Blocks w/ Neal Brennan - Ken Burns

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

Neal Brennan interviews Ken Burns (Leonardo Da Vinci on PBS plus The Civil War, The War, Jazz, Baseball and many more documentaries) about the things that make him feel lonely, isolated, and like something's wrong - and how he is persevering despite these blocks. ---------------------------------------------------------- 00:00 Intro 1:00 What qualifies for a Ken Burns documentary 2:16 Leonardo da Vinci 5:17 Self-parody 8:22 Why he decided to work on da Vinci 12:00 The Last Dance 16:50 da Vinci’s possible homosexuality 19:55 Ken Burns on Ken Burns 29:12 Sponsor: Verso 31:06 Sponsor: BetterHelp 32:43 Temper 38:12 Zen of the Brooklyn Bridge 39:49 Spirituality 44:53 Being Kind 53:44 Sponsor: Mando 56:10 Sponsor: Uncommon Goods 57:45 Trying not to make the others wrong 1:01:50 Covering Wars & Difficult Subjects ---------------------------------------------------------- Watch 'Leonardo da Vinci' on PBS: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/leonardo-da-vinci/ Follow Neal Brennan: https://www.instagram.com/nealbrennan https://twitter.com/nealbrennan https://www.tiktok.com/@mrnealbrennan Watch Neal Brennan: Crazy Good on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81728557 Watch Neal Brennan: Blocks on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81036234 Theme music by Electric Guest (unreleased). Edited by Will Hagle ([e-mail])  Sponsors: Visit https://www.ver.so promo code: NEAL to save 15% on your first order. Visit https://www.bettterhelp.com/NEAL for 10% off your first month. Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get $5 off off your Starter Pack (that’s over 40% off) with promo code [NEAL] at Mandopodcast.com/NEAL #mandopod Visit https://www.uncommongoods.com/BLOCKS for 15% off your next gift. Sponsor Blocks: https://public.liveread.io/media-kit/blocks ---------------------------------------------------------- #podcast #comedy #mentalhealth #standup Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guys, my guest today, according to his Wikipedia page, has 15 Emmys. He's got two Grammys. He's got various medals, decrees, several gift cards. He directed... fucking listen to this list of things. He... just one guy directed the whole Civil War, the Vietnam War, the War, Jazz, Baseball, Prohibition, Hemingway, which I watched several times and recommended to several people. And now he's got a new documentary on PBS. It's his Netflix, right?

I've, some of us have Netflix. He's got a new one called Da Vinci about Leonardo Da Vinci. Most curious man in history. That is on the PBS app and pbs.org. And his name is Ken Burns. Ken Burns, pulled for applause, it never comes. It never comes.

No, I watched the movie. It's great stylistically, obviously I'm sure a lot of people brought it up, a departure for you in that there's not, well first of all, tell me why you, what qualifies to be a Ken Burns segment? And like what's one that's gotten close but like ah? The latter none, I'm so happy to say, knock on wood. I've finished all this stuff.

But have you sort of had one in development that didn't quite get there? No. No, we've done... The ones we say yes to are the ones we do. I mean, I've had a situation where I wanted to do something. I just did a little exploration, realized the circumstances would be difficult to do. And so I sort of...

Can you give me some more insight on that? The kings. Martin Luther King. I wanted to do, and so I sort of... Can you give me some more insight on that? Uh, the Kings. Martin Luther King. I wanted to do something, and the family just seemed... At the time, this is like 20-plus years ago, seemed reluctant, but we still have that idea of doing it, but it's certainly not something that's been derailed. It was just wanting to be able to sit in conversation with you and not make an excuse about the film.

And all the films are, because of PBS, my Netflix, they're director's cuts. And so, you know, if you don't like them, it's all my fault. Right. So, Leonardo is... I was sort of dragged kicking and screaming into it. My dear friend Walter Isaacson is a biographer of Benjamin Franklin. I was working on a film about Benjamin Franklin. screaming into it. My dear friend Walter Isaacson is a biographer

of Benjamin Franklin. I was working on a film about Benjamin Franklin. Walter Isaacson in this movie, very little boy energy. Yeah, he's always that way. I was like, and then. Leonardo does a lot of studies of draperies and cloth. And what it shows is he understands how light hits a curving object.

Yeah. He's like, I don't know if you've set him a high angle or something, but he's like, ugh. Well, he had been pushing at a dinner in DC that we were having, we'd been friends for a long time, a twofer sort of that I would also do Leonardo, and I said, but I don't do non-American topics. And he sort of pushed through the dinner,

it was a little bit awkward I found. I said, no, Walter, leave it alone. And then I went out and I called my daughter, Sarah Burns, and her husband, David McMan, I've been collaborating with them for 15 years on various things like the Central Park Five and Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali. We've got three or four projects lined up.

You EP those or you co-direct those? We co-direct and... Central Park Five, also excellent. And thank you. And they wear a script as required, as in Jackie or Muhammad Ali or Leonardo Wright. So they basically said, why not? And I'm going, yeah, why not?

Like it was some sort of old dog that needed to be taught a new trick, it was no. So Leonardo is in an era, the 15th and early 16th century, that there are obviously no photographs in Israel. Just as Benjamin Franklin, and just as a big project I've been working on since 2015 on the history of the American Revolution, is also in a period without photographs.

What was great about Leonardo, that David and McMahon and Sarah Burns realized early on, is that his mind is so capacious. There's so much lateral thinking going on that it gave us permission to split the screen and show, you know, four images or nine images or to use photographs or even motion pictures, rocket ships taking off because his mind,

so he sort of dreamed for the rest of us the last 500 years, and that was a liberating thing. However, the structure of it, the way it unfolds is, you know, you could look at it next to Hemingway and say, oh, yeah, they're doing the same kinds of things. And it's an essential, not a form, it's not a formula. You think you were doing the same kind of thing, or Hemingway and...

No, no, no, I mean, I'm just saying how we structure a biography of Hemingway and? No, no, no, I mean, I'm just saying that the how we structure a biography of Hemingway and Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo are more or less the same. We're going, he was born and then he died and there's lots of stuff in between. What was nice was to be able to exercise this other set of tools

that Leonardo gave us permission to use that had the split screens, that had this sort of exuberant lateral thinking that was able to say, here is perhaps the most capacious mind in human existence. How do we contain it and represent it and honor it? Do you worry about self-parody?

Do you worry about... Oh, God, no, I love it. Oh, man, I've got four daughters. Sarah's my oldest. Lily is a big hot shot film producer. Emily in Paris, you know, Broad City Search Party, Daisy Samarrow, Samantha Bee. And then I've got a gal that is a sophomore in college,

and then a 14-year-old. They all, particularly the little ones, think, you know, the parodies, these withering parodies on The Simpsons. Ever since he was a young man, Ken Burns has loved two things, baseball and jazz. They so consumed my life. I never had time for a proper haircut.

For example, let alone every night show host that's ever existed. I'm saying, do you worry about it as you're like, I guess we got to do a slow push? No, no, no. I don't know what else. No, no, I mean, this is, I guess we gotta do a slow push. No, no, no. I don't know what else. No, no, I mean, this is, I'm treating an old photograph or a painting the way a feature filmmaker would a master shot

that has, you know, a long shot, a medium shot, a close shot, a tilt, a pan, a reveal, insert of details. It's just, it's the two tools. And more important, it's how you tell the story, what the calibration is of the various elements that you bring in oral, as well as visuals that determine whether a story is working or not. And, you know, style, I mean, which is parody

is another way of saying that the flip side of parody is style, right? So style, if we could agree, is the authentic application of technique. That is to say, you go to them- I've never seen you use a push incorrectly. Right, so- It's like, no, that's kind of the most effective thing.

If you sit in the middle of a gallery at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, and it's all Cezanne, or mostly a Cezanne, they look all the same from that distance in the middle, in the bench in the middle. And you go up and each single painting is its own set of problems. If you don't see problems as pejorative,

you see them as just friction to be overcome. Their own set of concerns and dynamics and calibrations of what it's going to do. And that's the same way you can say, oh yeah, the joke is the zoom in on somebody, the tilt up from somebody. You know, I have to admit that I have a couple of times in later films gone, don't need to tilt up,

say to the editor. You don't need to tilt up to introduce, because, you know, for me, a tilt is a story, right? Because it's your revealing. So if you're in the Civil War and you've got this baby face kid who may be 14 years old and there are two revolvers in his waistband,

like you can take his baby face and tilt down to the revolvers, that says something. You can start with revolvers, that says something, and go up to a baby face. Either way, it's a tremendously dynamic story. But you don't need to, unless you're really trying to desperately waste a little bit of time in an introduction, or you're talking about somebody else

before you get to that head, unless there's something interesting in what's going on, like revolvers and waistbands. Okay, so when you decide on a subject, people pitch you... No. ...other than Walter Isaacson? Well, I mean, no, he pitched me, but it didn't work.

And then I, and then my daughter, who's family, you know, and I mean, it's like, we're in the olive oil business. You can only, yeah. You're gonna keep seeing her. Yeah, she and David, who'd worked with me a little bit longer, he'd come as an intern during the jazz series, in the late 90s. They'd, why not? And then, of course, it was like, of course, why not? And so I've apologized profusely

to Walter 10,000 times, but there was no need for an apology. I wasn't gonna do a non-American topic until somebody within the inner circle says, would do it. But it's ideas that we think, that we incubate. So there were, you know, I say this all the time, but if I were given 1,000 years to live, which I am not going to be given, I would not run out of topics...

You look pretty good for your age. ...in American history. 97 years. I'm not gonna run out of topics in American history. And so, you know, as I get older and older, I get a little bit greedier, because there's something so great. It's like a high that comes from making a film better,

or just laying your head on the pillow at the end of the night and saying, you know, I made that better. Or, and then you wake up the next morning and say, what idiot thought of that? But at least by the time you get to the pillow the next night, you've made it better. And that's all I want to do.

So I find as I'm getting older, I keep adding more and more projects. I've already had a... always had a couple of things going at once, two different production teams. And now sometimes it's three, even four. And that's just thrilling to me. It's just like... In one office?

No, no. There's a Brooklyn office where Sarah and Dave are and a handful of people. There's a New York office that now has most of the revolution folks and another project that's going on on crime and punishment, different team. That maybe has 20 and then in New Hampshire where I live and work and used to be,

you know, 40, 45 people there. It's now with remote stuff, maybe there's another 20, 25. And it expands and contracts. Remember, this isn't Netflix. I'm not like, nobody's investing, right? I'm getting people to underwrite these films, like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Bank of America.

Viewers like me. And viewers like you. Thank you. Viewers like you means PBS put money into it. Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Humanities, less so. Foundations like the Arthur Bynum Davis Foundation. Is it a...

Am I a congressman? Yeah, but it's okay. You get what you pay for, so you pay, you put it in. Bank of America has been the sole corporate underwriter, doing maybe 20, 25% of a budget. It doesn't work that way, but they've been in since 2006. So that's an awfully long time. And is that a thing you have to sort of administer?

Yeah, but that's why, that's why at the end of the credits, it always says executive producer Ken Burns. Like if you see a film with 10 executive producers, it's just they're paying off the people who are doing the stuff. It doesn't work that way. And the great thing about PBS is that I could never make a film about, say, this great football star.

If that great football star or his widow or daughter or son were an executive producer or producer, they'd just say, no way. And yet, most of the stuff that's out there these days has got some connection. I love this sort of, seems really super old-fashioned, but this honorable thing of PBS, of a real separation. I mean, my underwriters, the people who come in, can come in and look at us at a cut,

but they can't say anything. They can't say, oh, geez. My only counterargument is, if you like basketball, The Last Dance was worth Michael Jordan's the access journalism angle out of it. I generally am with you. Like they've got, I find documentaries have gotten steadily worse as a result.

I don't think that. I think it's a, I like The Last Dance a lot. And I subsequently, I've said some stuff not knowing about it that I think hurt the feelings of the producer and director. And so I talked to him and just said, no, I don't know that. But you don't actually know what scenes

he did not want in there. And maybe they're none, but you don't know because of his title as part of the credits. Michael Jordan's title. You do not know what it is and you may be missing some element in it. Maybe totally entertaining in a way and that's fine, but like we can't do that. I mean, we had a review that was released a couple days ago

that was excoriating us for not emphasizing more the homosexuality of Leonardo DaVinci. We gave you everything there is. Well, that's what I was going to ask you. In the public record. And we're not going to speculate any more than telling you what we know and what was going on at that time and what happened. And so you just kind of go, well, that's your thing, you know, whatever it might be.

Okay, so that's a very recent thing I wanna talk to you about, which is how much do you feel like it's your job to not judge or... Obviously there's ways to lay things out. Yeah, yeah. So Wynton Marcellus said, when we were working on jazz, he's a dear friend now, brother, he said, sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing

are true at the same time. In our binary, our absurd assumption that everything is binary. Good and bad, yes and no, us and them, you know, gay and straight, old and young, rich and poor, male and female, whatever it is, they don't exist. Those things don't exist. And so, no political argument,

no argument actually ever does anything. The only thing that can do something, that is to say transform, is a good story, because a good story comes with its own inherent self-contradiction. And so what you want, what you're drawn to, what makes you say yes to something, are lots of those inherent contradictions

that make it so complicated. Whether it's the Vietnam War, or it's Leonardo da Vinci, or it's the American Revolution, or it's Huey Long, whatever it might be. And you know that when you lift your head up when the film is done, it's gonna rhyme in the present, as Mark Twain would have said. I mean, it's gonna just be... I used to, in every film, go out on the hustings

promoting it with a stock speech. What if I told you I'd been working for many years about a film about single-issue political campaigns that metastasized with horrible unintended consequences? About, um, the demonization of recent immigrant groups political campaigns that metastasized with horrible unintended consequences. About the demonization of recent immigrant groups to the United States. About a smear campaign during a presidential election cycle. About a whole group of people who felt like they'd lost control of their country and wanted

to take it back. You'd say, I'm talking about now. It was a film that came out in 2011, and it was called Prohibition. And people say, well, what about flappers and gangs? They're there. But the more important thing is that single issue political campaign that metastasized.

And the fact that there was this unbelievably bad, horrible presidential election in 1928. Al Smith was a Catholic running as a Democrat, smeared as a, you know, in the worst possible way. And of course, immigrant groups have always been discriminated against, and there have always been people who feel like they're used to be in America. That is no longer, because we're getting more complicated.

And let's, if we can only just sort of legislate and prescribe that thing, all things will be better. And of course, they won't. This is the biggest mistake we made in terms of amendments to the Constitution. The only constitutional amendment so far that pulls back rights, human rights, the only one, and the only one that's been repealed in like, a nanosecond when it comes to...

By part three, if I remember. Yeah, by part three. Exactly. And the only one that's been repealed in like a nanosecond when it comes to... By part three, if I remember. Yeah, by part three. Exactly. I don't want to say I'm a fan, but I broke up with a girl one time, and she said, Good luck finding someone to watch your old man documentary. That's like the guy with you feeds the dog the fresh pet

or whatever it is, stuff, and the friend thinks it's ridiculous he's got the dog food in the refrigerator and the friend's gone. Like, yeah, you're sticking with the dog food. You're still here, she's long gone. Well, okay, so that's the, so you believe that it's your job to sort of lay it out

with as much objectivity as you possibly can. Because the thing that, for the people who haven't seen it yet, Vincent had an intern. Leonardo. I'm sorry, it's a different movie. Yeah, Vincent Van Gogh tortured him as he cut off his ear. Leonardo had an intern, and he brought in when he was like 13,

and then they ended up having... Well, he was an intern, then he was an apprentice, then he was more than a part of the house. And he was a bad boy at one point. For a while he was a bad boy, and then eventually became part of the household, and eventually, we think, but we have no proof that he became a lover.

Yes. So, as did another person that was in the house. Right, and you just go, I don't, I mean, you're watching like 500 years ago. The people back then can- He was arrested, Leonardo was arrested on a charge of sodomy with four other men or three other men. Somebody had made the charge and they got off because one of the other guys was the son of a very rich guy. And that's what we know.

This is just public record. Leonardo does, he's got 4,000 pages of his codex, but they're not diaries, I feel terrible today, or I fell in love with this person, or whatever it is. So anything you want to do to extrapolate, it just means you're now subscribing to a particular theory or in history, it's historiography, a particular fashion of historiography. It might be Freudian,

it might be Marxist, it might be queer studies, it might be Afrocentrism, it might be symbolism, it might be deconstruction. At the end of the day, a good story, complicated narrative can contain all of those perspectives and unify them. And the point I want to make more than anything is that the presumption is, is that you make a film that you're building something, that it's additive. It is not. It is subtractive. Like I live in New Hampshire, we make maple syrup.

It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. We are shooting at least 40 times the material that we need. And then we are, you know, pretty quickly getting it down to, say, in Leonardo, four-hour film, we're getting down to eight. And then getting down to six is really complicated. And then getting it down from four and a quarter is the hardest thing ever. How do you... Do you screen it for people four and a quarter is the hardest thing ever. How do you, how do you, do you screen it for people

four hours straight? No, we, we, we might show folks, we might bring in first scholars that have worked with us, scholars that might be in the film, other, other colleagues. Then after we've got it down, we might just bring in what we call warm body. A friend of ours that doesn't know about filmmaking

and doesn't know about Leonardo. And just watch them watch. And it's not like a panel discussion. You just know when it's on somebody's board. Just being present, you know, they shift their leg, they turn over, you see, whatever it is. What was your impetus for starting? Like, were you sort of, did you see a...

Were you like an angry young man who felt like documentaries weren't being done exactly right or it was just trying to? I remember, I felt that there was lots of different documentaries. So my trajectory, my mom had cancer from before I was aware. Yeah, what's the Ken Burns on Ken Burns?

Go ahead. And it took her a decade to die. And I watched it as my brother did. It wasn't a moment when you didn And I watched it as my brother did. It wasn't a moment when you didn't feel there was just this, it was like a horror film, this evil outside the house about to rob us of that. So no real childhood.

Was that the sort of feeling that looking back you felt like a foreboding? Oh yeah, yeah, so I love baseball. Because it was a long illness. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I mean, by the time I, she'd been sick for a while. By the time I was like two and a half and three and realized something was really wrong.

And then when I was seven, we learned that she would die soon, like six months. She said, no, I'll get you to junior high, which seemed like this impossibly great, you know, throwing the Hail Mary at the end of the football game. And that would be great. She missed it by just a couple months. You know, God bless her.

But it was really tough. Afterwards, my father had a pretty strict curfew, but he'd forgive it on even school nights, up to 1 a.m., watching old movies with him or going out to the theater, sometimes seeing a 10 o'clock show, and he loved it. And one day we were watching a movie, I was now 12, maybe six months after my mom died in 1965.

And we were looking at a movie at home on TV called Odd Man Out, starring by Sir Carol Reed, starring James Mason about the Irish troubles of the 19-teens and 20s. He started to cry. And I'd never seen my dad cry. Hadn't cried when she was sick.

Hadn't cried when she died. Hadn't cried at this impossibly sad funeral. Cried there. And so at that point I remember saying this. I got it. I forgave him. I just said, whatever stuff he's been dealt, he didn't have a safe haven. And the emotional dynamics of film gave him a safe haven.

And I said, I wanted to be that Harbor. And I... Consciously? Yeah. I said, I didn't say Harbor, but in my And I said, I wanted to be that Harbor. And I- Consciously? Yeah, I said, I didn't say Harbor, but in my mind I went, I want to be- You said 13. I want to be, I want to be at 12. I want to be a filmmaker.

And that meant Hollywood. That meant Howard Hawks, you know, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, that was it. But I ended up going to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which was a new experimental school. It opened the year before in 1970. I came in 71.

And all of my teachers there were social documentaries, still photographers. And they reminded me that Hollywood calls itself the industry, you know? And while they have silhouettes of palm trees and not smokestacks on their stationery, it's still an industry. And so all of a sudden I realized that truths that can be drawn out of things that are happening or did happen are as valid as ones that are completely made up. And so all of a sudden by 18,

I'm now interested in documentary. And it's funny, I came out at Hampshire at 22, the last thing I did, the equivalent of a senior thesis, Hampshire does still, still experimenting, still wonderful, still transformative, and not transactional the way every other secondary education is, there are no seniors and there's no thesis, but I was,

whatever the senior thesis was, Division III it was called, was a film whose last shot was a pan across a painting. And if you told me that- Oh, yours? Yeah. That's funny. Yeah, and if you told me that I'd be doing that in, you know, however many years it is now since graduation, more than 50, I would say you're crazy.

But that's... that's what I've done. And so I've been very, very lucky to know what I've done. But I've been trying to make decisions that are not consciously the opposite, not obstin consciously the opposite, not obstinately the opposite, that's maybe the better word. It's just that I find that sometimes the momentum of things is, or the expected path isn't right.

I remember the third film I made was on Huey Long, the turbulent southern demagogue, and I met and interviewed and got to be really good friends with Robert Penn Warren, Red Warren. And then he really kind of adopted me in a wonderful, wonderful way. I love that man so much. And I told him I was thinking about the Civil War

and he told me to go look up Shelby Foote. So the first rolls of film, literally one through eight, were the first interview we did with Shelby. But once he looked at me and he just said, careerism is death. And he just had these goggle-eyed, snapping turtle eyes. And he just said it with a ferocity like it was like, yes, sir. And I think that's right because careerism, and I never use the word career, I always say my professional life, always. And career is something that often locks you

into someone else's determination of what's the best for you. Like the route to be, the parents who want you to be a doctor is the classic example, but we make our own traps. We make our own, we set our own minefields for ourselves. And I just felt that if I could listen to that dictum, careerism is death, that you could figure out how to make choices that were not about career choices, but about professional life.

What did I need? So I just- And it sounds like it's mostly curiosity. It's all about curiosity and how not to kill it. So the things that, you know, I've made the films, all of them have been director's cuts. It's been a wonderful thing. And every time anybody said, well, why aren't you,

why don't you, you know, they see going to Hollywood and making a feature film like the next run on a ladder. And I understand how that is for many people. It's just not for me. I just, I feel like I've found the work I was supposed to do. I'm, I'm, I agree with you in a lot of ways, and whenever people are doing a thing, and they're like, now I want to, it's like,

the thing, you're so good at this thing, and you have a, like, you sort of, a market that didn't really exist. Right. You made it, you... It wasn't even a market, I just thought, I wanted to do, I'd done all these films on the Brooklyn Bridge, on the Shakers, on Huey Long,

on the Statue of Liberty, on the Congress and the painter Thomas Art Benton. And all of those films had as a determining factor, casting a long shadow over the drama of all of those disparate subjects was the Civil War, the most important event in American history. And suddenly I said, I gotta do it. And was no longer gonna be an hour, an hour and a half

film of still photographs. This was gonna be originally five, one hours and then it ended up being- Sounds like the worst movie ever. Yeah, nine. Five hours of still photographs. I was turned down. Kill me. Exactly, I was turned down by the Corporation

for Public Broadcasting that had supported all the other works because no one on the jury felt that anyone's attention could be sustained across five episodes, five one-hour episodes on a subject. That film ended up being nearly 12 hours and nine episodes, and it's still 34 years plus later, the highest rated program in public television history, and nobody was supposed to watch it.

I was told by those critics that Steven Bochco has a new police procedural, only they're singing called Cop Rocks, and I will be blown out of the water by this. Do you, are you proud of that? I guess so because I just told you that. Um... I don't know why. It should be because I don't begrudge Stephen Bochko's genius.

No, no, not the Bochko portion of it. Just the idea that you were told no, and you were like, I don't know, guys. I feel... And you probably got rejected a lot. Yeah, there's... Oh, God, I used to. For Brooklyn Bridge, I looked 12 years old, and, I feel, and you probably got rejected a lot. I feel vindicated. Yeah, oh God, I used to, for Brooklyn Bridge, I looked 12 years old, and everybody would say, this kid is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge. And I could write a novel just about trying to raise

the money for the Brooklyn Bridge. How much did you have to raise? It turned out to be $180,000, but that would be like telling me now, $180 million to go do that. And I got paid two cents an hour. At one point, the best story is meat Esposito the boss of Brooklyn the Kings the head of the Kings County Democratic Club he died in jail calls me up to his I had breakfast today on Montague Street

on his second or third floor office on Montague Street and he hands me a check for a thousand bucks at least it wasn't cash. And he says something to the effect like, nobody makes a film about my bridge what we're not involved in it. He said what we're not involved in. Something kinda. Like literary.

Literary like that, exactly. And it's just one of a dozen kind of crazy Stuff that happened in the course of doing that but I used to save in two big three ring binders I can't find them anymore. So maybe I'm lying two three ring binders each with 200 pages of rejections for the broken Dear mr. Burns. Thank you so much for your yeah, unfortunately You know this is and I just kept them there as a reminder that it's just it's it's just not easy There's lots of friction and resistance Yeah You know, I generally have a soft spot for the holidays guys. You wouldn't know what to look at me

It doesn't fit the brand, but I do it's sweet. I like the songs. I like music I like to have their sweaters red green, but it's a it can be a lot It can be very demanding going all the events dinners looking gifts. And every year I tend to burn out quicker than last. Plus I don't like the, it's cloudy now and it's kind of getting cold. So I don't, you know, I don't like that either. But you don't know what's doing what. But maybe it has to do with getting older. But this year, I don't plan to burn out at all or get sad from the weather. Getting older is inevitable, but feeling older isn't. As we get older, our body's ability

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10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp.com slash NEAL. BetterHelp.com slash NEAL. Go to therapy, use BetterHelp. I promise you it will be good. I want to get into a block. He was nice enough to write down three blocks. His first block is Temper. Now, I kinda knew that was coming. Huh. And the reason I know it was coming is because

your films are, like there's one editor that got credit on this. I'm sure there's a lot of assistant editors. For episode one of Leonardo, there's one editor that got credit on this. I'm sure there's a lot of assistant editors. She, for episode one of Leonardo, it's one. And then there's a second editor for, that's Kim Mealy for episode one, Woody Richmond. And then we have an assistant and an apprentice, and, you know, sometimes...

But painstaking. These are handmade things. And very small. When you take even something as big as the American Revolution, it's however many people we have, it's basically made by a dozen and a half people. Okay, tell me about temper.

So temper is more an internal personal thing. So the best example I know is that I could be untying my sneakers at night all alone, except for my dog. And I just, it just doubles into a knot. And I'm like, oh, and then I'm starting to try to be paid. And then it's getting tighter and tighter. And so I'm suddenly swearing or something falls off. And I'll be walking across the Brooklyn Bridge,

which I do every time I'm in New York, at least I hope I try to do it once a day. It's the least you can do, go ahead. The least I can do just to visit my bridge. And you want people to love the bridge and it is beloved by everyone on earth. And people get married up there and I filmed people just in the intervening years

since my film was out, brides. Even today, I saw as I was walking from Brooklyn Heights back to Manhattan, I just saw people taking pictures, every language you can imagine. And in the afternoon, when I sometimes had the privilege of going, oh, it's just jammed.

And I can see myself like, get out of my way. And I'm going, what? I'm not saying it out loud, but I'm like going, okay, where does that come from? That impatience, the temper. And so that's something that I... Are you, how are you as a boss? Oh, no, I don't, there's no yelling. We don't, this is not, this is not brain surgery. And I don't even think yelling in brain surgery

helps the situation. Now, this is just making documentary films. We don't yell. Um, this is just making documentary films. We don't yell. The people who end up as yelling don't end up working very long and we get along. Does it get intense? It gets passionate in that it's not people fighting

over what they want. I may say this and Sarah and Dave and Leonardo will feel something differently or maybe one of them agrees with me and one of them doesn't or vice versa, you know, whatever it might be. How often do you walk up to the monitor and touch it? I never pull, you know, the ultimate thing is I have, I suppose the ultimate say,

but it'd be such a stupid thing. No, no, no, but I'm saying like I need it here. Oh no. Start here and then. No, no, no, I might be unequivocal about it, but the temper thing is more, like I'm always surprising myself that I have this kind of quick break. I don't yell at anybody else.

I just watch, I can just swear out loud. The toothpaste cap falls down and rolls under the thing and the dust. And you're just like, all of a sudden, there's this blue streak when it could just as easily just been taken up and put back on. I, do you find yourself, it's getting in your way? What do you think the, is it, it's getting in your way?

It's not what your plan was? It's not? No, was? It's not... No, here's what I've come to understand. We're rarely present, which is the only place where we can be. And that, for me, probably described as type A, there's a kind of movements. And so that keeps you sort of propelled

and doing things and getting things done. That's all very good, but you're not necessarily present. And I think that temper is a part of the slavery to not being present. That it just, you wish to control things. It's making you be present. Well, no, I don't think it is.

I think it's a manifestation of the thing that is keeping you from being present. To be present is to go, shoes gets knots, you know, caps of toothpaste fall. You know, people are visiting the bridge you want them to visit. You don't need to want to say out loud,

and you never would, get the fuck out of my way. But, you know, they stop, they take pictures, and you've got something to do. You've got to get there and across, pick up, you know stop, they take pictures, and you've got something to do. You've gotta get there and across, pick up your daughter from whatever it might be. Yeah, no, I've been telling myself recently, you know no moment is better than another one?

No, well there's only one. And so those, these are very superficial descriptions, but kind of obsession with the past, where the past owns you is a depressive state, where the future owns you is an anxious state. And what's happening right now is perfect. Yeah, I know, but it's... Hard to be there.

The reason I think you cuss when the thing rolls under the thing is because you're like, you're making me be present now. Well, that's... You motherfucker. I was on my way to a better place. The reason I think you cuss when the thing rolls under the thing is because you're like, you're making me be present now. Well, that's a good, that's a good. I was on my way to a better place and you're making me stop, you're making me park the car.

It's funny because I set some sort of ridiculous personal habits to sort of try to be present. Like every time I walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, it's a beautiful, beautiful piece. And the best moment happens when the... It's a suspension bridge. There are cables that are draped over these big towers and compressed. Is there a documentary I can watch about it?

Yeah, fortunately. And then they're held, the roadway's held up by these vertical suspenders, but there are also these diagonal suspenders, radiating stays, they're called. And when you get to that place where the radiating stays come out, you've got this unbelievable, it's like a combination of a musical notebook, but it's also the Gothic towers in the background and the steel in tension and the towers in compression.

It's just beautiful. It's why it's attracted so many artists. And so I've made this deal with myself to, like, try to be present in that approach to the Brooklyn Tower as I'm walking, you know, east to west to Manhattan, to see the Brooklyn Tower, the east side of it, and to see the Manhattan Tower, the east side of it. And sometimes I realize, oh, you're lost in thought,

or you just were thinking about this, and it's usually some complaint or whatever, and you've lost the present. So I'll actually turn around and try to catch it on the other way just to be present. Yeah, and you have to like, no, stop. Yeah, just a quiet, just a kind of quiet. You, 70-year-old man, fucking stop. Yes, exactly.

Learn something. Where are you spiritually? I am. Okay. So I asked because you watch Da Vinci and you're like, it's hard. A friend of mine said one time he's like watching, it would be hard to watch a child being born and remain an atheist. Yes, my first two daughters were born in my bedroom at home. The first time there was a midwife, a friend of my wife's and mine and my wife. So that's four people and nobody entered the door

and then there were five people in the room. It just like, the best ghost story of all times. And that's my oldest daughter who is now co-directing with me equal in every way and respect in this process. She wouldn't leave the room either. She wouldn't leave the room either. She is great. No, it's, I, you know.

But watching the videos, it makes you go like, I, I. So you look at what the stock and trade of all of these guys, and it had been true in medieval and middle ages time, was to do stuff of famous church scenes. But this is the Renaissance. So we've added, we've centered humanism in the face of it. It's not just all of these stories.

So when he does a story from the Bible, the Annunciation or the Adoration of the Magi or the Madonna and Child, he's got this complex psychodramas that are going on. He understands them as narratives and stories. I'm not even talking about those. I'm talking about the breadth of his abilities. Knowledge, yes. It's rooted in nature, which is perfect, and we are imperfect.

And so everything has to do with proportion, with microcosm and macrocosm. And he doesn't see as we all do, he doesn't have the binary systems that have these disciplines, the silos of musical genres or of academic disciplines. He is the greatest artist of the age, if not of all time. He is the most famous painting on Earth, is his, but he's only done 20 paintings and only half of those are finished.

But he's also the greatest scientist of the age, and he's never had a microscope or a telescope. He's an anatomist, a botanist, he knows about aerodynamics and flight, he knows about fossils and rocks and atmosphere, he's an inventor, he's an architect, and he would never have acknowledged any of the distinctions between that.

He played music, he sang beautifully, he staged elaborate theatricals. He clearly knew just about everything. I mean, he's the biggest mind I've ever come in contact with, and he's dealing with that question that you're asking. And he's not going to automatically assume anything about it. I love our founders who are basically riffing off a few centuries later the same energy of the Renaissance and

the age of exploration and the age of enlightenment, which is their deists, right? They believe in a supreme being, but one is that's disinterested in us and does not distinguish between faiths. The first thing is not freedom of the speech and assembly. It's not establishing a religion. And that came from that impulse that we ought to just say there are lots of ways in to whatever this thing is for Leonardo and then later for Emerson and Thoreau and John Muir. It's through nature to worship God in cathedrals made in nature,

not by cathedrals made by man. He didn't really talk that much about God. Did he talk about God in his notebooks? He has a sense of God as the same sort of thing. He admires the creativeness of the creator. And so he's dealing with the byproducts, the perfection of nature in a dragonfly or in a snail shell or in this the eddies of water

in a rushing babbling brook. So yes, there is very much a powerful sense, but he's also not accepting a catechism or a dogma to superimpose on that. He understands that a church and its teachings are itself a kind of mediation between whatever the supreme being is and us, each of us in our own way. And that's, you know, for a non-American topic, that's pretty American, or at least we're a riff on that.

Yeah, I mean, I was thinking you could name it Da Vinci Beyond Autistic. Because this guy's, it's like, my girlfriend was like, he might be autistic, I was like, this isn't, no one's autistic in 10 different categories. So it's not even that, he was, as one of his biographers, a work of art before he began doing it.

He was great to be around, great companion, great conversationalist, great involved with people. You wanted him, you want him at that dinner, that proverbial, mythical dinner. If Lincoln will shut the fuck up. If Lincoln will come. Oh, Lincoln will, Lincoln would listen. Let me do another block, being kind.

So there's, Leonardo grew up and around him was Machiavelli. It was also funny that he interacted with Machiavelli and Michelangelo. Machiavelli comes with a kind of pejorative automatic, it's a negative thing, but Machiavelli's about how you get things done, right? He understands that in a world that sees things in a binary fashion, there's expediencies

and there's tactics and strategies that you can do that. We know that a Roy Cohn, for example, is the kind of apotheosis of how not to do this. We've attributed to Machiavelli and his prints these kinds of overthinking of strategies. But it doesn't mean that Machiavelli was actually behaving this way. Right, I think he's just a very astute observer.

And he may have been, but I think we can take from Machiavelli. We don't have to just buy into the idea that Machiavellian for us right now is a pejorative adjective, right? We would say that that wasn't a good thing, that we were calculating and whatever. But we all calculate. And there is a kind of calculus to everything. And what I meant by be kind was in a way, if the temper thing is an internal kind of reaction, it kind of, it feels base and crude to the inevitable vicissitudes that visit all of us, like the cat falling off the toothpaste and rolling under the thing, or mother's dying, or the shoelace tied in

a knot. Then the outward thing is how not to plot an advantage, but to be kind. I had an experience when there used to be tolls on 95 driving to New York from New Hampshire, and there was a whole series of them that you threw a quarter or 50 cents later on before they took them down into these baskets. And I found myself in the exact change lane well before easy passes and all this. And I didn't have any change. All well before EZ Pass is all this. And I didn't have any change. All I had was a buck, and it was 50 cents, and I didn't know what to do.

And the line in the other lanes were filled up, and I just had to sandwich in. There was nothing to do. It's the super highway. So I'm coming in, and some guy is just giving me the finger and leaning on the horn and whatever. And I'm shugging my... You know, my shoulder's going, I don't have any other option than to break in here.

And he's just leaning on the horn and I get up and I... Get to the woman, I hand her my dollar, I said, I'm paying for myself and the guy behind me. And then I took off like a bat out of hell. And maybe five, six miles later, he catches up and he's going like this, you know? And he's really thanking me and beeping the horn this time in a kind way and waving like, thank you, man, like that.

And I just realized the extent to which the transformation of ourselves, this does more for me than it does for him. He's gonna go home. It's gonna be for me than it does for him. He's gonna go home. It's gonna be the story of the day for him. But, and I recall this every few years and remember it kind of- What a great guy you are.

What a great guy I am. That it transforms you. And so there's something about kindness, I think, that has that, it's an outer expression of this thing about being present. This had the added bonus of being passive aggressive as well.

You think? Yeah, because he's honking at you, and then you go like, well, turns out I'm a saint. I thought it was like the hippie bumper stickers of random acts of kind. Acts of kindness, yeah, yeah, yeah. That it had a kind of, oh, I could do this too. I could respond, and my temper, by the way,

in driving can be like, fuck you. And so to me, it was like, how do you negotiate your own stuff? Either the embarrassment or the anger of what he's doing. I remember the first time I'd ever heard my dad swear, my brother and I were coming back and they'd changed some streets in Ann Arbor to go one way where they'd been two ways or vice versa.

And my dad started to make a turn into the street, and suddenly he realized, oops, and he corrected, it was nothing, but the guy waiting at a light was more than happy to give him the finger and lean on the horn and whatever. And, you know, we were sort of scared of my dad. He had moods and stuff like that. We were in the back seat.

We got in some lumber from the lumber yard or something. And my dad just leans out the window and goes, fuck you, Jackson, just like that. And we first, my brother and I look at each other like, how does he know that word? You know? Because it's like the word we learned at school and he can't possibly know that.

And so then, you know, we're creeped, now we're freaked out. We're worried that this is the end. And so we're down crouched behind the car and my dad, to his credit, sort of, you know, like in his own anger and then finally funk and self involvement and all this stuff, whatever burdens he had, he finally just sort of realizes

there's total silence from the backseat. He turns around and he goes, how about that, boys? Fuck you, Jackson. So from then on, my mom had just been dead a year. From then on, we swore in our family all the time. Like, we would just like draw everything we could swear. And my dad finally, at the end of the day, he goes, look, we can swear. The three of us can swear.

But you cannot swear with anybody else, you know? Not with grandmother, not with you, you know? We don't, we're just gonna take this, it's just the secret that the three of us know. And it was great. In fact, later on I named a dog Jackson. And delighted him. Was Jackson the guy's name?

Did he know the guy? Or was Jackson just like a... No, Jackson's what you say is Joe or Bubb or whatever. Jackson was screw you, Jackson. And, Jackson's what you say is Joe or... Yeah, yeah, yeah....Bub or whatever. Jackson was, "'Screw you, Jackson.'" And, uh, but he didn't say, "'Screw you.'" And so I actually named a dog after Jackson

and got delighted in telling my daughters that story over and over again. How were you with cursing with them? Pretty good. I told them that story. I mean, there was one moment when my oldest daughter, Sarah, was in her, you know, early teens and kind of getting morose. And I never yelled at the first two girls at all.

Didn't have to. But I made their lunch every day. I was a single dad. And one day she came down and looked at this peanut butter and Nutella sandwich. Oh, I have to preface this by saying that we'd heard this joke from somebody that was kind of common in our family. We thought the perfect one-liner, about the guy, the Rube from the country who goes to New York

and knows the reputation of New Yorkers. And he goes up to a cop and he said, can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall, or should I just go fuck myself? Right? And so, we just love that in our family. So, Sarah comes in, sees me making the thing I've made for years every day, peanut butter and talent. She goes, no, I don't want that.

I said, okay, sweetie, what would you like? She goes, I want tuna fish. So I said, okay, I can make tuna fish salad. So she goes off, she comes back about 20 minutes later, I've made the tuna fish. She goes, no, not like that. This is a girl that I was feeling like I was losing. It was, you know, puberty and whatever.

This sad face, nothing. And I said, sweetie, would you like me to continue making your lunches, or should I just go fuck myself? And she just cracked a smile. It was like the fever broke, and whatever it was, that was it. They went on to whatever, but that was... How do they, how long, did they have the period of resenting you as a dad? Have they, like, I went to whatever, but that was... How do they, how long, did they have the period

of resenting you as a dad? Have they, like, I went to therapy and, yeah, have they had that? Well, not Sarah, but, I mean, resentment, you gotta ask them. It's always complicated. Parents are always flawed. I mean, it's the world's, you know,

most exclusive, but largest club, right? And nobody knows going in. There's nobody who knows going in. And I just, I feel more important to me than being a filmmaker is being a father of these four girls. It's just, everybody who knows me would say, he's not bullshitting you now.

And so, the girls would have to tell you. I'm sure there's complications. Did you know going in, like, I probably won't be good at that, I will be good at that, and were you surprised by it? I was scared out of my mind, which is probably a good thing.

And my first wife was so good, so natural, a mother, that she taught me a lot of things. That you could do? Cause it's one thing to see them do it, but it's another thing. Not taught in any didactic way, just imparted. And so I watched her and it's really great to watch my grown daughters who now have kids of their own,

two kids of their own, each boy and a girl, how good mothers they are and how patient. And it just reminds me of my first wife's just absolute it was the best job I mean that was her job she loved it I mean she I kept begging her not to retire from filmmaking she was the editor of that Brooklyn Bridge film and and the writer of that and the writer of a film on the shakers and then we had Sarah and she just like it stay with it stay with it please she just loved the job. It's official, guys.

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What's that mean? So... It's a block. My best friend, David Blisstein, I've known since for 50 plus years. He was at Amherst a year ahead of me, and I was in Hampshire, down the road, four miles, the hippie school.

When I was about to get married for the second time, my then soon-to-be second wife asked David what was the secret to his very, very long marriage. And he said, we try not to make the other wrong. Which is all human beings do. That's the whole nature of human existence. I had a marine in my Vietnam film now, a very close friend, who when we just got him

to describe what he did one day, and he was a little embarrassed about having to describe what he got a whole bunch of medals for, which he threw away in protest of the war when he got back. He, one of the ways he deflected, he just said, look, it's the history of the world. And that gave us the title of our eighth episode. And then later when he threw the medals away, he said,

it was a disrespectful loyalty, meaning to throw the medals away. And he was trying to be loyal to something bigger than the current policies of the then Nixon and Johnson administration. Anyway, these things that we do, the history of the world, comes about from finding another. Like I've always said, I've made films about the US

for more than 50 years, great privilege. But I've also made films about us. That is to say the two letter lowercase plural pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and we and our, and all of the majesty and the complexity, the contradiction, and even the controversy of the US. It's my job and I love it and I'm good at it. But what you see is that human beings make the other wrong.

It's just immigrants or it's that it's trans people. It's just Ingrub Akrib, us them, yeah, me, you. It's always the simplest and most direct way to separating ourselves from the common humanity. That is, you know, we also have an instinctual thing to help people. You know, the Duck Dynasty people were out in their boats during that Hurricane Rita or whatever it was

in Houston saving and Louisiana saving black and brown people. It's been devastating to watch our brothers and sisters and neighbors go through so much. So we're here to say, hey, it's time for the Christian people in this area to get out and help out. We have that as well. You know, some idiot threw a rock through the picture window of a family in Billings, Montana,

in 1993. And because the family was displaying a menorah at Christmas time. And so the Billings newspaper, whatever it's called, printed a full page picture of a menorah and thousands of Christians, Scotch taped a menorah to their picture windows during the Christmas. That's us as well.

But to not make the other wrong is to realize that you... I mean, one way to do it is that if our relationship is well, that's because of you. If it's not going well, that's because of me. Like you always wanna give away the thing that everything in our culture tells us to do the opposite thing. Do you think it's our culture or you think it's the human spirit?

It's the human spirit. But our cultures are the manifestations of that at a particular time. And people are always saying, yeah, but it's worse now, the attention spans. When the Telegraph came out, people complained that there'd be the death of literature and writing. Have you found it's gotten easier?

Meaning like the instinct is, fuck you. And then how do you, do you find like Ken relax? I'm a work in progress. I think that I'm trying really hard. There are lots of things in my life that are reminders, groups of people that I talk to, ideas that we circulate, the work itself. I gravitate towards telling the stories of wars.

I mean, after the Civil War series came out, I just said, we are not doing another war. It hurt too much. It hurt. And those Civil War soldiers, North and South in combat said, though had been in this combat said they'd seen the elephant,

which I assume was the most exotic thing they could think of for what combat is, which is unlike anything else anybody could experience. When your imminent death is possible at any moment, as it is not right now as we speak, you are vivified, your experience of life is vivified. Then how you turn it off or are unable to turn it off determines everything.

Or survive or don't survive or wounded or whatever it might be. It's so transformative. And one presumes quite correctly that wars reveal the worst of us. They also reveal the best. And they become stages, theaters. They even call wars theaters where

you can see played out just unbelievable dynamism. And that's why, you know, when I finally had heard at the end of the 90s that nearly 40% I think that was the figure of graduating high school seniors thought we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War. And that a thousand veterans, American veterans were dying each day,

that number is way smaller than that because of the actuarial tables. I just said we're gonna do World War. And that a thousand veterans, American veterans, were dying each day, that number is way smaller than that because of the actuarial tables. I just said, we're gonna do World War II. And before the ink was dry on World War II... Kind of based on that factoid? Just on those two factoids. And then before the ink was dry, we were locking it in December of 2006

for a broadcast in the fall of 2007. I said, we're doing Vietnam. And 10 and a half years later, in the fall of 2007. I said, we're doing Vietnam. And 10 and a half years later in the fall of 2017. I'm picturing you wearing like army fatigues. I know. I said, we're going to do, we're going to do, well actually when we were locking Vietnam in December of 2015, a month before the Iowa caucuses,

out of which Donald Trump was not supposed to emerge, I said, we're doing the American Revolution. And so we've been plowing that. They're always the most complicated things to work on, the most moving parts, the most susceptible to... hagiography, hero worship, susceptible to common stuff. Betsy Ross didn't do this. Nathan Hale didn't say,

I regret that I had one life to give. No one said, don't fire. Do you see the whites of their eyes? There's lots of stuff to let go of. And most people have never even heard of the things I've said anyway. But I would also argue, they were never especially useful.

They weren't useful, like wooden teeth and telling lies. everybody tells a lie, chopping down cherry tree, all this stuff keeps you... I've never seen any of your documentaries. Speaking of liars, I'm kidding. That's a new one. You just had to say that. I don't know who you are.

Um... Anyway, this is the... It's the history as Tommy Valloli is his name, Corporal Tommy Valloli now, you know, older than me and alive, thank goodness, It's the history as Tommy Valloli is his name, Corporal Tommy Valloli now, you know. Uh, older than me and alive, thank goodness, and still working in Vietnam. But it's the history of the world,

and there you can find in this stuff the real nub of who we are. Yeah, I hadn't watched the World of War, the BBC one. And I watched it, it's 26 hours. Yeah. Well, all right, here's before I even say, did you watch stuff like that before you start to see

what's left on the bones, so to speak? I had seen it. No, the second I decide to do something, I don't watch anything that's done. Got it. So I'd seen it, or parts of it, as a kid, and what I understood is that it's pretty much top down. And so what we did is we took four geographically distributed American towns.

Waterbury, Connecticut, Mobile, Alabama, Sacramento, California, each with about 100,000 people on January, on December 7, 1941. And then tiny Laverne, Minnesota, and told the entire story of the cataclysm, the greatest cataclysm in human history, World War II through their eyes, and a couple of ringers. But it's trying to be bottom up as well as top down. You knew what was going on,

but you also needed to know the guy who's in the water outside the Indianapolis where the sharks are. Taking down, like you're this far away, we're both hanging on a piece and all of a sudden you go, and he never sees you again. Yeah. You know, and that's, you want that story of the guy who's up in a bomber plane

and he's ladling out the blood, or the guy who can't hold the joystick of his bomber because he's just killed so many Germans and so he has to do that. And to this day, his wife knows which cup of coffee, which hand to hand the cup of coffee in the morning. Do you think those guys, do you think that there was, you watch it and you're like, this is so awful.

It's so unspeakable. You want to scream watching it. Yes. I was sending clips to my friends. Like the fact that I ever said anything negative about anyone from that generation, it's like, I take it all, but I did not know. You did not know, and in fact, you know,

the argument about the atomic bomb, it's easy for us to make a kind of moral thing about why would you use it and unleash this thing. But the estimates for the number of years and dead are so outrageous. By the time the Japanese surrendered, there were 292,000 combat deaths, a total of about 408, 410 total deaths, meaning missing,

accidents, all this sorts of stuff. So that's a lot. It was going to double for the invasion of Japan. Was the thing they had Purple Hearts ready? You ever heard that? Oh, yeah. And I mean, they the thing they had Purple Hearts ready? You ever heard that? Oh yeah, and I mean. They produced 100,000 Purple Hearts

for all the people that were gonna die, Americans that were gonna die in Japan. Yeah, well Purple Hearts are for wounded, dying. I'm sorry, whatever the other one is. Dying is, maybe a million dead Americans, probably six, seven, eight dead, million dead Japanese, and didn't happen. A hundred and fifty thousand people lives were sacrificed

with this horrific, two horrific bombs, but you can't tell anybody who was there thinking about where their husband or where their son might go. That wouldn't have said that was not a good decision. That went, goes against my liberal upbringing, goes against my liberal upbringing, goes against all of that stuff. But when I watched, you remember when I watched World War,

I'm like, oh, they weren't surrendering. There was no chance of surrender. No, no, no. The question I was gonna ask is, do you think that generation, there's like a humility to not talking about it? But also, do you think it's just like self-preservation and PTSD and like, I don't wanna think about it?

The depression, that's a really good question, Neil. Finally. Yeah, well, how far into the same thing are we? Let's say if you have a good answer, we can get the fuck out of here. But if not, we have another half hour. Shit, okay. So the depression tempered people to do without

and understood about shared sacrifice. Second World War asked for extraordinarily stepped up shared sacrifice, which everybody knew how to do. And there was a stoicism. There was no reason to land at Omaha Beach. There was not a reward financial that you were gonna get. There was not territory that was gonna be claimed

for the United States. It was not... It was for an idea. It's really a powerful thing. And, um... Even the revolution is more complicated. There's so many loyalists. It's a civil war. Our civil war is a sectional war, one part of the country against the other loyalists. It's a civil war. Our civil war is a sectional war,

one part of the country against the other. But our revolution was a civil war, and families were torn apart and killed each other. And it's pretty spectacular. But I think with regard to the greatest generation, they had a stoicism. I probably think there is as much, if not more, PTSD out of that war, just because of the sheer number,

16 million people in uniform. Not all were in combat, but do the mathematics. The Vietnam generation is a little bit more exposed. It's in a post-World War II psychological world, you know, analytics, Freudian stuff. It's a war that's unpopular, more than half at the end, more than half of the country was against it. So things were exposed and raw,

and it permitted people not to retreat. But I found many of the veterans, they lived with it every day. The man who couldn't hold the joystick, he'd wake up after horrible dreams and she would just look at his hands coming into the kitchen. He's sleeping later because he's having bad nights.

Still, successful businessman, good family guy, you know, living a good life, married to his sweetheart who he married, you know, during the war, now dead. Quentin Aniston was his name from Laverne, Minnesota. And he... She would hand, Jackie would hand him the cup of coffee to the hand that wasn't shaking. So, late into his life, that was still a calculus

in the morning, which tells you the luckiest people can lock it away and put it away. I can remember things where people would come up to me and say, you know, my dad told us he was in the Battle of the Bulge and they took over a Belgian farmhouse and there was a pretty girl or there was a wine cellar and they all got drunk. And then he watched your thing, and you had pictures of these Americans wounded and freezing to death in the coldest winter on record in Europe. And they're being lifted, and we have footage of this,

like cordwood, just stacked bodies, like they're almost cutouts, and thrown in the back of a flatbed. And he said, Dad just lost it, and all of a sudden, we heard about best friends that they'd never heard of, that had not been told to fathers or mothers or brothers or wives, certainly not sons and daughters. And they came out. So I think it tells you a little bit about the power of narrative to be able to open up, not just the story and tell complexity. In fact, my editing room has a neon sign in it

that says it's complicated and in lowercase cursive. Cause I want people to know that there isn't a filmmaker alive, myself included, that when a scene's working, you don't want to touch it, but we're obligated to touch it as we find out new and perhaps contradictory and therefore destabilizing information. So I want that courage to be able to destabilize

because there's somebody out there who's going to have a revelation. And one of the greatest things is doing an interview and changing reels when we are shooting film and taking the three or four minutes and you'd hear, honey or pop, you never told us that. And so you realized that you were there

at the birth of express memory. And some of that memory has been locked away, and understandably, the key's thrown away in that part of the brain we're not gonna go to, but something opens it up. Maybe it's later in life. Maybe the loss of friends of that time just dying of old age that survived. Whatever it is, we've been the beneficiaries

of people willing to tell... the tough stuff. I mean, just in Vietnam, we had a Gold Star mom. Why does she have to... What courage it takes to relive the worst day of her life when the car pulls up and the door is slammed and these guys in uniform and a priest start walking up the steps. She knows exactly what they're gonna tell her.

And she didn't have to give that to us. And she did, and by giving it to us, we get to give it to somebody else. And that may be helpful for anybody, somebody still alive, we lost somebody in World War II, somebody who's still alive in the Gulf War, Korea, whatever, or just someone dealing

with the half-life of grief, which is, of course, endless. That's what I do for a living. I wake the dead. I'm still trying to talk to my mother, right? I'm trying to do comedy, bro. Ken Burns, ladies and gentlemen. The movie is called Leonardo da Vinci. All you have to do is open, open up your hand, my man