Ken Burns is a globally-acclaimed American documentary filmmaker. His films, including “The Civil War,” “Jazz,” and his most recent release “The American Revolution,” have reached broad audiences and have been met with much commercial and critical success. Burns, colloquially referred to as “America’s Storyteller,” maintains a sincere passion for uncovering the narratives of the United States — past and present. He is also a father to four daughters.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: You are widely considered to be the most famous living documentarian. Even those unfamiliar with your work personally have probably heard of the “Ken Burns” effect. And yet you’ve maintained an air of extreme humility throughout your career. What forces battle within you to produce that appearance?
Ken Burns: That’s a hell of a good question. I’ve lived in a tiny town in New Hampshire for the last 47 years. I have in it a New Yorker cartoon that shows three men standing in hell, the flames licking up around them. And one guy says to the other two, “Apparently, my over 200 screen credits didn’t mean a damn thing.” I think that it’s the nature of the work we do: Humility is the only default there is. Where I live, any kind of notoriety plus four bucks gets you a cup of tea.
HPR: What fears do you have regarding the ability of people like yourself to continue to tell these incredibly important stories from the past in this era of diminished attention spans, short-form content, and serious historical revisionism?
KB: I think the greatest threat is that of the autocrat who seeks to limit the ability of people, outlets, and institutions to express themselves. People have always been torn between short-form and long-form. We’re always distracted, and at the same time, we’re also committed to long-form, whether we know it or not. We binge things. My daughters do that — and for much longer than anything we’ve ever made. People have been complaining about diminished attention spans for as long as there have been people. There’s always the hand-wringing and the “sky is falling” feeling about it. The greatest threat is obviously what autocrats do to a free press. And so far, we’ve been able to make the films we want to make over the last 50 years, and I feel incredibly privileged. They assassinated the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has been around almost as long as the Public Broadcasting Act, which dates back to LBJ and the Great Society, a film we’re working on. At the same time, we just had one of our biggest successes ever with our film on the American Revolution. As Mark Twain said, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” There’s this sense of existential threat, but the biggest thing is to get up and do your job. Get out and do your work, whatever it may be.
HPR: Is it fair, then, to say that you’re an optimist?
KB: People who are engaged in history get enormous perspectives. There is a kind of optimism that history provides. I’ll give you an example. A friend of mine was in the financial services industry, and when the financial meltdown happened in 2008, he said to me, “This is a depression.” I’d made several films that passed through the Depression, and I said to him, “In the Depression, in many American cities, the zoo animals were shot, and the meat was distributed to the poor. When that happens, I’ll say we’re in a depression.” So is that optimism, or is that the comfort that comes from my line of work? Today, optimism has got a naive and pejorative thing attached to it. So I don’t want to cop entirely to optimism, because all it does is permit a dismissal.
HPR: We live in a state of hyper-fungibility, where a single term can be applied to any number of distinct phenomena. How has your perspective on that reality changed during your time working on “The American Revolution?”
KB: I’m really guilty of using superlatives. We’re always happy to say, “It’s the greatest; it’s the best!” There’s a dimension to storytelling where the use of a superlative is a kind of cheap shortcut. And I’m proud of the fact that the rest of what we do is much more complicated than just the recitation of a superlative.
HPR: Your new documentary focuses on this nation’s founding. How do you hope that story will land in a country seemingly at its most divided and with what seems to be the least trust in its leaders?
KB: I’ll agree with the latter point. But I lived through the Vietnam period, and the Revolution was way more divided than we are now. Our Civil War was horrific; the Vietnam era was bad. The post-Civil War era of Reconstruction was a horrible betrayal of republican civil rights advances — so we have to temper that sense that we’re at our most divided. Sarah, my co-director on this and other films, has this notion that in the telling of history, there is a possibility for this awakening of a kind of civic virtue. And it’s not just that you can run for president of the United States; you can actually run for your school board and make a difference. And I would accept that. But we don’t go in with any other idea that we’ve got some message or something for people to take away. We know we’re telling a complicated story.
Take the most important person in the American Revolution, George Washington. He is a deeply flawed human being. He owns 577 human beings. He knows slavery is wrong. He makes some tactical errors on the battlefield. He’s very rash; he risks his life when he shouldn’t be doing it because he’s indispensable. And yet he has very many virtues. We want to provide people with the material. If they need to, in an unforgiving revisionism, throw him out, okay. And if they go, “Wow, I had not really thought about that,” or, “You’ve confirmed my sense of his centrality,” all of those are possible. What we want to tell is a complicated story. When it’s done, it’s not our story anymore; it’s your story. So when I think about what we want people to take away from our films, the short answer is: whatever they take away. You sound the question, “Who are we?” But you don’t answer it. That’s the question that ought to animate each of our lives.
HPR: You’ve spoken publicly about your personal spirituality. How do you maintain a sense of inner peace when working so intimately with some of the ugliest bits of human nature as they reveal themselves through history’s hidden narratives?
KB: I don’t think that inner peace and ugliness are mutually exclusive. I think some of those people who are able to attain inner peace are doing so in the midst of extremely ugly things. Inner peace is something to wish for, to work at, to struggle for. And you fail all the time at it. And that’s the whole idea of it — whatever spirituality or rationality or faith, whatever thing you want to call it — it’s always imperfect. So you want to just try; that’s the most important thing. Quite often, if you’re not telling a complete story, you’re betraying yourself. That’s one way American historical narratives often fail, with a sort of simplistic, narrow, bloodless, gallant mythology.
HPR: Despite the various hats you may wear, how do you know when you’ve done your job well?
KB: I don’t know. That’s a really good question. We get to a place where, whatever set of circumstances over, in this case, nine years and 11 months of working, we’ve reached a place where there’s nothing else to be done. And down the line, you may get new information and think, “That would’ve been nice to know.” But it doesn’t feel like a failure. It’s just that this is who we are. It feels like a snapshot is taken of who you are. So, it’s okay. You just let it go. And I’ve never regretted anything. I may look at a film and think, “I wouldn’t have as many fades to black,” but I would never change it. We do our best. That’s one of the things that public broadcasting permits us, which is the possibility to do our very best.
HPR: And lastly, Ken, what is the most important facet of your life?
KB: My children. I have four daughters, and that’s the much more important business.
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