Interview with Ken Burns
This is a transcript of an interview with Ken Burns on Conversations at KCTS 9 which aired on July 4, 2009.
Other Transcripts:
KB: You know, my dad had a curfew. My mom died when I was 11 and he had a pretty strict curfew for my younger brother and me. But he relaxed it if there was a movie late on TV or if there was something down at the local cinema that we could look at or a film festival and I found myself staying up until 2 am on a school night watching films and I was struck by their power. It was the only time I’d ever seen my dad cry was at a movie and that was a big deal because we’d just had this personal tragedy in our family And here one began to sense that there was something really unique about this medium, and so I vowed then that I would be a feature film maker. And I ended up at school, Hampshire College in Amherts, Massachusetts with teachers who were social documentary still photographers who reminded me that there’s much more drama in what is and what was than in anything of the imagination and that you could live inside a photograph. And I think the combination of all of that conspired to turn me around and face towards documentary and then American History.
EC: Talk a little bit more about your father. Tell me what was he like? Did he have an interest in filmmaking?
KB: Well it is very interesting. He was a cultural anthropologist. And I think that there’s no small amount of anthropology in the work that I do. He was also an amateur photographer, still photographer. And one of my very earliest memories is of a dark room that he built in the basement of our house in Newark, Delaware. And can you imagine the effect on a boy of three or four looking at a photograph coming up through that magic alchemy of developing and seeing a picture emerge from a white sheet. It was really powerful stuff for me. And in some ways I think that I’ve been honoring what he was interested and what he’s been doing all my life.
EC: What about your mom? You mentioned the fact that you lost her at an early age. You were 11?
KB: Yeah, there was not a moment in my life when I wasn’t aware that she was sick. And then by the time I was 6 years old that she was dying. That this was something that was going to happen at any moment.
EC: Cancer?
KB: Cancer and spreading and she was a heroic figure. About as generous and brave a person as I’ve ever met and I hope that at times or at least I’ve been able to give to my three daughters something of her courage and his intelligence and smarts as we’ve gone along. But it was a strange mixture and it was, it’s interesting that you bring all that up because many many years after she died I was aware and had confessed to someone that I could never remember the date that she died. Like I could see that day coming then I would always be receding, but I wasn’t present for when it actually happened. And this person said, well that’s just a young person’s wanting to, you know, magical thinking, keeping their mom alive.
Even though I was now 40 years old by this time And so I told another friend, a psychologist, a man who I respected. And I said I seem to be keeping my mother alive. And he said what do you think you do for a living? And I said, excuse me? He said you wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson and, you know, Louis Armstrong come alive. Who do you think you’re really trying to wake up. And then you begin to realize this thing we call history which for many of us is like Castor oil that you hold your nose but you take. You know, it’s good for you but not good tasting. This thing in which we think has broad national themes and America the short hand for history is the set of presidencies, punctuated by wars and the generals who fought them.
But history is really sort of a collection of individual memories of all the people who have participated in that. And in that way, that’s an intimate, emotional kind of archeology and that’s what I think I’ve been trying to do. I’m not sure whether I entirely subscribe to that perhaps dime store psychology of waking the dead, but it’s a good way of understanding what history could be. That it could be something that’s not rooted in sentimentality or nostalgia, but rooted in something emotional and higher than the normal, just rational world that we live in of just words and parsing everything with language. There are some things more powerful and more complicated than those words. We know this from music, we know this from our faith, we know this when we walk outside particularly in this magnificent city and look at the nature that surrounds us at every blush. And we’re inspirited, we’re made bigger of these awarenesses and I think that’s also the role of art. Tolstoy said Art’s the transfer of emotion from one person to another and that’s about as good a definition as I can think of.
EC: I think I heard you say once that one of the things about what you do is preserving history but it also helps to build our future.
KB: Well you know, it’s funny. The past is gone. The events of the past are gone, but that’s different from history. History is the set of questions we in the present ask of the past. And so it’s certainly considering those past events, but it’s also aware of what we’re scared of, what we’re excited about, what we’re hopeful for, what we wish, what we’re fearful of, and so the questions we ask at any given time. You know, that civil war hasn’t changed but when I was a little boy it was a different sort of thing than when I was an adult and making a film about the civil war.
We were asking different questions. We weren’t interested in the list of regiments or the guns or armaments or things like that, we were interested in all sorts of stories that had an emotional context to them that was about the liberation of African Americans. We’d always assumed that they were passive bystanders to the struggle, but in fact they were active, dedicated, self-sacrificing soldiers in an intensely personal drama of self liberation. Now, nothing in the civil war had changed except our perspective. Except the questions we were asking.
And so you begin to understand that history is not just about was as William Faulkner said, but is. And then conversely you begin to understand that if you know where you’ve been, you can sort of have a sense of where you are and where you might be going. So strangely enough as I sometimes have the privilege of giving commencement addresses, I often say you know, the worst cliché of a commencement address is “your future lies ahead of you,” well, I always say your future lies behind you in the past that you have yet to discover and know.
EC: Back to your parents. Did your father really get to know what you did for a living and appreciate what you did, or did he say, Go get a job, would ya?
KB: Well you know, it was very funny. He was very very proud. He lived till 2001 and was able to see, you know, civil war and baseball and jazz and many of the other films. Smaller films that we’d done, but I do remember the day I’d decided to do the Civil War. I was visiting him with his then 2 year old granddaughter and I finished reading a book called The Killer Angels, a story of the battle of Gettysburg, and I finished it on the afternoon of Christmas day and I shut the book and my dad walked into the living room of his house and said and I said, I know what I’m going to do for my next project and he said, what’s that? And I said, the civil war. And he said, Oh, what part? And I said all of it! And he just sort shook his head like my idiot son just walked out the door. So, You know, he didn’t swallow everything hook line and sinker.
EC: You know, your work and the body of work that you’ve done and I guess the things that really stand out is you’ve dealt with issues of, a lot of issues of race and justice, but also someone was telling me that you were addressing some people yesterday at a meeting and you said, It’s really about race and space.
KB: Well that comes from, and it’s true, you know, the great sub-theme of America is race. It’s undeniable. When you say, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. The beginning of the second sentence of the declaration. The man who wrote those words. The man who wrote our creed owned 100 other human beings, when he wrote that. Never saw the contradiction. Never saw the hypocrisy and more important, never saw fit in his lifetime to free them and set in motion an American narrative that is constantly struggling with a question of race.
It’s always there, when we think we’ve solved it, when we think it’s gone away, when it’s right staring us in the face, we’ve always had to deal with it. But 10 years ago, Dayton Duncan who is the co-producer and co-writer on or writer on a number of the projects I’ve done. He and I were making a film on Mark Twain and we were interviewing Russel Banks, the novelist, and he said that Huckleberry Finn not only was Twain’s greatest work, but our Iliad and Odyssey because Twain alone among writers in the 19th century, American writers in the 19th century, were grappling with the twin themes that Americans had that distinguished us from the European tradition that had written the Iliad and the Odyssey and he said that those twin themes were race and space. Not outer space, but the physical space, the geography of the United States and I realize that Banks had quite, you know, simply summarized not only perhaps Twains great contribution but we’d been involved in.
Because every time we picked up a subject in American history that we were drawn to, it dealt with race or it dealt with space or more often than not, both. And so I think we’re defined by this ancient original sin of race and we’re defined by our relationship to the land. And that relationship has reached it’s sort of zenith now by trying to consider the huge power and effect of National Parks.
EC: Let’s talk about the National Parks because it’s a perfect example of the issue of space and also race. I think some people wouldn’t really see the connection there, But having scene a preview clip of about an hour of the National Parks, it very much plays a role in that and in fact there’s a real strong connection here in the Northwest, Mt. Rainier. One of the people that you focus on is a Japanese immigrant and his wife who used to go to Mt. Rainier and then eventually were interned during the war, but still kept that passion.
KB: I mean this is the thing. You know, I , all the while we’ve been working on it, this has been a 10 year project, a labor of love for Dayton and me. And you know, you say you’re working on the National Parks, and they say, Oh, Teddy Roosevelt. And you go, yep, but he’s just part of our second of 6 episodes. Oh, John Muer, yep, he dominates our first and second episodes and his spirit, after he passes away is, informs the rest of the series. But this is the story of 50 other people who are come from every conceivable background and have really interesting stories to tell and to say.
And Ewou and Hanae Matsuchita of Seattle fell in love. They called Mt. Rainier their holy mountain with sort of echos of Mt. Fuji in Japan that they’d left. And when his Japanese company recalled him just before the second world war, he resigned rather than leave his holy mountain. And the great irony and I guess shame of the United States is that we saw fit to then intern Japanese Americans.
He was arrested within the first few hours of Pearl Harbor because not only was he a Japanese citizen but he’d worked with a Japanese company, was there for suspect and they were denied access to their holy mountain. But a kind of perseverance took over and I think the correspondence between these folks is as beautiful as any correspondence that we’ve been able to record in all the films we’ve done.
But this is not just a Japanese-American story, it’s a Hispanic story, it’s an African-American story, it’s a Native American story. It’s about foreigners as well as native born Americans. It’s about male and female people who fell in love in a particular place and dedicated their lives to preserving it or providing the vigilance that we need to have to keep these places there. You know, Dayton likes to say that you know, you can lose a place and it’s gone forever, but once you save it, it requires you to continually save it. Just like liberty itself and we see the parks as sort of the whole of the United States written in a different, sort of, language that this is the declaration of independence applied to the landscape that it requires our vigilance to make sure that all of those energies that want to, to put a dam here or cut that set of trees or mine that area, don’t get their hands on these places. These relatively small places that we’ve set aside and said, you know what, we need to have this.
We need to have this for our souls, we need to have this for the beauty of nature, we need to have this for to take our children to look at something that was the way it was 15,000 years ago and 150 years ago when John Muer looked at it and we hope 150 years from now or 15,000 years from now when we can look and see the same thing that our ancestors did. This is a hugely important institution we’ve created and requires all the vigorous vigilance that we can muster to protect it.
EC: It seems that your topics are uniquely American and is that always going to be what you do?
KB: Yeah, you know the real secret is we made the same film over and over again. You know this has been a 30 plus years of essentially trying to figure out who we are. Asking that question. Who are these strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Amerians? We’re mechanics. We lift up the hood and look at what’s working and not working and try to tell stories. And that’s in the end what it’s about.
You know, if I were given a thousand years to live, I wouldn’t run out of stories in American history and perhaps that makes me peroquial or prevential that we haven’t looked beyond the shores except in those American stories that have taken Americans beyond our shores, but that’s ok. We have, have had, and have, and hope that we continue to have a special place in the story of this planet.
And you know, Lincoln talked about the last best hope of earth and too many of us reduce that in a bad way and get sort of intoxicated by the myth of exceptionalism. But there is something special about us and more important that specialness is in our possibilities. And that requires and incredible amount of vigilance and self critical views but it also involves a particularly unique American brand of faith and optimism and all those things combine to make great stories.
And you know we don’t have to call it art. We don’t really have to put too many heavy labels on it. What we’re in the business of trying to do is tell good stories and we still feel like students trying figure out how to make those stories better. How to be generous, how to include more, how to tell the difficult parts of our history without then ruining the parts that are also incredibly positive. How to mix the good with the bad.
EC: Your next project.
KB: We are already deep in an update of our baseball series.
EC: Oh really?
KB: I remember in 1994 that came out was nine episodes which we called innings, now we’re working on the tenth inning. We’re doing a history of prohibition. That’s brought us back both projects have brought us back to the Seattle era. We’ve got some difficult subjects to sort of tackle in baseball, steroids, but we have some wonderful great actions on the field and one of the most important people in the history in the game of baseball: Ichiro Suzuki
EC: Oh really?
KB: is featured in the film. And it’s brought us back, and we’ve done interviews with him.
EC: Is that to focus on the fact that it’s become so international?
KB: Well partly that, but I think it’s partly who he is as a human being quite a part from whatever ethnicity. Yes he does represent, as the huge influx of Latin players as apposed to the African American story that we detailed in those first nine episodes and the Latin explosion is a huge part of this and we’ve been to the Dominican Republic. But I think Ichiro represents something more than just the changing demographics of baseball. He represents a sort of long lost ethos and this one person says in the film, I’m just happy to be alive in the time of Ichiro.
And then in our prohibition film we discovered an amazing bootlegger who was the king of the Puget Sound Bootleggers. And it’s a wonderful wonderful story that we intend to focus on intensely in one of the episodes which I think everyone in the country but particularly folks around here will enjoy.
EC: The digging to try and find these stories. I would imagine that it takes a lot of detective work to find these unique kinds of stories and then find the visuals at the same time particularly the archive stuff.
KB: That’s what we do basically. You know, we can talk a lot about it. We can get excited about it after we’ve made it to try to convince you to look at it. But the thing that we enjoy most is the searching and the collecting of those stories and the things that we write on the one hand and the images that we need to use to tell that story and then even more than that the decisions that we make in the editing room that are difficult decisions.
To sort of carve that block of stone into something that’s recognizable of a good story or a good set of stories and that’s basically what you pay us for and the rest of it is the showmanship that has to accompany the raising of the money and the convincing you to tune and that’s the stuff we love more than anything else and I’m so fortunate, I mean it’s so unusual that you’ve got a…it’s considered a Ken Burns film , but really it represents the talents of an extraordinary number of really amazing human beings who work really hard. Writers and co-producers and associate producers and editors and assistant editors and each one of those.
EC: It’s a team sport
KB: It’s totally that. It’s collaborative in the best sense of the word and the people that I play with are the people that I work with which is not always the case in this business. And that I think more than anything else, I think shows that we’re doing something right.
EC: Now you made a concerted effort to stay in New Hampshire where you set up shop. You live and you work there. Has that been a real key to really keeping yourself grounded and how you work?
KB: Yeah, the grounded is really the word. You know, I was in New York, I’d gone to school in western Massachusetts and a lot of my friends in the early 70’s had moved up into Vermont and New Hampshire, but I went to the big city But when I woke up and realized, oh my goodness I’m committed to being a documentary filmmaker and in American history,I just said look buddy, you’ve taken a vow of unanimity and poverty, you need to go someplace where you can live for nothing. And I moved to this tiny tiny village in New Hampshire. I’ve been there 30 years. That was the single most important professional decision I ever made and the second most was staying there. Because once the first film that we made was on the building of the Brooklyn bridge and it got nominated for Academy Award the sort of the pressure to move out of there and go back to New York or Los Angeles was terrifically great.
And the pull from people and offers and things like that and staying there made all the difference. We have a community of friends some of who have moved to the town others have converted themselves into filmmakers and we still sort of get a chance to hand make this film. I mean it’s a cottage industry in the best sense of that work, you know. We shape these films by hand and when you see something like the War and National Parks in which hundreds of people are listed and all those people contributed significantly to the film, It’s still made by about a dozen individuals that worked for several years full time to see this thing through to completion in a kind of intimate craft situation and not in an industrial sense and I think the decision to move to New Hampshire is all a part of that.
EC: The Civil War, when you made that, It really seemed to open the doors for you. And to give you the opportunity you need to do everything else that you’ve done.
KB: My now 22 year old graduating from Columbia University daughter was three and a half just after the Civil War was aired and we were walking in New York city and up ahead maybe 30 yards, somebody stopped and they recognized me and were turning around and she was holding my hand and she squeezed it even tighter and she said, "Look daddy," they want Ken Burns. And this was before domain name was, her Ken Burns was all one word and it wasn’t daddy and it wasn’t me and she was giving me a valuable lesson. The Civil War did open some doors but I think that the best thing we did was to make sure that the way we made films was the same way that we had always made films. There were 6 or 7 films before that under our belt that had been celebrated and we thought, my goodness this was the best possible outcome we could conceive.
Civil War opened a lot of doors but it also made us, what’s the word? Hungrier. We wanted to take on, tackle even more difficult subjects. And figure out how to do that. So everyone said, oh the funding must have been easy after that. Well, the funding, as everyone in public television knows, is never easy but I think we compounded that difficulty for ourselves by saying lets try to take on this and take on that and take on more and do more than one thing at once.
EC: And you’ve never done really small projects or small topics, I mean they’ve always been these huge things.
KB: Well you know, I think with this idea that we’ve made the same thing over and over again that we’re asking that question: Who are we? It permits a relatively small biography of Louis and Clark or Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson or Elizabeth Katy Stanton or Susan B Anthony to have the same significance, the same importance as taking on something huge like a Civil War or Baseball or Jazz or the second world war of the west or now the National Parks.
And what I think we are proudest of is a sense that we’ve tried to in each instance invest these films and I mean the we, not me, but all of the people who worked on it. We try to invest the films with the very best of ourselves. And so, we can sort of happily say to turn it around which is if you don’t like these films it’s all our fault. We have nobody else to blame. Certainly not public television. Certainly not any other external forces. We’ve worked as hard as we can and if you don’t like it, it’s our fault.
EC: Wanted to ask you about the Ken Burns effect. We talked about the, You really set the standard in still photography this kind of movement that then also would stop and just really grab your attention with still photos that everybody’s copied since then, God knows we have. Where does that come from?
KB: Well, you know, it’s interesting. All Apple computers have in their iMovie and their iPhoto this thing called the Ken Burns effect and it’s one of those classic modern examples of how the technological tale is wagging the dog. For 30 plus years, I’ve been interesting in honoring the power of individual images to convey complex information. That required looking at a photograph and not just looking at it at arm’s length, but going inside and realizing it’s the closest to that reality that it was trying to portray that we can not only show it in it’s wide shot, but it’s medium but it’s medium and it’s close we can tilt, we can pan, we can reveal. We can do inserts and not only that we look at it and see that it has many stories within itself to tell but that we can listen to it. You know are those troops tramping, are those guns firing? Are the glass ice cubes in the glass in the bar in the jazz club tinkling? Is the bat cracking? Is the crowd cheering? What’s the music? Is it the period music? Who sang something? Does it always have to be a third person narrator? The voice of God? Could it not also be a chorus of the first person voices reading the actual diaries and letters and newspaper accounts of the period. And that together with a whole nother set of techniques may in the end be, not an effect, but a style. And I think that when you then apply it in a computer program to what you can do with your still photographs, that becomes an effect.
But all it is, is an emotional and human attempt to do that thing that we talked about at the beginning which is try to transfer emotion from one person to another. Trying to say, I think there’s meaning here and I believe that if I show it in this way I can give you a glimpse of the meaning that I think was originally there that I now feel and that I hope that you can feel. And that’s a much more complicated thing than just sort of tossing something off as an effect and brother, that has nothing to do with me. That’s something above my pay grade.
EC: Ken Burns it is always a pleasure and thank you for everything you’ve done in the past and what I know you’ll do in the future.
KB: Oh that’s very kind, thank you very much. Great to be with you. Thank you.
