So when Muhammad Ali, did you initially seek his approval or his family's approval or not? No? Um, we never operate that way. We can't operate that way in PBS because it's so completely you know, we have to have a separation of church and state. We did have cooperation from Emily members in that they gave the photographs. Uh, they gave us access.

We were able to interview two of his ex wives, We interviewed two of his daughters, his brother, friends, families, hangers on, scholars, you know, all of that sort of stuff, that kind of triangulation that we want to do. Now, we need to see boxers today, professional boxers. They seemed awfully bulked up. They have gigantic muscles. Uh and maybe because of stimulants they're taking, or maybe they're better training.

But he didn't seem like an overly muscular person. What was his strength as a as a fighter, was he was as faster than anybody else? Or what was it that made him such a great boxer. He wasn't because he was so strong, was it? Well, you know, he trained, he had he was very, very disciplined most of his life. He usually lost when he hadn't been disciplined. And he did have, you know, great bulk to muscles, but not

in the kind of way that we see today. He's so suey generous in every single way, not just personality, but in his style of boxing. He did everything wrong. You know, when somebody throws a punchet, you're supposed to duck. He would lean back, which is supposed to be the recipe for disaster. And fortunately got a good trainer, Angelo Dundee, who realized that he was suey generous and that he would have to just strengthen these things. He moved around, he was very quick, but he you know, he's an

amazing boxer. I made a film on Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champion UM back in the first decade of the twentieth century, and they share similar traits. The difference was is that Jack Johnson was just for himself and Muhammad Ali seemed to be for everybody. He seemed to want to carry everybody with him and to love everybody. I mean, I think in the end, David, it's a hard thing to talk about. This is a

film about freedom, which is a classic American theme. It's about courage, which is also true not just in the ring but in the kind of stance, particularly with Vietnam, but also about love. I mean, this guy dies five years ago, the most beloved and known person on the planet. Something happened from that reviled, hated person refusing the draft to then and ats. That's a pretty interesting story that in many ways doesn't have anything to do with with boxing.

So let's go back to how you became a documentary filmmaker. Um. Everybody who wants to be a documentary filmmaker now wants to be Ken Burns. Um. I don't know who your role model was when you were starting out. But did you grow up and say I don't want to be in private equity, I don't want to be in hedge funds? Things important like that? You said I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker. What propelled propelled you towards that? And

where did you grow up? I I grew up the son of an anthropologist and biologist mother who died very young of cancer of a tenure battle of cancer when I was eleven. I remember after my mom died, I saw my dad cry for the first time, and he cried at a movie, and I said, that's it. I want to become a MovieMaker, and that at that point that meant Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford or Howard Hawks,

big name directors of the sixties. But I ended up going to Hampshire College, new brand new experimental school that opened in the fall of seventy I went in the fall of seventy one, and all of my teachers there were social documentaries, still photographers and filmmakers who reminded me quite correctly, that there is as much, if not more drama in what is in what was of any than

anything the human imagination can dream up. And often the human imagination dreams up things based on historical fact or the impossibilities of historical stories, as you know as well. So I emerged a documentary filmmaker and had the kind of Hampshire inspired hoods. But to just decide that I would just not go to New York and apprentice, I'd start my own company, Florentine Films. The first film we made, which took five and a half years to make because I looked like I was twelve years old and I

was trying to sell people the Brooklyn Bridge. On the Story of the Brooklyn Bridge was nominated for an Academy Award. And it was in that space that I moved from AMers, Massachusetts, where Hampshire was, to uh, New York, and then up here to Walpole, New Hampshire, where all the films have been, if not physically made, then erected. From up here was

it easy to raise money for the Brooklyn Bridge. And people say, you're trying to sell me the brooklyn Bridge all the time, David in fact, and it was the baby face. I mean, I'm sixty eight now, and I actually know that I don't look like i'm sixty eight, and uh, you can imagine what I look like at at at twenty three and twenty four when I was beginning to work on it. So they would say, this

child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge. And for a long while I had to three ring binders on my desk, you know, each those three four inch wide, big expandable affairs with all the letters of rejection, which I kept for you know, a decade on my desk, just to remind me of just how incredibly hard and it's still hard, uh to to raise the money to do these things. But the independence is is worth it, the idea of being able to present to you a

film on Muhammad Ali that I'm not apologizing for. It's a director's cut, and if you don't like it, it's all my fault, you know what I mean. And I don't want to not say, oh, the executive producer wouldn't let me hire this person or this the budget didn't allow me to do that thing. You know. It's just we get to do it in the time it takes to do it. However, long ten and a half years for the Vietnam War, six or seven for this one on on all e um some of them are the

National Parks was a ten year project. So after the Brooklyn Bridge, who did a number of other documentaries, I think another six or so. Yes, or you decided to do the epic Civil War series which took how many years to do? And how long did it take to get all the work done, the research done, and how long did it take to raise the money for that? You know, well, we were raising the money up until the very very end, and it's just it's still it's

never easy. It took us five and a half years from the moment I decided to do it, which was Christmas Day, uh eight four, where I was visiting my father with my brand new daughter and my wife and I, Um, I just said, I know what my next project is. And he said what I said, the Civil War? He goes what part? And I said all of it. He just shook his head and walked out of the room,

like my idiot son. But you know, five and a half years later we came out with something which is I'd always felt even as early as the Brooklyn Bridge, I said, I wasn't interested in excavating the dried dates and facts and events of the past. But the only thing that could hold that those shards together, the glue that could hold that was an emotional archaeology, not sentimentality

and nostalgia, which is the enemy of good anything. Um, it's it's the higher emotions our founders thought could be released if people were given a chance to govern themselves. And so we're interested in what those higher emotions are that we, you know, tend to avoid. We'd prefer things to be one and one equals to We'd prefer not to talk about the four letter word. The FCC allows me to say when talking about Muhammad Ali love um. And but yet our lives are compelled by the things

were one and one equals three? Not too you know, the the art, the faith, the relationships, the love that we have for other people. And that's what I pursue in my little tiny niche, my little Baileywick. All these now nearly fifty years of doing this. So people were mesmerized by it, and were you shocked at how Uh? It kind of transformed culture in many ways, and people

were talking about all the time. Did you anticipate that? No? No, In fact, I'd been at with a press tour and they said, Ken, this is terrific, but no one's going to watch it because Steven Boco, the great TV guy, had a new police procedural that was a musical called cop Rocks, and nobody would watch this, And then everybody seemed to watch it, and it had forty million viewers the first time. And you know DVD blank DVD tapes, Uh, not DVD, but cassette tapes were what ran out in Washington,

d C. I got invited to the White House. I was on the Tonight Show, and you know, it was just it was flabbergasting. And what what was really helpful to me, David was staying here in in Walpole because the pressure also to leave again Hollywood presume that just documentary was just a step rung on some career path that would inevitably lead to making feature films. And I was saying, no, I like my day job and being here and insulated by the people who are sort of there.

I think they're proud of what I've done, but it matters what the content of my character is. Why did you not go the route of becoming the next George Lucas or Steven Spielberg, make an enormous amount of money and then if you made a lot of money, go back to doing what you were doing before. Well, I I don't know. It wasn't for me. I really like the idea of public broadcasting PBS. It's public, but it's also that S is not system, it's service. I like

that idea. I also think PBS has one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other proudly out of it. Lots of what's best about this country is not necessarily in the mar ketplace, which is of course one of the best things in this country as well. And so it's not making the other wrong. It's just saying that if I had gone to a premium channel or gone to a streaming service, it might have been easier to get the money. Um, but then they would own it.

I own my films. They would also not permit me ten and a half years to do the Vietnam They'd want it in a couple of years, and the kind of corners that would be cut in that process was nothing that I wanted to do. I also was aware that even with the success of this Civil War series, people would come and ask me what I was working on from other places, and then when I'd say Baseball, they'd say, oh, great, that'll sell, you know. And then they said how long is it and I said eighteen

and a half hours, and they would walk away. And then after Baseball had an even bigger audience than the Civil War, they'd come to me, what are you doing And I would say jazz and they go long and I go yeah, they go no, African American stuff doesn't sell. And you just suddenly realized that sometimes you had to pick these projects, all of them base done your gut, not on a focus group, not on some marketing panel, but what you wanted to do. So how many projects

do you have in the works now? Can you tell you what some of the ones are? Yeah? Yeah, I don't know why people make the stuff secret. I've just locked or finished. We're about two next week mixed the first of two episodes on a four part UH two two hours on Benjamin Franklin, born the same day as Muhammad Ali and arguably one of the most compelling figures of the eighteenth century. I've been editing all last week

and all this week. As soon as we're done, we're going to dive into the editing today on a history of the U S and the Holocaust. What we knew and what we didn't know, what we did and what we didn't do, and what we should have done. A very complicated story that needs to be told. We're doing

a history of the buffalo, uh sort of. It's actually a biography of not an animal, but a biography the people who use the animal, the people who brought that animal to the brink of extinction, and then those very same people who nearly killed it to who brought it

back from extinction. It's a parable of d extinction. I guess you might say, we're doing a massive series on the history of the American Revolution, not just fifty five white guys with powdered wigs in Philadelphia, but a very, very complicated story of a bottom up story of people quarter a fifth to a quarter of the country remained loyal to Great Britain. And this was a civil war. Our civil war was not a civil war. It was

a sectional war, North against South. At this point in your career, do you consider yourself a filmmaker, a historian, an educator, or a public figure that's well known and recognized by everybody. Well, you know, the biggest thing is that I'm a filmmaker, and and that means I tell stories. And I happened to the way a painter might choose to work in oil as opposed to watercolors. I choose

to work in history, American history. With the exception of the upcoming Leonardo da Vinci, they've all been in in in American history, and history is convenient lea mostly made up of the word story plus high and all the other stuff that comes. I'm I'm pleased that these films

live in schools, that they have an educational dimension. I'm pleased that people respect the work, which means that if you know who I am, it means that you've seen a film of mine, and that that means that at least these stories are reaching some group of us, as much as I want to reach every single person. Um,

it's at least exciting. You know, I'm walking to New York City and uh, you know, a fireman goes by and says, hey, you're a guy that made the Civil War, or you know, somebody walks up to me to complain what I left out of baseball, which I love. Baseball is eighteen and a half hours. And people, if they tell you what you left out, I'm not an encyclopedia. I'm not a dictionary. I'm a storyteller. You have to

leave stuff out. And if they think I've left something out of eighteen and a half hours, that means they didn't find it boring. They just wanted the fifty nine White Sox that they happen to grow up loving, and we didn't have time or room or space, uh to do. So. I have these conversations with people all the time about who we are and what it means to be an American at lots of levels and lots of different people trust us to do and I want to emphasize us,

trust us to tell a complicated and truthful story. And in a time when the truth seems fungible, when we're always accusing the other of fake news, it's important to have at least a space. I think PBS provides that where you can get an accurate, balanced view of what's taken place that doesn't sugarcoat and at the same time, isn't just invested entirely in revisionism. Why should people really want to watch history about things that happened a hundred

or two hundred years ago? What what relevance is it? Would you say, Well, you know, I think it's hugely relevant. History gives you that ability to have a kind of perspective to see where the precedents are. For all of the dangerous things, for example, that we find ourselves in today, there are precedents, and yet there is in its totality

obviously unprecedented dangers and threats to the United States. And I think it would be incumbent upon Americans, who are often blind to their history, to understand exactly how their government works, what the Constitution is actually about, what it says,

what the nature of our government is. You know, we don't teach civics anymore, and a lot of the reasons we feel like we've lost a cohesion is because we've forgotten the glue that's held us together, not just in the in the patriotic ways, not just in the emotional ways, but in the very functional ways of how you get things done. And that's what civics is. It isn't just one senators and four hundred and thirty five representatives and

three branches of government. It's how human beings together get things done and compromise and see that there is a shared common good and so history becomes away. It's it's table around which I think we can all have a shared discussion of what we want and how we might continue to cohere, and how we can let the better angels perhaps reassert themselves. That's that's what I'm about, and

I think people want that. I think the divisions are huge and massive and threatening and have exposed the fragility of our institutions, indeed our democracy and our future. But I also think deep down people if they're made aware of the fact that they share common everything. I mean, one of the fallacies of the Holocaust is just the myth of race of you know, biologically it doesn't exist. You know, we are all the same. And I've I've said to you before, David. You know, I've made films

for more than almost fifty years about the US. But I've also made films about us, that is to say, the lower case two letter plural pronoun. And so I'm I'm addressing these films to everybody, regardless of their political persuasion or where they come from, are the sex, or their wealth, or their race, whatever it might be. I want to reach everybody to remind them of the US, all of the intimacy of this plus all the majesty, the complexity, the contradiction and the controversy of the US.

It's all there. And we don't need to say, oh, we got to limit our history and teach it only this way and teach only the good stuff. It's morning in America again. We need to actually have a rich history that pulls back the camera and reveals all the startling and at times yes contradictory, and not so pleasant things. So many people recognize you because you have a very famous hair do that I've asked you about before. But to some people they may say, well, Ken, what happened,

Where did that hair do come from? And where's it gone? Because right now it seems a little different than what I've seen before. Yeah, it's it's growing out a little bit, David. But COVID. You know, I ended up with hair going back down to my shoulder, and I finally realized that one of the things I had to do I had. I'm very loyal person, and I used to have hair down to my waist in my college and my hippie days before that in an arbor, Michigan, and I had

it cut off in the summer of seventy five. And I've gone to the same person now, a grandmother many times over, who was a young gal cutting hair in AMers, Massachusetts, and I still seek her out. And I finally just said to her, you know, COVID is enough of a change that I ought to be able to do something new,

So I'm ending up with shorter hair. Tom Brokaw, who's been a mentor as well, when I turned sixty eight years ago, said, you know, time for a big boy haircut, and I said, oh wait, I thought you said seventy, and so now I guess you know two years shorter of seventy, I'm getting a big boy haircut. Well, can I want to thank you for a very interesting conversation. You may not realize that your dog was in part

of the conversation. This is my executive producer. You know what they say in Washington, and I think it applies to filmmaking too. If you want a friend, get a dog. And that's Chester, who I call my executive producer. He's never barked once. And every once in a while he will pass through. Either he's heard this stuff before or he's sick of hearing my voice or something. But he's curled up over there and and and and is happily snoozing away because I've put him to sleep. Thanks for

listening to hear more of my interviews. You can subscribe and download my podcast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen.