Interview with Ken Burns
Ken Burns is an American filmmaker.
Proposing to the Project
Contents
Max Raskin: I will say at the outset that this will not be an objective interview — I'm an unbelievable fan of yours.
Ken Burns: Thank you — I'm so pleased. Have you had a chance to see The U.S. and the Holocaust?
MR: Yes, I watched it with my wife in Jerusalem.
KB: Oh, my goodness.
MR: You said once that you decided to do the Brooklyn Bridge documentary in a fugue state after having pneumonia and reading the David McCullough book. How did you settle on America and the Holocaust?
KB: Sometimes it’s just really having mental ideas and then suddenly something emotional drops down from your head to your heart, and you say, “Yeah.” You get down on your knees and propose to the project.
There are sometimes external stimuli as in the case of this particular film. This film was many years in incubation. Lynn Novick, Sarah Botstein, and I — along with Geoff Ward, who wrote the script — made a film on the Second World War, called The War, that came out in 2007. There was a significant scene within those seven episodes about the Holocaust, and we were very surprised to have people coming up to us — peppering us with questions that reflected misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, but also some very interesting questions. And we looked at each other and thought this would be a really good topic: the U.S. and the Holocaust.
Americans have had a luxury of avoiding thinking about the Holocaust, other than just as this event that happened an ocean and a continent away. But we had a real complicity in the inability of people to escape the Holocaust. It seemed like something we needed to engage. It hit all the buzzers.
I've said ad nauseum that I will not work on a more important film. And people have misunderstood that. I suppose that I should continue to qualify that by saying, I hope that other films that I've done in the past would be as important.
I hope that films that I'm working on now or will work on in the future will be as important, but I want to make it clear that I will not work on a more important film than this.
Holocaust Porn
MR: So I interviewed Dan Doctoroff, and he and I share an experience of turning on your documentaries to relax and calm down. Whether it’s Shelby Foote’s voice or “Stand By Water” — there is something just calming about your work, even when you’re dealing with grave subjects. When you're working with something intense like the Holocaust, what do you do when you need to relax?
KB: It's what I've always done — I walk. I live in rural New Hampshire, and so early in the morning I walk three or four miles with my dog into nature. I sometimes repeat that at the end of the night.
Right now, I happen to be in the city, and I will take phone calls walking because I prefer to walk. It is a way of balancing. It's a kind of meditation, I guess, that allows me to work on these projects.
Part of our job is a huge triage, a huge calibration, to make sure that we don't desensitize people by bashing them over the head with the very worst images. The thing that's important to remember about a project like this is that for the six and a half hours that these three episodes represent of finished film time, we've probably looked at 40 to 50 times that amount of material. We get to see those worst of the images and try to figure out how to absorb them and relate to them.
MR: What is the worst image that sticks in your mind right now?
KB: I won't describe it because it's so horrible.
There is a war pornography, a Holocaust pornography that people indulge in that can only seem to perpetuate the opacity of the situation — just like six million means nothing, absolutely nothing. It becomes the obligation, as the writer Daniel Mendelsohn says in our film, to particularize what happened. It might be, in the case of this film, the singular story of Anne Frank and her family. Or it might be Daniel Mendelsohn’s family. Or it might be an odd letter here and there from someone who knows they're going to their death and writes a letter to a friend saying that I want the world to know that a person named David Berger lived.
MR: Like Sullivan Ballou before Bull Run.
KB: Right. But we waited until after that battle was over — until, in fact, the end of the episode — and did it as a coda to say, if you focus on the specific in Bull Run, forget about it. This is a universal love letter that every woman wishes her man could write. And that's very important that we have bottom up stuff. So we have survivors, we have people who get out, we have one survivor who survives Auschwitz, which is amazing, who doesn't get out but lives.
Burns After Reading
MR: Let me ask you a quick question about prior Holocaust films — do you watch something like The Sorrow and the Pity before you do this?
KB: Oh, not before.
My dad made me sit down and watch Judgment at Nuremberg, where the prosecutors pull the blinds down, bring out the projector, and show the worst of the worst. And my dad, not a Jew and myself, not a Jew, wanted me to understand. That's my first introduction to the Holocaust — I was born in 1953. We were fighting Germans in our backyards and killing Jerrys with our hand grenades and our Thompson submachine guns. And that's what we did because that's what our parents had done. That film was a shock to me — that there was a bigger thing that it was about.
There was never a history course of mine in grade school or high school that touched on it. And so my education comes from The Sorrow and the Pity. It comes from Night and Fog. It comes from Schindler's List. It comes from Sophie's Choice. It comes from the choices I made as a college student, as an adult to read about it and to understand it from Hitler’s Willing Executioners and other fiction besides Styron. But everything dissolved…nothing prepared me for what this was about.
As my colleagues know, as soon as I agree to do something, I will not look at another film on the subject.
MR: That's fascinating.
KB: Even films you've seen — you don't want to be reminded about what was done well or not done well and have your own curiosity about the subject influenced by something else that's been done or mentioned. And you don’t want to feel some obligation or holdover from another film that you should go down this alley and pursue this thing because that film did.
What’s so great is that once the film is locked and it's over, the floodgates open up. So I sat down and I watched Schindler's List again and told Spielberg that I had watched it, and I watched Sophie's Choice again. As you know, my first film was about the Brooklyn Bridge so watching that exultant scene of the three of them at the bridge — I wept like a baby.
MR: I have an Israeli Holocaust movie to recommend — The Matchmaker.
KB: Oh, I know The Matchmaker. Absolutely.
MR: I loved it.
KB: What was the recent one? When I say recent, meaning in the last 10 years — it was all shot very close up.
MR: Son of Saul?
KB: Yes — fantastic. It was so great. But you just have to forget, you just have to leave all of that behind.
“One of the Greatest Places on Earth”
MR: So I'm curious a little bit about your work environment. In the documentary Wordplay, we learn you’re a big crossword puzzle fan. Do you still do them?
KB: Oh, every single day. Whenever you saw Wordplay — there has not been a day since when I haven't done the New York Times crossword puzzle.
Unfortunately, COVID switched me to the computer — my daughter set me up with that, and I really was kicking and screaming. I have great satisfaction whenever I'm out and about in buying the New York Times and doing it with ink. I just love it. I do it every single day.
MR: How long does it take you to do a Saturday?
KB: A really good Saturday is 15 minutes and a difficult one is around 25.
MR: When you’re in New York, do you have a go-to restaurant?
KB: No. Often because of my schedule, I'm quickly making a salad for my spouse or going to a deli and getting a salad or something. I love to eat. But certainly in COVID I've been much more circumspect.
There's a wonderful place in the Village called Bar Pitti on Sixth Avenue, and Bar Pitti is one of the greatest places on earth. I would say it's my favorite restaurant in New York.
MR: My dream job is picking songs for movies — not scoring, but picking existing songs to go with scenes. What do you listen to throughout your day?
KB: When I'm in the car, there's a lot of different music. My young daughters — I have two grown daughters and I have two younger daughters — all they want is to listen to the Beatles. So we're on the Beatles Channel. And when they get out of the car, I'll sometimes switch to Willie's Roadhouse, which is classic country, or to Real Jazz, which is a favorite music of mine.
MR: When I interviewed Geoff Ward, he told me you made a trade: he’d do Baseball if you did Jazz. Is that true?
KB: No. What happened was that I twisted his arm — he did not want to do Baseball because, as someone who contracted polio as a young boy, he did not participate in team sports. He didn't understand his father's love of it. His parents were stunned when they found out he was doing it. His learning curve was really steep, but it was great because we couldn't get too treacly on him. And at the same time, we could modify his Sergeant Friday “just the facts” approach with what is spectacular about the game. It’s a perfect situation.
But here's what happened — even before I had begun fully, I met Wynton [Marsalis] while I was giving a speech about the Civil War at the Metropolitan Museum — and we just looked at each other and we knew we would be friends for life and are. Within about 10 minutes of talking, he said, “You really got to do jazz.” And I thought, “Okay…I don’t tell you what to compose.” I didn't say that, but it's what I thought.
MR: I interviewed David Rubenstein and he joked that you should make a documentary about the virtues of private equity. What's the most common thing people pitch you?
KB: Railroads.
Then followed by labor, then followed by education, and then followed by their great, great grandfather — who wasn't in the Civil War, but wrote a four volume history of it from their home in Maine. I'm not kidding. It's pretty wonderful [laughs].
So what happened is Lynn interviewed Gerald Early for the baseball series, who said that when they study our American Civilization 2,000 years from now, Americans will be known for only three things: the Constitution, baseball, and jazz music. They're the three most beautiful things Americans have ever invented. And it was a great phrase.
And then I realized, my God, it's right. Essentially improvisation embedded in the Constitution, the infinite chess-like notation in a simple children's stick and ball game, and the infinite improvisation of jazz. And then I realized you need to do jazz.
But, of course, Geoff would absolutely have to say that doing jazz was the price he extracted for having to suffer through Baseball.
MR: Can I tell you — it's remarkable. I got to work a little with Wynton to write a resolution in honor of Phil Schaap. And then I was a TA in John Sexton’s class Baseball as a Road to God, and I teach and write about constitutional law at NYU. Everything you do just somehow touches my life.
KB: I wish I would tell you, “Thank God, Max, you're the first person I met like this.” But everybody tells me that. I'll meet some MAGA person, and he’ll say the only thing that he really likes is American political history and baseball and jazz music.
You go — “jazz music…really?” Or you’re in some other context and you go, “baseball…really??” Or you go “Constitution…really?”
MR: Who is your favorite right winger in American history?
KB: I don't know what you mean by right winger because the bar keeps shifting. Barack Obama is to the right of Dwight Eisenhower.
MR: I guess my question then is who is your favorite Republican after McKinley or Democrat before him?
KB: Hamilton, obviously. I think there's an enormous contribution there to who we are and how we are. As much as Jefferson gets the credit for the prose and the poetry and the possibilities, despite his own failings and limitations, the world that we live in is more Hamiltonian than it is Jeffersonian. That’s an important acknowledgement to make.
But I really don't like the labels because we find people at war with themselves — the Republican party, for example, born on the idea of liberating the black man has completely flipped and become the party of white supremacy.
A Professional American
MR: Just riffing off of the Ballou line about how strongly our civilization leans on the triumph of the government — you mention that FDR famously said he was a Christian and a Democrat. How would you describe your value structure in that standing-on-one-foot way?
KB: I'm an American — that's what I do for a living — I tell our stories. Each film is essentially asking the same question: Who are we? Who are those strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans? You never answer the question, of course, you deepen it with each successive project.
I've got in my editing room a neon sign in lowercase cursive that says “it's complicated.” There's not a filmmaker in the world who, once a film scene is working, doesn't want to change it. And what we do for a living is change it. We find out contradictory material, we find out new material that does the effect of destabilizing what's working about a scene, but we want to lean into that.
MR: I think part of what it means to be an American is that we are the only creedal nation I can think of — the country was founded on a creed, not a nationality.
KB: I agree with you, but how incredibly contradictory that we know our creed, the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence was written by a person who owned hundreds of other human beings and didn't see the hypocrisy or the contradiction in what he's doing. So the only country that had a creedal foundation has a foundation based not on a lie, not artifice, but on very human complications.
And since you brought up the creedal thing, I'll just put a finer point on it — I learned recently from Geoff Ward who had read this in a biography, that the great progressive journalist I.F. Stone, who I had the honor of interviewing for my Huey Long film in the early eighties.
MR: He dies in 1989 — you must have interviewed him right before he died.
KB: Right. He told me that in his late seventies or eighties he was teaching himself Greek and Latin so that he could reread the classics in their original. And he did. I just had the most amazing admiration for him.
But Geoff told me this story that some acolyte had come to him with great disappointment, frustrated that he, I.F. Stone, the great liberal, could possibly admire Thomas Jefferson. And he looked at him and said, “History is not melodrama, it's tragedy.” And I just love that.
In melodrama, all villains are perfectly villainous, and all heroes are perfectly virtuous. That's not the way things ever work. What animates the complexity of human life and therefore history is the fact that you can have within a heroic figure, not the perfection we seem to superficially forget that heroes aren't meant to have, but, in fact, are at war with themselves over distinct elements. Achilles had his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths.
MR: That’s what Lipstadt says about FDR.
KB: Yeah — it’s so funny — there's almost like a parlor game in which people want to find the American villain and they're so content — particularly conservatives — to find it in FDR. “Aha!”
He is not the villain of this piece. Does he act with a political calculation at times? You bet. Could he have done more, screamed louder? You bet. But he wasn't the Fuhrer, he couldn't end the Johnson Reed Act and say, “Oh, yes, let this boat in because I say so, I decree it,” in the case of the St. Louis. He had to work the margins. But look at Abraham Lincoln who we argue is the greatest of all greats.
The High Priest of American Civic Religion
MR: Robert Bellah wrote this thing about the American civic religion. You really are the high priest of the American civic religion. So I have a weird question based on that…do you watch any crap on TV or eat French cheese — anything that would surprise someone given your role?
KB: My daughter, who now is one of the principals of Imagine Entertainment, Lilly — she and I basically agree that one of the most perfect films of all time is Die Hard. The first Die Hard.
I watch Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives all the time. This is the most incongruous other type of person: Guy Fieri is not me. I am not him. I hate anything that's a contest. I just think food is not about contest. I hate those sorts of things. But the idea of celebrating everybody's cuisine everywhere in the United States…you’ve got me.
MR: Anything else?
KB: I was a fan of Homeland. In fact, Homeland gave me the inspiration for Mandy Patinkin as the voice of Benjamin Franklin. I was watching with my youngest daughter — she should not have been watching Homeland…I was covering up her eyes at the violence — but I was trying to explain statecraft and spycraft and Afghanistan and Russian-American relations. And then I suddenly went, “Oh, my God, I need the voice of Benjamin Franklin. He's got to be Mandy Patinkin.”
When he saw the film, he said Sunday in the Park with George, The Princess Bride, and this are the things he's most proud of. And I just thought, he's the biggest mensch on earth. I love Mandy and I can't wait to work with him again. He's got the most interesting way that he centers himself.
I've worked with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, and they're so great at making these quotes come alive and making them not about Tom or Meryl. When we screened the Roosevelts for our critics and we had Meryl as the voice of Eleanor, all these people were asking where we got that recording of Eleanor. And it was so great to see that. And I've told that to Meryl a few times — it wasn't like a performance, it was an inhabiting of that character.
And Tom's done that, too. People are impressed we got Tom Hanks. But I forgot one second after I remembered it was Tom Hanks, who was the first voice and the last voice in The War — just a newspaper editor from this tiny town in Laverne, Minnesota. And he just is unbelievable.
But Mandy, he went inside of Franklin and brought him out and gave it to us as a gift. First to us, and then we opened it to everybody else.
MR: Can you talk to me about David McCullough? What does David’s loss mean to you? Were you close with him?
KB: So I approached him first for the Brooklyn Bridge and he was a little bit standoffish, probably because there was some competing movie. But he eventually gave an interview and then agreed to be the narrator, which is great. And I learned more about writing in a session that he did with me and my first wife, Amy Stechler, who just passed away. Amy was writing it and editing it. We had just a three-hour session with him and I’ve said it was the single greatest three hours of learning we’d ever had in our lives. Just a three-hour session. It's in her obit that was just in the Times.
And then he narrated most of the other films. He had a run-in with Thomas Hart Benton on the vineyard and didn't want to do Thomas Hart Benton, but he narrated just about all the other films we did, through The Civil War. And then we didn't work again until I interviewed him for The Roosevelts in 2012. Yeah, he's a huge important part of my life.
MR: What about Peter Coyote?
KB: When we were working on a film about the West, it was suggested we use Peter Coyote and I was not enthusiastic until they got back from the session and it was great. And then we've returned to him for many films. And Keith David too, we've worked with almost as much as Peter.
Recording narration is the hardest thing that we do. It just requires so much concentration and hearing. Brain cells are burned and it's fabulous. You feel alive and it's tiring. Most people come in and read an hour of film in an hour and a half.
Basically Peter can do an episode a day and he's really good at what he does. And we're normally using take two or take three, sometimes take one. And we're rarely doing more than that. And some people have required 50 takes that we've worked with until I feel like I've gotten the thing that I want.
Ken Burns’ iPad
MR: Do you take photos on your iPhone?
KB: Tens of thousands of them.
MR: Really? I don't know why — I wouldn’t think that you were a big photo taker.
KB: I started as a still photographer, funnily. My first memory is my father building a dark room. And my second memory is of him holding me in his arms and watching the magic alchemy — the chemistry of photo development.
MR: Jerome Liebling was a big influence for you, right?
KB: My principal mentor is Jerome Liebling. He was a still photographer much more than a filmmaker. And so I'm rooted in still photography and I take photographs all the time. In fact, I'm publishing a book, not of my photographs, but a book that's coming out at the end of October called Our America, which is all old prints, beginning with the first photograph ever taken in the United States, we think, and up to the present — without color, all black and white, one photograph to a page, minimal caption in it.
MR: Do you use any of your own photos?
KB: I’ll tell you this — because I walk at dawn and sunset, I get unbelievable light and I take pictures for my films. There's three or four shots I took on my iPad — moving pictures of imagery that were in Franklin. And because we're working on a massive series on the history of the American Revolution, I'm taking lots of things right now — mist in the morning, sunrises.
MR: Geoff told me that's what he's really spending his time on right now.
KB: He's written a brilliant script. I am, of course, slicing and dicing it up.
MR: What do you use to edit nowadays?
KB: We edit on Avid as we have for the last 21 years.
MR: Are you good with technology?
KB: No. I don't like it.
I can use about one tenth of the brain of my iPhone and that's about it. I couldn't after dinner, take you out, fire up the Avid, and show you the most recent cut. I have to have somebody send me a QuickTime link to it and even that would probably be a struggle. Whereas in the old days after dinner, I knew how to thread up the Moviola and the Steenbeck and how to adjust the sync and how to set it up and show you the analog stuff.
I’m sort of frozen in that area, just as I write most of my speeches and letters and poems with pen and paper.
MR: You write poetry?
KB: I have lately. The Atlantic published something a couple years ago that I wrote at the beginning of COVID called “In the Social Distance.”
MR: You know, I think you got one on me. I’ve seen The Simpsons, I’ve seen everything — but I think you got me on this one.
KB: On the poetry, I surprised myself. It was a gift to my youngest daughter, and it just had a lot to do with what happens in the reflective nature of walks. COVID really changed the dynamic of my walking, of my meditation in that way because of the existential forces on the outside. All of a sudden everything became heightened and something was revealed. I used to do that in high school a lot — write poems.
MR: What were you like in high school?
KB: I had long, long, long hair — not down to not my waist, but pretty long, straight hair. Everyone thought I was a girl or a very unattractive girl. They would say “ma'am” or “miss” to me all day. I didn't care. I was in Ann Arbor…we were hippies. We didn't call ourselves hippies, we called ourselves freaks because hippies were the idealized version of what we were.
MR: Did you ever watch Freaks and Geeks?
KB: Yeah, except that it's nothing like that. Each little subculture — and Ann Arbor was not an insignificant sub-subculture — has its own rules. And those quickly change as people come and go. But for a few years when I was in high school, we were like the coolest people on earth.
Who’s Keeping Score
MR: Were you a Grateful Dead fan?
KB: Not then as much. Workingman’s Dead is where I really came into the Dead. I worked in a record store, and so by that time, because the Beatles were no more, I was a Stones fan and I liked a lot of R&B — still do a lot — and soul music.
MR: Tell me this, did you pick the soundtrack for The Vietnam War? I must have listened to that soundtrack a million times during the pandemic.
KB: Well, I've got a lot of things that I'm proud of. I didn't make all the choices at all and certainly I didn't compose what Trent Rezner and Atticus Ross did or what Dave Cierri did.
But I think I knew two years before we were finished that the only way we were going to go out was “Let it Be.” And Procol Harum's “Whiter Shade of Pale” is the end credits for an episode which is, like, perfect.
“One Too Many Mornings” by Bob Dylan was picked by my editor, Tricia Reidy, for the Mogie Crocker death. I can't hear “One Too Many Mornings” without crying and grieving for the loss of Mogie Crocker.
MR: I think the absolute best, and it may sound strange, is that “Summertime” by Janis Joplin. First of all, I'd never heard that record. And pairing it with Robert Kennedy quoting Yeats — I really think you’re an unbelievable genius.
KB: Well, I work with a lot of people who are really talented. Most of the things you identified are Tricia.
When you said you wanted to score things — scoring is a mathematical term that you do at the end of a film. We record our music beforehand. We let the music dictate the pace and rhythm of our scenes. If we have to cut narration to fit a scene or expand narration to fit a musical phrase, we'll do it. And so in the Civil War series, we just went and opened up hymnals and opened up music of the period. I listened and I’d identify 40 tunes and then we'd play each of those tunes 40 different ways in the record studio.
MR: That’s like “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” — you must have done that a million times.
KB: 150 versions. From lounge lizard to jingle.