How I Built This with Guy Raz - Florentine Films: Ken Burns

Episode Date: April 11, 2022

As a boy, Ken Burns was captivated by the power of film and dreamed of being the next Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford. But in college, he discovered that stories about American history could be just as dramatic as any he could make up. Eventually, he set out to make a new kind of documentary, layered with actors’ voices and sound effects; and animated by a gentle panning motion that became known as the Ken Burns Effect. But he also had to run a business: knocking on doors to raise money, managing a small team of producers, and fiercely protecting his creative vision and IP. Today, 40+ years after it was founded, Ken’s company Florentine Films has built one of the most valuable documentary archives in the world, including The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, The Statue of Liberty, and most recently, Benjamin Franklin.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. For many, many years I had on my desk two, three ring binders, each of them three or four inches wide, filled with all the rejections. And I kept them there just to remind me that you could have the best idea in the world.

all the talent, but there was some other ingredient that had to do with stubbornness or perseverance, and I don't know where I got that. That's why I kept those nose, and I was just trying to get people to yes. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Ken Burns built one of the most valuable documentary archives in the world and became one of the most ideas. iconic filmmakers of his generation.

There's a black and white photo in an old National Geographic from the mid-1950s of a young mother spooning food into her baby's mouth. The baby sits in a high chair looking straight at the camera, and the mother smiles gently at her son. It's a photo of true love. The baby in the photo is Ken Burns. The young woman was his mother, Lila, and a man behind the camera who took the photo was his father, Robert Burns. Now, if you read more about this photograph, you'll find

out that the family was in France, where Robert Burns was an anthropology graduate student doing research for his dissertation. There's so much in this photo that captures the story of a young family and a moment in time. But just 10 years after the photo was taken, Ken Burns' mom, Lila, would pass away from breast cancer, and her death would have a lasting impact on the family. Ken was just a kid, but a kid who grew up to become one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation. The power of the still photo and of archival black and white footage would become his stock in trade. He figured out a way to add just the right amount of movement, music, narration, and sound effects to bring a story to life. In fact, engineers at Apple were so

inspired by his trademark panning movement that they integrated it into their video software and called it the Ken Burns effect. Ken and his small team of producers and editors have built an unmatched documentary film archive, basically a storehouse of American history. The Civil War, the Brooklyn Bridge, jazz, the national parks, World War II, baseball, and many, many more. His company, Florentine Films, has brought to life American giants like Jackie Robinson and Lewis and Clark. In fact, it's hard to imagine an important American story without a companion film from Ken Burns. But it's also hard to imagine any of these films existing without a key ingredient, which is money. And so in addition to being a creative, Ken Burns had to learn pretty early on how to be a businessman.

Partly to cut down on costs, he moved his business to Walpole, New Hampshire, which is where he still operates today. And even after he developed a close relationship with PBS as a producing partner, Ken still had to knock on doors of corporations and foundations to find a way to pay for each film he was inspired to make. But perhaps most importantly, Ken was uncompromising about intellectual property. He did not allow his work to be owned by any of it. someone else. And as a result, Ken Burns oversees an archive of films and content that is enormously valuable. Ken was born in Brooklyn, but mainly grew up in Ann Arbor, in a house near the University of Michigan, where his dad was an assistant professor of anthropology. And once Ken's mom was diagnosed with cancer, he and his younger brother, Rick, had to face the sadness and uncertainty

of a life without their mother. Since I was two and a half, three years old, he and his younger brother, somewhere around there. I was aware that something was wrong. And it was obviously confirmed by many trips and time away to the doctor and then in the hospital. And then they sat us down. I can really remember it and just said, you know, and my mom pulled me aside afterwards and pulled us aside. She said, oh, don't worry. I'll see you till junior high school, which then meant it started seventh grade. And, you know, God bless her. She missed it by a few months. She died at the end of April, April 28th, 1965. I was in the last month or so of the, I was 11, soon to be 12, and in the last months of the sixth grade. And so, you know, it was hell guy. I mean,

there's no other way to describe it. It was, it was terrifying. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's hard to imagine what it's like to be a child going to sleep every night with the anxiety of, and trying to process what that means. Yeah, well, that was it. You don't go to sleep and you stay up and I have all these memories of stomach aches that, you know, lasted all night and trying not to bother my parents or bothering my parents or being unable to go on a school trip because the second I moved towards the bus, I get anxious. And not, not, we didn't have that word then. I get a stomach egg, right? And it was literally an attempt, I guess, to stay close and protect my mom. And, And, you know, it was eating us both Rick and me, and I'm sure my dad, not to mention my mother,

who was incredibly heroic and courageous, and she just was a rock. I mean, I found a famous carthal letter she wrote to my father's mother, just saying, I'm dying. What's going to happen to my boys? because Bobby, as everyone called my dad, can't take care of us. Well, you know, we struggled after she died, and he did an okay job. He tried. He did his best he could, and we did survive, and we did okay.

Everything that I've read about your dad was that he was brilliant, and as you described in the smartest person you ever knew, but not equipped to handle the aftermath of your mom's passing. He was not, you know, and I think a lot of, lot of people can relate to this. It just, it crushed him. He couldn't function properly. I think he couldn't deal with life itself, Guy. And I think then, you know, the death of my mother also kind of became something to hide behind. It gave him another excuse about why that dissertation wouldn't get finished, you know. And a lot of people who are in the position of actually making

diagnoses but never met him, postured that there was a bipolar component to this, so much so that he was actually sought some treatment in the early 90s and was misdiagnosed by a quack and ended up sort of being treated for ADD, which was then a kind of diagnosis de jour. And it totally changed him from a father who was so proud of his son. sons and what they did to someone who was sort of angry about it. And it was hard to take. And whatever the meds were or the combination of meds, it just wasn't good for him. And so I don't know how where his grief really was.

I never saw him cry when she was sick or when she died or at the funeral. I did see him cry when he showed me a movie once. And that's what made me, that's my origin story. That's what made me want to become a filmmaker. I saw my dad cry for the first time watching Sir Carol Reed's Odd Man Out with James Mason about the Irish troubles. And he just cried, and I suddenly, I got it instantly. I was by that time just 12. But I knew that it had provided him some emotional safe harbor.

And I knew I felt emotions with music that made me feel a certain way. and that I wanted to do that, I guess. Yeah. You mentioned, and I've seen you mention this in the past, this movie, Odd Man Out. He was really, like, not just into watching movies on TV. Like, he was really into it. He was really into it. Yeah, he loved.

And, in fact, you know, he had a fairly strict curfew for Rick and Me after my mom died. And he forgave it on school nights. If till 1 a.m. with all the commercials, there was some movie he wanted me to see. or he'd take me down to the campus theater on South University. And, you know, I just got this amazing education, and he seemed to know and love all these things, not just the famous directors, but he'd also show the lesser stuff of Howard Hawks, you know,

who is a great, great director, but, you know, it doesn't come to mind. And so, you know, when I decided at 12, after I saw him cry that, I wanted to be a filmmaker, then I just took on that same responsibility to read as much as I could about, film theory and criticism and mostly history and more importantly to see as many movies as I could. And by the time I was in late high school, I was keeping like three by five cards on, you know,

what I'd seen and arrived at Hampshire College, you know, certain that I would be John Ford or Howard Hawks. And they were like, huh, who are you? I think at 17 is when you got your first camera, Super 8 camera. And I'm curious, at that time, this isn't sort of 1970-ish. Was it really expensive to get a super-8 camera? No. You know, and I have to check with the mythology department here, guy. You know, my dad gave me a camera.

It was not because I was Steven Spielberg, who, you know, I know and admire, and I know the way in which he just learned the craft. It was because I seemed to be into movies and keep saying that I wanted to be a filmmaker, that I got a super-8 camera. And I really didn't know what to do with it. We'd sometimes sort of have these false starts in some sort of drama or science fiction thing. Or I'd go out and I'd want to document pollution in Ann Arbor and couldn't, you know, figure it. Nothing ever got finished.

Nothing ever really got made. And all of the period of time we're talking about, my brother is digesting for the most part novels. And I'm reading the encyclopedia. And I don't know it. I could not articulate it. but I was developing a love of American history. And in fact, somebody who was in my class in the ninth grade world history, and he said, I always remember looking over at you and thinking,

there's somebody who knows what he's going to do. And I'm going, you know, BS, no way. At that point, I knew exactly I wanted to be a writer and a filmmaker. And, you know, please don't interrupt that dream. It was only that accident of stuff in college that the history came roaring back and such a, just like a refreshing kind of flood, a clean cleansing flood. And I hadn't realized it. And you just realized, oh, my God, how lucky am I?

I know what I want to do, and I know what I want to do it about. I mean, the history piece of it would come a little later because, as you said, when you went off to Hampshire College in 1971, you wanted to do feature films, like maybe the next John Ford or Hitchcock. So you studied photography and film with the professors there. And by the way, Hampshire was, I mean, it's obviously still experimental today, but, I mean, it was really brand new when you got there. Yeah, it was brand new. Yeah, I went for my interview and it had just opened. I mean, there were cranes or the equivalent of cranes.

There were holes in the ground with, you know, false work and scaffolding and things like that. And it was terrifically exciting. I'd grown up literally abutting the University of Michigan of 40,000 students. Yeah. And because of our financial situation, it was just presumed I'd go there. And I never applied to any other college. And then suddenly I realized just before Christmas of 1970 that I was about to go to the most expensive college on earth. And I had no money.

So my grandmother gave me some money and a great aunt of mine on my mother's side. had died and left me a little bit of money. And so somehow I got a scholarship and it all made possible and I would go away for one year. That was the idea. And I went away obviously and I stayed because I had just loved it and just figured out a way by hook or by crook to do it. But yeah, I walked in there fully intending to be John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock who Howard Hawks. And they were looking at me like I was some strange person and they were all wonderful still photographers. And they had kind of disabused me of that in the gentlest way, you know. That maybe feature filmmaking wasn't the direction you should have had into.

Well, Jerome Liebling, who was the senior faculty member, Elaine Mays was the other, and she was the first person. We got very, very intensely close to her, but Jerry was sort of the father figure and scary. He just said they call it the industry, don't they? Right? You know, like implying that, you know, they had silhouettes of palm trees on their stationery, but really there should be smokestacks, right? So right then and there, I began to feel like my legs were buckling a little bit.

It's interesting because I remember reading about like Quentin Tarantino, and his film school was working at a video store, just watching everything, Japanese films and so-called blacks' exploitation films. And that's what led him to make films. But it seems like in your case, you had read so much film criticism that in a sense, You couldn't, you came to the realization or the conclusion, I guess, that because you knew what was bad about film or what wasn't good enough, that you would never make anything that could satisfy your. Oh, that's so interesting. I've never thought about it in quite that way. I do think that maybe that criticism implies good and bad. But there was something about, and as soon as you make a film, you'll know this, it's really hard.

to just make a film, however bad the critics think it is. It's just really hard to get a film done. So I'm overly generous to anybody you can get a film done because I know firsthand how hard it is to do a film. And so I don't think I quite understood that then, but I do know that I had yet to find a way to express what I wanted to do. So here was the beginning of the abandonment of the original dream of Hollywood and feature films and realizing within the world of documentary, I am coming to a fundamental realization that what is and what was is as dramatic as anything anyone can make up. And so all of a sudden, I'm not leaving dramatic films. I'm just saying they've got an alternative universe, which is a new kind of documentary I'm thinking, right?

That there's a beginning in the middle and an end, an antagonist and protagonists and a climax and a denouement. All of the laws that we follow are all in Aristotle's poetics. It's a hero's journey and all the things that go on. And so I realized that we were obligated to tell a story anyway. And then it's just sitting around waiting for the right connection, right? And the right connection turned out to be completely serendipitously, completely accidentally, American history. And then all of a sudden, whatever collision created the kind of explosion that just you kind of went, Literally, yes, I know what I'm supposed to do.

Hmm. All right. So you graduate in 1975. And I guess you and a few other students stayed behind in Amherst, like started basically making films, like for like nonprofits, right? Yep. I decided that, you know, we'd, in Hampshire, we'd started. We had, you know, great teachers. We had some equipment and we had no money.

So the students in production couldn't be given a grant to make a film. So we offered our services for free to nonprofits in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. Right. The first film I worked on for an upper class person was about the Children's Protective Services in Holyoke and Springfield, Massachusetts. And we followed families around. And then when I had moved up and it was now my time to inherit a film, I made the second film that would be made for Old Sturbridge Village, the Living History Museum in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. And I made a half-hour film called Working in Royal New England. It's all live cinematography.

We'd go early, early, early in the morning and stay later after the tourists had left and before and filmed the interpreters in costume living the life of the late 18th and early 19th century, 1790 to 1840, pre-industrialization. And there were first-person voices in this film reading diaries in addition to a very modest third-person narrator, and it like lit me on fire. And I had a moment with Jerome Liebling, which may be arguably one of the most important moments of my life. Everything about the shooting of this film

had been informed by who he was and what he wanted me to be. And he came in to look at somewhere between a rough and a fine cut, and he said, it's really coming along. I think here I would do this, and I would say, no, I really like this. And he pushed back and I pushed back and he pushed back and I pushed back and then he let go. And I realized, oh, no, because it was like jumping off a cliff without a parachute. Yeah.

And that meant no longer did I have daddy in a way holding my hand. And it was a really wonderful moment. But all of that made us all think that we just did not go to New York and apprentice ourselves to some film company and work our way up the career ladder. In fact, later on, as Robert Penn Warren told me when I was working on Huey Long, he said, careerism is death. So I've actually never used the word career. I use the word, unless I'm speaking like this, I use the word professional life because he had instilled in me this sense that a career was actually a form of imprisonment. There was an arc that you went on, and that wasn't what it was about. So you were really cutting your teeth, right?

learning about how to make these films by essentially doing it. At some point, you with some friends from Hampshire and Amy Steckler, who would become your wife, you formed a kind of a collective that you called Florentine films. What was that? Was that going to be sort of like an umbrella company to make documentaries? How did you think about what that was going to be? Well, collectives are a really good word guy. I think that's what it was.

The company involved Buddy Squires, who still my cinematical. Roger Sherman, still one of my closest friends, and Amy Steckler, and we sort of started a company in 76 called Florentine Films. I had originally toyed with something called Kniema Productions, the goddess of cinema that was on the top of a dome of some New Jersey movie palace from the 30s. But we changed it to Florentine because Elaine Mays, our beloved teacher, had lived in Florence, Massachusetts. And so we called it Florentine Films after that. and we, you know, made a company, and there was a whole set of films that were lining up ahead of me, whatever they might be.

In your late 20s, you began work on the film that really would become your breakthrough movie. It was a documentary on the Brooklyn Bridge. How did you get the idea for that film? My best friend, David Blisdine, was a book salesman. He graduated a year before me. at Amherst College up the road. And he was traveling New England and basically was selling trade paperbacks, not the mass market paperbacks, but trade paperbacks. And he plopped down David McCullough's Great Bridge, the epic story of the building bridge. I had pneumonia. And I read it. And I just said

to Buddy and Roger, this is what we're going to do next. They thought I was crazy. And we just sort of moved ahead. It was sort of had to do with kind of my refusal to give up on it. How did you, when you had that idea, right? I mean, now you're going to go collect a lot of images, historic images. You're going to shoot the bridge. I mean, there's a lot of moving parts. You're going to interview people. You had some experience doing this in Western Mass. We cut our teeth at Old Sturbridge Village. I knew how to draw up a budget. I knew how to tie a tie, I knew how to make a presentation. But this was a much bigger, more ambitious.

This was a terrifying, yeah. And I still can recall the unbelievable anxiety that possess me every single day. Not just that, but of the larger unanswered questions about my mom, unexamined stuff about family, just every possible insecurity was put on alert. And in fact, Rogers folks had helped us secure initial $2,500. It allowed us to make a couple of interviews. And it was just me kind of doggedly taking the Peter Pan bus to New York Sunday night and coming back Friday night and, you know, raising money and trying to get a thousand.

Where did you raise money from? How did you, I mean, because you were so young, you had no national name. No one knew of you. And everywhere I went, you know, people like the Brooklyn Museum would say, if there's a film going to be made on the Brooklyn Bridge, we're going to make it. Like goodbye. And I said, no. And so the best story of the money, it was like 500 bucks or 2,500 bucks or 1,000 bucks. I once went to a second or third floor walkup on Montague Street in Brooklyn, downtown Brooklyn, Brooklyn Heights, and met with the Democratic boss of Brooklyn who died in jail.

I believe, or at least went to jail. And he gave me an envelope with $1,000 in it from the Kings County Democratic Club. And he said, no film is going to be made on my bridge that doesn't have my name on it. Wow. And so he gave me $1,000. And that's the way it was. And then all of a sudden, maybe a year or two later, it was New York Telephone. And it was $12,500.

And then we were almost done with the film. And it was Citibank, and they were $30,000. This was unbelievable. How did you get those meetings? How did you? I mean, this is before email. You were sending letters. I was writing letters by hand before there were computers, before they were even self-correcting, selectric typewriters.

I was writing them out, and I had allied myself both smartly but also terribly, it turned out with the Department of Records and Information Services of the city, which had the Brooklyn Bridge drawings. And they gave me a little desk, and I just worked out of there, and they were going to be the fiscal agent. So as soon as I had massed the money, they just suddenly said, you know, where's our cut? And I go, and I had to go before the board of estimate. I had to do all this stuff. And finally. Well, they assumed that they had some equity in this. Yeah, yeah.

And it was not equity. They assumed that there would be some level of control or more importantly if there was money coming in, they wanted to cut. And, I mean, these things would send me and my heart would be pounding. I lost weight. I was just, it was, I was a wreck. But we finally got to the place where we had amassed enough money. to film the archives, to film the Brooklyn Bridge drawings, to go to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, to the Library of Congress, to places where the archives were.

You never, you know, nobody mailed you a print. You went there and you filmed in person. And meanwhile, while you were doing all of this, I guess you sort of got an offer that could have totally changed the course of your career. I mean, you were offered a real job. Yep. And finally, by the summer of 79, I realized, you know, I needed a job. Somebody at the PBS station in New York, WNET offered me a job of $800 a week, which was like saying... It's a lot of money in 79.

It's like saying, I'll give you a million dollars a year if you come. They offered you a job to be a producer there at WNET? Uh-huh. And I just said, no, I can't do it. But you were broke, right? You didn't... Broke, but here was the Faustian bargain. And I was sitting there with all these reels.

We had like 75, 80 reels shot. Each one of the reels is 400 feet, 12 minutes, a little bit less than 12 minutes. And I realized that I was going to put, if I said yes to that job, I'd put it on top of the refrigerator, and I would wake up, and I would be 45 years old. And I will not have finished the film. And I just said, I can't do that. And that's when we went up, Amy and I went up and found, looking for a house around Walpole. New Hampshire and then we ended up, Amy went back and found the house that we eventually lived in.

And you did that to save money. Oh yeah, we did that to save money. But it turned out to be great. So I used to say that that was the best professional decision I made moving to Walpole. It's not. It's actually the second best professional decision. The best decision was to stay there. And it's because this is so labor intensive.

It requires so much time. It requires so much love that you weren't going to be able to get. get if I had to maintain the high overhead of offices in New York. It was just the nature of making historical films, you know? And that was the best decision when I said, no, I'm staying here. I think the total process from start to finish of Brooklyn Bridge was about five years, at least. Yeah, at least. And during that time, you had to raise money to make it. By the way, do you remember how much you raised in total to make a movie? Oh, of course I did. The budget was about 180,000 a little bit more and changed 383, something like that. And I calculated I got

paid two cents an hour. Okay, 100. So 180,000 to make it. And you were pounding the pavement, going to, you know, Citibank and anybody that you could go to, um, to make the phone. But I wonder, I mean, you were like 28, 27, you know. And, and you admit, in middle, you looked even younger. How did you, when you would go to these pitch meetings, to explain what you were doing and how you need the money because you needed that money you really needed it and you needed the time to make the film so you were like fundraising and like putting a camera on your shoulder and filming yeah how did you i mean how did you deal with the anxiety of of trying to show people that you could confidently pull this off well dealing with the anxiety was impossible pulling convincing people that i could do it i don't know how it happened i never took No, I remember that what would happen. I'll give you an example.

I won't name the funder because it's not fair to them. But I had a connection with somebody, and they would say, well, unfortunately, you know, this. I really don't think we're at this time interested. And so I called back six months later and I said, hey, I have great news. Like, PBS is going to show this. And they said, oh, wow, let me talk to so-and-so. So they'd kick me upstairs, and I'd be with somebody else for a while, and they'd say, well, I don't know. So I'd leave it alone.

Six months later, I'd go back and I'd say, I'm sorry to bother you, but I have really, really great news. We've expanded the film to an hour, and it's going to be on a national PBS broadcast. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. So finally, I reached some place where some guy goes, and what do you need?

And I said, 12,500. He goes, no problem. You know, and that's how I did it. I just said, and I'll tell you, I like to speak about the negative space of creation. You know, we have shooting ratios of 40 or 50 to 1, right? It's like the, the block. of stone brought to the sculptor's studio and she works away. And what we see in the gallery

of the museum is not the whole thing. It's the rubble on the floor. And she is aware and has to honor the negative space of creation. But the negative space of fundraising, I also did. So for many, many years, I had on my desk two, three ring binders, each of them three or four inches wide, filled with all the rejections from the Brooklyn Bridge film. And I kept them there just to remind me that you could have the best idea in the world, all the talent, but there was some other ingredient that had to do with stubbornness or perseverance, and I don't know where I got that, that you know how it's so much easier in the business world or in most of the world to say no. To say yes is to lay yourself open for criticism. To say no is to protect your flank.

And so that's why I kept those noes. And I was just trying to get people to yes. And, you know, I was inventing myself and I was inventing the film as I was doing that. Yeah. I'm not in any way trying to call into question your integrity because I did the same things when I was younger. But I'm assuming that you were a little bit of a hustler when you would rate. Because it sounds like you had to give it to PBS, but they were not necessarily committed to airing it. But when you would go and talk to people, you would say, yeah, and it's going to be on PBS. Is that true?

Yeah. I mean, if they had asked me a question, I would be honor-bound to tell them exactly how the dynamic worked, that PBS, when it was finished, would evaluate it to see. So it was all, but I think, yeah, I mean, we're all hustlers. We're trying really hard. Everybody at some point has to bite off more than they can chew and then learn how to chew it. And that's what each successive, either making too many films at once, or maybe it's making, you know, going from an hour or an hour and a half film to a, to a multi-part series like the Civil War, it's biting off more than you could chew

and then figuring out how the hell you're going to do that. I read a story you told about when you premiered the film at the Brooklyn Museum. Because I think initially the Brooklyn Museum was not, they didn't want to be part of it unless they were going to make it. They were the mortal enemies. They were the first call I made because I was advised by someone who had written a wonderful academic book about the Brooklyn Bridge that this woman who had mounted the beautiful excellence,

or had been part of the beautiful exhibition of Brooklyn Bridge drawings at the Whitney. Barbara Milstein was there and she was a curator. And so she befriended me and took me under her wing and told me who to see and introduced me to this congressman and that potential funder, New York Dock Railway, I think, gave us 500 bucks. They're the people who, you know, float railroad cards on scows across from New Jersey to Brooklyn or whatever it is. I mean, I just, it was just a crazy, crazy world of Brooklyn that we got in. But the head of it, Michael Botwinnik said, you know, you will not do this film. Unless we make it, right? This is the head of the Brooklyn Museum, Hussein. Yep. We will make it. You will not know this. And I walked out of his office, and he was my mortal enemy.

And so I had a screening of the Finnish film. I couldn't even watch. I was so nervous. But I watched, people went crazy. And Michael Buckwinick came up to him. He said, Ken, I am so sorry. I had no idea. This is a beautiful film.

What can I do? And I said, I want you to. to host the premiere, he says, done. Wow. So it was, you know, it was really great. My brother was there sobbing because somebody in the family had done something, you know. Somebody had finished something. And it was beautiful.

It's a beautiful film. I love that film. And it's got Amy and it's got Buddy and Roger in it. And we worked so hard. And it just, I mean, the experiences of that film alone are a whole book. You devoted five years of your life. life to make this film, which was, I think, two hours long, right? Yeah.

No, no, one hour. One hour, yeah. Wow. So, one hour long. And, I mean, five years of your life for a one hour film. I mean, I must have felt like an incredible, I don't know, relief when you debuted it. Can I tell you the payoff? Yeah.

So, I don't know where Amy was, but I was alone at the house. And it was February. and you go out February of 82. And you go out and you hope that the wood stoves don't die out, right? And I came back and I walk in and I noticed into my house

and the wood stove is out. And I went, oh no. And I opened it up and I try to stir the embers. You know, you get it going really hot and then you turn it down and hopefully it's still there when you get back. But it was out. So that was like a whole big rigmarole.

And then I looked over at the answering machine, which maybe got one message or two messages a month, and there were 12, right? And I pressed, you know, the button. And the first one was a hang-up. The second was the hang-up. The next one is, this is the AP in Concord, New Hampshire. Can you please call us? Here's the number. Then a couple of hang-ups. Then, Ken, this is the Boston Globe. Can you please give us a call? Here's our number. And then it was the AP in Boston. And then it was, and this is where I got it, the guy says, This is somebody from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Can you give us a call? And then this guy who is distributing our film in Los Angeles called up and he says, congratulations to Ken. Brooklyn Bridge just got nominated for an Academy Award. And I jumped up and down.

I'd already taken off my coat. I'm in my shirt. I just jump up and down and then I look. And the wood stove is still out, right? So I go outside without putting my coat on in February, get a big load of wood. I'm completely distracted. I'm higher than a kite, and I slip on some ice.

And I twist and I fall into a snowbank, pretty soft landing, right? And I'm still holding on to this big, with both arms, big huge load of wood. But my shirt has pulled out of my pants at my back. And my back is warming the snow, which is trickling down my pants. And I sat there and for some reason had the... thing, the insight to say, how lucky are you? You are the only nominee who is in this position today. And how humbling it was and just don't take it. But it was one of those glorious. I was yelling and jumping and doing the kind of pirouettes that people do when they're alone and don't

think they're being watched. And then this nice little slip in warning. And I still remember just lying there, looking up, cold as hell, water trickling down my backside and just, thinking, you know, this was pretty lucky. When we come back, how Ken broke some of the basic rules of documentary filmmaking and how, despite having to curry favor with funders, he was able to keep creative control of his work. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's late 1981, and Ken Burns' documentary, Brooklyn Bridge, has just been released.

And on the night of its premiere at the Brooklyn Museum, Ken discover something that at first, he can't quite believe. So, first of all, when it was over, they asked me if I'd like to go up and answer questions. The first question, some lady shot her hand up and said, where did you get those newsreels of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge? I said, ma'am, it was built between 1869 and 1883. There's no newsreels. There's no, no, no, no, no. When the stone was delivered in those scows up to the towers and they're bringing this. stuff up and I said, ma'am, those were all still photographs. And she said, no, they weren't. And then I

suddenly thought, just be grateful. Just say, okay, just move on to the next question, because it worked. Everything I was trying to do in animating the still photographs, it had worked. She believed she was looking at motion pictures. We'd added the sound of gulls. We'd added, you know, distant hammering. We'd hammer, you know, everything had, we were trying to wake that photograph to bring it a life and and to move. So for this person's untrained eye, this meant it was moving. She was there. And I was going, you know, just declare victory to yourself and move on to the next question.

But you very consciously were intending to create that effect, that from a still image, to give the impression that it was moving, there was movement, it was propulsion. Yes. And so you can see that in that Brooklyn Bridge film. You can see it in Civil War film. You know, there's not a single shot of the hundreds of thousands of photographs taken during the Civil War. Not a single one is a battle. Not a single one.

And yet, I'd say 20, 25% of our film is during a battle taking place. So what do you use? It's the blur of the trees. It's the close-up of the cannon mouth. It's the glint of a bayonet. You know, all of those things become the way in which you create this reality and a seamless. I remember the law of the law, including. quotes of filmmaking, film editing was that when a talking head came on in a documentary,

you stopped whatever effects were going on. Right. And you just focused on that person. And you just focused on that person. And even the music wasn't there if you even had music, right? It was usually just tramping feet, firing guns, just one or two tracks. And we were doing 15 or 20 tracks. It's like layer of layer upon, and I should mention this to people listening because we're an audio show. Even with this show, we have many layers of tracks. So of audio tracks. It's just like, imagine layer of one pop of sound on top of another layer of sound. Yeah, we're in the business of making those things come alive. That's what I, that's what I hung my hat on was that ability to do it. And then I said to the editor, just keep, Shelby Foote came on to describe the Battle of Shiloh,

just keep the sound effects going. He's telling us what's happening. Why are we leaving the Battle of Shiloh and coming to the present? It's happening now. And he goes, but you don't do that. They said, just do it. And so we played it. And it was like suddenly you were in it. And it was so great. Yeah. Ken, the effect that you became famously known for, which is many people know that Ken Burns effect, that sort of taking a photograph and not letting that photograph limit the movement of the film.

Before you landed on that technique, when you were working in a Brooklyn Bridge documentary, did you ever think, let's just recreate scenes with actors. you ever think about doing something like that? So, because that was a technique. So I did do that, but I limited it to, yeah, it's called reenactments. Yeah, sorry, reenactments, yes. The Civil War, there's only one reenactment. There's a horse hoof going through a puddle. Other than that, nothing.

Right. So my feeling was that that reenactment can take place on the soundtrack. That is to say, not just the effects you and I've been talking about, but in addition to the third-person narrator, you would have a chorus of first-person voices. they're reading the diaries, the letters, the speeches, the whatever it is, and that if you got the right people to do it, you could actually add to the kinesthetic, the apparent kinesthetics of this situation. The apparent movement within a photograph and the dynamic sound effects gave it apparent motion. And I hoped emotion, which was much more important to me. These were not moving images, but you could make them moving emotionally if you would do all these things. So this was a chorus of first-person voices of people that read.

And people never read before, John Hartford, the folk singer. Just amazing voice. Great. Hoyd Axton. You know, people that, Kurt Vonnegut. You know, people like that. Arthur Miller was the voice. Brooklyn-born Arthur Miller with a thick Brooklyn accent played William Tecumseh Sherman. When you were filming those images, right, at the archives with the cameras,

and mounting them on the rigs and moving them the way that we, we now know what they look like. Did you think it was going to have an impact? Did you think it was going to become this thing? Were you, or was it just something you were kind of playing around with and trying? So, if you're shooting hoops at the garage, do you sort of imagine where you're going to be? You kind of do that you're hoping to go play on a team someplace. But you just, you do it because you think this is the right thing.

and you actually, if you spend too much time thinking that it would become what it did become or didn't become, you're lost. You just have to at some point have some faith that I've chosen this particular thing. I'm going to shoot 100 baskets tonight and see if I can go ahead it in before Mom calls me in, right? Whatever it might be, whosoever it is. In some ways, you will this to work. You have to believe something will work in order for it to work, and particularly things that hadn't quite been done. I mean, Perry Miller Odato, a woman producer, made a wonderful film on Gertrude Stein in the early mid-70s called When This You See Remember Me. And she had actors reading. She filmed the actors reading. And sometimes she'd cut away to still photograph of Paris.

And I went, wait a second. In my mind, I went, wait, why even show the actors at all? Just keep them off camera all the time. They can service things. So, you know, you're always standing on the shoulders of somebody else's stuff. And if you think too much about what it is you're doing, you don't do it. You can't ride that bicycle. Hey, mom and dad, watch me. I got it. Crash, right? All of a sudden, you're thinking about it.

Now I'm in performance. It's not going to work for mom and dad that I can ride a bicycle. So you really at some point just have to give it over to saying, I've chosen this route. We have to make this work. And that's what it was. You were now, you now became an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker at, you know, at age 30. And so this was real. This was really real. I know you were, I thought it was real before. But now, I mean, this was going to become clearly something even bigger.

I know that it's a sort of almost crass to use this word. you had to kind of really think about the business that you were forming, right? I mean, you were, you needed financing, you needed an apparatus, you needed to build a business. And that would take time. It would happen over many, many years. But did you ever, did you think about what you were doing in any way as a business? Or would that just, if I asked you that in 1982, 83, would you have just looked at me like, that's just a crass question? No, but there would be a nice, important yes, but to it, right?

Because we'd been in public broadcasting, we had to gather the underwriting together, and it was really complicated. Still is. It's a pain in the neck. But what it affords was a kind of measure of control over that material. So we were willing to sacrifice the kind of outer accoutrements of a business because it's not really a business, right? It's every project was its own zero-sum game. You know, you have a budget, Brooklyn Bridge, $180,000, right? You empty that budget. There's no contingency in it. There's no profit margin. in it. You get paid a salary, very modest, and so does everybody else. And at the end of the day, it's the money's out. There's no profit for the company. So you think about it more as, this is actually a pretty good model to do what we want to do because the tradeoff of the

profit margins and the contingencies and the expenses was that we would have total control, that we wouldn't ever have to apologize for not being able to do something. And so you suffer a lot, right? You worry a lot. There's lots of anxiety. But Walpole, New Hampshire insulated me. And about the time of that nomination, I came across a New Yorker photograph that showed three men standing in hell, the flames licking up around them. And one guy says to the other, apparently my over 200 screen credits didn't mean a damn thing.

I put it right up. It was just like falling in the snow at the news of the nomination. I put it up on the refrigerator until it just, you know, turned to yellow and withered away. And so the fact that we've been blessedly gone along, each project is its own separate LLC. It's its own bucket. There's no profit margin. There's no contingency. We just empty that budget.

Everybody gets paid. And essentially, we are all still freelance in this company, right? We exist as long as there is an operating grant production to pay the salaries of people. I mean, I know that today it's different, right, because of who you are and what you've, in your impact on our culture. It's not different. It's so hard because what I needed to do in order to keep that team going was not just have one project, but have two or three or now seven going at once. And so it's economies of scale. So it feels like the same, not Sisyphean, but like you're climbing Mount Everest in terms of the financial dynamics of it. I want to break it down a little bit because to me it sounds overwhelming. And I've got two businesses that I'm part of, and that's overwhelming.

And essentially, I mean, at the beginning it was maybe two or three films at one time, and now it's six or seven or eight. So I want to go back to just the beginning of this, which is, and break it down, which is, for example, when you are going to find funding for your films, I'm assuming every single person who's going to make a commitment, wants to have some kind of input or control or asks the same questions. And what were your terms? Were your terms basically like, look, we have total control. You're not going to have any say over what we do. This is basically what we're doing. We need your money.

Are you in or are you out? Is that what you would say? Well, essentially, you go to people, you're not looking for investments. You're going to sources that already understand the Ili-Monsonary nature of this, that this is grant production. But yes, you do have the pressures of that, but you hide behind those skirts of PBS. They don't allow it, you know. I'll give you a good story, and it's a wonderful one.

We got, and this has only happened once, and that was our film on the Statue of Liberty. The entire budget was paid for by Liberty Mutual Insurance. Right. Okay. And so we were showing a fine cut of that film to the guy from Liberty Mutual who had given us the money. Wonderful man. Whitney Lancaster, the Third. Hope he's still alive to hear this.

And he had brought along his ad guy. And in our film, we had interviewed James Baldwin, who was then a guest lecturer, teacher at Hampshire College. And he gave this phenomenal thing dealing with all this. You'd think he'd said it yesterday, given all of the stuff that's going on now with regard to race in this country. And at the end of one particular bite, he said, and for black people, the Statue of Liberty means nothing. It's a bitter joke, meaning nothing. And so we finished the film, and I could hear over here in the back of the very small room, the Whitney just sort of, you know, letting out of breath.

He said, wow, James Baldwin. He said, that's worried. And the guy, I wish I remembered his name, who was the ad guy, said, leave it in. It keeps us from being a puff piece. Don't worry about it. So when he said, leave it in, I freaked out because you don't have a choice. It's in, right? And I would have gone to bat.

But I love the fact that he'd gone to bat for me. And there have been many, many times when people have tried to cross the line, trying to influence content, trying to tell us what to do or not do, or that this is a little bit too hard, or this is too this or that. And we just go, sorry, you know? I mean, Ken, just, you know, in my reading about your life and the films I've seen, it's almost overwhelming because you're so prolific and your team is so prolific. And you've covered so many different subjects and topics.

but I wonder how did you, like, there's no question. I don't have to read anything about you to know that you are a perfectionist, right? There's no doubt. Anybody who watches any of your films knows that. You can see the almost tortured, painful, you know, birthing of every film because every moment is so thoughtfully put together. But by the same token, that might be. It must make you sometimes difficult to work with.

I don't know. I don't know for sure. I've read people saying mean things about you, but it must because... We don't have any yelling. That's my number one rule. And at lunch, I wash the dishes at the editing house. And so we speak to people about that. The intensity is shared by everybody.

They want to do that. And nobody, because there's no yelling, this isn't brain surgery. And I actually don't think yelling during brain surgery helps either if someone drops the instrument or hands you the wrong claim. I don't want the doctors yelling whether surgery my brain. No, no, no, we don't want that to happen. So, you know, I mean, I know a lot of filmmakers who are yellers and I don't get it. I mean, we try to have as good as up, but it is intense only in our shared dedication to get it right.

And I am difficult. I'm sure, and other people can tell you that in ways that I don't even see. I mean, my ancestor, Robert Burns, said, oh, would some power of the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us. But we have happy rooms and people who, the young intern who worked on that Statue of Liberty film and was in that room when the ad guy said, don't worry, it's not a puff. It keeps it from being a puff piece. She is my senior editor. And Lynn Novick. And Lynn Novick, I've worked with, came in at 89.

We're still co-directing film. Sarah Botstein, who came in in the mid-90s. Jeff Ward, who wrote the first script in the early 80s, dating. and Duncan who came and stayed and also were refreshed by new folks and people retire and they go on. And so I think it's a really good environment. But how do you, how do you maintain the quality of what you do and your your demands that it, that the quality is so high, but also be willing to sometimes, because I mean, I think we all, all leaders deal with this, right? Deal with with the pushback sometimes of like, hey, just let it go or make some compromises.

Yeah, well, I think we all do that. And I think we're learning. And I think one of the places where I learned is to try to hear that weak voice that says that shot's not working, you know? And, and, you know, even though you loved it the last time, it may not be great this time. And I think PBS is the real answer to your question. There's no other place where any of these films could have been made. You know, I could go out to, you know, a streaming service.

or to a premium cable channel and say, hey, I'm making a film on Vietnam. And with my track record, they'd say, how much do you need? And I would say, we need $30 million, which is what it cost to make our Vietnam series over 10 and a half years. And they'd say, no problem.

And they could write it in one check, not the, you know, the 25 that I took to get. But they wouldn't give me 10.5 years. And PBS does. And so that allows us to incubate this constant desire to get it right, to always improve. And after a while, it's self-fulfilling for everybody. Yeah.

I do miss a little bit of those old days when we go out to the archives with the scoop lamps and we'd put them up, the pictures up with magnets. Everything's now digitized and scanned. And, you know, there's a little bit of Gertrude Stein's comment about her hometown of Oakland, California. There's no there there in a digital world. Yeah. And we're desperately trying to make a there there. When we come back in just a moment, how Ken and his brother decide to take on their own family history project to reclaim the memory of their late mother Lila. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So when Ken Burns's series, The Civil War, came out in 1990, it was a pretty momentous television moment. At the time, it was the largest audience in PBS. history. Nearly 40 million Americans binged it over the course of a week. And Ken Burns became, well, really famous. He was invited to the White House and millions of people watched as he was interviewed on the Tonight Show. About two weeks after that, my then second daughter, Lily,

who runs Imagine Entertainment right now, so just to put this into context, and she would have been in 1990. She was just short of her fourth birthday. So she's three and three quarters. And we're walking down Broadway in New York. And she looks ahead and I look ahead and we can see that some people have recognized me and are stopping to come towards me. And she squeezes my hand in warning.

And she says, Daddy, those people want Ken Burns. And she reminded me that I am Daddy. I am me to me. And I was Ken Burns to somebody else. And so, you know, all of that, the White House visits to the Oval Office with President Bush, the, you know, the salutes at this, the on the, all of that is an interesting phenomenon. I was scared out of my mind before the tonight show, the tonight show. But it doesn't matter. None of that matters.

It just matters how much, you know, in my little town, that. that and 50 cents get you a cup of coffee. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's like, yeah, so the town put on a little thing for Amy and Ken congratulating us on the success of the Civil War series. And, you know, they made some jokes and that was it. And nobody said anything since, which is just the way it should be. I wonder, Ken, and I don't, again, forgive me for sometimes I can be a bit psychoanalytical without any formal training.

But I wonder if the attention from the Civil War and the, you know, accompanying kind of just pressure or whatever it might have been may have had an impact on your personal life. I know that you and Amy split in 1993 or what was it just, you know, it happens. People. No, I think it's, I think you're right to ask that. I think it's a variety of factors. One is, I think that my travel is always ridiculous, particularly in those early days of raising money and being away. That's a strain on any marriage, particularly if there are two young girls in it, right? But I think the more important thing is that I had not outgrown the grief of my mother.

I hadn't dealt with it in any way. And that's not what a wife signs up to be. They sign up to be a wife and a partner, not a mother, right? And I think that I don't think. I know I was asking Amy to be all of those things, which is hugely unfair. And at some point, and I knew this from the very beginning that this would happen, but it was the great fear. It had to happen. And so what it forced me to do, the dissolution of that marriage, was to go back and try to figure out about my mom.

And to do at 39 and 40 work that an 11-year-old couldn't have done, and maybe a 21-year-old should have done but didn't do. How did you do that work? Man, it was so, so hard. First of all, she died on April 28, 1965. I always remember every year I'd see the April 28th coming, and then it would go behind me. I was never, ever able to be present on the actual day. And so obviously there was some avoidance. And then a therapist said to me, where is she buried?

And all of a sudden I realized she's nowhere. My father had her cremated and then in his whatever, never picked up the ashes. And then this therapist said, go bury her. Find her. Barrier. So my brother and I undertook this detective work. And we, the funeral home had long gone out of business. The guy had retired to Florida and died.

His wife was still alive and said, oh, unclaimed remains were sent to this. So we went to that place and they said, oh, they may be buried here. We went to there and they said, yes, she's with 28 other cremains using the euphemism of the industry. But nobody had, they were all paupers and nobody had come. And so we said, can we put a plaque? And they said, let's check. And they said, yeah. So we did.

And we had a little ceremony. We brought my dad. It's when he began to do work. Where is she? Where is the plaque? She's in a cemetery outside of Ann Arbor where she was buried. We couldn't remove her. I then made myself go back every single year with my then-young older daughters, and they got to know her.

So that when my oldest daughter, Sarah, had her first child and it was a girl, she named her Lila, which was my mother's name. And that name, we never said it. We still Rick and I did this day. I still say, mommy. But, you know, it was draped in black crape. And now that name just, you know, I say it every day. But, you know, this April, she'll be gone 57 years. That is way too long to be without a mom. But, you know, the half-life of grief is endless, but you do make some progress. And so I think in my own personal life, that was a hugely important move. And I'm just sorry that Amy had to bear so much of the unexplored and the unexamined.

But yet we're very, very good friends now and our good nannas and granddaddy. I often describe what I do in this show is my own form of therapy. I'm working through things in my conversations with people. Yeah, no, no, no, no. There's no other way. I mean, that's why the process for us here is so, and it's us. It isn't just me. You know, it's not how I built it.

It's how we built it. It's so many people involved. And the hard work that all of the films take are the greatest, greatest medicine, I know. When you were working on the Civil War, right, for six years, and I know there were other things going on, but I mean, I always have so much admiration for investigative reporters who will spend like two years on one series that will run in the newspaper because I can't imagine the stress and anxiety of working on something so long for that one moment when it's released, you know, like wondering whether it will all have been worse. But that's the assumption of a kind of zero-sum game of release because it's the process. It's the process of doing it. Yeah, tell me. Yeah, I'm, yeah. I love it. People always say that to me. How could you, I mean, the Vietnam was 10 and a half years. National Park nearly 10 years. You know, it's just. And you never, there's never a moment where you're just like, it only gets, it only gets more. It's not to say there is an anxiety and worry and disappointment if somebody gives you a bad review or this, you know, the thin skin of this. But, but yeah, no, you know, it's. It's. It's. It's. It's. It's. really, when a film is finished, it gets a label on it and goes out and it's yours, guys. It's not mine. It's ours, our film is the process, the day-to-day making it. And by the time that's out, we are deep into something else, right? I am promoting a film right now on Benjamin Franklin.

And I've locked another film on the U.S. and the Holocaust, which is coming out in September, but I still have to do a lot of creative work, mixing and onlineing stuff, still to go. And we're working on several other projects that are really compelling us. So all of these, they're the same film. They're the same film. It's the same. It's you get up and you try to bring every ounce of your energy and attention and focus to that particular part of the process and try to put your head on the pillow that night thinking that you made it better. I mean, Ken, you know, you, and this is a, I'm just going to say straight up. This is a crass question, but this is a business. this show, so forgive me. And I think it's a fair question. You have made films that have been

very successful commercially, and you've made a good living off of it. But if you did a deal with Netflix or Apple TV, or I mean, you could do a $200 million deal. You could do a massive deal. You could be really, really rich if you wanted to. And I'm not saying that's the point or the aim, But I think a lot of people would, for a variety of reasons, for the freedom, for just the freedom of having that money, jump at that. Are you just, we just rule that out? I mean, would you never consider that. I think the figure you said probably would mean the catalog, right? Well, yeah, let's say, or a production deal.

Yeah, no, I wouldn't do a production deal. I want to stay with PBS. I like what we do. Now, I've got a valuable library. And, you know, who knows what happens there. But I've made enough, I'm perfectly comfortable, right? So it has to be considerations that have to do with, you know, well beyond me. People, you know, I have four grandchildren and four daughters, and I expect more grandchildren.

And so it's really about them and also about the things that I care about, you know, other filmmakers having a chance. that, you know, I remember with Brooklyn Bridge, it's still as vivid. I mean, just talking to you made me sick to my stomach thinking about those days with Brooklyn Bridge. And the first money is so hard and the last money is so hard. And so I'm trying to figure out how to help other filmmakers. Although I actually have a thought that runs through my mind that how much of that pain was actually helpful to the humility about what this is involved. Nobody's entitled, you know, to the sense that there's lots of people with a lot more talent than me, but, you know, maybe aren't as persevering, tenacious, whatever the word is.

And that's actually helpful to the whole process. I mean, you also wisely decided early on that you wanted to retain the intellectual property of everything you did. So you own all of your films. I mean, that is a hugely. valuable archive of content. Yes. Yes. And that has a market value. So that's something to talk about and to

think about. But, you know, I did that because I don't want to sit in conversation with you and duplicate conversations I've heard from sometimes even well-known Hollywood directors that you would know, where they're saying, oh, well, you know, if I'd only been

able to use that music or I wanted to have this person's hard, if you don't like these films, Guy, it's all my fault. If you do like them, then I can celebrate the entire team that's involved, but I don't have to complain about it. And that has to do with PBS. That has to do with the way we structured and my insistence that I am not giving up the ownership of the film because the second you do that, then there's someone else who might say about James Baldwin, I'm not sure about that. You know, there's some suit somewhere that would wish that it would not be so uncomfortable to

watch, as I hope watching the U.S. and the Holocaust will be for you. Yeah. Your latest film is about Benjamin Franklin. And in some ways, he's sort of the ideal candidate for how I built this, because he was an entrepreneur, innovator, and idealist, which is what our tagline is. And so obviously so much has been written about him. So many books have been written about him. He has been examined from many different perspectives. And I wonder when you come to a character like this who has been so examined and researched. How important is it for you to reveal something new or is it more about taking a different look or looking at him from a different perspective? It's neither. It's just acknowledging that for the most part, what comes down to us,

our conventional wisdom, our superficial knowledge, is itself so pitifully small that whatever we do will be very new and whatever. So it's just improving on a thing. So people say to me, you know, what was surprising to you? I said everything was surprising. Like, I didn't know that he had enslaved people in his household. I didn't know that he ended his life as an abolitionist. I didn't know this. I didn't know that.

This guy is on the $100 bill guy, right? He's a Benjamin. He's a Benjamin, right? He represents everybody's idea of striving, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, making your own living. And yet, part of his genius, is his inventions, none of which he took out a patent on. He's into self-improvement about making himself better.

He is all about learn curious about himself and how the outside natural world works and how he can make things that are useful and better for other people. He helps frame, he helps make the Constitution happen, including its terrible compromises. He's the guy who helps gently edit Thomas Jefferson so he doesn't say we hold these truths to be sacred. But he says self-evident. We're in the Enlightenment, man. Come on. So he's got, you know, and he's a successful business fan.

He's a printer. He's in charge of social media for the colonies, right? He prints stuff up. He publishes stuff. He's the postmaster. You know, he's just an infinitely, infinitely interesting human being that we need to know more and more about. And that's what our deep dive was. I don't know how he did it.

This was before Ritalin. Amphetamines. Yeah. He stated. He's something else. When you take on a project, right, and there are multiple projects happening at the same time, now there's a, there's, I'm sure, a well-worn kind of playbook. But how does it begin?

It's like, okay, so you've got this idea, and then there's, you've got to get, you know, the different spokes on the wheel, there's funding, there's the production process, there's deciding how long it's going to be. There's, you know, coming up with the storyboards and the episodes. So where does that seat, when that seat is planted, like, okay, let's do Benjamin Franklin? So you fall in love and you say, let's do Benjamin Franklin. That's a big yes. It was a meal with Walter Isaacson.

And I just said, and I'd read his book. And I said, you know, it's not going to be about your book. It's going to be lots of other scholars. He goes, I get it, I get it. And so I walked out of there. And I said, yeah, okay, I'm doing Benjamin Franklin. And then it's, you know, you set yourself off on a lot of path. There's money to be raised.

Yeah. And you're talking something that probably is five. years away from broadcast. A film, a small film like Benjamin Franklin, which is two parts and four hours. So you think that's a blink of an eye, a blink of an eye for us. You know, it just, you have to have good quartermasters in addition to good battle generals. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And people who know how to feed the army, people who know how to schedule it so that, you know, the gasoline catches up to your tanks. How many employees do you have full-time employees? I don't know. Nobody's a full-time employee because it's all grant funding. It's all expands and contracts. I mean, we do have some people who are clerical, but they're still paid. Like, we're going to pay this person in finance for, you know, these two years out of this project. And then at this point, they'll go over to half that project and half a new project. And then that project will take over the next year. So no one is technically full-time, including myself, particularly myself. And I've gone at times periods of six months where I haven't drawn.

a salary because we're coming to the end of a project and I realize that money can be spent better on something else. Ken, I really admire your relationship with your kids. It's really important to me as a father. It's the thing I'm most proud of. I don't care about pretty much anything else. Me neither. And, you know, your longstanding relationship with your collaborators like Lenovic and others, where are you, where do you kind of, what are your shortcomings? I mean, you know, and again, is not a criticism at all. It's just to say, you know, you have personally, right, you've had marriages that didn't work out. I'm a worrier and I'm impatient and I'm kind of dogged. And I assume doggedness can appeal to appear to somebody else as either competition or aggression or aggression

or sort of certainty. And it's certainly not that from my point of view, but I could understand how that could get the the benevolence of my opinion can get lost in translation. Your mom, her name was Lila, right? L-Y-L-A. I know that you had mentioned when you're last few years of your dad's life, he had a little bit of bitterness about his sons and their success and that may have been related to the medication he was on. But you can't help but imagine.

that ultimately he was really happy for what his kids accomplished. You and your brother is also an accomplished filmmaker. How about your mom? I mean, can you imagine what she would have thought of you and your brother today? Yeah, that's the hardest one of all. Yeah, I think, you know, I don't know what I believe about what's beyond what I can see. But I have to know, you know, I was asked, let me turn that around. I just say I was asked by a sociologist in the,

early and mid-90s, what my mom's, after a three-hour interview, what my mom's greatest gift to me was. And I instantaneously said to them dying. And then I burst into tears. Because, of course, Guy did not mean that I wanted her to die. But everything that I am has come out of that tragedy.

And so in some ways, she gave me everything, not just life, but in her absence, what I've been able to do. my late father-in-law said it best. You know, he said, you wake the debt. You know, you make Jackie Robinson and Louis Armstrong and Abraham Lincoln come alive. Who do you think you really want to wake up? That's, you know, this is her great gift.

So I have to believe it's somewhere she knows. And with my daughter Sarah naming her firstborn, Lila, and having that such a vibrant part of our lives, It just goes on. She looks a little bit like her. You know, I've sent her a picture of my mom. You know, my daughter never met her grandmother, let alone, you know, my granddaughter meeting her great-grandmother.

And so Lila has on her, you know, in her bedroom a portrait of her namesake. And I sort of feel like she's, you know, here, part of it. When you think about the journey you took, right, you end up at, Hampshire College, you meet this guy, you know, Jerry Lee Ling, and, you know, you meet the person who you would eventually marry and was pivotal in early in your career, Amy Steckler, and all these people that you came across, and these experiences you had that led to Brooklyn Bridge and then the other films and Civil War and all, and baseball, the war, everything you've done.

But when you go back and you think about how you got to that place, how much of that do you think has to do with how hard you worked in your just commitment, devotion, and how much do you attribute to luck? It's the perseverance that that's it. There's serendipity, there's luck along the way, but as Branch Ricky, the man who did two great revolutions in baseball, he invented the farm system, and he brought up Jackie Robinson. He said luck is the residue of design. And so design comes from hard work of rolling up your sleeves. And you're right to name those people. Every film, Lewis Mumford, was a mentor in Brooklyn Bridge. The Shaker Eldresses in their 90s, Bertha and Gertrude, were mentors in our Shaker film.

Robert Penn Warren was the same in Huey Long, Shelby Foote in the Civil War, Winton in jazz. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And I've said this over and over again. It's probably nauseatingly cliched. But for nearly 50 years, I have made stories about the U.S., but I've also made stories about us. All the intimacy of us and we and our and all of the majesty and the complexity and the contradiction and the controversy of the U.S. and that is a wonderful space to be in.

I know that I am greedy for creation. I just keep adding the number of films the older I get when I should be slowing down. Should be. Who says? And I'm doing that because I know I won't be given a thousand years to live. And if I were given a thousand years to live, I wouldn't run out of topics in American history to do.

So I'm doing as many as I can do because that's what I know how to do. That's what I love doing. That's Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker and co-founder of Florentine Films. Thank you, Guy. This has been fun. Yeah, thank you. I hope this was kind of what you want.

I mean, it's not what you want. It's you've got material that you can use, I guess, is what I want. Well, yeah, I mean, you're Ken Burns. But I did you do what you don't do to your subjects, which is I made you sit butt in chair without a single break. I actually stood up the whole time. Oh, you did. Because I sat down in the chair and I go, I can't do this.

I'm going to have to at least rock. If I can't walk with Guy, I got to rock. So I've been swaying to and flow in the breeze of this conversation. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can follow HIV-T on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening right now. Or you can listen to it early and ad-free by subscribing to Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. Another way you can support the show is by filling out a survey at Wondery.com slash survey. And if you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This, and mine is at Guy Raz.

This episode was produced by Carrie Thompson with music composed by Rumpteen Arablewe. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Claire Murashima. Our production staff includes Casey Herman, Liz Metzger, Alex Chung, J.C. Howard, Julia Carney, and Elaine Coates. Our intern is Margaret Serino. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Build This.