SmartLess - "Ken Burns"

Episode Date: September 20, 2021

We are blessed to have Ken Burns sit down with us this week. Ken clears up the rumors about George Washington’s wooden teeth and teaches us how much sap it takes to make syrup... amongst other things like The Civil War, Baseball, and his upcoming series, Muhammed Ali. After all, history is “story” plus ‘hi.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey guys, we're about to start a show today on the show that's called SmartList that we're all part of and right before we do the show, we do this little intro thing that's really interesting and fun to do just because we need to come over and fucking give you a hug. What is happening? We started too early. It's 12.20. Yeah, you're falling apart. Welcome to SmartList.

We had two shows today and we just had a little break and what did you do in your break? I'll tell you exactly what I did. I made a couple eggs, put some avocado and some toast, put it all together and I put it in my goddamn mouth. First of all, to be fair, you weren't really asking what we did. Yeah, I was wondering. You just tell us. So don't dress it up as a question like, what did you guys do?

What I did was blah, blah, blah, that's all you wanted. You just wanted to tell us that. Yes, exactly. And he probably spent the whole hour in between the two podcasts recording going, boy, what should I start off the chat with? Oh, I know. I'll just tell him what I ate. That'll be a great conversation starter.

Sean, you're the worst. Also, Sean, we don't live in like 1950s connected to New York where we don't have access to avocado. Anybody can get an avocado now. So it's not a big deal. And you're not supposed to give any thought, you're not supposed to pre-think what we're going to be talking about. I'm not.

I literally just sat down. I climbed like, I'm still wiping the eggs off my face. I'm just saying, it's a pretty, what the kids would say, pretty weird flex. Oh. So just if we're being fair. All right. So what did you do? Oh, so now it is a topic of conversation.

I'm going to go with it. Some charity. I just went and did some charity. Oh, did you help some people out? Yep. I went and helped. I know, you know what I did? I made Archie some toast and a little bit of breakfast.

And everybody's carbo-loading. When's the big race, guys? When's the big race? Yes. I worked. I worked. Hang on, Sean. Hang on, Sean.

Oh, did you? Yeah. Doing what? I was watching a cut of episode 407 of Ozark. Ozark? Yeah. You know what? I'll agree with you.

Watching Ozark is work. I agree with you. Oh. I walked right into it. I deserve it. Are you, Jason, can you feel the, like can you see the barn door from here at the end of Ozark? How are you feeling right now?

Emotionally about it for real? Barn door. I love it. I'm feeling great about it because I feel like we did, you know, it's just, we remember we talked about in the last episode about trying to make a friend of mortality and hoping that you at least used your years correctly. It's kind of like what this is, like, you know, the show's not going to go on forever. So when it comes to an end, you'd want to look back and hope that you're proud of it.

And I think we all are. And you're directing the last episode as well, right? Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Which is awesome. And I wish, I always say this to you. I love your episodes that you direct.

I always notice a difference. I do like them. It's hard for me to give you that compliment. Thank you. But would you... What I'm ready for the butt. Here it comes. No.

Do you feel added pressure now? I mean, it's like a little bit of like the leave. Like what is the leave that, you know? The only thing that I'm trying to focus on is, you know, the writers specifically Chris Mundy just did a great job of sort of trying to land the plane correctly, you know, in his mind with the story and the themes and all that stuff. And he really, they really did. And so I'm just hoping that, you know, we don't screw it up with the way we acted or

photographed. To service that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, service. When do I pitch my part? Like for the finale? Gosh. I don't want to come in at the finale.

November would probably be a good... Do you have a webcam? Are you comfortable self-tapping? I'll do it, right? Okay. I had... Jason, it's funny you asked that because now that I realized that I shouldn't have said that to you.

I'm, you know, I'm doing this. I just know I'm doing this Netflix show, this new show, and it's kind of like improv-y and whatever. And I had this lovely sound guy saying to me yesterday, at the end of our first week, and he's putting my mic on, and he goes, man, you got to do a lot. You got to know all that dialogue, and then you got to improvise, and you got to do all this stuff. And he goes, huh, I mean, it's a lot of pressures on you to really make sure the pressure is

really on you as I'm starting the day at 7 a.m., and I look at him and I'm like, he's a great guy. I'm like, what are you doing, man? I got to... Thanks. Thanks for reminding me. It cost me $50. It cost me $50, but he was open to it.

I'm so stressed out. I started the day like in a whole, like walking towards it, I was like, it is on me. I got to... Boy, I really got to step up on this next scene. It's all on you. Anyway, while talking about stepping up in filmmaking and pressure, we're going to find out if our guest today feels any pressure. He...

Probably asleep by now. Sorry, sorry, guest. He could be. But I will say this. I'll tell you what I don't do is I don't fall asleep when I'm watching his films. He has been making incredible films for a long time for many, many years. He's originally from New York and then lives in New Hampshire. He's a filmmaker who's made, put it this way, he's garnered a bunch of awards, including

two Oscar nominations, two Grammy Awards, 15 Emmy Awards. He has made some of the, you know, probably the best documentaries any of us has ever watched throughout the course of our lives, from Brooklyn Bridge to Statue of Liberty, to baseball, to Civil War, and to now the new Muhammad Ali documentary that's coming out this fall. Ken Burns. Ladies and gents. Ken Burns.

Wow. My God. Good Lord. Ken Burns. Wow. And he's in a booth. I love this. This is so cool.

I've seen so many of your films. It's so great to meet you. Yeah. It's my pleasure. It's great to be with you today. Yeah. Super cool. I will say that you, sir, are responsible for my addiction to baseball.

I followed every sport a little bit for my whole life up until about 20 years ago. And maybe it's more than that now. Maybe 25 years ago when I saw the baseball documentary, multi, multi, multi-part documentary. And now I, that's all I follow because you, that series of documentaries, got me to see it more as a game as opposed to a sport and all the history and the pageantry and the elegance of it. Yeah. And all the people you got to speak about it.

Thank you for that. A moment. Well, that's great. You know, it's the only, it's the best game that's ever been invented. That's for sure. And it's so interesting that we don't sort of think about the obvious that there's, this is the only sport in which the defense has the ball. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and you know, it's not the, not the ball or the puck or the, or the, you know, pig skin that scores, it's, it's the person. Yeah. And there's, and there's no time limit, you know, we're there till there's a winner. Yeah. You know what, by the way, but while we're disparaging other sports and I'm going to excuse the, the shot at hockey, Ken, because I'm such an incredible fan of yours and he

will climb through the mic. He's a crazy Canadian. I have such reverence for what you do. Football, it occurred to me last year that American football, and I want to hear your views on this because, because you're a very learned man. American football, only like three people ever touched the ball. So you can be a guy who's a lineman on either side, pick your side, by the way, defensive or offensive lineman, and you can have a Hall of Fame career.

Yeah. I played 18 years in the NFL and you never touched the ball. So are you a football player or are you a wrestler? Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's okay. But, you know, George Wills had a great line about that in our baseball series. He said that, that football has two of the worst habits in American life, a frequent

committee meetings punctuated by violence. That's funny. That's the perfect description. Now, let me ask you, first of all, I want to say this, you're standing, you're, you're in a booth. Are you standing in the booth? I'm sitting in a booth. Okay.

On a stool. On a stool. You have incredible posture. You have incredible posture. You have the posture of somebody who's standing. Cause I often stand. I can put a book on my head if you guys want to keep up with the finishing school aspects of this.

No, no. But I wanted to say that you, I love that you're in a booth. It really tickles me. So I am going to kind of, we're going to jump all over the place a little bit. And the reason I bring it up is your films are such incredible films. And you've told so many great stories and so many aspects of, and I'm getting this a little bit later, of American life. You've dissected so many different areas that have, you know, represent a real cross-section

of kind of what makes America America or makes Americans American. But in order to, to tell that, those stories over the, and by the way, Jason and I hate the term storytellers, but truly you do tell a story. And you, you use narrators and voiceover artists who aren't necessarily voiceoverers. And what I'm getting to is this, it's two part. It's like, by the way, this question is 12 part. I'm familiar with that. Yes.

The first voiceover, I think that you, you, was David McCullough the first real narrator that you had for one of your films? Yeah. He, I got him to narrate the, you know, I filmed him on camera and I was hoping that he could be the third person, the narrator of it. And for a while his folks were sort of, we don't know, but I'd, I'd always, I always knew that in most cases I needed to have a complimentary chorus of first person voices that would read the letters.

Now that's not true in, in my most recent film made with Sarah Burns and David McMahon on, on Muhammad Ali, but if it warrants it, if it's a place, I'm just finishing a film on Benjamin Franklin and Mandipa Tanken is the voice of Franklin and there's several other people who are reading first person in addition to, to Peter Coyote doing the third person. In the case of Ali, it's Keith David, but David did the first five or six of the first seven films and stopped at Civil War. And stopped at Civil War.

So David, David McCullough, if you guys don't know who he is, you know, incredible historian and your relationship, am I right, your relationship started because you're the document you did on the Brooklyn Bridge was based on his book. Is that right? Well, not, but I, I was given his book called The Great Bridge, the epic story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and I literally finished it in one gulp and I said to my partners, we just started our company in the mid seventies and I just said, you know, and we all lived in the same apartment.

This is our next film and they looked at me like I was crazy, like I was trying to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge, but he had made that story come alive. So the film I made, the first half is the history, the second half, this is an hour long film, I probably couldn't do an hour long film to save my life now, was sort of the response to it in the last century of, you know, just ingenuity and hope and promise and the way it's been a backdrop for so many things good and bad. So it's not sort of based on that. He just told the best story of how it got built and, and I, I got him to narrate and

he taught us a lot in the course of narrating about writing, which was a hugely great thing and he appeared on camera and then went on to narrate the shakers and Huey Long and the Statue of Liberty and the Congress and the Civil War. And I made a couple others in there and he didn't do it. And you're right. He is a great story too. Even when he gives speeches, when he accepts awards and stuff, his speeches, his speech writing is excellent and his cadence and everything that about his voice also is really

interesting. And he gave me a really hard time when I said I wanted to use McCulloch because they presumed that you would use an actor, you know, out of that stable of narrator, Alexander Scurby, Orson Welles, kind of deep, basso profondo kind of voice. And I said, no, this guy knows the story. Well, isn't it better to inhabit the meaning of it so completely and fully? And well, I have then moved and continued to use like amazing people, Sally Kellerman has been a narrator in a film besides Keith David and Peter Coyote, who are great actors

in their own right. They're, you know, we've just had Jason Robards has read, Aussie Davis has been a narrator. He narrated a film on Thomas Jefferson in the first question at the television critics. Some guys said, hey, you know, Aussie Davis is black. And I went, what? He's black? Yeah. Right.

Who did the narrating in baseball? I want to say, I want to say John Chancellor, but that's, that's you. You got it right. I do. It was so funny because when McCulloch said, you know, I'm going to go on and do something else. And he's, you know, he's a writer that this was, you know, I was taking him away from the day job.

And somebody had said, I'd heard that somebody told me that John Chancellor was from Pittsburgh, where David was from. So I tried out Chancellor. It was funny because he had, I really had to, to the late John Chancellor, really wonderful human being. I really had to sort of break him like a wild horse of the kind of announcer's voice. So the baseball series begins and he would read it. In 1909, a man named Charles Hercules Ebbets began secretly buying up adjacent parcels

of land in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, including the site of a garbage dump called Pig... How do you remember that? The pigs that once ate their fill there and the stench that still filled the air. Oh, remember that word? Perfect. How do you... Because I'm the scratch narrator.

I read it. I read it for all the folks. Of course. He lays down all the scratchers. That's amazing. I can go on. But what happened is I broke him and I, and so I said, look, he's just talking to your grandchildren.

Just let, make sure they lean in. So he goes in 1909, a man named Charles Hercules Ebbets began, and like that he goes, oh, you want me to be God's stenographer, none of the ego, all of the meaning. And I go, that's it. Yeah. I just want to say the one more. So my last thing on that is I, as a voice guy, a guy who's made a lot of my career around my voice.

I am such a fan of David McCulloch, it's funny to say, because he's not, that's not what he does. That is not his day job. And I think he's so excellent at it. And I remember actually right after 9-11, somebody put out a commercial, it was like the first, do you remember that? And they used his voice to kind of calm America down. They said, everybody, everything's going to be okay.

Everybody relaxed. Yeah, he's the perfect guy to tell us. It's totally perfect. And it was so funny, the grief I got just because he didn't have the credentials. I said, he knows this story cold. He knows American history. As a voiceover guy, I would say he's one of the best. You're like, this guy, he's just got it.

He's up there. He's in the pants on. Sorry, Sean, I keep coming up. No, that's okay. I'm fascinated with your work ethic. And because you've done so many films and your work life balance, it just seems like I want to know how you do it. I want to know production and like, because you have so many films coming out.

You've done so many films. How do you do it? So work life balance, that's really great. So you should have told me I'd get both my ex-wives here and they could tell you about that. You know, look, I just turned 68 and I'm so greedy. I've got, I'm working on seven films, not counting Muhammad Ali, which I'm in the evangelical stage.

I have different teams. I've had two or three teams for an awfully long time. It's just like, you know, if I were given a thousand years to live, I wouldn't run out of topics in American history. And so, you know, we're pretty good at generaling and marshaling our resources. So, you know, we're shooting a few, we're in pre-production in a few, we're editing three, you know, and I just move, I never miss an important thing. And I delegate some stuff that I used to do obsessively before, but that's healthy,

you know, and the other thing is, I'm telling the same story over and over again. And each film asks a deceptively simple question. Who are we? Who are these strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans? And what does an investigation of the past tell us about not only that moment, that event, but where we are now and where we may be going. And so, you don't ever answer the question. You sound it deeply in each one and they're recurring themes.

You know, everybody says, well, history repeats itself. Of course it doesn't, there's never been a moment when history has repeated itself. But Mark Twain is supposed to have said, it doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And that's a really good way of doing it. You begin to appreciate the rhymes, race, for example. You make a film on Thomas Jefferson, here's a guy who distills a century of enlightenment thinking into one sentence that begins, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and yet he owned hundreds of human beings in his lifetime and

didn't see the hypocrisy of the contradiction. And so, we have a nation that is, you know, up until now and tomorrow, completely struggling to deal with the question of race. And so, I can think of a handful of films of the nearly 40 that I've done that don't do it. I could count on the fingers of one hand, the films that aren't about it. Yeah, of course. And it plays a big role.

And I know that you've discussed that and you've discussed recently this idea of, you know, people sort of stepping up and saying, why should a white filmmaker like you be the guy telling these stories and stuff? And I know that also your answer is, well, we all have questions to ask and why can't we all play a part in asking those questions? And it's just as valid for me to ask, is anybody else? And I'm sorry, I'm not putting words in your mouth. You can tell me if.

Yeah, no, no, no. I think it's important to tell a lot of stories, but I also think it's important to remember that we're all in this together and connected. And I just came across, it's so interesting that you just brought that up because I came across this great, just a couple of days ago, this great quote by Martin Luther King that is so totally to this. This is what he said. It's just so, it's so perfect.

He goes, all life is interrelated. All people are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality, which means is my beats American history. And I can't say I'm only going to do one sort of thing because the warp and woof of it is so intertwined and so interconnected that how can you not?

And I don't go looking for it in most cases. Obviously, if I pick jazz or I pick Jackie Robinson or Jack Johnson or in this case, Muhammad Ali, it's going to be dealing with the question of race, but so does the Civil War. So does every other film we've made. Yeah. And like you said, it comes up a lot because it is such an integral part. It's woven into the fabric of this, of America. It's part of it.

You can't escape it. It's our original sin. Yeah. It's the original sin. We're under the thrall of three viruses right now, the COVID and a 402-year-old virus of white supremacy and racial intolerance started in 1619 and then an age old human one that everybody's been writing about and talking about it, which is misinformation and lies and paranoia and conspiracy.

And when they meet together, it's just a shit show. Also the other title of our show. Yeah. The shit show. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. You've been making films about the American experience and about America for the, you know, whatever, it's been over 40 years.

Do you have a cynical view now of where we're headed and where we've come from? Is it doom and gloom or do you feel okay? Well I don't think anybody has the luxury at this moment of being cynical. Cynical's a, you know, like just debauchery is just a luxury of too much time and too many things that you're not doing with your hands that you begin doing with your hands. It's really serious. There are three great crises before this, the Civil War, the Depression and World War II.

This is equal to it. And it's the first time that we've got, Lincoln gave this great talk when he was very, very young to the young men's lyceum on a Saturday afternoon, I think it was. And people will write in and tell you that that wasn't a Saturday afternoon. It was an afternoon conversation about foreign policy. He said, this is when he's like not even 29, he's a lawyer in Springfield. He said, when shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow?

And then he answered his own question, never all the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa could not by force take a drink from the Ohio river or make a track in the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live through all time or die by suicide. And we're, you know, we're looking right down the muzzle of that gun. That quote is so great. It's also, there's a band called Titus Andronicus and they actually have that quote.

Have you ever heard that song? Yes. It's pretty cool the way they use it. It's really cool. That's the way I opened the Civil War series. I mean, it's the end of the intro and you just kind of like, oh, that's right. You know, we got these two great oceans that provide this kind of geographical force field and two relatively benign neighbors north and south that, that provide the same thing.

And so if, if we're going to hell, it's from within. Yeah. And that's what's the biggest. Ken, tell, if you would tell Jason what the Civil War is, um, well, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's said of criminal prosecution, there's civil, is it, is it like a courtroom drama that you've written? That's right. It's, it's, yeah, that's right.

It's about people fighting politely. That you've written. Is Corbyn Burson in it? Yes, yes, right. Yeah. Yes. I'm in. Exactly.

Yeah. You're totally in. With all of your passion and respect, um, for, for America and, and its history and its promise and its idea, uh, and, and all the sort of altruism you've, you've shown us with the stuff that you've given us to watch and learn from, do you feel a sense of urgency right now to speak even louder and work even quicker with something because obviously what you do take so much time and so much care that even if you started something, you know, on January 7th to address the crescendo that we seem to have hit, it ain't going to hit

us for another year or so and three years for me. I mean, I, as people say, people ask me about Ali, they go, so why Ali now? And I go, I started this in 2014. What are you talking about? I didn't, you know, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, it's not there, but they're all relevant at, you know, everything rhymes. If people ever reached out to you and said like, from other countries or other parts of the globe and said like, can you tell really great stories about America?

But we have this going on over here. We would love if you would tell this story about what's happening in our country. But you know, it's interesting, the longest film that's ever been shown at the Cannes Film Festival is not Shoah, which is a phenomenal film. But our series on the Second World War called The War that came out in 2007. But it's American-centric though. And people, yeah, it was completely American-centric and we told the story of the greatest cataclysm in human history from the point of view of four geographically distributed American towns.

But it was this amazing group of people like a little United Nations that went from one screening room to the other as Cannes moved it from a big screening room in the main building to smaller rooms in that same building. And some people just sort of gave up their agenda and watched it and then went back to Denmark or then went back to Japan and said, we want to do this same sort of stuff. But our films play really well. The Civil War and now Ali and Jazz have gone all over the place. And what was great is that people felt that the Civil War series, I got this from Canadians

and Mexicans as well as everybody else. Ah, this is the Rosetta Stone. I finally kind of understand my complicated neighbor to the south. Yeah. You know, that was the general letter from Canadians. I didn't learn American history in the same way. I'm a big fan of history as students and it's exclusively pretty much what I read. And I've had to sort of educate myself on American history as I got older because and

of course your film was instrumental in helping me understand the Civil War and the intricacies. But I will say, I've often thought, I wish that Ken Burns would make a movie about Eastern Europe because I think I am right now, by the way. Are you are? Yeah. I'm making a film called the US and the Holocaust. And it's what we knew and when we knew it, what we did, what we didn't do it. But the central story is from is Poland.

Yes. Yes. Those stories, Poland, ethnic polls in the Ukraine. If you could start getting into that, we could really start understanding why the world is the way it is today. Stay tuned next fall. Next fall. Oh my God.

Ken, I'm coming over. Are there any other subjects or things that you will not touch or go near or don't want to? No, no, no. I mean, it's, I have up until now been entirely American history and it's, and what I tell people is that I'm a filmmaker. I'm not trained in history. I, you know, I took a Russian history course my first year of college.

The last time I took American history course was 11th grade, you know, when they put a gun to your head and make you take it. I love it, but I am a storyteller and I just happen to work in history the way somebody might work, a painter might work in oil as opposed to watercolor or do still lifes as opposed to landscapes. And that's it. And it works out pretty well because the word history is mostly made up of the word story plus hi, which is a good way to begin a story.

And that's what I've been doing. I am, I have to admit the team, my oldest daughter Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon and I, we made the Central Park Five and Jackie Robinson, IEP to film they did called Eastlake Meadows that came out last year about a public housing story, Atlanta, horrible, amazing, transcendent story. But we've done this Ali thing together and the next thing we're doing is our first non-American, my first non-American topic on Leonardo da Vinci. Wow.

I can't wait. You know, a gay bastard who, you know, is arguably, you know, in the running for the person of the last millennium. Yeah. Sean, was the title of your autobiographical one act? Absolutely. Ken and I are working on that. Yeah.

Hey, Ken, was Lincoln gay? I don't know. You know, how do we know? You know, there's what you're referring to, Sean, is that his partner, Joshua Speed, they exchange letters that are intimate and fill of, I can't wait till you get to the end tonight where we could be able to touch and hold each other. And so there was this presumption that the language of intimacy, which is true of women and of people in general, I don't know.

Jesus, Sean, don't put them on the spot. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, Sean. Why put them on the spot? And you know, and also... Hey, Ken is with Jim Neighbors gay. Yeah.

Hey, Ken, did George Washington's mouth really stink? No, you know, he did not have wooden teeth, by the way, guys. And he did tell lies, everybody lies, and he couldn't throw a dollar coin across the baton. Can I ask you about the filmmaking part of it? You're the... I don't mean to dork out for a second, but you're... The way in which you light and literally the focal length you use on a lot of your interviews,

the shallow depth of field, the single source lighting, the music that you choose... The single camera. The single camera, yeah, whether it be, you know, a tiny piano or even your use of the Beastie Boys mix up in the addendum to the baseball thing, the 10th inning, I mean, talk to me about your taste in filmmaking and your working, your enjoyment of working with multiple departments to shape that experience for the audience. It's a great question, and you've asked a lot of questions, you know, maybe, you know, if style is the authentic application of technique, right?

If somebody has a... Oh, that's a style. It just means that you've used the tools at your disposal in a way that seems to be authentic or genuine, organic, consistent. And then you can stand in a room of Cezanne paintings and go, wow, they're all different if you go up close, but they share something which is an authenticity coming from one person. So we all, as filmmakers, have lots of techniques at our disposal. I could reduce it for clarity to eight.

They're for visual and for oral, and the visual are obvious, still photographs and energetic exploring of them, trying to will them alive, trusting that they had a past and a future to the arrested moment that they represented, footage, live cinematography of the now quiet whatever you want to say, and interviews. And then orally, you have a third person narrator, you have first person voices, you have sound effects as complicated as a feature film, and you have music. Music, Jason, is the art of the invisible, as Wynton Marsalis describes. It's the only art form that you don't see.

And so it works faster than any other one. And so what we do is we, in our process, we don't have a set research and writing period that produces a script that informs shooting and editing. However improvisational you might be within the context of those, we never stop researching and we never stop writing, and it makes us corrigible to the end. But more importantly, we don't add the music at the end. We bring it up to early in the editing, if not just before the editing process, so that the music, its pace and rhythm, its dynamism drives the scene.

And it may be authentic to that period. It may be using, you know, Beastie Boys, or it may be using rap in a later period. But it also may be free and liberated from that. The most memorable tune from the Civil War is not from the Civil War's period. Everything else was, either a folk tune, a hymn, or a marching song, except for this one thing, a Shokan farewell, which was written by one of my session musicians that bridges the gap, a Jewish guy from the Bronx who wrote the most beautiful Scotch Irish lament I've ever heard, a Shokan farewell.

So what we're doing is we want it just to work and we'll just use whatever works. And this Muhammad Ali thing has got, it's got Philip Glass, it's got some original compositions by this kid, wonderful composer named Jaleel Beetz, a guy we've worked with named Dave Sierra, lots of R&B, lots of soul, lots of funk, you know, and then some rap and other stuff. And sometimes we import Jaleel Beetz back to the early sixties when there wouldn't have been anything like this, you know, to animate a fight, or maybe we're using it authentically that this is the year this guitar riff from Jimi Hendrix came out, so let's use that.

But that's the same thing is true of, I'm finishing Benjamin Franklin, the stuff that we're using is stuff from the 18th century that he would have heard, or that it would have been composed for an instrument called the Glass Armonica that he invented. I mean, music is the most important element in a way because it undergirds everything. But remind me, I think you just said it, you do pick some things or compose some things if you're not using needle drops, as they say, before you see the footage even that inspires. That's how we start editing. I mean, for Civil War, just to give you an example, I went into old hymnals and old

song books, and I had somebody plunk them out on the piano, and whenever something hit me, I go that one. And then we go into the studio with Session Musician and probably do 30 different recordings, some of them a single hand on a piano, rubato, untethered to any kind of pace, some of them adding different instrumentation, sometimes subtracting that instrumentation, sometime ensemble. And that music will then inform the edit. Yeah.

And Jason, I have literally extended a sentence so that the words fit the phrase of music, and I've cut a sentence so that the words fit the phrase of music because music is God. I love. Really quick, this is, I think this is kind of interesting, Steven Spielberg in E.T., so he heard John Williams score at the end of the movie. John scored it before he saw the movie, and Steven loved, he didn't want to cut any of it. That's why the long goodbye between Elliot and E.T., it's very, very, very long because

Steve Spielberg didn't want to cut one single note of it. He knows. He gets it because at some point, if you think about scoring as a mathematical term, that means you're all watching the film, you got headphones and you're looking, and you want to have that beat at exactly this and that, and we don't do that. We'd rather move the action to the beat that is already there. That's part of the authenticity. I remember even on our little show we did in Venice, a Netflix show called Flaked, we

had, I always knew that we were going to end the whole series on this song, Range Life, by Pavement and the great Steve Malchemist who actually scored the show as well, but I always wanted to, and I didn't tell him until the very end of the edit process of the second season, I said, I've always wanted to use Range Life, and I hope you're okay with that. And he was like, yeah, and so we shot, we had this sort of single shot of me riding my bicycle through Venice, and we shut all these intersections off and set around, and then we had this really sneaky little edit as I passed this van, but we thought that

we'd time it anyway. We get into post and it's just not quite long enough to fit for where I wanted to hit. So we did a lot of trickery and extended shots and extended little pieces because of like, it has to, it cannot be one fucking beat off, it has to be exactly to Steve's song. Yeah, intact. That's the most important thing. You've got to serve the music, even though it is in the film process traditionally, not an afterthought, but something done at the end.

And I think it has to be, it's not icing on the cake, it's fudge, it's baked in there. They sent me a little screener of the Muhammad Ali documentary film that I'm so excited to watch. Well, I know, I've got it, by the way, I've got it, you guys. It's as excellent as you thought it would be and hoped it would be and even more so. And it occurred to me, Muhammad Ali, I mean, we live in a day and age now where we have access to, for any sort of, you know, especially living figure, there's a tremendous amount of documentation of that person's life.

There's video and film and et cetera, and photographs. Muhammad Ali, and again, correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm wrong a lot. There are a lot of photographs, there is a lot of video of him and he must have been one of the first people of whom there was a lot of these things that in existence. Is that right? You'd be surprised, he is one of the most photographed and interviewed person, he's such good copy. But I think what we tend to do is because of the time I'm given, we can let go of our

own preconceptions. Sometimes we're fitting Muhammad Ali into our thought. There are lots of great documentaries on him that I love. They're mostly about a particular fighter. A couple years, we wanted to do soup to nuts, birth and boyhood, Louisville, segregated, Jim Crow, Kentucky, to Death by Parkinson's five years ago, not that long ago in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. That's our comprehensive thing.

What we were able to find by spending the seven years doing it is all of this material that you wouldn't necessarily have. It doesn't serve a purpose. It belies the thing that at this point he was supposed to be this way or that way, valuable, and then he's despised for that volubility because athletes aren't supposed to brag and certainly not black athletes. That's not our definition, but he's redefining what a black manhood means. Maybe Jackie Robinson, a subject I've treated a few times, was the earlier generation.

This is an entirely new one. He joins the nation of Islam, the separatist, hardly Islamic cult. It's just a cult. He's about separation when Americans are finally getting hip to the mainstream integrationist movement of the civil rights. Then he refuses the draft, so he's this pariah, and he works his way back in interesting ways. You want the music to reflect that, but you also want the footage. You don't go looking for never before seen or that because you want it to work.

Everything has to serve the telling of the story, but you realize that we are so complicated. As Whitman said, we contain multitudes. Do I contradict myself? Ali does that, and there's nothing wrong with that. It just downstairs in the main cockpit of the editing room in Neon, in cursive lower case it says it's complicated. There isn't a filmmaker in the world who doesn't, when a scene is working, want to go, don't touch it, but when we find new and contradictory information, we just go, okay, let's make

it even more complicated. Let's add undertoe if it's true to that story. The access to that unique material, though, is it just a question of you have the luxury of taking more time to seek it out and find it, or is it a question of licensing it, and do you have to pay for it before you say you're going to use it? No. I don't want to get into the weeds of the business of it all. Yes, you do.

Please come and visit us while we're editing. I would love that. We have time code and watermarks. You got to look through a lot of stuff to see it. You would presume that filmmaking is architectural, that is, you're building something. While I have scaffolding and false work that will be taken away eventually, it's just additive. It's subtractive. I live in New Hampshire here.

We make maple syrup that takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, and that's what it is. Our editing room floor is covered with really good scenes, and so we're pulling out stuff and trying to honor the negative space of creation, what's not there. We need the time. It's not a luxury. It's a necessity in order to collect all the material. At any given moment, Jason, there may be 40 other photographs that could fit in at that

moment. It's rarely that case, but you have those kind of options, and you're just trying to figure it. Sometimes you're making a decision, well, that's got a light background, and a dark background has a warmth, and the psychology of the reception of that image is that, and I'm saying, let's just change it. I know the other one's sharper and a little bit better, and we're looking through watermarks and time code.

What would you do with 40 gallons of sap? First of all, I was just going to say that it's funny, all of my films, all the good scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. All right, back to the show. I will say it does seem overwhelming, but also I can see your passion for even as you talk about it, you have this excitement about all of it. Process, it's process. It's not the film.

So whenever it comes out, if it says Ali on it, well, that's for you guys, right? But I'm doing the same thing. Somebody asked me earlier about putting my head on the pillow, like all I want to know is that I made a film better that day. Yeah, right, right. That's so great. The best moment was mixing the Civil War series, where you know how it is, you're laying in the different tracks, and we hadn't laid down the gunshot at Ford's Theater, and we'd done

everything else. We had the arena stage theater that put on Our American Cousin, all the tiny Victorian at Custodale be gone, and door slams, and footfalls, and laughter, and people coughing in the narrator, and whatever the music was, but we hadn't laid in the bullet, and I was saying, okay, it's all analog. Back in the Mixer's lead actor, great, great feature film mixer, Woody and Spike, and Marty and everybody, and it sound one in the Brill Building, and we're going, and he looks around at me, and I yell, stop, just before it comes to rest on the bullet.

And we just sat there, tears rolling down our cheeks, and then I nodded to him. He went back, laid the bullet down, but the best moment was just for a moment, not having killed Abraham, like it just held him from death, you know, from the mouth. That's interesting. Yeah, you get to play with history. Yeah, it's just amazing stuff, you know, the laws of storytelling, as you know, are the same for me and Steven Spielberg, and I talked to him about it, I interviewed him on a stage in Washington, and we realized it's the same thing.

He can make shit up, and I can't, but it's the same laws of storytelling. Yeah, right, sure. But your ability to create these incredibly compelling moments, having your hands tied with the fact of the story, in other words, you can't embellish a big, you know, crescendo ending for dramatic satisfaction. You are a slave to what the story was and what the ending is, and so your ability to craft the lead-up to and the framing of is unmatched, and I'd say that in front of Spielberg. I mean, it's just incredible what you do, and I just can't thank you enough for doing

it. Thank you. Thank you. You know, Shelby Foote in the Civil War called me up and he said, God's the greatest dramatist. Because you just, you know, suddenly you win the war on Friday, good Friday, and you figure that by Tuesday night you got, you're ready, you got some free time, you'll go to the theater. Yeah.

You can't make that shit up. I forgot to mention Shelby Foote. I stopped drinking because of Shelby Foote, because we'd be on the seventh, you know, bourbon, and I'd be under the table, and he'd be talking away, and I'd be like, oh, man, I can't do this anymore. Where did you get the discipline, the instinct to ignore good in the pursuit of great, you know, because a lot of people will just stop at good, and that's just, you know, good stuff.

I think moving up here helped me 42 years ago this week. I had finished shooting most of the Brooklyn Bridge film, and I needed a real job in New York, and I could easily put the film footage up on top of the refrigerator, and then boom, wake up, and I'm 45 and didn't finish that novel the way they had got. So I moved up here where I could live for nothing, and the first film got nominated for an Academy Award, and people said, come back to New York, go into LA, and go, no, I'm gonna stay here, because I realized that that dynamic of what we do required an amount of time, and you could build a community of people who have the patience and understand

their respect for the process. So when we finish it, but we're doing the same thing every day, we're just trying to make a film better. Do you live in a small town up there, Kim? It is like, looks like Courier and I. Yeah, and do people like, do people point, stand up and go, that's where that crazy filmmaker lives? He lives in that.

People drive by, but you know, they leave me alone. It's really great. So any kind of celebrity plus 50 cents gets a cup of coffee. You know what I mean? It's like, they care more about whether if my neighbor's not feeling well, I shovel their drive, you know? Yeah, of course. No, no, I spent enough time in New England to know that the fact that you're a celebrity

makes them want to pay less attention to you. The biggest thing that happened is about 10 or 15 years ago, I was giving some talk in town, and I said, look, I realize that maybe my great, great, great grandchildren have a chance to be on the volunteer fire department, right? Yeah. About two or three years ago, a guy that I know who comes at four in the morning to fix your cracked pipes, who's a volunteer on the EMS, came and brought me a T-shirt that said Walpole Volunteer Fire Department.

It's like, I died and gone to heaven. It was just like. That's so crazy, because Jason used to often have to fix his crack pipe at 4 AM, but I used to, I was going to know it was going to take that one. Man, I didn't even see that either. I know. I'm sorry about it. Is there a filmmaker Ken that you admire?

Is there a doc in your genre, in your world that you're like, how can I? Oh, yeah, lots. I love Fred Wiseman, who does Cinema Verité. I've dabbled in it. The Central Park Five is as close to the film I made on these dyslexic kids, learning to memorize and recite the Gettysburg Address. I love that. I love what Errol Morris does, the highly stylized stuff of that.

Bernard Herzog is a good friend of mine, and he and I are like total opposites of what we do. He's a total opposite of everybody, it seems. We were on a panel once, and he looked at me, and he said, I'm interested in an ecstatic truth. My friend Ken is interested in an emotional truth, and he turned to Michael Moore, and he said, you, with your big belly hanging out, you're interested in a physical truth. And he looked at D.A. Pennebaker, the great Cinema Verité guy, and said, and you, you,

I think you're my enemy. Cinema Verité is the cinema of accountants. Wow, my gosh. I don't know who that is. You've got to see his film, My Best Fiend, which is Bernard Herzog's relationship with Klaus Kinski, which is just phenomenal. And Bernard Herzog, and I say this with a lot of respect and love, is a fucking nut job in the best way.

In the best way. But so that must be an interesting, interesting. Well, he's gotten into documentaries after two or three decades, and still does features of, but he's really gotten into documentaries, and it's so different. And it's just he will run through every stop sign that I will politely put on the brakes and look both ways and proceed with caution, and he doesn't care. Do your kids want to do what dad does? Well, I've got four daughters.

The oldest, Sarah, has been working with me for 10 years, and her husband was working with me for longer. My second daughter, Lily, is the principal in Jack's Media, which does Samantha Bee and Daisy Sunmarow and Search Party and Broad City. Those are all her shit, and she's great. And then I got a 16-year-old gal who is interested in history, and a 10-year-old gal who makes movies. She goes, Dad, I'm going to make a movie, and I'll be right back.

And she comes in two minutes and comes back with this thing. And I go, how did you do that? I can't even tie my shoes in there. Were you a great student in school? Yeah, I was pretty good, but I really thought I'd be an anthropologist, which is what my dad was. My mom was sick the whole time with cancer, died when I was 11. And this psychologist, maybe to answer the question earlier from Jason, I went to him

one day, my late father-in-law, and he said, I seem to be keeping my mom alive. I couldn't remember to be present the date she died. He was always approaching and then receding. And he said, and I bet you as a kid, you blew out your candles wishing she'd come back alive. I said, how'd you know? She goes, look what you do for a living. You wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive.

Who do you think you're really trying to wake up? And so a lot of the passion is that if my mom hadn't died, we wouldn't be talking. If I hadn't gone to Hampshire College and met a couple of still photographers, Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mays, we wouldn't be talking. I wouldn't have had the guts to start my own company and say, no, I'm just going to do it my way. Every film I've made is a director's cup. The better way of putting it is, there are no complaints.

And the even better way is saying, if you don't like something, it's all my fault. And that's the way it should be. Yeah. Do you ever feel like being a bully and doing a two-hour documentary just so that you can wrap up the Academy Award with no competition whatsoever? No. You know what? I got nominated twice for Brooklyn Bridge, which was one hour.

And for Statue of Liberty, which was one hour. And we didn't win, which was fine. Wow. Third time's a charm. And then the Civil War, we had like a really great score, but somebody on the committee, just a couple of people blackballed us and it didn't even get nominated because it was quote TV. And then we were supposedly the lock for the Central Park Five film and it didn't even

make the final cut. So this is about feature films and the documentaries branch is, I think, trying to improve. And it doesn't matter. People said, well, don't you feel bad about having to get all these grants, make you give it to PBS? I said, no. I traded for a slightly smaller screen. I still go to festivals where we go every year to tell your eye, which is the best festival

on earth and get to Cannes sometimes and go to New York. And it's great. Do you take 95 when you go to New York? No, no, no, no. You take 91 down to the Merritt and then the Merritt to the Cross County, to the Cross County, to the West of Thailand. To the Sawmill. Well, Sawmill for two miles.

Right now. Yeah. Do you get to the Bronx? But don't rule it out because then you'll get screwed. Yeah. Okay. Ken, are you a Red Sox fan? Is the Pope Catholic?

Yeah. Of course I am. I believe in rooting for the place. I've been in New England since 71. So when I went to college. Who was the bigger Red Sox fan? You or Doris Kearns? Good one.

Oh God. You know what? She had the earlier love of the Dodgers. Well, Mike Barnacle. Well, Mike is the best red, both of these people are good friends of mine. The love is the same and while he's pretty cool customer, Doris and I are as neurotic as you could possibly be about the Red Sox and I'm like, my latest thing is to step out and say not only does Big Poppy deserve to be in the Hall of Fame, but he's the greatest

Red Sox player ever. Wow. Because the way that will just bristle up the Ted Williams, Carl Yastramski crowd. But there's, you know, Babe Ruth, maybe, right? Yeah. Yeah. Three World Series. I will say this.

I was at that game in 2004 when Big Poppy hit that home run when the Yankees were up 3-0. Yeah. David Cross. In fact, Jason was there, but Jason left early because he had to fly back to Hollywood because he had to go to a Hollywood elite party. But David Cross and I stayed. David Cross and I stayed and we watched that come, which was the greatest come back then.

The greatest thing ever. I went on that first game when the Yankees went ahead fairly early, I just, I was in New York actually and I went to Lincoln Center because I'm friends with Winton and I just thought, okay, I'll drown and I was walking around and I kind of put it out of my mind figuring it was just like 0-3 the year before we just got screwed, it's over. And I watched this whole concert and then I hear this guy in the next seat, he goes, fuck, they're tied. And I went, what?

And I ran out of Lincoln Center and I called my then wife and who hates baseball and she goes, it's a game of circumstances. I said, yeah, what the fuck is happening? Tell me what happened? She goes, I don't know, it's just tied. And then by the time I got into the subway and back, I sat there like red buttons in Hattari. Does that reference mean anything to you guys?

Red buttons. Okay. So there's a great John Ford film called Hattari about African guys and he designs this net that will let the rocket shoot over a tree so they can trap these monkeys that they'll take back to the zoo. And he's so nervous about it, he doesn't watch it. And so he misses this amazing thing and he spends the rest of the movie in his cup saying, you know, tell me about it again.

Anyway, it's great. And then I just didn't miss anything afterwards. My daughter and son-in-law were at the or future son-in-law were at the sixth game, the bloody sock game and it's incredible. So what that documentary did for me with baseball, you know, I'm a huge classical music fan and I'd love to become as passionate about jazz or even country music. If I watch jazz or if I watch the country music one, will I, will I get the same? Jason Singh, could anything make him passionate about anything?

Go ahead. As long as Ken Burns does a film about it, I'm going to fall in love with it. He's aching to feel. If I, if I had that, that mythical dinner party, I'd invite Abraham Lincoln, but I'm more interested. I would invite Muhammad Ali and Louis Armstrong. Wow. So watch jazz first before country.

No, they're all related. What commerce and convenience makes us put silos around this stuff. Yeah. Stop trying to rank everything. All of the great, the pantheon, the Mount Rushmore of country music all had black teachers right? Right. And when Ray Charles had creative control of an album for the first time, his first

album of his own design was modern sounds in country and western music. And the number one hit of 1962, the summer of 1962 is I Can't Stop Loving You by Ray Charles singing Don Gibson's country song. And it's a black soul singer singing a country voice. It is. Wow. It's unbelievable. And there's just no borders.

Like the best selling country single of all time is by Lil Nas X, who is a black gay rapper. Wow. Wow. Yeah. I mean, that's what, this is where, look, here's my last stick, I promise, is that I've been making films for 45 years, almost 50 years about the US, but I've also been making films about us. And the thing I learned in country music, Jason, is that there's only us.

There's no them. And if anyone tells you there's a them, which is what everybody's doing these days, run away from them. There's only us. Wow. Ken Burns. Great. What a way to end.

Thank you so much. I mean, you're just, it's what an honor to have you. I don't know about these guys, but I could talk to you all day. No, same. You're saying it was who you wanted to. Nine parts. Nine parts. Nine parts.

You want to do it? We've never had a guest. I don't think we've ever had a guest where we have talked over each other so much, trying to get in there with a question. That's right. The three of us just completely enamored with you, and I can't thank you enough for coming on. Yeah.

Salutations and all the incredible work you've done for the last 45, whatever it was. Thank you, Ken, for all of that work. Just really incredible, incredible body work. And so much more to come. I'm so excited about the Muhammad Ali documentary that's coming out in September. We're really excited about it. It's so great. Like I said, I just started it and just all wishing you all the best and so much success

and all good things in your life, Ken. Thank you for being here. Really great. Thanks, Ken. Thanks. Great to be with you. Pleasure. Thank you so much, Ken.

Pleasure. Bye. Bye. Bye. Well, Scotty's obsessed. Obsessed with the Roosevelt's. He's seen it like 10 times. I have not seen that one.

Oh, it's fantastic. Yeah. There's plenty of his that I haven't seen because he has been so prolific. But my God, the ones I have seen and there are a lot of them. It sounds like the only one you've seen is the baseball one. No, it's the one I talk about because it's just, you know, baseball is my passion. Because it's the one you've seen. You know what I'm going to do though?

I'm going to watch each one of them. You don't have enough time. Yeah. No, I'm going to like one a night, one every other night. That's what I'm doing. Listen. No, no, no. I'm talking about like all of them though.

I mean, Vietnam's 10 parts. The war is 10 parts. I mean, it's. Do it all. Yeah. I would, I'll be there right there with you right after I finish driving back from Will's house after watching Ali. Will, I'm coming over for that.

Listen, the war is really good. Yeah. Vietnam is really, really good too. And I do want to watch jazz and country music too. Oh, really great. And Will, you will never beat that as a guest. That's, that's, that's your best, your best guest ever. He's such a fan of his.

Yeah. Yeah. No, me too. But you know what? All of his filmmaking is completely fair and impartial. None of it is. Yeah. He's not, doesn't have an agenda.

Doesn't seem. Bias. Oh. Pretty good. Pretty good. Bias. Bias. Bias.

Bias. Smart. Smart. Bias. Smart. Bias. Smart. Bias.

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