Dan Snow's History Hit - Ken Burns and Lynn Novick on Hemmingway

Episode Date: May 11, 2021

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick are two of the most talented and inspiring history filmmakers on earth. Their works include the seminal The Civil War, Baseball and The Vietnam War all of which have been rightly celebrated around the world. Their latest project examines the life and work of Ernest Hemingway and gives an insight into the relationships and character of this complex and often difficult man. They discuss with Dan their film making process, what makes a good documentary series and what Hemingway's life can teach us about masculinity.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. 30 years ago, I was 10 years old, and I was an unusual 10 year old. I watched a TV series that changed my life. It gave me a passion for history, and it opened my mind to the possibility of making extraordinary historical documentaries that might inform, educate, and entertain people all around the world. That documentary series was The Civil War. It was produced by Ken Burns and his associate producer was Lynn Novick. 30 years later,

after watching their other series, their other collaborations, for example Baseball in the 90s that won an Emmy Award, the Second World War, the Vietnam War that recently was a great success all over the world, I got a chance to talk to Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. They have just produced a six-hour documentary on Ernest Hemingway's life, his work, his loves. It was on PBS in the States and it's coming very soon, the BBC. They are two of the most talented, the most justly celebrated history programme makers on earth. It is an enormous privilege to get them onto this podcast. I had 30 years worth of questions, everyone, and I managed to get through only about 1% of them. You'll be glad to know. It was a huge honour and they were incredibly generous

with the time they took and the level of engagement that they gave me during the course of the interview. It was a real treat. It was a real treat, everyone. If you want to watch the History Channel that I launched, inspired in large part by Ken Burns and his team, you can do so at historyhit.tv. It is a documentary channel just

for history fans. People who look at Lynn Novick and Ken Burns' nine-part series on baseball and think, I could use a little more. I could use a little more content there. That's the kind of people we're talking about for this history channel. It is people who love history. If you want to go over there, historyhit.tv, it works all over the world you sign up like Netflix for a very small subscription and then you get access to hundreds of history documentaries all sorts of podcasts as well and we're making two new shows every single week we got some really really big exciting stuff coming up so please do listen to this podcast and then go and check out historyhit.tv a truly global history channel for history fans.

But in the meantime, everyone, just enjoy this conversation with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Ken and Lynn, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Dan. I was that kid back in, was it the 80s? No, no, very early 90s. I was that kid that watched the Civil War series several times. And you fired me with a great love of history and also with a love of trying to make history in the media. So, I mean, you guys are literally the reason I'm here today. So first of all, thank you for that. Tell me about Hemingway. You talk about the myth. When you approached this project, what was the Hemingway that you thought you were going to find?

Well, I think I don't really remember what I thought I knew. You kind of leave that at the door when you begin it. But I think the idea that here is, on the one hand, some protean figure in American, if not world, literature who is undeniably a great writer. And at the other hand, you have this outsized personality and an outside reputation, a kind of macho thing of the brawler, the drinker, the deep sea fisherman, the big game hunter, the naturalist, all of those sorts of things that was a kind of insulating barrier to getting at what we found was a much more complex and dynamic, contradictory, confusing, and more interesting human being. And so many of us erect these facades in order to protect us from the vicissitudes of life.

And when you're a celebrity like Hemingway who helped to construct it, it became one of these detrimental things that contributed to pulling him down. That's very interesting. Did he find the burden of his reputation, of his brand, in the end, too much? You know, he created this brand and he created this persona with the hope, I believe, that it would bring him success and fame

based on his literary output, but also just becoming an icon. And it became, as Mary Carr, the writer says in our film, very constricting. Those sort of boundaries around which he set up this persona, as Ken was just saying, this sort of hyper-masculine guy who embodied courage and doing the right thing and mastery over everything. And command was a lot to live up to and actually impossible. And so there's a time in his life, in his 40s, 50s, where it starts to kind of really bleed into his work in very problematic ways, I think. And I think a lot of literary critics felt as well,

that he kind of got in his own way. And what he had been so great at and such a genius at was sort of noticing the world, understanding the relations between men and women, an affinity for nature and kind of a sensitivity. And when his big persona got too big, it was hard for him to kind of get past that. And it was tragic for his career in a way, but also I think for his life and his relationships with the people around him. Well, yeah, I'd love to come on to those disastrous relationships.

But your films go into his childhood in huge detail. He had a pretty unusual childhood. Did that kind of hyper-masculinity, do you think it grew from some of the ways he was treated and, for example, dressed issues around gender as a child? Well, I think that, you know, it's always the contributing factor to who we are. There is the nature part of it. and he inherited a very complex family prone to mental illness, and they lived an outwardly comfortable life in a very comfortable suburb of Chicago, Oak Park. The father was a physician, but brought him in contact with a lot of life and death situations, women dying in childbirth, trying to save people, cesarean sections, all of which

will populate his later writing. His father's also a depressive. His mother is a melodramatic character, interested in music and instills a love of the arts and particularly music. And he has an early love of Bach with its counterpoint and repetition, repetition and counterpoint, which you can begin to hear in the music of the cadence of the spare prose that he'll develop. He has a chance to be a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star, which was known for its spare writing. But he also goes to World War I as an ambulance driver and essentially has what we would all agree is PTSD. He is nearly killed. He spends months in hospital. It affects him for the rest of his life. And so I think the father brings him into the outdoors, brings him into the world of life and death within the doctor's position.

The mother, the overdramatic, melodramatic mother, though passionate about the arts, all contribute. And the mother also twinned the children, as it was called. A very common Victorian era thing in which boys and girls were dressed in girls' dresses or boys' things. She kept it going for perhaps a little bit longer, but it contributes to this fascinating opposite of this macho personality, which is his interest in women and how they think and feel, and his own interest in gender fluidity, something that was almost impossible to even

contemplate back then, and now something that we're now more easily fluent in. And he's therefore incredibly modern in a way. At the same time, he's 100 years old and beset with some of the balls and chains that that 100-year-old hyper-masculinity would suggest. So the childhood is hugely central. And then, of course, after he emerges from his childhood, his father does commit suicide. And suicidal ideation has been already a part of his life. And so you have this kind of shadow behind him that is beginning to operate. And so he is very passionately going into what is happening in nature in an unromantic or sentimental way. He's a keen observer of everything. He's looking at the dynamics of how men and women operate together

and apart. And he's dealing with war as well. And all of these kind of exhilarating moments, and he's coming to understand them with an extraordinary discipline and dispassion that permits us access to it decades after he's gone. And yet it's also going to, because he is at the same time as Lynn suggested, constructing a mythology, the writer Tobias Wolfe in the film says, an avatar that will ultimately consume him. As I'm listening to you say that, I'm so struck. And you guys must have come across this with so many of the characters and the people in the films that you've made. The trauma that was just, I mean, a lot of people today have trauma, but the trauma that seemed to be just like a baseline. Albert Camus, like father lost in the war, impoverished, nightmarish.

Dickens, Frederick Douglass, of course, but nearly being shredded by an Austrian bomb during the war. No wonder he was prone to destructive behaviors. I mean, do you sometimes think when you're studying these people from the past, do you think we have equivalent? These things now strike us as so rare, but they must have been normal. It's still normal, Dan. I think almost everything about modern life is designed to distract us from the thing that Hemingway was a genius at. None of us are getting out of here alive. And so as he watches his father struggle to save a life, as he puts it in a story in Indian camp, as he talks about war, some of the best passages about war in A Farewell to Arms that I know of, of the people in A Son Also Rises who are avoiding talking about it.

He is dealing with these fundamental things. Now, of course, if you're talking about actuarial facts of the 19th and early 20th century, people are not living as longer. There is more people dying in childhood, mothers dying in childbirth. And so there is a more immediate direct response to trauma. But I lost my mother at age 11. I wouldn't be talking to you had she not died, right? I would just poof, disappear. I am about trying to wake the dead, as my late father-in-law psychologist said. So all of us, I think, are in some ways, we wish to sort of aggregate all the good things. And that's a wonderful thing to do with our families, with our children, those memories. But in fact, we are formed more directly by these, as you suggest,

Dan, traumas. And they define us in a way. Theodore Roosevelt's asthma, the loss of his wife and his mother on the same day, February 14th, in the same house, sending him, you know, as he said, February 14th in the same house, sending him, you know, as he said, black care can rarely catch up to a rider whose pace is fast enough. That's a 19th century way of just keep going and you'll outrun your demons. Wow. Amazing. Lynn, how was it to get to the real Hemingway? What are the sources? How do you penetrate this masculine armor that he tried to put on to protect himself? Yeah. You know, that was the great challenge of the project in many ways and we benefited from a lot of things that were available to us number one access to his archive and that includes his voluminous letters so hemingway like many people of his era communicated by letters and he wrote thousands

of letters in his lifetime and he saved carbon copies, which is interesting. So he was kind of creating his own archive as he was communicating with people in his life, his children, his wives, his publisher, his friends, his enemies, the public. There's literally thousands of letters and there's a project to archive them and publish them. So we had access through the scholarship

of this team of scholars to find the best letters for every moment in his life that could really give us insight. It's really like you're picking up the phone and listening in on the party line and they're having a private conversation and you're hearing it because the letters are part of conversations that are ongoing between him and other people. And so that was amazing. You hear him in every mood, in every age, on every topic. I found it really fascinating when you read his published work in the book, you open up a farewell to arms, it's poetry and it's polished and it's perfect. And the letters are more informal and kind of off the cuff

and just like you'd be talking to someone basically, but he's typing away. So you have a more improvisatory and spontaneous access to who he was and how he felt and what he was thinking. And there's incredible vulnerability. There's anger. There's love. There's resentment. There's just every human emotion in these letters, sometimes directed at people that he really cared about and then alienated. You know, he could be incredibly cruel, but he's sort of unvarnished in the letters. So the letters are a treasure. The photographic record is also a treasure. He was photographed hundreds and

hundreds of times and all these pictures are available. And you see him present himself to the camera in a certain way. You see him age from this gorgeous young man at the peak of his powers to this haggard, just destroyed person by the end. And he's only 61 and he looks like he's 80. So just by seeing the images of him as he goes through his life, which was lived at this hyper speed, he did everything to the hilt and it shows in his face. So that's another way to access who he was. And then on the literary front, it was talking to writers, great writers of today who have been inspired by him and have a lot to say. And so they helped us really understand

what he was trying to do with his work on the page, the struggles he had, and how that work connects to his biography. Your first question was about that sort of, who is he? And how did he do this? And what did the work say about him and vice versa? And that was what we were after. You're listening to Dan Snow's History here. I'm interviewing the legends, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. We'll talk about Hemingway more after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt

and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week kane we're having such a big conversation at the moment aren't we about masculinity and i was certainly brought up to think that teddy roosevelt a hemingway approach to life was the right one and as i've hit middle age and experienced anxiety and the things that are very human i've tried to

explore that in my own life and you've've both said that Hemingway, you think ultimately actually couldn't outrun his demons. In fact, perhaps he even accelerated, maybe he sped the demons up. I'm not sure if this metaphor is working. What do you mean by that? Like, how do you think actually he started to wilt under the weight of this armor that he put on? Well, you know, I think in the pathology of Ernest Hemingway, in which one can never be ultimately precise, of course, you've got a lot of demons. And one of them is, and perhaps a lesser one, is this trying to live up to your persona. Because that will have consequences, perhaps, with career. And we see later degradations in the writing. But I think he does inherit, as I said before, this family

history of mental illness. His father does commit suicide. He does suffer from PTSD. He also has more than 10 serious concussions in his life that cause the kind of brain trauma that can produce a form of depression or even dementia. He's an alcoholic, which has its incredible costs, and he's medicating himself, self-medicating to sort of offset the effects of the alcoholism. So at the end, like Teddy Roosevelt, he's a rider galloping at full blast away, but there is a whole horde of black cares, as TR would say, chasing after him. At the end, it's really take your pick. You don't know. No one can say for sure what did it. But I think they're all contributing factors. And what they do is they make him more interesting. And because, as Lynn said, we're able to triangulate with the writers who understand his enduring effect, with the extraordinary beauty of the writing itself,

and then the intimacy of these sort of untutored kind of things, undisciplined letters, you're able to sort of fit a portrait of someone who is much more dimensional. And while there are certainly obviously very sympathetic sides and very unsympathetic aspects to Hemingway, you ultimately can develop, I think, a kind of overriding compassion, not just for the complexity of him, but for the complexity of us. And that's all that we do when we tell stories. And this is, we're just storytellers. We add high to it, and that makes us historians, but we're storians. We want to tell a good story, and this is one hell of a good story. These stories are always about us as well. They're cautionary tales. They're tales of aspiration. I wish to be better. I wish to

be as disciplined as him. I wish to have this rigorous thing. I wish to see the world with the precision he did. I do not wish to treat women this way. I do not wish to behave this boorishly. I do not wish to kill these number of animals as if by collecting every species, a kind of reverse Noah's Ark, he has somehow inoculated himself from the thing that he also, as an artist, understands is central, which is the inevitability of death. And so many of the stories resound with it in a way that can be so helpful for us. And then there's just the practicalness of what he knows about eating and loading a gun and leading a bird and fishing and all of that stuff. Lin interviewed a woman named Le Minh Quay, who volunteered as a teenage girl to go from

North Vietnam, then North Vietnam, down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to repair the damage done by American bombers. And she took For Whom the Bell Tolls with her and felt that it gave her a kind of sense of how you survived in war. Meanwhile, overhead, metaphorically, is John McCain bombing them, who himself believes, as he says in this film, posthumously, that if you wish to know who he is, it's the fictional hero of For Whom That Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan. He read that as a 14-year-old kid and it never left him, this idea of a flawed human being adhering to a flawed cause, but trying somehow to do it honorably in a way. And it's also with a father that kills himself as Robert Jordan does. And McCain didn't have that, but he fully imbibed it.

So there as above, so below. Le Ming Kuei, John McCain, and this just radiates out to the whole world, his influence, both in a positive way and as a cautionary tale. If I could, I just want to jump in on the masculinity question. I really appreciate what you said, because I think part of the persona of Hemingway that we started talking about is that this masculinity has gotten in the way, especially for several generations of women, to appreciate and kind of come to his work. And as Ken was just saying, what's so interesting to us is that

his public life has a lot of very disturbing aspects to it, especially his relationships with the women in his life, particularly some of his wives and his sometimes objectification of women abuse. I mean, it's a very difficult picture. On the other hand, in his work, what we found that was so interesting is actually an implicit critique of that. And it doesn't require a master's degree to understand. So one of the stories that we highlight in the film, because of an interview that we did with Edna O'Brien, who's just such a wonderful presence of trying to understand and access

Hemingway is up in Michigan, a story he wrote when he was in his early twenties and he couldn't publish it because it was considered obscene at the time. And it might even be hard to be published today. It's about a sexual encounter that goes wrong. And we can apply words like date rape to it or sexual assault or just a misunderstanding. It's not clear exactly, but the point of it and what she says in our film is that he's seeing this experience from the point of view of the woman. She's in tears. This is not a good experience for her. And that's the point of the story. So to think of Ernest Hemingway as a young man, maybe he had seen this kind of thing

or experienced it himself. We don't know, but he had the imagination and the empathy to write it, you know, a defining moment in his life and his career. And the story was important to him. He wanted to publish it, but he wasn't able to. And that kind of sets in motion this sort of paradox, dichotomy, whatever, between his public persona, some of his disturbing behavior, and what he's trying to say in his work that is really critiquing masculinity and hyper-masculinity and toxic masculinity and all these words that we have, and really understanding what it's like for women to be on the other end. So that's just such a profound and important way for us to get access to why Hemingway matters today and why he's so relevant to this moment that we're in.

In some of the media I've seen you do, you said you feel this is your most adult. Yeah, I said that and I always watch Lynn sort of cringe. I don't mean to misunderstand that there are lots of sexual aspects to the story that we tell, but it isn't adult in that way. It's adult in the kind of complexity and maturity of the psychological investigation that we've been able to do, the literary investigation that we've been able to do, and just the human one that we've been able to do. And as Lynn speaks to it, this transcendent nature, the idea that he could see himself perhaps even own that boorishness up in Michigan and in other places where you see masculine prerogative on full display,

and he is excoriating it, and your sympathy is entirely with the female character, hills like white elephants. It's pretty remarkable that he was able to do that, and that's what you don't see. I mean, famously, his fourth wife, Mary, who suffered the most verbal and we believe physical abuse, reads his manuscript as he's writing it of Old Man and the Sea. She basically says, I forgive you for all the rotten things you said. Now, what he does is ultimately unforgivable. And we keep his feet to the fire throughout. But the idea that art could be transcendent, that maybe the criminal could write best about the crime and from the point of view of the victims is amazing.

Amazing. And it just, it opened us up. We've always tried to be nuanced. We've always wanted to tolerate contradiction and undertow in our work from the very, very beginning. And our longtime collaborator, Jeffrey Ward, and I have talked about this for coming up on 40 years. And yet I think in this film, we've had to wrestle with it in ways that we haven't in others. It's not that we haven't had

these many shades of gray, and it's not that we haven't had to before resist the facile solutions of dichotomy of binary on and off, yes and no, good and bad, which is a big struggle, constant. But the dimensions of that with an artist so great, with a human being so complicated, have made it, I think, as rich a kind of story as you could imagine. And I think called us to the very best of whatever we could bring to the moment. Can I take you back? You mentioned 30, 40 years ago. Can I take you back and ask about the late 1980s, about the decision to make that huge series on the Civil War? Did your ambition extend to kind of reimagining history on television? No, I'll tell you, it was so simple,

Dan. I had made a film on the Brooklyn Bridge. It would not have been built without this new metal that the Civil War helped to promote called steel. That is the widespread use of it. The next film I did was on the celibate religious sect called the Shakers, which had been very successful. They were celibate and they didn't die out because of the celibacy. They began to decline after the Civil War because of the psychic changes that had taken place in the country. The next film I did was on the Statue of Liberty, which was originally intended as a gift

from the French to Mrs. Lincoln to commemorate the Union's survival despite her husband's ultimate sacrifice. And the next film I was working on was one on Huey Long, a turbulent Southern demagogue who came from a dirt poor North Louisiana parish, not county, but parish that refused to secede from the union. They thought the Confederacy was a rich man's cause. And so it became a kind of hotbed of radicalism and

socialism and populism that continued and created him. And then I was just beginning work on a film about the history of the U.S. Congress, whose most dramatic moment was when there were two Congresses, one in Washington, D.C., and another in Montgomery, Alabama, and then in Richmond, Virginia. So the Civil War was everywhere. And I finished a novel called The Killer Angels about the Battle of Gettysburg, principally, on Christmas Day, 1984. I was visiting my father up in Michigan and he walked into the room just as I finished. And I said, I know what I'm doing for my next film. And he said, what? And I said, I'm doing the civil war. And he goes, Oh, what part? And I said, all of it.

And he shook his head and walked out of the room like my idiot son. But from that moment, we plowed on. And as we were finishing The Congress and as we were releasing Huey Long and finishing The Congress and another film on the painter Thomas Hart Benton, who painted murals of the Civil War, we realized that all of American history, Shelby Foote said it was a clear river that ran into a bloody lake that ran out clear again. Now, that's a pretty inapt metaphor when we understand the structural racism and white supremacy that had been obtaining in America from the very, very beginning. But this is a spasm, the most important event in American history. And every one of these diverse topics were in some ways majorly influenced by it. So how could you not do it? The simple thing is, and what I should have said to not waste your time, is that before the Civil War, when talking about our country, Americans said the United States are, plural.

That's grammatically correct, Dan. After the Civil War, and we saw ourselves as many things, Robert E. Lee was offered the head of the Union Army by Lincoln, and he said, He was offered the head of the Union Army by Lincoln, and he said, I cannot raise my sword against my country, by which Robert E. Lee meant his state, Virginia, and so became the general of the other side. So we saw ourselves as a many thing. After the war, we began to use the word union more often, a one thing. And we now say, to this day, ungrammatically, the United States is. The Civil War took us from an R to an is, and that's what we tried to make the film about. It is hugely complex.

It obviously did not solve the question of race. It did not even solve the tension of states' rights that exist to this day, as we see uneven rollout of vaccines or uneven mask mandates and things like that. But what it did do, at least temporarily, is make us an is. And that was why I'm happy with that film. But the country was so desperate for a version of that story that included many more versions than Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind had, which suggested that a homegrown terrorist organization like Al-Qaeda or ISIS, the Ku Klux Klan might be the heroes of this story, which they were not and are not.

Lynn, I'm sure I'm not alone listening to you guys talk to wish that we could be flies on the wall the next Blue Sky meeting, that team Ken and Lynn just working out what we're going to do next. How does that work, just out of interest, you know, for those of us who wait excitedly for your next release? We have four producing strands. We have me and four different producers and with Lynn co-director that are working on two or three things at once. And so these meetings are pretty lively and things get decided sometimes 10 years in advance. But Lynn is one of the master generals and schedulers and person who can see the long and big picture. Maybe.

Yeah. I think one of the things to say is that even a film that has our name on it has a lot of people involved. So our writer, Jeff Ward, that kind of leads to our producer, Sarah Botstein, our editors, our producers. There's a lot of people involved when we decide to make a film. It's going to involve the work of many, many people. And like Ken said, for the films we do, that's our team. And then there's other teams working on other projects as well. So what that means is we get together kind of the senior people every three or four years, not too often because these projects take so long, every two, three years, four years to kind of say, okay, what are we doing? And Ken will have projects that he's absolutely passionate

about. Jeff Ward suggested the Roosevelt's, I believe, long time before that project went into production. Each project kind of has its own origin story, frankly, and sometimes they germinate for a while. So someone might suggest something like, for example, Hemingway. Ken had been thinking about a film about Hemingway for 10 or 15 years before I came to work with him. I went to Key West. I was inspired by going to Hemingway's home. And I came back in like 1995 and said, we should do Hemingway. And we started talking about it, but then we didn't actually start making the film for another 15 years. So some things happen right away and some things happen more slowly. So for example, we're working on a film with Sarah Botstein

and Jeff Ward about the United States response to the Holocaust. And that came about because the Holocaust Museum in Washington was working on an exhibition on that subject. And they came to us and said, we're doing this exhibition two, three years from now. This was already five, six years ago. And would you be interested in making a film? And we said, oh, that is a great idea. We've looked at the Second World War and the question of America and the Holocaust in many projects, but never really made that the central focus. So it's sort of like it was hiding in plain sight for us. We thought about it, but not necessarily really focused on, okay, and this goes and worked like to the front of the line, because it's so important and so relevant to everything we're struggling with today in terms

of who's a real American, what is our response to humanitarian crises, what kind of country are we and do we want to be? So every project kind of has its own story of how it came to be. But suffice to say, some of them are just an idiot and some of them take a long time to reach the place of we're going to do it. But the better thing would be to come when we're editing because our films are made in the editing room and to watch perhaps when we're editing, because our films are made in the editing room. And to watch, perhaps, when we do a rough cut screening, I'm still the scratch narrator. Not every voice is in. We haven't hired our narrator to come and read the final thing because we're always tinkering. And we've maybe got five or six or maybe 20 scholars or consultants or advisors and our whole team in this barn and spend a week watching. That's the much better thing because there are thousands of projects we could do.

I could be given a thousand years, which I won't, and I would never run out of projects in American history. So it's less the kind of deciding because it doesn't really matter. The world sees each finished film as its own stuff. To us, we're practicing. It's just the same with Hemingway. He was just writing,

right? And at some point you ended it and said, okay, that's a short story cut up in Michigan, or that's The Sun Also Rises, or that's The Old Man and the Sea. But this is a daily thing that we like to do. And we like to finish a day and know that we've made a film or two films better because of the work that we did that day. And so that happens less on these kind of blue sky things than they are in the trenches of the interpretations. And then you can begin to see the obsessive worry about punctuation, about inclusion, about whether a shot that isn't precisely the year that we're talking about, but it's better than the shot that is the year that we're talking about in terms of an old archive and how you use it and what kind of permission and license you give and what lines you don't cross, what you do, what the scholars add when they add nuance and

say, well, you've forgotten one aspect of this. And we have a neon sign in our editing room that says it's complicated because when filmmakers have a scene that's working, they don't want to touch it where we are relishing touching it and dismantling things and sometimes making a great scene less great because it has so much complication to it. But so be it. I will say also that one of the things that we don't take into account in making this decision is the availability of visual materials, which is surprising. I mean, a lot of people will say, oh, we're going to make a film about X because we know there's a lot of great archival to tell that story. And our process is the exact opposite, which is this is a great story. And whatever it takes to find a way to represent it visually, we will do that. And we may discover great archival material along the way. And in the case of Hemingway, we did know

that there was a lot of photographs of him and the events he saw and experienced and influenced him are well documented. But for many projects, the opposite is true. And that's kind of the fun is, okay, there's nothing archival to show for this. What are we going to do? Two projects that Lynn's not working on, Benjamin Franklin and A History of the American Revolution. There's not a single photograph, not a single photograph and no newsreel, of course, and we have to tell that story. So there's a kind of dearth of that and it's a great challenge and terrifying at the same time. Well, as a fan and as a big fan of the 18th century, I am extremely excited to hear that. So thank you very much indeed, both of you for coming on. What's it called, guys? It's called Hemingway, right? Yes, and it will be shown on BBC. We don't have the exact date, but we know it will be on the BBC,

I believe sometime later this spring. Hemingway on PBS Now and BBC coming up. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, Dan. Thank you so much. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. handy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to

the podcast. We can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.