WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 845 - Ken Burns & Lynn Novick

Episode Date: September 10, 2017

Ken Burns and his frequent collaborator Lynn Novick have made indelible documentaries about American life, on subjects like jazz, baseball, the Civil War, and World War II. Their latest film is a ten-part examination of the Vietnam War, and Marc talks with them about the bold storytelling choices used in the film, the decade-long process that went into making an 18-hour documentary, and the lessons learned that show we are still living in an America defined by this specific war. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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I hope I hope you're OK. I'm recording this on Sunday. I know things are getting gnarly and shitty and bad. I just hope I hope you guys get through it. I don't know what I can do or what I can say, but my thoughts are with you. And my mother's down there. And I've been trying to text her. I don't know what exactly is happening. But I hope mom's okay.

I hope you're okay, mommy. You know, I could probably do this on the phone. Today on the show, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, they co-directed the new documentary, The Vietnam War, that premieres on PBS next Sunday, September 17th. I think it's like 10 parts. I've watched all of them. I'll get into that a little bit because it definitely blew my fucking mind up.

That is for sure. It is just awe-inspiring, this documentary. You know, he's done documentaries before that are mind-blowing, but this is nuanced in a way, and the depth of it is pretty astounding. So that's coming up shortly. I did also want to mention that the release of Waiting for the Punch is upon us, folks. It's one month away october 10th so go pre-order your copy now at wtfpod.com or markmarronbook.com and upload your receipt on the pre-order page to get a book plate signed by

me i've been sitting there at the dining room table signing the book plates that's what i've been doing again also i want to thank everybody for the tremendous reaction and response to my special I'm proud of it I'm glad you guys are enjoying it I I put a lifetime's worth of work and experience into that special on Netflix that you can watch now too real if you haven't watched uh my comedy special too real on the on the Netflix so I guess I guess for those of you who like to keep up with my life, I should tell you what's going on in my life. It's been a pretty exciting weekend

this last weekend. Sarah the Painter was part of a big opening downtown here at the new Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art down there on 7th Street across from the Greyhound Station. There's a beautiful new museum.

This is probably the first time ever, if not in decades or years, where anything across from the Greyhound Station is a good thing. Hey, I would imagine any time you said, meet me anywhere across from the Greyhound Station, it's not a good thing unless you're just being picked up. But this is right across from the bushound station is not a good thing, unless you're just being picked up. But this is right across from the bus station down there, and she's got a big work on site there on the wall. She was up on the scissor lift painting this thing, man. It's a big thing.

Looks great. And the show, there's another installation inside, and the show that's there is great. The space is great. So if you're in the L.A. area and you want to see a beautiful new space for the art, for art, go down to that L.A. Institute of Contemporary Art. But make sure you notice as you walk in to the left the astounding and magnificent painting that is there on that wall. It's not just a painting. There there on that wall. It's not just a painting.

There's other elements involved. This is some deep abstraction, folks. This is the big shit, the big work that Sarah the Painter does. So we went to the opening of that. And I enjoyed the museum, and I liked looking at the art people. And I met artists. Not my world. I feel a little intimidated by it all, by that. But right now I'm feeling a little intimidated by everything because I no longer have my buffer.

I no longer have my nicotine. And now the gaping hole is just open. It's open and it wants to drag me into it the weird kind of vulnerability and insecurity and second guessing that happens when you let go of the thing that protected you from yourself at least mentally that that that thing that wall that that you could feed between you you and your fear oh oh this so this warm blanket of nicotine over my heart and mind gone and in the caffeine is just tea caffeine which is nauseating and kind of just flat lines i mean it gives you a nice perk a nice level a nice sort of uh hum but it doesn't give you the you know pow man my brain is turned inside out but i'm dealing all right so here's

here's some exciting here's some exciting news i told you you know how much i love randy newman and i told you i wanted to hang out with randy newman it was awkward because i don't you know i always i don't do that i don't reach out but i reached out to his manager and she put it in his ear. Well, anyways, I get an email a few days ago from her. Do I want to come to this benefit? Randy's playing at a benefit for the Silver Lake Conservatory of Music. And I'm like, yeah, that sounds great. Knew nothing about any of it, but I knew I would get to see Randy Newman play at a small event, which I was very excited about, and maybe hang out with him a little bit. Great. I said, yes, Sarah and I would like to go, and we're in.

And then a day before the event, out of nowhere, I get a call from Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Now, I'm not dropping names here. I've never talked to Flea other than when he was in here. I don't know what was happening. He asked me if I wanted to host that benefit. And then I looked it all up and put it all together. It's his conservatory. It's the thing he started to teach kids in the community

and bring kids a musical education here in Silver Lake. And this was the benefit for the school. And it's Flea's thing. And I go, I'm going to be there anyways. He didn't know that, but I was glad to help out for the kids and be part of it. So I went to the thing, which was great.

The school is great. The Silver Lake Conservatory is a beautiful facility and they do a great thing over there for kids and music. But I get there, I'm sitting at Randy's table with Sarah and like four of Randy's kids and their significant others and Flea's there and Owen Wilson is there. And I met Michael Keaton's son who came up to me and said that he liked my interview with his dad.

It was all very, you know, it's a whole other world, man. I'd never seen the Chili Peppers live. And so the acts were, they did a chamber music thing with the kids, and then I brought on the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And there was maybe 300 people at this thing. Maybe four, maybe. It was an outside thing in a tent situation.

Nicely done. And I brought them up, and I said, this is said this is exciting i've never seen these guys perform live and to see him like i was like two tables up from the stage and they were great they fucking bring it and then um there was some things and a little this and that video some other stuff then randy goes up and just sits at that piano and does a half hour some of the best songs he did marie he did short people he did birmingham he did sail away he did you can leave your hat on he did you've got a friend in me and then at the end before his final number he said mark maron wanted me to play this song and he played guilty arguably the greatest song ever written right there in front of me and i cried a little bit as i do every time i hear that song really an amazing experience for

me all around to see him hang out with him and and watch him play those songs those songs he did political science and the new song Putin. About Putin. Just great. And then Anderson. Pack. Was the last act. Who I didn't know.

I had to do all this research on everybody. I didn't have to do anything. I did like five minutes up front. And did a couple of jokes that were probably a little too cynical. For the event. Threw John Mayer under the bus for no real reason. Because one of the things you could get at the auction was a guitar lesson with John Mayer. And I said, well, that could go either way, that experience. Depending on how you look at that guy for the hour you'll be spending with him.

Got a big laugh in the room. Anyways, I did fuck up one thing. I brought up Anderson Paak as Andrew Paak, and some guy yells at me, like, it's Anderson. I'm like, oh, no, am I that old guy? Am I the old guy that can't get the musical sensations name right? But you've seen me do it on this show. I guess I am that guy.

That was the one bit of embarrassment I experienced the entire night. It's Andrew Pack and the Free Nationals here. Andrew Pack, bring him up. How about that kid, Andrew? It was a great event. So, the Vietnam War, the documentary, Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, co-directors, it's going to bring you through the war.

And look, I'll admit my ignorance, blind sides, most of them. I knew that war was a disaster and wrong and changed a lot of things culturally. But I and I have images of it in my head from when I was a kid. But I knew no, I really did not know the history of it. I really didn't. And the amazing thing about this documentary, you see our America become disenfranchised with the government, with the war effort, with where culture was going, with transparency.

The battle lines that were drawn then are the ones that are still polarizing this country now in a lot of ways. And the fascinating thing about this documentary is you get the full backdrop to what happened to this country and to Vietnam during that war from all angles. They talk to American vets. They talk to American vets. They talk to American military personnel. They talk to American officials from the time. They talk to vets from all sides in terms of how

they feel about the post-war, how they dealt with that war. They talk about the anti-war movement, about race in the war, about the sort of disillusionment that happened over time, the strategies. But they also talked to the other side. They talked to the South Vietnamese. They talked to South Vietnamese Army. They talked to North Vietnamese Army. They talked to Viet Cong. And they balanced it all out.

So you really get both sides of this thing, which is really astounding. And it's really a masterpiece of documentary. It's heartbreaking and it's mind-blowing and it's historically important. And it'll give a lot of things context in terms of what happened in America to sort of the major shift from whatever the 50s was or whatever it pretended to be, to where we are now. And a lot of it hinges on Vietnam. So it was a real honor to talk to Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, and I will share that conversation with you now.

The Vietnam War premieres on PBS next Sunday, September 17th. And lock in, because it's certainly worth it. So this is me, Ken Burns, and Lynn Novick. Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know,

we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. Be honest. When was the last time you thought about your current business insurance policy?

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Yeah. Yes, since 1989. And in different capacities, Lynn, you've done stuff with him. Yeah, I started off the luckiest day of my life. My father probably was getting hired to be associate producer when Ken and his team were finishing the Civil War series. So they had basically almost locked the film, but they needed someone to help because somebody quit sort of toward the end of the project. So I got to fill in for her. And I thought I was being hired for six months to help finish up this project.

And now it's a lifetime. And here we are. Yeah. So Ken very generously gave me the opportunity to produce the baseball series. Oh, yeah. And so that was our first real collaboration. And what's your background? How do you come to documentarian or documentary work?

No, I have no professional training. Many of us have a little bit or none, but American Studies in college and interested in history and photography and film. That all works together. So that's the combination. Yeah, exactly. And then learn by doing, you know, it's really been an apprenticeship actually to see how the work is done and then to figure out what you can bring to it.

So over time it's sort of evolved into co-directing and making these films together. It's been amazing. It's sort of, it seems like it's a calling and some sort of, there's a lot of social responsibility in it. Now in terms of like, they're important. I mean, that's the one thing about documentaries is that you're like, before whatever's happening now happened, where I actually do a joke on stage now about documentaries,

you know, just because you have an iPod and your cat is sick doesn't make you an auteur. It's sort of a Hail Mary pass for some people. Storytelling is a really complicated thing. So even when we're making it, there's no sense of the larger picture of it because it is so hard to tell a good story. All of those people with iPhones become grist for our mill. The people who take photographs become grist for our mill. So we concentrate so heavily on just the task at hand, which is not only additive, as you would assume making something is, but it's subtractive because you're starting off with this huge, big, gigantic amount, 20 times, 40 times, 50 times the amount of the finished product. And you're trying to whittle away at it in some way. But at least with some documentaries,

if it's a story about individuals or an event, one event, and what you're dealing with is the emotional components or the moral components that are supposed to be left as a cliffhanger at the end for you to be the decider, you usually, it seems, deal with large swaths of historical narrative. Yes. So you do have a beginning and an end. We're going to talk about the Vietnam documentary, and I don't want to spoil it or we lost.

So I don't want anyone to get weird about it. But the thing about documentaries, you can't really get weird about it when it's a historical documentary. That's right. And you can't. You absolutely are governed by the goalposts of the experience. But at the same time, history, which we think is fixed, is really malleable. And it depends on what age you made it. So the Vietnam film, if we'd made it in 85 when America was in a recession, when Japan

was ascended, Vietnam would be this ball and chain, this dark cloud hovering over us forever. If we made it 10 years later in 95 when we're the sole superpower, our economy's at 10, Vietnam would be important, but it wouldn't be some sort of big existential drag. And 10 years after that in the Lee of 9-11 and Iraq and Afghanistan, new colors. So what happens is you want to realize the extent to which where you are now really influences how you see the kind of questions you ask and who's asking the questions so these are all involved and and it turns out that the

past is pretty malleable and good history meaning that is to, the narrative distillation of what actually took place. Right. A storytelling. In history, you want people to feel like you stick around because it might not turn out the way you know it did. So you go to the scene on Ford's Theater. Maybe the gun will jam this time. Sure. You know, maybe he'll change his mind. Maybe he'll miss.

Right. And you know it's not going to happen, but the idea would be that you have been brought to this moment with the sense of not the inevitability that we know that time and history has told us took place. Right. which are evanescent and disappear after that is less important, sort of see what we do as kind of convenient and lucky because we do have the beginning, middle, and end. For us, it's not like that. And what you want is the inevitability of things to sort of be met by opening up moments with people and events and facts that then themselves give you a sense that the thing is happening now. you know faulkner said history is not was but is yeah that would mean that you could feel like it was happening now so in vietnam we want you to actually feel the ted offensive not sort of reflect on it from the safe distance of oh i understood that it was militarily a defeat for the North and the Viet Cong, but in fact, it was a public relations disaster.

We just want you to go, oh, my God, make it stop. Well, I did. I'm 53, and I watched all of it. And I had some very, to be honest, if I'm really going to cop to it, after watching it, I mean, I knew nothing. I knew it was bad, and I'm really going to cop to it, after watching it, I mean, I knew nothing. I knew it was bad. Right. And I knew it defined culture.

And I knew a lot of what I thought was cool when I was a very young kid. I gravitated towards, so I'm born in 63. So by 69, I'm seeing things. By 72, I want to dress like a hippie. So innately, I knew where I was headed. But I did not know that the history and it was very visceral and very present and I think the the idea of malleability of history is that it it's all relative to perspective that's exactly correct so you know what I noticed

right away in this documentary is you oh you almost give equal time to the North Vietnamese Army, the Viet Cong, the U.S. military, the South Vietnamese Army, the people that were at an executive level within the government. It's very well balanced. And it was a little jarring initially to be like, well, that's one of them. So to have that moment. We're glad that you felt that way. That's probably the most, greatest compliment you can pay to us

because that's what we started out to do was to feel what we hoped we could do was to shed light on this by looking at it from every possible angle we could collect. And it was interesting how available and how the people that were in the Viet Cong, how they had aged and over time

have acquired some sort of perspective and wisdom and survived. And the way it played out was the way it played out. But these are older people reflecting on something. But don't you like the fact that the Viet Cong or the NVA regular soldiers sound a lot like our Marines and Army guys? And that the experience of war has both a uniqueness and a commonality. The terror must be the same. The effects of that terror must ripple down and certain societal pressures might make it easier to express or less easy to express for whatever psychologically positive way.

But when the Viet Cong guy looks through the bush and sees Americans crying over the dead and said, boy, they have the same humanity. I hadn't realized they have the same humanity as we Viet Cong. Yeah, that was a stunning moment. I mean, we Vietnamese. I mean, it's a stunning moment because, and that's what it is. What you want to do is create an atmosphere in which more than one truth can obtain because the way we live, particularly today, is to decide, like, good, bad, right?

It's binary. One, zero. It's childish. It's completely childish. And there's nothing in life that suggests that things are so crystal clear. And so what you want to create is an environment in which whatever preconception you come in, maybe zero, honestly, about Vietnam. But it's there. And you've got, you know, your background and you know what you think.

But you want that to be kind of neutralized by a combination of perspectives that some of which you don't subscribe to, but you realize that if you extend to them the courtesy of listening, of your attention, and it matches with other stuff, all of hopefully liberating as it did us as we made it, liberating us from the preconceptions, hopefully liberating our audience from preconceptions. Right. And it definitely did. And I was approaching it with a certain amount of shameful ignorance in the sense that- We love that. There's no shame in that though because honestly- No shame in ignorance. One of the reasons why we set about to do this is because we think

it's fair to say that americans don't know much just as a country we don't know much and we don't talk about it in an informed way and there's good reasons for that yeah it was so traumatic and painful and sort of unsettling to our sense of who we are as a country that it's just hard to talk about and people avoid talking about it and avoid teaching it and avoid i mean we're basically the same age and i never studied vietnam war in school yeah i don't know anything about it and avoid teaching it and avoid, I mean, we're basically the same age and I never studied the Vietnam war in school. I didn't know anything about it. But let me just interrupt you kids and just say, you know,

I'm 64. I lived through this. I thought I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I thought I knew everything about the Vietnam war. And, and day one for the next 10 years was a kind of humbling, you know,

of, of what you didn't know. And when you started this doc, when we started this doc, you said 10 years in the making. Yeah. we've been working on it since actually a little bit longer at the end we lynn and i made a film on world war ii called the war in which we had followed the entire greatest cataclysm through the experiences and eyes of people in four geographically distributed old dudes that could talk about it and they were at the end of their

life and i think part of that was the sense of how lucky we were is that they were just going out the door and we didn't want them to go before they told the story. But it was also all of the stuff that war churned up for us, as it always does, as it did before on the Civil War,

many years before that we just said, I just turned to Lynn at the end of 2006. I said, we got to do Vietnam. And our film on World just turned to lynn at the end of 2006 i said we got to do vietnam and we this our film on world war ii wasn't out until the fall of 2007 but we've been kind of plowing towards that ever since not that we haven't done other films but this has been the gigantic mac truck rolling down our consciousness waking us up at night making us worry well why you know having lived through it you know, what was your life like then? Where were you?

How old were you? In 65? Okay, in 65, I was 12. We were living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My father was, glad you picked 65. 65 is when Johnson ordered ground troops on the ground, March of 65. I was 11, almost 12. The first, one of the first teach-ins took place at the University of Michigan.

It was one of the departments that was involved in it centrally was the anthropology department. My father was an anthropologist in the film. You see a guy speaking to the local Channel 7 reporter, and I spent a long time going, I think that's one of my dad's colleagues, and it turned out to be our best friends, family's best friends we the wolves my father's colleague eric wolf a distinguished anthropologist we were on wellington court he was over on forest we could cut through one house and be there you know very important parts of my life i spent at the wolf house and there he was and i learned this just within the last few years of a 10-year project. But as a 12-year-old you don't really know the full range but so by 70, you're 17. Yeah. And you know.

I'm worrying about getting drafted, yeah. And the world and the country's coming unhinged. Yeah, completely. And Ann Arbor, you know, we had some stuff, some really heavy duty stuff and I still have the memory of a police baton at the back of my head and I had hair down you know you had the whole thing you have brothers and sisters I had a younger brother Rick who's a documentary filmmaker and we were all trying to get through my dad my mom had died uh of uh the month after the teach-in and so the three of us were just trying to negotiate

both the loss but the 60s and being in Ann Arbor and music. I mean, when you're talking about all the cultural influences that Vietnam spawned, it also was in turn influenced by those things and not just music that we think of, but civil rights and women's rights and environmental stuff. All of that's sort of playing. It was incredibly tumultuous, incredibly exciting. I can't think of a better place to be growing up was a small town with a big university. Right. And the one thing I realized when I was watching is that the timing is very interesting because the sort of loss of innocence that the country experienced in reaction to that war and how that reorganized American culture is exactly, it's the same now.

It is the same. There's a moment where you think like it's almost like, well, Nixon's silent majority is now in charge. That's right. That's exactly right. And they've not, they've always been there to one degree or another. That's right. And the one thing that I found sort of encouraging in sort of a dark way was that the country really felt at that time, the way you captured it anyways, and it was visceral, that it was coming unglued.

Yes. That it felt like, you know, it was going to, something was going to collapse. Yes. And, you know, we felt that the seeds of the disunion that a film about mass demonstrations taking place all across the country, protesting the current administration that you had a White House obsessed with leaks in so much disarray, a president railing almost daily about the news media and they're making up stories about asymmetrical warfare that the military can't really deal with it a big document drop of classified material into the public sphere that's changing and destabilizing what we understand

about stuff and accusations that a a political campaign reached out to a foreign power at the time of a national election to influence that election that bit of business was like is that known is that a well known bit of business it's not it's what it's getting well known now but it is and and it is also i think beginning to change this sort of conventional wisdom about nixon too because we have really really certain uh negative reactions about nixon and really certain positive things that he did and this upends it all well i mean that moment where where where you have that uh those those tapes of of johnson talking to dirksen and talking to dirksen and

then talking to nixon treason treason he says this is treason but he made a choice not to bring attention to it yeah because of political reasons and and what we're talking about it we're we're sort of not letting on uh is that you know know, Nixon reached out to the South Vietnamese government, correct? Yes. Behind Johnson's back, who was then president. This was in the 1968 election. It was a very, very close election. Yeah.

And Johnson had, at the very last minute, gotten the South Vietnamese to agree to go to peace talks with the North Vietnamese. And this was, you know, the hope to Hubert Humphrey, who was a Democratic candidate, was quite embattled because the war was so unpopular. And he had not really distanced himself from Johnson. And so at this moment, when there's a chance that there could be peace talks, Humphrey starts going up in the polls. And it's a very tight election. And then a few days before the election, the South Vietnamese government say, we're not going to the peace talks. And, you know, why not? We're just just we're not going to go. And then Nixon ends up winning by a tiny, tiny margin. 7 tenths of 1%, 43.4 to 42.7. And remember, there's desperation on the Nixon campaign, because when the Democratic Convention is finished, he's got a just a seemingly insurmountable

lead over Humphrey. And that just andrey. And what the positive progress in the peace talks suggested was that Humphrey would overtake them. So there's all sorts of theories about why that Johnson didn't want to reveal the sources or that Humphrey himself said, no, no, no. I want to win legitimately, not by calling a foul at this point. Lots of very interesting things. But it's only now coming out i mean when we first wrote our scene several years ago yeah we felt we were sort of a like a just a little bit ahead of stuff and that we were worried that maybe we'd said too much but a couple of biographies have not only confirmed but gone ahead and said that it wasn't just the campaign as we said but nixon himself who had initiated and begun the sort of... He cut a deal.

He had his people suggest to the South Vietnamese that if he got elected, he would be tougher on Hanoi and they would be supported more. The Democrats would sell them down the river, that kind of thing. And who knows, but essentially they just said they're not going to go to the peace talks and they waited many, many weeks. And then many, many years afterwards, there were rumors about this, lots of rumors, but never really clear evidence until relatively recently. So, as Ken was saying, we sort of had to modulate as, and that's kind of emblematic of the film, that new scholarship came out on many things as we've been working on it. For 10 years.

Right, for 10 years. So new things come out. Not four regiments, three regiments of NVA coming down the trail that month. And we just wanted to get it right. I mean, we would open up the film and change it. Well, the amazing thing was is that in watching it, I'm like, we're going to go through every battle just about. That, you know, you pick these. I imagine what were important conflicts or battles, but the ones that you picked and how you characterized them over the years

really painted a picture of what warfare was like previous to the massive bombing, which was like this horrendous Hail Mary. So what you have is the opportunity, particularly in some early battles like at back and binjad, to sort of triangulate where you've got, I mean, most of the time,

the american experience with the enemy was with the exception of big things like debt and later you know other stuff were skirmishes ambushes and things like that of the enemy's choosing but in a few instances we got a vietcong guy talking about the attack here and he's on one side of the hedgerow that that our arvin guy and our Marine advisor are talking about. And that, to me, is if you're curious about warfare, and it is the worst thing human beings do, but lots of more stuff than just saying bad come out of it. It's exhilarating to have that kind of perspective on a particular moment. Yeah, and that kind of warfare, which really, even with the way guerrilla tactics work

in Iraq or Afghanistan, there has not been anything like Vietnam. Right? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that the enemy was very adaptable. So they learned pretty quickly how to fight this enormous army with the air power and the artillery that we had. They didn't have that.

Well, they knew the landscape. They were committed. They worked at all ages. There was a nationalistic fervor and responsibility. And it was a repressive communist regime that sort of, you know. You're going to go. It's just one thing. And so the, you know, the messiness of democracy, particularly a corrupt democracy and a sort of

heavy-handed one that's lending aid, is that you've got lots of space for all sorts of different things. And also the South Vietnamese government, I did not know, was perpetually corrupt and completely unstable almost at all times. But when you start a project like this, obviously you know that you have the history and you're going to have to do a bit about France and the occupation and colonization and all that business to sort of set the stage. But where do you start for any of the things you do? Because you're not making a two-hour movie that you're going to tie up.

You're like, people have got to commit a nice chunk of their life to this yeah yeah and and starting is the hardest hardest when did you decide to do this in 1967 to do Vietnam in 2006 when you're finishing our film on World War two and then it you know there's sort of setting the table and getting some funding to begin shooting and thinking and organizing and grant writing and all that stuff. And you've got to see who's alive, right? You've got to see who's alive. That's the first thing we do.

And find out where the people are and follow the leads, both serendipitous and otherwise. Well, you're very fortunate in that, what's his name? Sheehan is alive. Yes, and he's quite frail now, actually. Most of the interviews were shot in 2010, 11, 12. Oh. So we're very lucky that we got the interview with him when we did because he's got Parkinson's and he's really not so well

at the moment. Oh, that's too bad. And several people have passed away. So one of the first things we do is think, okay, you know, the actuarial tables,

if you're over 85, we need to find you right away. Right. So you had to lay that out. Right. So we found a guy, the first interview we shot was a man who was in the OSS

in World War II and went to Saigon in 1945 and sort of tried to understand what was happening after World War II ended. And he ended up going to Hanoi and meeting Ho Chi Minh. And he was in his late 80s. Wow. So he's actually still alive.

Still alive. We saw him a few earlier this week. So we're very happy that George Wicks will be able to see the film when it comes out. But we really start with older people. And you were able to tie it into that. Yes. It's fortunate because, you know,

if you just had words and pictures to attach this to, you know, American intelligence, World War II intelligence, you know, things that had predated, you know, our even presence there at all. Right. To sort of like incorporate it into the...

Well, you know, what we had in the first episode is called Deja Vu because the French experience is so much like what would happen to the Americans that it also permitted us an opportunity to, as the French experience sort of unfolded in the late 40s and early 50s, to sort of shoot ahead to a decade ahead or a decade and a half ahead to an American experience that mirrored precisely that. Yeah, it was interesting. But that also had the extra added benefit of giving us all somebody to care about, Americans that are going to then populate the rest of the nine episodes as we're doing the geopolitical historical tables.

Well, those choices were great. You know, the choice to use, hold on, I want to make sure I get names right. John Musgrave. We knew you were going to say that. And the story of Mohi Crocker. Yes. You know, those two stories. What was very, the humility of hindsight with even the most hawkish people

that you talked to was profound. It seemed like there was a period of time, and I think you talked about it, in how this war is seen culturally and historically, that, you know, once you talk to the guys who were involved in it and the women who were involved in it, you know, what you find is that, you know, it was horrible on both sides. There was mutual respect and that there was a shame to it all that had to be opened. That's very well said, yeah. I mean, you know, over the accumulation of the 10 years of working on this film and trying to understand what happened, which was no small task for us

and everyone that we worked with, you know, we went to the wall many times. So, you know, you see those 58,000 names and you think about every single family represented by one of those names. And what does that mean? And we only told a few of those stories in the film and that was enough. But then you go to Vietnam and you think about million died, and they have 300,000 missing. And, you know, it's exponentially more tragic for them than it is for us. And it's not like there's a contest. But you begin to kind of accumulate the weight of loss and grief, and how people live with that and manage it, how societies live with it, how countries live with it, how families, individuals. And the chaos, because this wasn't really a territorial war. This was not, you know, we got that country, we've held this line. So Musgrave says that in our fifth episode, is that war is real estate business, meaning you take territory. He says, you do not like to get wounded a second time on a hill you've already taken.

And that is one of the aspects that makes the vietnam for the american strategy such a disaster and and you know we're going we're falling back into history again but the fact that they knew you know pretty pretty clearly that it was unwinnable in the mid 60s it's just devastating information it's and and to and to sort of concede to the fact that that what we the only way to make it look like we're winning is to have a bigger body count on their side. as Hal Kushner says in the film of just good and bad, that sort of places Ho Chi Minh, a sympathetic figure who declares independence, citing Thomas Jefferson, and is in the proximity of OSS officers, to send him over to the other guy, the bad side, and plows us inevitably towards this tragedy that first the French practiced, do a dress rehearsal for us. It wasn't a dress rehearsal for them. It was real bad stuff. But their need for that territory was almost completely economic, no?

Yes. I mean, this is the difference between a proxy war fought over the larger ideologies in lieu of World War III, which I think everybody would agree would not be the pleasant alternative. China, Russia, America. Yeah, so you have the proxy war. So before, what the French are involved in is the desperation of holding on to a dead form, be the the pleasant alternative china russia america yeah so you have the proxy war so before what the french are involved in is the desperation of holding on to a dead form which is the colony you know the the fact that they'd gone in there for a whole bunch of reasons and added that sort

of bullshit you know civilizing thing that we're going to bring our religion and our culture and all this sort of stuff and of course the vietnam people, say, look, we've got our own culture. It probably is longer than yours. And we want to determine who we are. And this was President Wilson as well as President Roosevelt's sort of desire. And you begin to feel, you know, just the tightening of an incredibly tragic, there's no other word,

it's just a tragic noose that is tightened on all of this. How did you track down, like, you know, when you make the list of people that you want to involve in this and to see if they're still alive, how do you accumulate those names? What are your sources? Obviously, American journalists, American soldiers, you know, some South Vietnamese, but, you know, when you get into the weeds of, you know, who's alive in the VC, who's alive from the North Vietnamese Army. I imagine some of them are still in power to some degree or no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I got to make many trips to Vietnam to try to figure all that out. Actually, not really possible to do that from here.

And we had a lot of help with a wonderful Vietnamese producer that we worked with who was pretty well connected in military circles. And so we explained to him, for example, Ken was talking about a battle where we see from all sides. We had found an American Marine advisor and a South Vietnamese Marine who were in a battle. So we wanted to find a Viet Cong who was in that same battle. And he went to local veterans organizations and talked to people and found some people that he, you know.

Wow. So he did a lot of the legwork. His name is Ho Dang Hoa. And our film would not be the film it is without his incredible legwork. And also even once, you know, I got to Vietnam, working closely with him to have him help explain to people who we were. They weren't too familiar with our work or public television or anything like that. So, you know, what is this film about?

What are we looking for? Because in Vietnam, the ordinary soldiers don't normally have a voice like that. Right. So they don't get asked, what was the war like for you? Right. Did you ever see Americans? You know, what was who was wounded? What happened to your family? These are not questions that are normally discussed. They have sort of a pretty simplistic national narrative about the war and they put it behind them. We won and that's it. Pretty much it, right. So, you know, they were open to sharing their stories because I think they wanted their, I don't think, I know, this is what they said, that they wanted their children and grandchildren to understand the truth of the war, how terrible it was, what they sacrificed, the actual nature

of the sacrifice, not this sort of bloodless myth of the war. And so they really, you know, once we sat down with the camera and we had to have someone translate for us, obviously, to explain what we're asking, it was pretty interesting that they were as open to communicating, not just to us, but to their own children and grandchildren, to their fellow citizens, to the American people, what this war really meant and what they gave up and what they gained. And so many women involved.

Yes, that was a revelation. Right. That was a political thing, I think, Cong. Yes, that was a revelation. Right. That was a political thing, I think, for them. It was a total war, a people's war. So everybody had to get involved, and children got involved, which is obviously for our soldiers very complicated. Yeah. Because how can you tell who's a civilian and who's an enemy

if children are looking for mines and all that kind of stuff? But there was a tremendous amount of pride in that, and young women sometimes took up arms. Usually they were scouts and kind of helping out. There was also a whole core of people. This we had, I mean, we didn't understand this at all. The Ho Chi Minh Trail is a character in the film. It's a character in the war.

To keep that conduit open. Yeah. And let's remember, it's not a single road. It's not like, you know, the 101. Yeah. It's like a braided thing that goes in many different directions. And by the cover of night, they're bringing in heavy artillery.

Heavy artillery. Being moved in from Russia and China, right? And we couldn't fly at night. So this is a huge tactical or strategic problem for our Air Force, that we couldn't fly at night. So they knew that. So, you know, the enemy isn't sitting there

waiting to get bombed. And they sent, you know, loads and loads of trucks down there. And they had women repairing the bomb damage because during the day we would bomb and they would have these tens of thousands of teenagers, girls out there filling up the bomb craters until they get bombed again. It was an epic undertaking and it's probably essential to how they won the war. So we interview the pilot that's doing the bombing or the strafing. And he comes to our editing room. It's a terrific episode.

He spent his entire career in the military and retired as the head of the Air Force, General Merrill McPeak. And he had no idea we had already interviewed Le Ming Kuei and Nguyet Anh, who were two of the women that were down there. And it blew his mind because he had already stated on film that he would have been proud to serve with these people. And it just sort of set his military mindset and his perhaps, and I don't mean this pejoratively, a kind of chauvinist male mindset about who the combatants are into an amazing disconnection. And so that's what this war did. who the combatants are into an amazing disconnection. And so that's what this war did. It just upended all of the various things that you think would happen. We dropped more bombs on the Laos portion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which is this elaborate labyrinth, than we dropped in Germany and Japan.

Much more. Okay, so once you get your list of people and you start engaging in that, right? I mean, it's not really like we couldn't start out with a list. But over time, like several years, two or three years, we gradually find one person, like Ken said, leads to another. And they're like, I know a guy. Yes, pretty much. You interview a journalist. He said, you know who we should talk to? It's this guy.

And then this guy says this guy. And you follow that trail. But here's the thing. So you're doing journalism, really. But I'd like to liberate you from sequential production. That is to say, you begin here and you do this and you do this. You research, you write. I'll take any liberation you can offer.

You shoot and then you do post-production and then you blah, blah, blah. We never stopped researching and we never stopped writing and we essentially never stopped shooting either even though editing is the single largest component of our production thing so you just get a you just keep adding to the mound of footage or subtracting to or saying later though i mean you're not subtracting while you're doing but no we may be we may have found out that we've done an interview i mean we what halfway through editing we met a woman who was born in hanoi or in the north yeah what was would become the north had to flee because her father

was a french oh she's in it a lot and she's in every episode zvong on my elliot and she's an amazing story but we're sitting there her husband is one of the consultants she's in every episode zvong on my elliot and she's an amazing story but we're sitting there her husband is one of the consultants she's one of the consultants and we're having a debriefing after an episode one and she starts talking and everything she says lynn and i are furiously writing down and finally by the end of episode 10 we just said lynn i said lynn go get her let's go let's go interview her right away. And usually this doesn't work very well, that when you're very late in an editing process,

it's very hard to integrate new voices. But she went in like it was just she was born to be in the film. So if you think about it, if you were to think ahead about how we organized this, you might have assumed that Mai was one of the first people we interviewed because she's so constant throughout the film. Yeah, I don't know if I had any real assumptions about, like, you know, that it was a step-by-step process. And I appreciate being liberated, but I don't know if I was thinking about that

because I was too busy. But, you know, a lot of productions do that. Sure. They research for a period of time out of which they write something. And what comes down is like from Mount Sinai etched in stone, and that informs not only shooting but editing, boom, done. We can't do that. That's so malleable. So think of it as a kind of a Russian novel.

So that is to say we are committed to telling a political military narrative, policy decisions, what's going on from the top. We're aided, of course, by the intimacy of the tapes that are there to reveal unintentionally for them the Johnson and Nixon administration. We're also interested in the bottom-up experience of so-called ordinary people. of Americans. Let's set aside all those Vietnamese that we have that represents all different strata of society as well. We've got, you know, protesters and resistors and draft dodgers and deserters and journalists and policy wonks and gold star families and military families and just Marines and army guys that we follow out of Roxbury and or out of Independence, Missouri into the fray. So we know where they went to high school. We know what their folks did in World War II. We know the dynamics of their lives. And you've got skin in the game.

Yeah. And also you have what you were talking about earlier is that, you know, this is coming out of civil rights legislation. It's the beginning of the women's movement. Anti-nuclear proliferation stuff from the 50s, late 40s, 50s is a big tributary that flows into the anti-war movement. And you have to integrate all that. I mean, you have to deal with racism in the military and how it leveled out.

And you talk to that one nurse who was great, Joan Fury. Yeah, she was like tremendous. It's like unsung hero. You don't realize how a woman in that situation was feeling or that they weren't necessarily in that situation. Exactly. Yeah. And the thing that blew my mind, among many other things, is just that you could track, you know, once the country, the politics of it, you know, culturally, and the entire glossary

for how to characterize progressives and liberals in the left was written at this time, you know, by that administration, by Nixon, and maybe a little bit of Johnson, but not much. And then also it makes you rethink Johnson. You're always rethinking Johnson. Yeah. And I love that. I mean, to me, he's the most tragic figure in it because he's got this ambitious domestic agenda that, you you know he wants to be a new fdr and the vietnam he doesn't know about foreign policy and he keeps all of kennedy's guys and says i need you more than he needed you perhaps yeah yeah and then he's you can hear in this and you know the the the domestic pro program off camera shrinking and so one of the projects that lynn and

i are are are going to do in the future is to make those domestic programs on camera. Oh, really? Yeah, and do his presidency so that the guns of Vietnam are getting louder and louder offstage and beginning to shrink the possibilities of this ambitious second only to FDR domestic agenda. I'm sorry. Go ahead. One of the things that you mentioned earlier about disillusionment, I think it struck us

over and over again and that is sort of the overall arc of the story actually. Yeah. It's what our country went through and, you know,

because of these tapes, you have this intimate access. Like we interviewed all these people and they tell us their personal stories. We couldn't interview Johnson and Nixon

if we had. I'm sure they wouldn't have told us such intimate things that you can hear on these tapes when they've put them. Johnson might have. Johnson might have.

He might have. I don't know. You know, public figures are always kind of like creating their own persona and all that, right? A little cagey. Yeah. So, and, you know, he installed that tape recorder and so did Nixon. But you sort of think they, I don't know if they really forgot it was on or they just figured that it was never going to see the light of day. So, you hear them at every time of day, in every mood,

talking about the most important things of the world. And also, what did you have for breakfast, and how was your weekend, and kidding around with their staff, and kind of seemingly not taking things so seriously all the time, because I'm sure that's the weight of the job, right? Well, part of that job, having talked to Obama, and I just talked to Al Gore, is that whether they know it or not, or whether it's innate, there's a necessary detachment.

Right. And you hear that. Which can be evil, seemingly. Indeed. But you also are a human being, and in the case of presidents, you're not there because you're a recluse. You're there because you're gregarious, and you know the name of the secretary, and you know your friends, and you want to know how they're doing.

And you're a politician, and you do all that stuff that politicians do it's it's i i think it's one of the most unusual thing it'll never happen again that we have these two presidents the two most important presidents with regard to vietnam there they should be just purely top-down policy stuff and then johnson told me or then the president decided to do this, but we can hear the anguish early on in Johnson. We can hear the cold and calculating real politique that Nixon and Kissinger are practicing. things that Lynn is describing. And what they do is they both humanize and they make no longer top down, but just joining the whole flow of all the other people bottom up. And that's a really great place to have a president in. Yeah. But also from the bottom up, the business of the voice of the American people, you know, collectively, you know, as the war became seemingly more and more

futile and heinous, that the momentum of public outcry in the way that it manifested itself was, has never been seen since. Right. And, you know, because of the internet, I think that that has neutered some of that. But there's obviously a lot of people doing that now in relation to the health care repeal. But, you know, oddly, a lot of them are the same people. Same people. And it's their kids or their grandkids.

And it's a pretty interesting continuum, you know. And you were speaking a little bit about if we could have interviewed Johnson. Yeah. But we made a very conscious decision early on that we wouldn't interview folks like John McCain. We went to John McCain and John Kerry, one of the first meetings we had, and said, look, we need your help, but we're not going to interview you. You're going to be in it.

And John McCain's in it, and John Kerry's in it. And we weren't going to interview Kissinger or Jane Fonda either, because they've got reputations to sort of spin and we don't we don't we're not interested in wasting the time that spinning represents we wanted basically people that you could have had Thanksgiving with telling you what it was like to climb that mountain or having incoming artillery and wondering you know whether you were ever going to out and telling your mom I'm not going to come home. Did you talk to John McCain? Oh, yeah. And how did he help?

Just, I think, I can't really say. His former chief of staff, Mark Salter, was one of our advisors and helped us understand his situation and helped us understand from a different perspective some of the things. John Kerry, you know, we put his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is in. And John McCain, we learned things about that McCain incident of his capture that goes beyond kind of what is just generally known about it. And that's important. And we, Lynn and I, had the opportunity recently, a few months ago, to go to McCain, you know, ostensibly to have a few minutes to share stuff with him. and he actually stayed and watched

twice as long stuff and was incredibly emotionally engaged didn't want to see anything about him wanted to see the north vietnamese stuff wanted to understand wanted to understand that and it was to his credit that he was so interested in some of the things like the exemptions that were granted to the high party right no and i think that that's the thing we found from a lot of, even the scholars who've worked magnificently to expose new information over the intervening 42 years since the fall of Saigon, just know their little area. And so we were able to aggregate all of that new scholarship,

bring in all of the testimony of veterans, try to integrate it, aggregate it into one place. And so we would find our veterans and our scholars saying, I had no idea about this. And then they say, now, with regard to this, I think you should think about doing it this way because your thumb is on the scale here or there's too much emphasis on this. Who are those people that were giving you that kind of input? Wonderful stuff. Historians from West Point and from the war colleges.

I'm sure that the idea that you're getting both you know three sides of one conflict must have blown their minds i think they kept saying it was really nice to hear that no one's ever told this story this way in a book in a film in a you know in any form because of the access that we had to the vietnamese and also the perspective of time and the tapes and all the different things we've been talking about and sitting in the screenings with our advisors you know they would sort of not just tell us to fix things but they would have discussions among themselves because they came at it from such different places and so we would be sitting there sort of it's one of our favorite things to do is listen to them argue about whether West

Moreland was right or wrong about this particular thing or whether Johnson really meant this when he said it or what was the impact of this decision or that decision. You know, we learned a lot just listening to them argue with each other and trying to kind of find, we never try to find a middle ground because that's sort of banal and boring. Right. But try to find the right answer. And let me, what I wanted to just interject for a moment is this is the time for the commercial for public broadcasting.

Yeah. Because there is no other place that would have dedicated more than 10 years and the extraordinary resources in order to do this. So much so that there is not a single book or a film out of the marketplace that our scholars and our veterans are telling us that has happened. And it's not to toot our horn. It's just saying we are so grateful to have actually been able to spend our professional lives in an institution that would even permit the notion of this. And it just literally, I mean, people could say, oh, the marketplace, well, this. Well, when your house is on fire, you don't call the marketplace.

And in this case, the only place that would put out this fire was public television. That's beautiful. It's great. Now, who were these advisors? So, Ed Miller, who is at Dartmouth, who is fluent in Vietnamese, a scholar. Fred Logevall, who is sort of, how would you describe? Presidential historian. A presidential historian who understood policy and could help us in the nuance. Everybody wants to say, well, if Kennedy had lived, he wouldn't have gotten us into this. Well, you know, it's a really interesting dynamic that we don't have to didactically even raise in the film.

We can just tell you what happens and what the handoff is and who the personnel are and what those personnel recommend to Johnson and what Johnson does. He's he's a free agent here in a way. personnel recommended Johnson and what Johnson does he's he's a free agent here in a way so it's it's it sort of renders sort of moot some of these tropes that we sort of discuss at the cocktail party what about sure what it could have shoulda what it could have yeah and and that's it what happens is is that you find wouldn't we employed scholars who knew what happened and we were interested in saying what happened now Sounds like a whole other documentary. Well, with them come arguments.

Right. And many of the other people that we didn't do because it would have been unwieldy have arguments. But arguments aren't the same thing as facts. So I'll give you

a really good example. There is within the Vietnam debating society this thing that if Westmoreland had been fired earlier and Creighton Abrams, his deputy, had been advanced, we would have won the war. That is an argument, a woulda, coulda, shoulda thing. All our job is, is umpires calling balls and strikes.

We're saying this is the point where he replaced Westmoreland and put in Abrams. Many people would think that Abrams would do something, but in fact, there was no real significant change. So it's either going to enrage those people or they're going to say, see, I told you if it would have been. But I think you can look in the eyes of a French guy 30 years before and go,

this isn't going to work out very well. One of the real privileges of this project was bringing some people from Vietnam who were scholars to come and watch the film. And there's a man that you meet in the film named Huy Duc. He's a scholar and a writer, and he has studied the war. And he has access to information that no one else in America has. And he came to screening and watched the film and sort of helped us understand what was happening in Hanoi,

what was happening on the ground in South Vietnam, what was the perspective of ordinary soldiers and of the leadership. And we couldn't have gotten that any other way. And whenever he spoke, everybody just listened. Yeah, we just shut up. It's really quite something. And another teacher who was not fluent,

didn't speak English at all, but spoke a little French, actually a lot of French, Nguyen Nop, who's this beloved, he was a foot soldier, but became a kind of celebrated teacher and historian in vietnam he came too and and it won't want the same thing we'd already interviewed hui duk but we pushed

him in front of our cameras again after he spoke up at these meetings but when winop came we just went in and he's wonderful i mean he gives us this incredible thing about he's in the jungle and i've seen animals wild ferocious animals and they don't kill unless they're hungry only human beings kill oh that guy yeah that was good that guy was good yeah yeah that guy is really something so yeah you guys it was quite uh the whole thing was but you understand what you're so engaged but the process yeah see if you if you aren't always doing all the things rather than making it a sequential series of research, writing, shooting, editing, then you're not open to this. Then you can't say, look, let's open up the film and correct that thing that the scholar said, or let's film Winn-Nopp right now and see how he can be integrated into the film. But also the way you're talking about it and looking at some of your past work, this seems like this film in particular was a kind of a mind-blowing experience for you on this level.

Because there are films that you've done where you're dealing with, you're spending a lot of time zooming into still photographs. You do that here. No, but you had a lot of footage, man. So this was mind-blowing. And we've had footage in baseball. We've had footage in World War II. I wasn't taking a shot at you no no no no the and i didn't think you were the process is the same but i you hit the nail on the head which is this was the most challenging and the most transforming for us we don't recognize who we were who went into this project and who

we are now and a lot of it is just adhering to the same very time-consuming but very necessary, we think, ethical, honorable, artistic sort of process things that we've always done. Back to my first film, Brooklyn Bridge, through the Civil War and all the other stuff. But then with this huge megilla of a subject in which we've had to triangulate from every which way. And also one side was relatively unheard yes and then this is also not unlike a lot of your other films a film ostensibly about america well you know right from day one we really said yes we want to understand

the war we are americans and it's an epically important i think you know the most we've been saying the most important event in American history since World War II. So as Americans, we need to understand it. But as Americans, even if we only care about Americans, we cannot understand it if we don't understand the Vietnamese, what they did, who they were, who we were fighting with, who we were fighting against, what drove them, you know, why we failed. It would be an exercise in futility and navel gazing to just focus on ourselves once again. And, you know, we're asked a lot about Hollywood movies and other representations of the war. And so rarely do Vietnamese have any voice at all. And sometimes when they're interviewed, they're even given a voiceover. So you don't even hear their voice. You know, someone else speaks

for them. And we felt it was extraordinarily important to just listen, just ask the questions, find out and then find them present, find them. And we also spoke to Vietnamese here in the US, because many, you know, left the country after the war on the losing side. They've come here and become incredibly productive citizens. But they have this kind of loss of their country. Many of them had to leave everything behind, like many refugees, and, you know, embrace a new life. But they don't talk about the war because it's too painful. So their children don't know what their life was like. They don't know what happened to their parents before this tragedy befell them.

And so trying to excavate all of that felt like they're Americans too, by the way. Yeah. So they're part of our story. And at least if we've been able to get something from some understanding, deeper understanding of the American experience, it encompasses all of this. Yeah, I found that what became really fascinating to me, too, like along was following, you know, John Musgrave story into the anti-war movement.

And then, you know, realizing as public opinion shifted and the morality, not morale, which was also diminishing, but the morality of what was necessary to survive over there started to slip. This seems to be the central question, really, what you're hitting on right now, which is if you're a citizen of this country, what do you do if our government is doing something that you don't think is right? And if you're being lied to, and if we're going in the wrong direction, if you really What do you do if our government is doing something that you don't think is right? Yeah. And if you're being lied to, and if we're going in the wrong direction, if you really believe that, are you supposed to just blindly obey? Are you supposed to question?

Are you supposed to protest? Wait to vote? What do you do? Right. These are just profound questions. There's no easy answers. But John Musgrave's story, he embodies that entire transformation of someone. Anguished, anguished journey through all of those questions. Yeah, and trying to reconcile your own idea of what America is with the reality you just endured.

So traditionally, filmmakers then impose their sort of lesson on it. But we don't need to do that because we still want to honor the people who think that we should still be there. But we also want to, we feel that John Musgrave's journey combined with several other journeys are going to say it all and nobody's ever going to take place within the viewers of it. I mean, because it's sponsored in you, passions and ideas and thoughts about it that excite us today that we're so thrilled that things that we did that we didn't want to call attention to and didn't have even a didactic bone in our body to sort of say, isn't this so like today? You can't help but feel. Oh, absolutely. And because I think those divides were,

like to me, the powerful thing was that the culture war and the sort of commitment to nationalism versus truth was really, that's when it exploded and defined itself. So we focused on what was going on in all three capitals, too. It isn't just all the array of people. So, you know, people in Hanoi weren't telling their folks everything. Right. People in Saigon certainly weren't.

Right. People in Washington, we've learned, weren't. And so that makes for a very interesting story to tell as those things leak out. I found it just as interesting to find out that the head of the big officials in Hanoi could go off to Moscow and avoid the draft. You know, in a different episode, we're showing pictures of Bill Clinton in England and showing pictures of W in the Air Force Reserve. And this is all the privileges of wealth and position and political power that people take about, or in the case of Bill Clinton, brains.

His brains got him out of, I mean, he's from rural Arkansas, and that would have put him right in that man's army, but his brains gave him a different dynamic. Yeah, I mean, you definitely covered everything. But I found towards the end when they were when nixon was sending them in and it was clearly futile that you know the the the disposition of of the the people that were being drafted and sent at that time you know that you know i think that the one thing i go back to is that that scene in Apocalypse Now where, who's your commanding officer?

Ain't you? You know, that there was that menace of, you know, questioning orders, not following orders. Right. You know, threatening, you know, commanding officers. You know, and then the idea that I don't know that you really got into, because I don't know what kind of information you would find there, is about, I don't know what they call it, but grunts taking out officers. Fragging. We did a section on that.

And it's always not what the Hollywood movies portray. It was very rarely in the field, mostly back at camp, usually over race or drugs or insubordination, personality disagreements. And it comes from the fragmentation bombs that would be used, sort of tossed into a commander's bunker. And you relieved your problem that way. And it was significant enough that the Army studied it and got deep in the weeds about what was it doing.

But by then, you know, we've got pictures of guys smoking dope in front of the news cameras and guys saying, I've not fired my gun and I don't intend to fire my gun. And the heroin epidemic. And the heroin and the drug epidemic. And so, you know, as we quote someone quoting Abrams saying, I need to get this army home to save it. That was a pretty real thing by the end of this, where it's nearly all draft and it's

nobody wants to be there. And they already know this is unwinnable. And they already know that the unwinnable and they already know that the tide of public opinion if hasn't completely turned is in the process of completely turning and and they don't want to be the last person to die in vietnam as john kerry said it's crazy and and i i imagine you must have been amazed at i was amazed at how much journalistic film footage. Yeah, courage. Wow. Yeah. I mean.

Yeah. We were sort of just horrified to discover several hundred journalists were killed during the war trying to collect that footage. They were really up close and personal to what was happening. It's extremely dangerous. Oh, it felt dangerous. I mean, that added a lot to what you wanted the immersive experience to be. Yeah. Was that you're like, who is shooting this?

You find yourself asking yourself that all the time. Yeah. And, you know, there are Vietnamese photographers. They're American. They're from all over the world. I mean, the greatest journalists in the world, like, we would expect, all went there. Yeah. And the access was unprecedented because the army, our military, did not restrict where they could go. So you could get a press pass and you could just hop on a helicopter

and go anywhere you want, basically. Right. And, you know, their goal was to try to get somewhere where something was happening so they could find some action or go out on a patrol or something. And then in the Tet Offensive, when the action was actually happening in Saigon, that's where they were based. So they had enormous numbers of cameras following the war as it was exploding around them. It's crazy. It's pretty crazy. And still photographs that like were drilled into my head yeah those two of the the execution of lamb on the streets of saigon during the

ted offensive and they're running ahead of the national and the little girl running right and i would to which i would add the kent state oh the one hovering over the body that those three iconic images what happens is that we, as we always do in a media culture that is suffused with outlets but doesn't want to go deep, it wants to be superficial and conventional, is that we don't really explore. And in each one of those photographs, we... Yeah, you show the other shots. We give you more of what happened, more of the story so that at least, even in a speech

like Nixon's silent majority, usually it's just quoted, you, the great so that at least, even in a speech like Nixon's silent majority, usually it's just quoted, you, the great silent majority. It's out of context, this brilliant speech that turns the tide of public opinion in the favor of Nixon, right? I mean, that's just not said. Or hearing one line of John Kerry, and we've got nearly the entire speech, or the entire testimony. Kerry, and we've got nearly the entire speech, or the entire testimony. Yeah.

It is fascinating about the American mind, you know, where it draws a line. You know, I heard something on one of the shows, they were talking to McCain's, you know, one of his old, Stephen, I forget his last name all the time, who worked with McCain. Smith, I think. Steve Schmidt. Yeah, Schmidt. Sorry, I was close. I was close.

That he said that, you know, when Nixon resigned, he had a 29% approval rate. Oh, Schmidt. Sorry, I was close. I was close. He said that when Nixon resigned, he had a 29% approval rate. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. Which is not high, but it's not going anywhere. I think we developed, at least I did, I think we all did, great appreciation for Nixon's political skills. Yeah. You know, it was, I mean, I grew up-

Houdini skills, yeah. Yeah. You know, in Watergate, he was so demonized if you were realizing that the government, you know, how corrupt what was happening was. But watching, going back into the beginning and seeing the speeches he gave, his understanding of how the sort of excesses of the anti-war movement could be used to his advantage, you know, and the kind of language he used about law and order and peace with honor resonated with people so powerfully. He was brilliant. order and peace with honor resonated with people so powerfully he was brilliant and on top of that you know he and kissinger came to the conclusion that vietnam wasn't really that important to america anymore and what was important was making peace with china and you know diffusing tension with russia and that was actually going to be their legacy and they just wanted to sort of fix

up this vietnam problem and make it go away essentially we're playing a larger game right and it's a china game and a russia game a soviet union game and a a re-election game this is old this is done this is exhausting yeah it's over so what you see is that from truman on eisenhower kennedy johnson nixon even ford they are making decisions about vietnam that are influencing foreign policy and also military strategy, i.e. lives lost, based on domestic political considerations, which means, will I get reelected? And that's happening now. All the time.

All the time. That's the other thing is that some of this stuff never changes, and some people are always going to be like, why don't you shut up and listen to the president? Yes, exactly. And you know what? And conversely, if we had tapes of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, we might be shocked at the sort of, you know, perhaps vulgarity of the conversations, as you can hear in Johnson and Nixon at times, but also the coldness of the real politic and other times the anguish and the lack. I mean, what to me is stunning is to hear Johnson's anguish and then hear the speech he gives the next day or the day before, full of certainty and whatever.

And it's all all right. It's great. Same with McNamara. I mean, they're all confident. And from the beginning inheriting notes from the Truman administration that are saying the same thing you know it is a big WTF I mean this is we could have called the film this yeah so well what do you like and I and I also like that the way you arced it you know the the arc of the film ends up with the design and and

the engagement with the wall you know and that that you know, I get choked up just now thinking about that, like, not unlike, you know, Ground Zero in New York, that there's going to be resistance from people who say, how can you even possibly begin to think of how to make a memorial? Right. And that thing, and that one guy who was like that, to me, it looked like nothing. A ditch. A ditch of shame, I believe. Yeah.

And then he starts to cry about the end of the sentence that he's begun vehemently and certainly opposed to what the wall represented. By the end of it, he is broken down because it proves the effectiveness of it. And if you can escape the binary stuff that he's a prisoner of at the beginning of the sentence and get to the place where he is at the end of the sentence, then you have not just an opportunity to appreciate the wool, but you have an opportunity to have a conversation about Vietnam, which we don't have, because we've either stuck our head in the sand like ostriches, we lost, we don't want to deal with it, it was too painful, I don't want to talk about it, or it set in motion such, you know,

opposing divisions between people, such polarization that you can't have a conversation about it without devolving into yelling almost from the beginning. So we're sort of saying, you know what? You can. You can have this conversation. In war particularly, more than one truth can obtain, and we can help you see that that's the case. We had no thumb on the scale. We had no political agenda or ax to grind or some subtle narrative thing that we're going to do. Obviously, we're going to bring who we are and try to learn what baggage we brought into it and learn pretty

early on that we had to free ourselves of that baggage. But we just want to tell you what happened. And just what happened is itself so mind-bogglingly complex, but also so compelling. And it reveals to us so much about human nature. We study war, not just because it's bad, as I said, but because it's also reveals stuff about love and friendship and courage and fellowship and all sorts of stuff. And the people you met, I mean, there may not be like the Civil War, we didn't end slavery and didn't bring the country together or end fascism. And there's nothing redeeming about Vietnam. But in these individual stories, man, it's in some ways cleaner than the Civil War and cleaner than World War II.

Because you get right, because it is a tragedy, you get right to the heart of it. And you get, I think we got valuable information for ourselves and how to live our lives from this film. And we hope by, you know, extension or osmosis or whatever it is that happens in film and art and whatever it is with our audience. My buddy, Jim Loftus, who worked in the government for 30 years. Yeah, he was with Kerry. He did advance for several presidents and he was with John carrie doing uh work with him for like five or seven years he retired from government but when i met him in college you know in 1981 or 82 you would think he had been to vietnam he was a freshman and he would not stop talking about it he was obsessed with it

and i was like i i got hold of this and he's's like, Oh, God, he's up in New Hampshire, where you are, right? Yeah. And you know, he's just he's retired out of the government. He's just sitting up there. And I'm like, you got to watch this. And he I think he watched it straight. Like, I don't think he slept. And he's like, Oh, man, this is great. You know, like, we don't recommend that. I just want to say that, that it's like taking the whole bottle of pills at once. There is I mean, it's, it's tough taking the whole bottle of pills at once. There is, I mean, it's tough for us. I think the most we've ever squeezed it in was three days. Is that right?

I think so. And that was tough for us. And we've seen it a gazillion times, and it still just rips us apart. I know. I just told them to send it back to me because I've got to watch it again. Oh, my goodness. You got one? Yeah. Okay.

You know, what we've found that's been so heartening is that it is really intense. And especially young people have come. And, you know, we've had screenings for a variety of reasons with interns and just people who are friends of friends and that kind of thing. And they come in and they say, I think I'm going to have a, you know, I was expecting a history lesson, like high school history about the Vietnam War. But I just had an experience. experience. And, you know, that is the highest compliment we could possibly have, because it's, you know, some kind of funny alchemy to make something out of this raw material that feels like you were there. But we're hoping because of the way all these different points of views exist, and people really sort of open their hearts to tell their stories, we get a

chance for people to have a different kind of conversation about this period and all the divisions that Ken talked about earlier. We've had people in our edit room come in, and not just consultants who are a little bit out of our move, but people who live through it who really don't agree at all. Watch the film. Agree about what? Should we be there? Was it just? Oh, right, right.

I mean, the basic questions of the war. People on the right and on the left, people who protested and prisoner of war, let's just say, for example, coming to a screening and after watching it, they might not agree, but they're having a really different kind of conversation, having seen the film. And that is, you know, the best news we can have, because that's what we think is so missing right now from our public life. We're not having these kind of conversations. Civil discourse. Right. Civil discourse. And, you know, something about this film too that

we haven't really talked about that I think is a hugely important ingredient is the music. We have Trent Dresner and Atticus Ross composed an unbelievable track that just mirrors this in the way they do with the hard metallic stuff that creates anxiety

but just also resolving into something melodic and more emotional. And then Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Rado Ensemble, in addition to 120 takes of the best music from one of the best periods, if not the best period, of popular music ever. And so we've got Beatles and Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan and, you know, Crosby, Stills and Nash and Simon and Garfunkel and Creedence Clearwater and Miles Davis. And, you know, but that Reznor stuff that, you know, that the Reznor stuff is like the whole thing.

It's the pulse of the film and it's just stunning. I don't know how they do it. And we we were here a few months ago with them and they told us it was one of the most satisfying collaborations they'd had working on this stuff for us. We wanted to get into their garage yeah see how they did it yeah but but we had felt that this was the most satisfying collaboration that we'd had and there was something really exciting that that this subject had for trent and atticus had had sort of pushed the right buttons in the way it had pushed our buttons as well something you know what we did was show them raw footage. It didn't score to the film at all. So we showed them interviews,

just uncut material. And then we talked about the moods that we hoped they would be able to evoke. So dread and anxiety. He's good at moods. And more than one mood at the same time. I mean, that's what's so fascinating is that, you know,

the music is so complex. Excitement and dread. Like, do, do, do, do, do. And yet at the same time, it's resolving in the pit of your stomach with a kind of, you know, that kind of acid. Yeah, exactly. And Peter Coyote is an old radical himself. So, you know, you got him.

He learned a lot, you know, because he kept on, he had to really leave his baggage at the door too, because you know, he lived through this period in one way as an activist, but you know, lived through this period in one way as an activist but you know seeing what was happening in hanoi and what the north vietnamese soldiers were saying and what was happening in the white house and i mean you know he came away with a completely different understanding of the war when when we yeah we're directing him how how to read it and

we've used him and we love him and he's a dear friend yeah he does this great thing he doesn't want to see it in advance so he's reading cold and often we're taking the first take so sometimes those sentences are someone essentially in the moment carrying the words inhabiting the words in the best sort of way but as we would move on to the next narration block yeah he would read everything in between and he was going jeez i had no idea and so what i think that's what it was is that yeah that that for the open-minded still among us to be able to just check your your weapons at the door you know what i mean and just sort of say i am disarmed because i think i know but i don't know anything this was our experience going in and it was the experience

of our writer jeffrey ward who's an extraordinary writer I've worked with for 35 years. Uh-huh. And we just all had to sort of let it go and then go into this with a different kind of mindset. Yeah, and I think that if you can penetrate the sort of apathy or detachment or whatever it is that people, or just the youth, some people just not caring, you do a real good job because right away, you know it's not a history lesson. It's hard not to care, I think. Yeah, it's hard not to care. And it's very engaging immediately.

The biggest thing to drop is certainty because I think this is what we do all the time, particularly today. We're always really certain. And denial. And denial. And denial, yes. But that's a flip side of certainty, which is we're all in our hardened silos of just the absolutely sure that we know what it is. And there's some incredible release that takes place when you let that go. And we had to do that necessarily to make a film but we've watched our audiences i mean left right

and center as lynn is saying young and old i mean just incredible testimony from a kid who you know in our an intern who was you know grew up with violent video games and after he watched the ted offensive referring to the assassination of the north vietnamese spy right on the streets he said he's really dead and he started to cry and i thought my god if we cut streets, he said, he's really dead. And he started to cry. And I thought, my God, if he cut through, if he's killing and blowing up heads all day, and then he comes and he's worried about Lem as a real life human being. And the footage is pretty graphic.

You delivered the goods. Have you been approached by video game companies? No, no. And we would never do it. I remember after the Civil War we got approached and I just said uh-uh

because you'll make it possible for the Confederacy to win and that's not going to be one of the options that I will tolerate well thank you so much Lynn and Ken that was

I think you did a masterpiece it was a great job and you know and the book too is this coming out too I've got this huge book yeah terrific it's Jeff Ward

being able to say okay you sons of bitches you cut this out of this episode for time. I get to put it back in and then add a little bit more. So it's always a terrific treat to it. And then I think it's important for people to know that this is not a downer. No, no, no. You know, look, there is a way. I mean, there's humor in this. There's transcendence in here.

But it's also, you could argue, really, this was a good thing. The system worked. The people of the United States, over time, decided that this was not really in the best interest of the country. And they elected people who changed it. Yep. And the wisdom, the humility, the sort of enlightenment, all the good human things and the bad human things are in there. Yeah. I mean, we sometimes.

Transcendence. Right. Exactly. I mean, over the course of making the film and spending time with this material, it was so dark and often really devastating for everybody who worked on looking at the images, thinking about the losses that people suffered and the guilt they carry for who didn't make it and the awful things that happened. Just, you know, it became at times really overwhelming.

And we would sometimes say, you know, this is such a dark story. How are we going to get through it? But I think what carried us through and we hope carries our audience through is that it is this resilience that people who've gone through these things can still be here. They can tell you their story. They can make sense of it for themselves. And there's tremendous courage in that. Yeah. And humility and grace in a way, like you said.

And it's not a happy ending by any means right but there is some deeper meaning for all of us that that's what we're all hoping it's you know um in the beginning of the film max cleland says uh he's quoting um from the holocaust survivor victor frankel who wrote a book called man's search for meaning the idea being to live is to suffer to survive is to find meaning in suffering. And I heard a corollary to that recently, which is Jung said, you have to make meaning out of suffering, which is even different than finding it. It's active. It's not a passive thing. It's not waiting for that understanding to come.

It's going out and seizing the bull. I mean, this is. Right. And we see the people in the film do this over and over again. And there is, like, I do feel that, you know, along with all these things that whatever is open-ended, you know, in terms of how you feel or how the discussions evolve, is that you do feel closure. Yes. Okay, well. There you go. Yeah.

Which is good. Right. Given all that information. It is. No, it's really, really good. And I think the message finally at the end is hopeful. South Africa had one of the worst passages of time, and they did a thing called truth and reconciliation. And I think that what the film is attempting to do is suggest as close as what we can by the variety of, what the truth of the situation was, and then

it leaves open the possibility of reconciliation. Yeah, well, we need it right now. Amen, brother. Thank you so much, you guys. Thank you. Thank you. Watch that thing. I'll tell you, what a great conversation with those two and what the documentary is like.

I'm going to have to start it over just to process it all. It's definitely worth it because there are just so many things that I certainly didn't know. Maybe some of you are more obsessed than I am, like my friend Jim who's up in New Hampshire now. He's hunkered down up there in New Hampshire. But he was obsessed with it. And he, you know, for those of you who really knew a lot about it, you're going to know more.

And for those of you who feel a little light in terms of how much you do know, you're going to know more. And for those of you who just knew the ideas of it or reacted to it the way you were supposed to react to somebody who was against that this is going to be an eye opening alright so thank you what am I doing it's the end of the show am I going to play guitar you know it's weird when I play this sort of raunchy shitty dirty guitar people react

to it I guess there's no illusions to doing something different. I'll do it. I'll do it. Boomer lives! Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category.

And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. It's a night for the whole family. Be a part of Kids Night when the Toronto Rock take on the Colorado Mammoth at a special 5 p.m. start time on Saturday, March 9th at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton.

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