November 28, 2025 • 35 mins
Ken Burns has been telling stories about America for almost 50 years. The lauded documentary filmmaker has a new series on PBS, The American Revolution, which charts the period before and after 1776. It will air internationally ahead of the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence.
Mishal Husain asked Burns to join the show to mark Thanksgiving, looking at today’s America through the lens of its past and the characters who made history.
02:15 - The complexity of the American Revolution
04:00 - The underdog story
07:15 - The global significance of the American Revolution
13:43 - Mishal Husain’s connection to Lexington Green
16:15 - Why Ken Burns became a filmmaker
17:55 - “My mother’s gift in a funny way was dying”
19:20 - The Ken Burns Effect
20:15 - Hollywood actors as first person narrators
21:25 - Directing Josh Brolin as George Washington
22:00 - Why Tom Hanks didn’t want to be the voice of George Washington
23:00 - Filming reenactments
24:50 - The American Revolution is not over
29:10 Working for PBS, American Public Broadcasting
32:20 What is Ken Burns grateful for on Thanksgiving?
Watch this podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe4PRejZgr0Ns_wjGlmjlPz0cded0nTYS
You can find the written version of this interview with Mishal’s notes on Bloomberg Weekend: https://www.bloomberg.com/latest/weekend-interview
Contact The Mishal Husain Show mishalshow@bloomberg.net
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
We're chicken Littles, the sky is falling, It's all bad.
I'm grateful for the fact that being a student of
history permits me to have a kind of sense that
the human race will figure this out.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Ken Burns, filmmaker, chronicler of America and now telling the
story of the American Revolution.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
I think gratitude is the missing ingredient in our degraded
political lives. These days. Everything is binary and it's not
It's so complicated, and yet I have an essential optimism.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
From Bloomberg Weekend. This is the Michelle Hussein Show. I'm
Michelle Hussein. Ken Burns has been working on stories of
America for nearly fifteen years. He's made epic documentaries on
the American Civil War, the Vietnam War, the US and
(01:07):
the Holocaust, and his style bringing old photographs and documents
to life is what led Steve Jobs to name an
Apple video editing feature the ken Burns Effect in his honor. Now,
the filmmaker has turned his lens onto the United States
origin story the American Revolution with a mammoth twelve hour
(01:29):
series on PBS American Public Broadcasting and even if you
think you know everything necessary about the founding fathers, the
Brits versus the Colonies, I think you'll be surprised and
enriched by what you're about to hear. This conversation also
comes right up to the present day, and given its
(01:50):
Thanksgiving weekend, it felt right to hear from America's best
known documentary maker with his take on his country then
and now. So here's Ken Burns telling me first what
he discovered as he investigated the revolutionary story.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I had no idea of the complexity, the variety of individuals,
the sense that it was a bloody civil war in
ways that our civil war is merely a sectional war.
That it's a world war, a global war, maybe the
fifth global war, for the prize of North America. That
it has the big ideas and all the famous for Americans,
(02:30):
founding fathers, the boldface names, if you will, but also
hundreds of other people that are engaged in it, who
are important and give dynamics and dimension and complexity to
the story. And that's all we want from our stories.
We don't want a superficial Madison Avenue sanitized version of
our past. We want a complete one. Everyone wants that
(02:51):
it doesn't matter about politics. You just want dramatic stories.
And we have a sign in Neon sign in our
editing room that says, it's complicated, because in my business,
the art has to be subservient to the facts. And
when you learn new facts, and sometimes they're contradictory, you
have to find a way that your narrative can tolerate
them and understand them. And when, unfortunately, we live in
(03:14):
a media world where everything's a one or a zero,
and we live in a political world and where everything
is one way or the other, it's a binary that
does not exist, but is artificially created for the simplicity,
the laziness, the cynicism of what's going on. But telling
a complex story escapes the specific gravity of cynicism and
offers something in return, something rich, in something where you
(03:38):
can say the whole is greater than the sum of
the parts.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
And the series is out now in all its complexity,
but you will have known as you did it that
it's a more fractious time in America compared to the
end of the Obama presidency when you start out. And indeed,
in an executive order, the White House said earlier this
year that they were against telling history in a way
that costs the founding principles in a negative light.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Well, I certainly haven't done that. I've put them in
a very very positive light. I've just put them in
the correct light, which is the engagement of all the characters.
It is possible, I assume, to make this a one act,
one room play where it all takes place in Philadelphia,
but it doesn't give you the dynamism. It doesn't understand
the underdog story that this is. I mean, on April nineteen,
(04:26):
seventeen seventy five, when British troops open up on American
militia on Lexington Green in Massachusetts, the chances of their
success is zero, and six and a half long years
later at Yorktown, that British army is surrendering. And how
that happens is forty battles, enormous social and political, even
(04:49):
religious change within the colonies. So you have this complex
dynamic of the five hundred thousand people out of the
three million who are free or enslaved Africans. You haveative
Americans either coexisting assimilated with the colonists, and then those
nations that are as distinct and as important to say,
of France or of Prussia is on the world scene
(05:12):
that have maintained relationships for centuries.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
And one of the many things that really interested and
intrigued me about this series is realizing that this revolutionary
spirit on the part of the colonies, how their ideas
were influenced by the Native American nations, that Native American
nations had what we would recognize today as a union
(05:36):
in a way that the Thirteen Colonies really didn't until
quite late.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
It's really remarkable. At the very very beginning of the film,
there is a group of six Native nations, first five
and then six, which is often called the Iroquois Confederacy.
They call it the Hoda Nshone. It permitted each of
those nations to sort of retain their identity. It's sort
of like the European Union, and at the same time
could economically and diplomatically and militarily have a union. And
(06:05):
Benjamin Franklin seizes twenty years before the revolution, says, I
want that. That's what we need, from New Hampshire to Georgia,
the Thirteen Hongs, we need that, and he gets people
to sign up for his plan of union in Albany,
twenty years before the Revolution seventeen fifty four, and then
they go home to try to sell it, and nobody
wants to give up any autonomy. So the plan dies,
(06:26):
but it gets resurrected as the revolution begins to become
a shooting war. And it's very interesting. It's also, i
have to say, the Enlightenment and the Americans are reading.
They're very literate, in some ways, percentage wise more literate
than the British population. They're freer, they own land in
ways that ordinary folks in Britain do not own land.
(06:49):
They pay less taxes, they got great health, their literacy
is second only to Scandinavia. And they're reading Modesque, they're
reading the French philosophers of the Enlightenment, they're reading Lacke
and Human the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers. And so when you
marry this idea of a practical example sitting at your
western doorstep, of the possibility of union, and you merge
(07:12):
it with these arguments you're having with your own countrymen,
that suddenly get blown out into universal rights, yikes, And
they're very powerful. The word liberty means something to everybody.
It means something to George Washington who owns hundreds of
human beings, and Thomas Jefferson, who owns hundreds of human beings.
But it also means something to those hundreds of human beings,
(07:33):
and it means something to women, who are a majority
of the population, and it means something to Native Americans.
And that animating spirit makes the American Revolution not just
this important origin story for the United States. It makes
it one of the most important events in all of
world history, because that revolution is going to spawn two
(07:54):
hundred years of revolutions all around the globe. It has
a kind of force and a power that is going
to destroy the French monarchy, is going to change Europe,
It's going to change Latin and South America, and then
later Asia and Africa. And it comes from the idea
of this anti colonial movement that strange to say, in
(08:15):
this day and age the United States invented.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
And yet when that anti colonial movement is ultimately successful
in seventeen seventy six and then finally against the British
a few years later, what it results in is the
westward expansion, which dispossesses Native Americans of their lands exactly,
and those African Americans who are runaway slaves are hunted down,
(08:41):
and George Washington the great hero if there is one,
although there are many of Your story is keeping those
runaway slaves imprisoned so that their owners can come back
and get them.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
This is the story of human beings. The contradictions, the hypocrisies,
all of that is there. We don't have a country
without George Washington. But yes, he owns other u uman beings.
He wants those escaped enslaved people to be returned to
their owners. They don't make George Washington the head of
the Eastern Seaboard Army. They make him the head of
a continental army, which is directed by the Continental Congress.
(09:13):
They know where they're going. So, first of all, the
irony that settlers dumping the tea, colonists dumping the tea
in Boston Harbor are crudely dressed as Native Americans. Every
school kid in America knows that. And then when you
ask them why, they say, oh, to put the blame
on the Native Americans. That's not the reason. It's this attempt,
so ironic and so bittersweet and so complicated, so moving
(09:36):
in a way. They're trying to tell Britain we're not
of you. We're not of the mother country anymore. We're Aboriginal,
like the people. We've spent the last one hundred and
fifty years dispossessing of their land so that we can
have these thirteen colonies, and the people that we're going
to spend the next one hundred and fifty years getting
rid of all the rest of the land, all the
way to the Pacific. So there's ironies throughout.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Well, don't you struggle with that hip hocrist, No, this.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Is what what do you mean? There's a wonderful moment
when the great scholar Annette Gordon Reid, who is a
black woman, says, you know that slavery bound Thomas Jefferson's
life from beginning to end. We're in the middle of
a section on the Declaration of Independence where he is
declaring that all men are created equal. We hold these
choose to be self evident. He says, they're not self evident.
(10:22):
These are brand new in the world, that all men
are created equal. And he knows slavery is wrong. George
Washington knows slavery is wrong. And she said, well, how
could you do something if you knew it was wrong?
She said, that's the human question for all of us.
She's not taking Thomas Jefferson off the hook, er by extension,
George Washington off the hook. She's putting us on the
hook for artist tisk presentism about how we're so different,
(10:45):
we're all complicated. This is what you're William Shakespeare has
given us in so many ways of what's going on,
the contradictions. Here's the good news though. Those words, when
Thomas Jefferson meant them, he meant all men of property,
free of debt who were white. We don't mean that anymore.
(11:05):
And everyone who heard those words began to argue for
something that changed the world. Now the second he says
the word all slavery's over. Now, it will take fourscore
and nine years before that happens. Women will have to
wait just and excruciatingly impossibly long, one hundred and forty
four years in our country to receive suffrage. But those
(11:29):
walls are broken down, they're done, they're over, and you
could extend it to all other kinds of things, child labor,
gay marriage, whatever it might be.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
This has so they start something by saying by saying
the words all, they start something, even though they're not
prepared to deliver it themselves.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
The late historian who Bernard Balin, who died at one
hundred and one, God bless him, and we interviewed him
when he was ninety eight or ninety nine, says nobody
talked about slavery as an evil before the Revolution. There
were people who spoke to it's evil, but it was
not part of the common conversation. The second the Revolution started,
and for every moment through to our Civil War, it
(12:07):
was the number one topic in America. So by bringing
up what you're calling the hypocrisy of these natural rights
by people who owned other human beings, just because Jefferson
didn't see the hypocrisy, I mean he did see the hypocrisy,
he just couldn't act on it. There's too much money
to be made in slavery. And may I point out
(12:27):
that the British Empire's wealth, its profit centers are in
the Caribbean. Only South Carolina is profitable. We're just the
most populous, and we also are the most literate, and
we make things, and so we're great trading partners with
Britain before the revolution. But the thirteen colonies in the Caribbean,
like Jamaica and Barbados, which are ninety percent in slave people.
(12:50):
That's where the engine of wealth for the British Empire
comes from. And so when we deal with hypocrisy, it's
kind of like like saying oxygen. This is like human behaviors.
I mean, there would not be a William Shakespeare if
there was not a hypocrisy and irony and contradiction and
undertow not between people but within individuals. So you can
(13:14):
see that in Washington, you can see that in Jefferson,
you can see that in many of the founding fathers,
though the adams Is were vehemently opposed to slavery, and
John Adams's wife Abigail, who may be the best writer
of the whole lot, is from the very get go
just totally uncomfortable with the idea that we're going to
be talking about liberty and we can't rid ourselves of
(13:35):
this horrific hypocrisy right in our own midst. So this
is what makes the story dramatic.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Ken, I hear you on the universality of hypocrisy. My
family from India and Pakistan and the impact of the
revolution on the British as far as India was concerned,
is that no way are we going to lose India.
Oh look, look at what the Americans did to us.
We're not going to have the same thing happen again.
Can I tell you what my connection is to Lexington
Green into seventeen seventy?
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Yes, please, do you have one?
Speaker 1 (14:02):
I do have one, which I had no idea about
until I was on a TV ancestry program and they
traced six generations back. One of my forefathers, Michael Farley,
was the head of the Massachusetts Militia. His four sons
were all soldiers of the Revolution, one of them killed
And essentially the link to me is that one of
the grandsons ends up in India, so goes off by
(14:26):
eighteen twenty to seek his fortune. But it gives me
this connection to exactly the period that you're talking about,
and I have to reconcile myself to the fact that
when they were fighting for their liberty, they didn't mean
everyone's liberty.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
I learned that I have on my mother's side and
a slave person who was a household one person, and
I took that with equanimity. The thing that really bothered
me was that I have an ancestor also on my
mother's side in Massachusetts named Elded Tupper, who had to
move to New Brunswick because he refused to sign a
loyalty oath after the revolution, had been a loyalist through that,
(15:00):
I do have one saving grace, perhaps for those of
you in the UK, that I am also related to
Robert Burns, the National Poet of Scotland, who still says
in his poem to allow us one of my favorite
lines in the English language, owed some power of the
gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us,
and that becomes an animating part of how we tell stories,
(15:24):
not sort of imprisoned by the binary that we've been
talking about, but tolerant of or just aware of all
of these contradictions and undertow which makes drama more interesting
and makes us able to deal with one another. If
it's that binary, you can't be married. If it's that binary,
you can't raise a child. But somehow we permitted our
(15:46):
politics to descend to this, you know, abysmal level of
one thing or the other that actually, frankly doesn't exist
in nature.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Can I understand a bit more of about your own
nature and the story of how you came to to
do this work that you have over decades now. You
started with the Brooklyn Bridge documentary and the Civil War,
of course, was an amazing American TV moment. One of
our producers was nine when it came out and she
remembers everyone sitting and watching it. So how did that
(16:17):
work began? What was it in your early life that
led you to it?
Speaker 2 (16:20):
You know, as many things for many people, the thing
that has been the most significant for my growth has
had to do with loss. My mother had cancer, began
when I was two or three. She died when I
was eleven, just a couple months short of my twelfth birthday.
I remember, some time after my twelfth birthday, saw my
father looking at an old movie and crying. And I'd
(16:43):
never seen my dad cry, not when my mother was sick,
and not when not when she died, or not at
the impossibly sad funeral. And the film was Sir Carol
Reid's Odd Man Out about the Irish Troubles, starring James Amason.
It's a beautiful film, still works today. And I realized
that the film had given him a safe haven that
nowhere else in his life could he express these emotions.
(17:05):
And I was sitting there late at night with him
as a school night. He was letting me stay up
and he cried, and I just went at that moment,
I want to be a filmmaker. And later on in
life my late father in law, who's an eminent psychologist,
I said, you know, I could never be aware of
the date that my mother died April twenty eighth. They'd
always be approaching and then, you know, receding, but I
(17:26):
was never present. He said, I bet you blew out
your candles on your birthday cake wishing she'd come back.
And I said, how'd you know? He said, look what
you do for a living. You wake the dead. You
make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do
you think you're really trying to wake up? But I then,
by thirty nine or forty, I began to really work
to understand what it was that I had not dealt
(17:48):
with as a little boy, with this tremendous loss, and
it enriched my work even more. But it's born in tragedy,
it's born in loss. My mother's gift, in a funny
perverse way, was dying. I don't want her to be gone.
There's not a day that I don't think of her.
My oldest daughter named her first child after her, my
first grandchild, And it is a poignant and positive response
(18:11):
in the middle of a lot of draped black funereal
crape that has attended my life, like the Spanish moss
and the live oaks in the south. But it's born
of loss. And it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Your mother's been gone sixty years.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
I think sixty and a half. It's way too long.
I will tell you that it is way too long.
I talk about this with my brother. You know, it's funny.
My dad died much later. He'd moved from daddy to dad.
She never left mommy. So you have two seventy year old,
seventy men in their seventies who refer to their mother
as mommy. And we talk about that, you know, every
time we talk, we just say mommy, and it just
(18:48):
is what it is. She left at a time when
he was ten and I was eleven.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Do you think you're still grieving?
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Yes, the half life of grief is endless. I think
that's true.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
The style that you have made your trademark and and
the use of paintings, fragments of letters, photographs with your
more recent work where you zoom in and you're panning across,
you're using music, you're using sound effects. How much of
that was born of necessity in that Let's take the
Civil War documentary. You didn't have a lot of great
(19:41):
visuals to work with.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Well, we had a lot of photographs. And that's where
the American Revolution is at an even greater deficit, because
photographs are real. You show a picture of Abraham Lincoln
with his general at Antietam and you just know what's
going on. But you don't have that. The variety of
portraits of Washington are widely very Some look cartoonish, some
don't look at all like him, some do look like him,
And so you have to figure out a way in
(20:04):
this case to make them come alive. It's the filmmaker's problem,
like you have to have a complex sound effects track
in this case, in addition to a third person narrator.
I have been pioneering since the first film on Brooklyn Bridge.
First person Boys is read by the finest actors in
the world, and I would submit that the cast list
for this film is better than any film or television
(20:25):
series that's ever happened. I think that Sir Kenneth Brandow
could have read every single part except the female parts.
And maybe I'm selling him short. But also Tom Hanks
and Meryl Streep and Paul Jamatti and Laura Lenny and
Claire Danes. And I've probably listed a fifth of the
voices that make this Jeff Daniels, Josh Brolin and Berlin.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Who's the voice of Washington? Right? And I wonder just
let us into how you direct them, because I think
that you are. You are very specific on how you
want these people to sound. So how do you know
that that's how Washington?
Speaker 2 (21:03):
I don't know. Sometimes it's hard, and Washington was particularly hard.
Last year. I was at the Rome Film Festival and
I was flying back home and Dune iiO was playing,
and I was falling asleep and nodding out. But at
one point I just sat up straight because I heard
Josh's voice. He's in both the Dune films, and I
just said, okay, let's give this a try. I said, look,
(21:24):
you know, as everybody, I've told everybody this, you don't
have to project. This is not the theater. It's almost
like the way if you're reading to your kids or
your grandkids, you actually lower your voice, which brings people
closer and so I said, you need to just inhabit
the words. And in the case of George Washington, you
have an impossible task. This is an opaque and unknowable
person by design. He kept that rectitude so firmly there.
(21:48):
But there is in the writing little glimpses. So I
need you to be both opaque, but give me the
little bits where you feel the emotion, you feel the passion.
And he did it fantastic. I told Tam Hanks, you know,
I'd make you George Washington in a second, he said,
But then everybody would be saying, oh, Tom Hanks is
George Washington. I said, right. So I gave him fourteen
different voices, and every fourteen is in the film. He
(22:10):
is such a good reader that he actually slips in
and hides with perfection behind the eight or ten people
that he plays in these fourteen quotes. And I just
have to tell you that when you record voices with people,
not all of them get in in editing, you whittle
them down, but everyone that he read is in. And
he's I've worked with him now, it's close to twenty
(22:32):
five years, and he is so talented and so generous
that if you wanted somebody to read the back of
your serial box or the phone book. He'd be the
guide to do it.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
What you're saying about Tom Hanks does explain to me
why I knew he was in the series. And as
I watched the episodes, I was like, which one is
Tom Hanks because I couldn't recognize his Well, now I understand.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
I'll tell him. I'll tell him that because this is
exactly what I love.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
You did bring in one new thing in this series
you hadn't done before Ken, and that's the reenactments. There's
a lot of reenactments. Why is it because in the
TikTok generation you do need visual device.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
I have no photographs, I have no newsreels. We spent
more than five years filming reenactment groups in French and
British and militia and Continental and Native American Black troops, whatever, women,
children that are always there in the battlefield, and we
collected a critical mass of them so that we could
use them as if we'd gone to the National Archives
(23:33):
to pick up the photographs of that. We treated them
in a very impressionistic way. We film them at every
time of day and night, usually at dawn or dusk,
we don't see faces, we see silhouettes, we see cannon firing,
and all of that means that we're not asking them
to reenact a specific battle. We're asking them to participate
and to give a sense. And if you add complex
(23:55):
in some cases one hundred and fifty different soundtracks along
with the music, the third person narrator read by Peter Coyote,
and then some of the voices that you and I
have been talking about, then you get a sense that
you're there. And there's a coldness that you can feel
in the winter scenes. There's a hotness that you can
feel in the summer scenes when twenty British soldiers were
(24:16):
dying in the march across New Jersey every day just
of heat. The live cinematography is the key to this,
as are maps, some of them just leaving the old
maps alone. They're beautiful works of art, some adding arrows,
some extruding them and making them dimensional. So there's lots
of ways to bring to life, to wake the dead.
As my late father in law.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Said, now I'm going to read the words that you
put right at the end of the series and forgive me,
because clearly I'm not Meryl Streep or Laura Linny or
Claire Danes, or any of the amazing voices that you
had in But these are such striking lines Benjamin Rush
in seventeen eighty seven, saying the American War is over.
But this is far from being the case with the
(24:59):
American Revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act
of the great drama is closed. It remains yet to
establish and perfect our new forms of government. Patriots, come forward.
Your country demands your services. Hear her proclaiming, in size
and groans, in her governments, in her finances, in her trade,
in her manufactures, in her morals, and in her manners,
(25:22):
the revolution is not over. I mean, I'm feeling emotional
reading these words, and I'm not even emotional.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Ed Norton, the great actor, reads that as he does
many characters in the film.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
But ken are you saying the revolution is not over today.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
In all of the spirit that moved you in that moment.
There's something interesting. We sometimes focus on the phrase pursuit
of happiness and argue about happiness means the right to
make as much money as I want. This is what
worried the founding fathers. They thought the pursuit of happiness
was lifelong learning. But the key word here is pursuit.
(25:58):
This is a process story. The Declaration has it, we're
in pursuit of happiness. The Constitution eleven years later has it,
a more perfect union. We're a nation in the process
of becoming. So everyone knew that these were original documents,
the Constitution that would immediately would not be ratified if
it wasn't immediately amended by some things, some basic rights
(26:22):
that all of the people who fought for it wanted
to have, and that we would continue to be tinkering
with this machine to perfect it. So that meant in
seventeen eighty nine, when the United States government actually took
the Constitution of two years before and put it in action,
it meant all white men, you know, could vote right
(26:43):
who are twenty one years old. We don't mean that now.
And so the story of the American Adventure, which Benjamin
Rush understood right away. He's saying, this is an open
ended thing. We are perfectible, and that is a key thing.
More often than not, people say this is it. And
just as the Bible, the Old Testament says in Ecclesiastes,
(27:05):
there's nothing new under the sun. Most human beings believe
that nothing would ever change. There are people from Wales
and England and Scotland and Ireland who have worked dependent
land for a thousand years. Whole families have worked it
for somebody else, and they've come here and they now
own a plot of land, may be taken from Native Americans,
(27:26):
but they own it and they feel the sense of
the possibility of things actually changing. And I think what
is in some ways one of the biggest takeaways is
the perfectibility of human beings, the improvement. And in fact
that's the beauty of Benjamin Russia's statements. It doesn't mean
you have to kill people every twenty years, you know.
(27:48):
Jefferson famously said many years later that the tree of
Liberty should be watered with the blood of tyrants and
patriots every twenty years. And you kind of go, no,
you don't need to do the violence. This is what
human beings always do.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
But I guess I'm asking all the aspects of what
has happened this year that you're struggling with.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
No, I have to be disciplined, that sign it's complicated.
Our famous satirist Mark Twain says history doesn't repeat itself, which,
of course it doesn't. No event has happened twice. But
it rhymes that there's nothing new under the sun. What
has been will be again, what has been done will
be done again. There's nothing new under the sun, suggesting
human nature doesn't change, and it basically doesn't. But I
(28:30):
think what happens is you have to as a filmmaker
be disciplined. The rhymes that were happening when we began
this project when Barack Obama was present, changed in the
next year and the next year and the next year.
So they're different rhymes, and if you pay attention to them,
you date your film. But today is a school day
in the United States, and hundreds of classrooms are looking
(28:51):
at my thirty five year old film on the Civil War,
that Lewis and Clark film that we made, the film
on the Roosevelts, on World War Two, on jazz, on baseball,
and on our recent film on the US and the Holocaust,
and many others, because they're evergreen, because we did not
succumb to the desire to say, ah, isn't this so
much like today?
Speaker 1 (29:11):
But what about your next work? That's what I wonder about.
Because you've always worked on with PBS several PBS's President
Trump wants to end federal funding for public broadcasting.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
He did. He killed the Corporation for He did, and
the Congress killed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and it
was an incredibly short sighted thing. It will hurt rural
stations more than us. I took a big hit. Money
that had already been authorized and appropriated for future projects
that I'm working on and have been working on for
years has disappeared. I'll have to fundraise. PBS had to
(29:43):
lay off a lot of people, but they'll be around.
They'll continue. I'll continue.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
So will you find other sources of funding? Where do
you make that up from?
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Just you know, places, foundations, individuals of wealth who have
always contributed. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was eliminated,
was about twenty percent of my budget, equal to our
corporate underwriter. But many other people will fill the gap.
I'm worried about the next person coming up who's not
going to be able to be funded. I'm worried about
those rural stations. Sometimes the PBS station, it's the largest
(30:13):
network in the country. There are three hundred and thirty
eight individual stations. That's the only signal they get and
so there'll be a news desert, nobody will be covering
the school board or the city council meeting. They won't
have that emergency signal. So it's just it was an
unfortunate and unnecessary sort of political gesture. And maybe things
will change and it will be resurrected, and I feel
(30:36):
optimistic that that, you know, in a selfish way, I'll
be able to go on and PBS will continue. And
it's been the only place that could have put on
my films. I could, with my reputation, go to other
places and get all the money I need to do
the Revolution thirty million dollars plus, but they wouldn't give
me ten years to do it right. They wanted in
(30:56):
a year and a half. And I don't make films
that are this complicated and this deep in that amount
of time. I don't know how to do it, and
my ats are off to the people who can. But
I think the reason I occupy a position as I
do in my country is because I spend that time
to do it right, that I don't put any of
my personal politics in it, and that I speak to everybody,
and there is in this film something for everybody here,
(31:19):
not because we're trying to be all things, to be
all people. But if you tell a good story, it'd
be like saying, well, Shakespeare is only good for liberal democrats.
That's poppycock, right. He appeals to this day because of
the truths he was able to get to everybody.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
What stories are you telling next?
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Well, we're working on a film we have been for
several years on the history of LBJ Linda Maine Johnson
and the New Deal. His hero was FDR. It's a
very complicated thing. The Vietnam War curtail that we're doing
a film on reconstruction, which is the most misunderstood period
in American history, that post war period where the North
was attempting to rebuild the South and great Black Americans
(32:01):
into it, and it's collapse is the disaster. However, Birth
of a Nation and Gone with the Winds suggest that
the actual reconstruction, the attempt at equalization, was the bad thing,
and that in both of those films, the Ku Klux Klan,
which is our own homegrown Al Qaeda or Isis, were
the heroes of that story and when in fact, they
(32:23):
are the villains of that story.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Ken as you are all Thanksgiving episode can I ask
you this Thanksgiving weekend, what are you grateful for?
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Well, you know, I'm grateful that I am an American.
I am incredibly patriotic, as my children and my grandchildren
will tell you, probably with no small amount of discomfort,
that every year before we eat on the fourth of July,
I make them listen to me read the Declaration of Independence.
Each time I get a little choked up, as you were,
(32:55):
and I were listening to Benjamin Rush's words. And now
my kids will offer other readings, or I'll give it
to my grandkids, or learning to read, to read something else.
I'm very, very grateful, and I think gratitude is the
missing ingredient in our degraded political lives. These days. Everything
is binary, and it's not It's so complicated, and yet
(33:18):
I have a as a history will do an essential optimism.
I'm grateful for the fact that being a student of
history permits me to have a kind of sense that
the human race will figure this out, that the imbalances
of the moment, and we're all so narcissistic. Our moment
is the worst. We're chicken littles. The sky is falling.
It's all bad that I can point out in this
(33:39):
American Revolution, it's much more a division back then, that
it is a civil war, that it is a global war.
And maybe by seeing their own reflection in these historical figures,
well known or not well known, gives you a chance
to realize that for the first time in human history,
people were no longer subjects under Arrian rule, but citizens
(34:02):
with all of the responsibilities attendant to that. And it's
been on the whole with lots of problems, are positive
in the course of human events, as Thamas Jefferson.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Me today, Hen Burns, thank you for taking us into
the past and talking about the present as well. Happy Thanksgiving.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Happy Thanksgiving to you, and.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
That's the Michelle Hussein Show for this week. Do subscribe
if you haven't already, you'll know as soon as we
have a new episode. That way, Thank you for the comments, ratings,
and for your emails. You can send a message to
Michelle's show at Bloomberg dot net. If you want to
see the written versions of these conversations with my notes,
(34:46):
they are at Bloomberg dot com slash Weekend, and you
can also watch them on YouTube and on Bloomberg TV.
Our producers are Jessica Beck and Chris Martlou guestbooking is
by Dave Warren, on social media by Alex Morgan. Our
sound engineer is Richard Ward. Video editing by Toby Babalola.
(35:07):
Our executive producer is Louisa Lewis at Bloomberg Weekend. Editorial
Director of Audio and Special Projects is Brendan Francis Newnham,
and our executive editor is Catherine Bell. Music is by
Bart Warshaw. And we'd also like to thank Alana Susnow,
Sammasadi and Sage Bauman, and also thank you for listening
(35:31):
until next weekend. Goodbye,
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
We're chicken Littles, the sky is falling, It's all bad.
I'm grateful for the fact that being a student of
history permits me to have a kind of sense that
the human race will figure this out.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Ken Burns, filmmaker, chronicler of America and now telling the
story of the American Revolution.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
I think gratitude is the missing ingredient in our degraded
political lives. These days. Everything is binary and it's not
It's so complicated, and yet I have an essential optimism.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
From Bloomberg Weekend. This is the Michelle Hussein Show. I'm
Michelle Hussein. Ken Burns has been working on stories of
America for nearly fifteen years. He's made epic documentaries on
the American Civil War, the Vietnam War, the US and
(01:07):
the Holocaust, and his style bringing old photographs and documents
to life is what led Steve Jobs to name an
Apple video editing feature the ken Burns Effect in his honor. Now,
the filmmaker has turned his lens onto the United States
origin story the American Revolution with a mammoth twelve hour
(01:29):
series on PBS American Public Broadcasting and even if you
think you know everything necessary about the founding fathers, the
Brits versus the Colonies, I think you'll be surprised and
enriched by what you're about to hear. This conversation also
comes right up to the present day, and given its
(01:50):
Thanksgiving weekend, it felt right to hear from America's best
known documentary maker with his take on his country then
and now. So here's Ken Burns telling me first what
he discovered as he investigated the revolutionary story.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I had no idea of the complexity, the variety of individuals,
the sense that it was a bloody civil war in
ways that our civil war is merely a sectional war.
That it's a world war, a global war, maybe the
fifth global war, for the prize of North America. That
it has the big ideas and all the famous for Americans,
(02:30):
founding fathers, the boldface names, if you will, but also
hundreds of other people that are engaged in it, who
are important and give dynamics and dimension and complexity to
the story. And that's all we want from our stories.
We don't want a superficial Madison Avenue sanitized version of
our past. We want a complete one. Everyone wants that
(02:51):
it doesn't matter about politics. You just want dramatic stories.
And we have a sign in Neon sign in our
editing room that says, it's complicated, because in my business,
the art has to be subservient to the facts. And
when you learn new facts, and sometimes they're contradictory, you
have to find a way that your narrative can tolerate
them and understand them. And when, unfortunately, we live in
(03:14):
a media world where everything's a one or a zero,
and we live in a political world and where everything
is one way or the other, it's a binary that
does not exist, but is artificially created for the simplicity,
the laziness, the cynicism of what's going on. But telling
a complex story escapes the specific gravity of cynicism and
offers something in return, something rich, in something where you
(03:38):
can say the whole is greater than the sum of
the parts.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
And the series is out now in all its complexity,
but you will have known as you did it that
it's a more fractious time in America compared to the
end of the Obama presidency when you start out. And indeed,
in an executive order, the White House said earlier this
year that they were against telling history in a way
that costs the founding principles in a negative light.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Well, I certainly haven't done that. I've put them in
a very very positive light. I've just put them in
the correct light, which is the engagement of all the characters.
It is possible, I assume, to make this a one act,
one room play where it all takes place in Philadelphia,
but it doesn't give you the dynamism. It doesn't understand
the underdog story that this is. I mean, on April nineteen,
(04:26):
seventeen seventy five, when British troops open up on American
militia on Lexington Green in Massachusetts, the chances of their
success is zero, and six and a half long years
later at Yorktown, that British army is surrendering. And how
that happens is forty battles, enormous social and political, even
(04:49):
religious change within the colonies. So you have this complex
dynamic of the five hundred thousand people out of the
three million who are free or enslaved Africans. You haveative
Americans either coexisting assimilated with the colonists, and then those
nations that are as distinct and as important to say,
of France or of Prussia is on the world scene
(05:12):
that have maintained relationships for centuries.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
And one of the many things that really interested and
intrigued me about this series is realizing that this revolutionary
spirit on the part of the colonies, how their ideas
were influenced by the Native American nations, that Native American
nations had what we would recognize today as a union
(05:36):
in a way that the Thirteen Colonies really didn't until
quite late.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
It's really remarkable. At the very very beginning of the film,
there is a group of six Native nations, first five
and then six, which is often called the Iroquois Confederacy.
They call it the Hoda Nshone. It permitted each of
those nations to sort of retain their identity. It's sort
of like the European Union, and at the same time
could economically and diplomatically and militarily have a union. And
(06:05):
Benjamin Franklin seizes twenty years before the revolution, says, I
want that. That's what we need, from New Hampshire to Georgia,
the Thirteen Hongs, we need that, and he gets people
to sign up for his plan of union in Albany,
twenty years before the Revolution seventeen fifty four, and then
they go home to try to sell it, and nobody
wants to give up any autonomy. So the plan dies,
(06:26):
but it gets resurrected as the revolution begins to become
a shooting war. And it's very interesting. It's also, i
have to say, the Enlightenment and the Americans are reading.
They're very literate, in some ways, percentage wise more literate
than the British population. They're freer, they own land in
ways that ordinary folks in Britain do not own land.
(06:49):
They pay less taxes, they got great health, their literacy
is second only to Scandinavia. And they're reading Modesque, they're
reading the French philosophers of the Enlightenment, they're reading Lacke
and Human the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers. And so when you
marry this idea of a practical example sitting at your
western doorstep, of the possibility of union, and you merge
(07:12):
it with these arguments you're having with your own countrymen,
that suddenly get blown out into universal rights, yikes, And
they're very powerful. The word liberty means something to everybody.
It means something to George Washington who owns hundreds of
human beings, and Thomas Jefferson, who owns hundreds of human beings.
But it also means something to those hundreds of human beings,
(07:33):
and it means something to women, who are a majority
of the population, and it means something to Native Americans.
And that animating spirit makes the American Revolution not just
this important origin story for the United States. It makes
it one of the most important events in all of
world history, because that revolution is going to spawn two
(07:54):
hundred years of revolutions all around the globe. It has
a kind of force and a power that is going
to destroy the French monarchy, is going to change Europe,
It's going to change Latin and South America, and then
later Asia and Africa. And it comes from the idea
of this anti colonial movement that strange to say, in
(08:15):
this day and age the United States invented.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
And yet when that anti colonial movement is ultimately successful
in seventeen seventy six and then finally against the British
a few years later, what it results in is the
westward expansion, which dispossesses Native Americans of their lands exactly,
and those African Americans who are runaway slaves are hunted down,
(08:41):
and George Washington the great hero if there is one,
although there are many of Your story is keeping those
runaway slaves imprisoned so that their owners can come back
and get them.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
This is the story of human beings. The contradictions, the hypocrisies,
all of that is there. We don't have a country
without George Washington. But yes, he owns other u uman beings.
He wants those escaped enslaved people to be returned to
their owners. They don't make George Washington the head of
the Eastern Seaboard Army. They make him the head of
a continental army, which is directed by the Continental Congress.
(09:13):
They know where they're going. So, first of all, the
irony that settlers dumping the tea, colonists dumping the tea
in Boston Harbor are crudely dressed as Native Americans. Every
school kid in America knows that. And then when you
ask them why, they say, oh, to put the blame
on the Native Americans. That's not the reason. It's this attempt,
so ironic and so bittersweet and so complicated, so moving
(09:36):
in a way. They're trying to tell Britain we're not
of you. We're not of the mother country anymore. We're Aboriginal,
like the people. We've spent the last one hundred and
fifty years dispossessing of their land so that we can
have these thirteen colonies, and the people that we're going
to spend the next one hundred and fifty years getting
rid of all the rest of the land, all the
way to the Pacific. So there's ironies throughout.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Well, don't you struggle with that hip hocrist, No, this.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Is what what do you mean? There's a wonderful moment
when the great scholar Annette Gordon Reid, who is a
black woman, says, you know that slavery bound Thomas Jefferson's
life from beginning to end. We're in the middle of
a section on the Declaration of Independence where he is
declaring that all men are created equal. We hold these
choose to be self evident. He says, they're not self evident.
(10:22):
These are brand new in the world, that all men
are created equal. And he knows slavery is wrong. George
Washington knows slavery is wrong. And she said, well, how
could you do something if you knew it was wrong?
She said, that's the human question for all of us.
She's not taking Thomas Jefferson off the hook, er by extension,
George Washington off the hook. She's putting us on the
hook for artist tisk presentism about how we're so different,
(10:45):
we're all complicated. This is what you're William Shakespeare has
given us in so many ways of what's going on,
the contradictions. Here's the good news though. Those words, when
Thomas Jefferson meant them, he meant all men of property,
free of debt who were white. We don't mean that anymore.
(11:05):
And everyone who heard those words began to argue for
something that changed the world. Now the second he says
the word all slavery's over. Now, it will take fourscore
and nine years before that happens. Women will have to
wait just and excruciatingly impossibly long, one hundred and forty
four years in our country to receive suffrage. But those
(11:29):
walls are broken down, they're done, they're over, and you
could extend it to all other kinds of things, child labor,
gay marriage, whatever it might be.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
This has so they start something by saying by saying
the words all, they start something, even though they're not
prepared to deliver it themselves.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
The late historian who Bernard Balin, who died at one
hundred and one, God bless him, and we interviewed him
when he was ninety eight or ninety nine, says nobody
talked about slavery as an evil before the Revolution. There
were people who spoke to it's evil, but it was
not part of the common conversation. The second the Revolution started,
and for every moment through to our Civil War, it
(12:07):
was the number one topic in America. So by bringing
up what you're calling the hypocrisy of these natural rights
by people who owned other human beings, just because Jefferson
didn't see the hypocrisy, I mean he did see the hypocrisy,
he just couldn't act on it. There's too much money
to be made in slavery. And may I point out
(12:27):
that the British Empire's wealth, its profit centers are in
the Caribbean. Only South Carolina is profitable. We're just the
most populous, and we also are the most literate, and
we make things, and so we're great trading partners with
Britain before the revolution. But the thirteen colonies in the Caribbean,
like Jamaica and Barbados, which are ninety percent in slave people.
(12:50):
That's where the engine of wealth for the British Empire
comes from. And so when we deal with hypocrisy, it's
kind of like like saying oxygen. This is like human behaviors.
I mean, there would not be a William Shakespeare if
there was not a hypocrisy and irony and contradiction and
undertow not between people but within individuals. So you can
(13:14):
see that in Washington, you can see that in Jefferson,
you can see that in many of the founding fathers,
though the adams Is were vehemently opposed to slavery, and
John Adams's wife Abigail, who may be the best writer
of the whole lot, is from the very get go
just totally uncomfortable with the idea that we're going to
be talking about liberty and we can't rid ourselves of
(13:35):
this horrific hypocrisy right in our own midst. So this
is what makes the story dramatic.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Ken, I hear you on the universality of hypocrisy. My
family from India and Pakistan and the impact of the
revolution on the British as far as India was concerned,
is that no way are we going to lose India.
Oh look, look at what the Americans did to us.
We're not going to have the same thing happen again.
Can I tell you what my connection is to Lexington
Green into seventeen seventy?
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Yes, please, do you have one?
Speaker 1 (14:02):
I do have one, which I had no idea about
until I was on a TV ancestry program and they
traced six generations back. One of my forefathers, Michael Farley,
was the head of the Massachusetts Militia. His four sons
were all soldiers of the Revolution, one of them killed
And essentially the link to me is that one of
the grandsons ends up in India, so goes off by
(14:26):
eighteen twenty to seek his fortune. But it gives me
this connection to exactly the period that you're talking about,
and I have to reconcile myself to the fact that
when they were fighting for their liberty, they didn't mean
everyone's liberty.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
I learned that I have on my mother's side and
a slave person who was a household one person, and
I took that with equanimity. The thing that really bothered
me was that I have an ancestor also on my
mother's side in Massachusetts named Elded Tupper, who had to
move to New Brunswick because he refused to sign a
loyalty oath after the revolution, had been a loyalist through that,
(15:00):
I do have one saving grace, perhaps for those of
you in the UK, that I am also related to
Robert Burns, the National Poet of Scotland, who still says
in his poem to allow us one of my favorite
lines in the English language, owed some power of the
gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us,
and that becomes an animating part of how we tell stories,
(15:24):
not sort of imprisoned by the binary that we've been
talking about, but tolerant of or just aware of all
of these contradictions and undertow which makes drama more interesting
and makes us able to deal with one another. If
it's that binary, you can't be married. If it's that binary,
you can't raise a child. But somehow we permitted our
(15:46):
politics to descend to this, you know, abysmal level of
one thing or the other that actually, frankly doesn't exist
in nature.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Can I understand a bit more of about your own
nature and the story of how you came to to
do this work that you have over decades now. You
started with the Brooklyn Bridge documentary and the Civil War,
of course, was an amazing American TV moment. One of
our producers was nine when it came out and she
remembers everyone sitting and watching it. So how did that
(16:17):
work began? What was it in your early life that
led you to it?
Speaker 2 (16:20):
You know, as many things for many people, the thing
that has been the most significant for my growth has
had to do with loss. My mother had cancer, began
when I was two or three. She died when I
was eleven, just a couple months short of my twelfth birthday.
I remember, some time after my twelfth birthday, saw my
father looking at an old movie and crying. And I'd
(16:43):
never seen my dad cry, not when my mother was sick,
and not when not when she died, or not at
the impossibly sad funeral. And the film was Sir Carol
Reid's Odd Man Out about the Irish Troubles, starring James Amason.
It's a beautiful film, still works today. And I realized
that the film had given him a safe haven that
nowhere else in his life could he express these emotions.
(17:05):
And I was sitting there late at night with him
as a school night. He was letting me stay up
and he cried, and I just went at that moment,
I want to be a filmmaker. And later on in
life my late father in law, who's an eminent psychologist,
I said, you know, I could never be aware of
the date that my mother died April twenty eighth. They'd
always be approaching and then, you know, receding, but I
(17:26):
was never present. He said, I bet you blew out
your candles on your birthday cake wishing she'd come back.
And I said, how'd you know? He said, look what
you do for a living. You wake the dead. You
make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do
you think you're really trying to wake up? But I then,
by thirty nine or forty, I began to really work
to understand what it was that I had not dealt
(17:48):
with as a little boy, with this tremendous loss, and
it enriched my work even more. But it's born in tragedy,
it's born in loss. My mother's gift, in a funny
perverse way, was dying. I don't want her to be gone.
There's not a day that I don't think of her.
My oldest daughter named her first child after her, my
first grandchild, And it is a poignant and positive response
(18:11):
in the middle of a lot of draped black funereal
crape that has attended my life, like the Spanish moss
and the live oaks in the south. But it's born
of loss. And it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Your mother's been gone sixty years.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
I think sixty and a half. It's way too long.
I will tell you that it is way too long.
I talk about this with my brother. You know, it's funny.
My dad died much later. He'd moved from daddy to dad.
She never left mommy. So you have two seventy year old,
seventy men in their seventies who refer to their mother
as mommy. And we talk about that, you know, every
time we talk, we just say mommy, and it just
(18:48):
is what it is. She left at a time when
he was ten and I was eleven.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Do you think you're still grieving?
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Yes, the half life of grief is endless. I think
that's true.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
The style that you have made your trademark and and
the use of paintings, fragments of letters, photographs with your
more recent work where you zoom in and you're panning across,
you're using music, you're using sound effects. How much of
that was born of necessity in that Let's take the
Civil War documentary. You didn't have a lot of great
(19:41):
visuals to work with.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Well, we had a lot of photographs. And that's where
the American Revolution is at an even greater deficit, because
photographs are real. You show a picture of Abraham Lincoln
with his general at Antietam and you just know what's
going on. But you don't have that. The variety of
portraits of Washington are widely very Some look cartoonish, some
don't look at all like him, some do look like him,
And so you have to figure out a way in
(20:04):
this case to make them come alive. It's the filmmaker's problem,
like you have to have a complex sound effects track
in this case, in addition to a third person narrator.
I have been pioneering since the first film on Brooklyn Bridge.
First person Boys is read by the finest actors in
the world, and I would submit that the cast list
for this film is better than any film or television
(20:25):
series that's ever happened. I think that Sir Kenneth Brandow
could have read every single part except the female parts.
And maybe I'm selling him short. But also Tom Hanks
and Meryl Streep and Paul Jamatti and Laura Lenny and
Claire Danes. And I've probably listed a fifth of the
voices that make this Jeff Daniels, Josh Brolin and Berlin.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Who's the voice of Washington? Right? And I wonder just
let us into how you direct them, because I think
that you are. You are very specific on how you
want these people to sound. So how do you know
that that's how Washington?
Speaker 2 (21:03):
I don't know. Sometimes it's hard, and Washington was particularly hard.
Last year. I was at the Rome Film Festival and
I was flying back home and Dune iiO was playing,
and I was falling asleep and nodding out. But at
one point I just sat up straight because I heard
Josh's voice. He's in both the Dune films, and I
just said, okay, let's give this a try. I said, look,
(21:24):
you know, as everybody, I've told everybody this, you don't
have to project. This is not the theater. It's almost
like the way if you're reading to your kids or
your grandkids, you actually lower your voice, which brings people
closer and so I said, you need to just inhabit
the words. And in the case of George Washington, you
have an impossible task. This is an opaque and unknowable
person by design. He kept that rectitude so firmly there.
(21:48):
But there is in the writing little glimpses. So I
need you to be both opaque, but give me the
little bits where you feel the emotion, you feel the passion.
And he did it fantastic. I told Tam Hanks, you know,
I'd make you George Washington in a second, he said,
But then everybody would be saying, oh, Tom Hanks is
George Washington. I said, right. So I gave him fourteen
different voices, and every fourteen is in the film. He
(22:10):
is such a good reader that he actually slips in
and hides with perfection behind the eight or ten people
that he plays in these fourteen quotes. And I just
have to tell you that when you record voices with people,
not all of them get in in editing, you whittle
them down, but everyone that he read is in. And
he's I've worked with him now, it's close to twenty
(22:32):
five years, and he is so talented and so generous
that if you wanted somebody to read the back of
your serial box or the phone book. He'd be the
guide to do it.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
What you're saying about Tom Hanks does explain to me
why I knew he was in the series. And as
I watched the episodes, I was like, which one is
Tom Hanks because I couldn't recognize his Well, now I understand.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
I'll tell him. I'll tell him that because this is
exactly what I love.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
You did bring in one new thing in this series
you hadn't done before Ken, and that's the reenactments. There's
a lot of reenactments. Why is it because in the
TikTok generation you do need visual device.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
I have no photographs, I have no newsreels. We spent
more than five years filming reenactment groups in French and
British and militia and Continental and Native American Black troops, whatever, women,
children that are always there in the battlefield, and we
collected a critical mass of them so that we could
use them as if we'd gone to the National Archives
(23:33):
to pick up the photographs of that. We treated them
in a very impressionistic way. We film them at every
time of day and night, usually at dawn or dusk,
we don't see faces, we see silhouettes, we see cannon firing,
and all of that means that we're not asking them
to reenact a specific battle. We're asking them to participate
and to give a sense. And if you add complex
(23:55):
in some cases one hundred and fifty different soundtracks along
with the music, the third person narrator read by Peter Coyote,
and then some of the voices that you and I
have been talking about, then you get a sense that
you're there. And there's a coldness that you can feel
in the winter scenes. There's a hotness that you can
feel in the summer scenes when twenty British soldiers were
(24:16):
dying in the march across New Jersey every day just
of heat. The live cinematography is the key to this,
as are maps, some of them just leaving the old
maps alone. They're beautiful works of art, some adding arrows,
some extruding them and making them dimensional. So there's lots
of ways to bring to life, to wake the dead.
As my late father in law.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Said, now I'm going to read the words that you
put right at the end of the series and forgive me,
because clearly I'm not Meryl Streep or Laura Linny or
Claire Danes, or any of the amazing voices that you
had in But these are such striking lines Benjamin Rush
in seventeen eighty seven, saying the American War is over.
But this is far from being the case with the
(24:59):
American Revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act
of the great drama is closed. It remains yet to
establish and perfect our new forms of government. Patriots, come forward.
Your country demands your services. Hear her proclaiming, in size
and groans, in her governments, in her finances, in her trade,
in her manufactures, in her morals, and in her manners,
(25:22):
the revolution is not over. I mean, I'm feeling emotional
reading these words, and I'm not even emotional.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Ed Norton, the great actor, reads that as he does
many characters in the film.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
But ken are you saying the revolution is not over today.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
In all of the spirit that moved you in that moment.
There's something interesting. We sometimes focus on the phrase pursuit
of happiness and argue about happiness means the right to
make as much money as I want. This is what
worried the founding fathers. They thought the pursuit of happiness
was lifelong learning. But the key word here is pursuit.
(25:58):
This is a process story. The Declaration has it, we're
in pursuit of happiness. The Constitution eleven years later has it,
a more perfect union. We're a nation in the process
of becoming. So everyone knew that these were original documents,
the Constitution that would immediately would not be ratified if
it wasn't immediately amended by some things, some basic rights
(26:22):
that all of the people who fought for it wanted
to have, and that we would continue to be tinkering
with this machine to perfect it. So that meant in
seventeen eighty nine, when the United States government actually took
the Constitution of two years before and put it in action,
it meant all white men, you know, could vote right
(26:43):
who are twenty one years old. We don't mean that now.
And so the story of the American Adventure, which Benjamin
Rush understood right away. He's saying, this is an open
ended thing. We are perfectible, and that is a key thing.
More often than not, people say this is it. And
just as the Bible, the Old Testament says in Ecclesiastes,
(27:05):
there's nothing new under the sun. Most human beings believe
that nothing would ever change. There are people from Wales
and England and Scotland and Ireland who have worked dependent
land for a thousand years. Whole families have worked it
for somebody else, and they've come here and they now
own a plot of land, may be taken from Native Americans,
(27:26):
but they own it and they feel the sense of
the possibility of things actually changing. And I think what
is in some ways one of the biggest takeaways is
the perfectibility of human beings, the improvement. And in fact
that's the beauty of Benjamin Russia's statements. It doesn't mean
you have to kill people every twenty years, you know.
(27:48):
Jefferson famously said many years later that the tree of
Liberty should be watered with the blood of tyrants and
patriots every twenty years. And you kind of go, no,
you don't need to do the violence. This is what
human beings always do.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
But I guess I'm asking all the aspects of what
has happened this year that you're struggling with.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
No, I have to be disciplined, that sign it's complicated.
Our famous satirist Mark Twain says history doesn't repeat itself, which,
of course it doesn't. No event has happened twice. But
it rhymes that there's nothing new under the sun. What
has been will be again, what has been done will
be done again. There's nothing new under the sun, suggesting
human nature doesn't change, and it basically doesn't. But I
(28:30):
think what happens is you have to as a filmmaker
be disciplined. The rhymes that were happening when we began
this project when Barack Obama was present, changed in the
next year and the next year and the next year.
So they're different rhymes, and if you pay attention to them,
you date your film. But today is a school day
in the United States, and hundreds of classrooms are looking
(28:51):
at my thirty five year old film on the Civil War,
that Lewis and Clark film that we made, the film
on the Roosevelts, on World War Two, on jazz, on baseball,
and on our recent film on the US and the Holocaust,
and many others, because they're evergreen, because we did not
succumb to the desire to say, ah, isn't this so
much like today?
Speaker 1 (29:11):
But what about your next work? That's what I wonder about.
Because you've always worked on with PBS several PBS's President
Trump wants to end federal funding for public broadcasting.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
He did. He killed the Corporation for He did, and
the Congress killed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and it
was an incredibly short sighted thing. It will hurt rural
stations more than us. I took a big hit. Money
that had already been authorized and appropriated for future projects
that I'm working on and have been working on for
years has disappeared. I'll have to fundraise. PBS had to
(29:43):
lay off a lot of people, but they'll be around.
They'll continue. I'll continue.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
So will you find other sources of funding? Where do
you make that up from?
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Just you know, places, foundations, individuals of wealth who have
always contributed. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was eliminated,
was about twenty percent of my budget, equal to our
corporate underwriter. But many other people will fill the gap.
I'm worried about the next person coming up who's not
going to be able to be funded. I'm worried about
those rural stations. Sometimes the PBS station, it's the largest
(30:13):
network in the country. There are three hundred and thirty
eight individual stations. That's the only signal they get and
so there'll be a news desert, nobody will be covering
the school board or the city council meeting. They won't
have that emergency signal. So it's just it was an
unfortunate and unnecessary sort of political gesture. And maybe things
will change and it will be resurrected, and I feel
(30:36):
optimistic that that, you know, in a selfish way, I'll
be able to go on and PBS will continue. And
it's been the only place that could have put on
my films. I could, with my reputation, go to other
places and get all the money I need to do
the Revolution thirty million dollars plus, but they wouldn't give
me ten years to do it right. They wanted in
(30:56):
a year and a half. And I don't make films
that are this complicated and this deep in that amount
of time. I don't know how to do it, and
my ats are off to the people who can. But
I think the reason I occupy a position as I
do in my country is because I spend that time
to do it right, that I don't put any of
my personal politics in it, and that I speak to everybody,
and there is in this film something for everybody here,
(31:19):
not because we're trying to be all things, to be
all people. But if you tell a good story, it'd
be like saying, well, Shakespeare is only good for liberal democrats.
That's poppycock, right. He appeals to this day because of
the truths he was able to get to everybody.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
What stories are you telling next?
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Well, we're working on a film we have been for
several years on the history of LBJ Linda Maine Johnson
and the New Deal. His hero was FDR. It's a
very complicated thing. The Vietnam War curtail that we're doing
a film on reconstruction, which is the most misunderstood period
in American history, that post war period where the North
was attempting to rebuild the South and great Black Americans
(32:01):
into it, and it's collapse is the disaster. However, Birth
of a Nation and Gone with the Winds suggest that
the actual reconstruction, the attempt at equalization, was the bad thing,
and that in both of those films, the Ku Klux Klan,
which is our own homegrown Al Qaeda or Isis, were
the heroes of that story and when in fact, they
(32:23):
are the villains of that story.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Ken as you are all Thanksgiving episode can I ask
you this Thanksgiving weekend, what are you grateful for?
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Well, you know, I'm grateful that I am an American.
I am incredibly patriotic, as my children and my grandchildren
will tell you, probably with no small amount of discomfort,
that every year before we eat on the fourth of July,
I make them listen to me read the Declaration of Independence.
Each time I get a little choked up, as you were,
(32:55):
and I were listening to Benjamin Rush's words. And now
my kids will offer other readings, or I'll give it
to my grandkids, or learning to read, to read something else.
I'm very, very grateful, and I think gratitude is the
missing ingredient in our degraded political lives. These days. Everything
is binary, and it's not It's so complicated, and yet
(33:18):
I have a as a history will do an essential optimism.
I'm grateful for the fact that being a student of
history permits me to have a kind of sense that
the human race will figure this out, that the imbalances
of the moment, and we're all so narcissistic. Our moment
is the worst. We're chicken littles. The sky is falling.
It's all bad that I can point out in this
(33:39):
American Revolution, it's much more a division back then, that
it is a civil war, that it is a global war.
And maybe by seeing their own reflection in these historical figures,
well known or not well known, gives you a chance
to realize that for the first time in human history,
people were no longer subjects under Arrian rule, but citizens
(34:02):
with all of the responsibilities attendant to that. And it's
been on the whole with lots of problems, are positive
in the course of human events, as Thamas Jefferson.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Me today, Hen Burns, thank you for taking us into
the past and talking about the present as well. Happy Thanksgiving.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Happy Thanksgiving to you, and.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
That's the Michelle Hussein Show for this week. Do subscribe
if you haven't already, you'll know as soon as we
have a new episode. That way, Thank you for the comments, ratings,
and for your emails. You can send a message to
Michelle's show at Bloomberg dot net. If you want to
see the written versions of these conversations with my notes,
(34:46):
they are at Bloomberg dot com slash Weekend, and you
can also watch them on YouTube and on Bloomberg TV.
Our producers are Jessica Beck and Chris Martlou guestbooking is
by Dave Warren, on social media by Alex Morgan. Our
sound engineer is Richard Ward. Video editing by Toby Babalola.
(35:07):
Our executive producer is Louisa Lewis at Bloomberg Weekend. Editorial
Director of Audio and Special Projects is Brendan Francis Newnham,
and our executive editor is Catherine Bell. Music is by
Bart Warshaw. And we'd also like to thank Alana Susnow,
Sammasadi and Sage Bauman, and also thank you for listening
(35:31):
until next weekend. Goodbye,
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