The following is a special presentation.

Ken Burns and the American Idea, produced in partnership with New Hampshire PBS, New Hampshire Historical Society, New Hampshire Humanities, and the Capital Center for the Arts.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Ken Burns and the American Idea.

I'm Laura Knoy and Ken, what a thrill to be with you tonight.

Thank you so much for being here.

I'm happy to be back home after a year and a half of, I feel like Odysseus out spreading the news about the American Revolution.

Happy to be home in New Hampshire.

And happy to be speaking with you, Laura.

Well, thank you so much.

And you've made so many films, Ken, about so many subjects, but some of your most epic documentaries, I think a lot of people would say are about war.

So why war?

I think that we are drawn as human beings to wars because as storytellers, they exhibit the heightened kind of drama.

You see the best and obviously the worst in human beings.

And I think they draw out.

I mean, it's so interesting.

I've been interested for many years about, with Leo Tolstoy, when a deeply spiritual Russian writer whose epic is, of course, War and Peace, and we are constantly dealing as human beings on an intimate level and collectively in a community and a national in a global way, with these great forces within us and without us.

And I think that I, I, I mean, thank you for reminding me, as well as everyone else that there are many, many other films and many other subjects that we're drawn to it.

And as you can see, the similarities, the word civil war, the thousands of places, the, the, the kind of cadence of what takes place is a way to explore the depth of human character.

And I'm disappointed that my species, which has and holds out so much promise, also has as part of its history, Will and Ariel Durant, the historian husband and wife, apparently measured every time of recorded human history.

And apparently there were only 38 years when there wasn't a war.

I think they probably missed the places where a war was going on during those 38 years.

The sad part of the legacy of our species, as it we cannot seem to get rid of the idea that the best solution is killing each other.

Well, the war films are sometimes very hard to watch, even in the American Revolution, where you're relying on old paintings, you don't have photographs, you don't have footage.

Even there, you can sort of see the anguish and the faces and, you know, as a mother of sons in in every one of those faces I see, I see my sons, the Civil War, seeing those bodies stacked up.

I mean, it's heartbreaking.

And the Vietnam War full confession.

I couldn't watch the whole thing.

It was just too hard.

And I wonder Ken, how do you and your team decide what to show and what not to show?

It's really hard.

I think the biggest thing to understand is that the work we do is subtractive.

We're not building something.

We're actually subtracting from a huge amount of material that we've collected, usually 40 to 50 times the final length of the film.

And so it's really distilling and we have very impassioned conversations, very anxious conversations about what to include.

It's very interesting in the The War, the film about the Second World War, there is excruciating footage of the Holocaust that came out in 2007.

By the time I came to the US and the Holocaust in 2022, 2023, we were pulling out some of the stuff in in some ways not to privilege the perpetrators.

Sometimes you have to show the footage.

The only thing that exists are the home movies and photographs of the people who committed the atrocities in the Second World War with regard to the Holocaust.

But we also found that you that less was more, that even when we finally got to Auschwitz, we could show most of it with live cinematography of Auschwitz, now narrated by a survivor, Eva Gredinger Schloss, who just passed away a few months ago.

And it's you didn't need to have what, what can often turn into in the wrong hands a kind of war pornography.

Right, right.

Well, and you personally, I'm picturing you sitting there in the studio going through those hours and hours and hours of footage.

Was there one of these war films, Ken, that was especially hard for you personally?

They were all really, really hard.

In fact, after the Civil War series, which came out in 1990, we just vowed we'd never make another film on war.

I've heard you say that.

No more war films.

And this was, you know, at the reserve of 150 years or almost 150 years.

We weren't going to do it.

And these were still photographs.

But I learned at the end of the 90s that a thousand American veterans of the second war were dying each day.

That number is down to single digits, if at all actuarial speaking.

But the also that a huge, unacceptably large number of graduating high school seniors thought we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War.

And I said, I said the f word out loud and said, we're going to do the Second World War.

Yes, that sounds like a good idea.

Before the ink was dry on that, we were committed to Vietnam before the ink was dry on Vietnam, we're committed to the American Revolution.

But I remember one time when we were working on World War Two, I went into the editing room and my chief editor, then a man named Paul Barnes, was editing, and he looked terrible.

And I had had this horrible night's sleep with all of these horrible dreams mixing in with the footage.

And, and I said, how are you doing?

And he just looked up and he said, bulge, meaning battle of the bulge.

And he said, what about you?

Because he said, you look like, you know.

And I said, Peleliu, which was this horrible, unnecessary island in the Pacific, a dot in the blue in which we could have just bypassed the remaining Japanese there.

But instead, as some person who participated in it was two scorpions in a bottle killing each other.

And you realize that there is this, even as it was intimated in the Vietnam War introduction, there's a kind of momentum to war.

There's a way in which it was easier to just let it muddle on than to admit the serious mistakes underlying it by both, you know, presidential administrations.

You know, I mean, by by both parties over several presidential administrations.

It's it's a conundrum.

And yet you're drawn to it.

So all of these war films were hard personally.

Actually making any film is really, really hard in good way.

And there are other films are no different that each film represents literally millions of problems.

And you just don't see problems as pejorative.

You see them as just something to overcome, like a marathoner who chooses to be a marathon.

As you hit Heartbreak Hill, you still have to lift each foot up.

That's a problem, right?

Each foot is a problem, but you're going to do it.

You're going to do it.

And at the same time, the war presents special challenges.

But they also have special rewards because they have that accompaniment of the worst with the best.

And you begin to meet characters.

And they're not all boldfaced names.

They're not all top down.

They're not all George Washington's, they're not all Abraham Lincoln's their bottom up people that no one has ever heard of.

I had not heard of.

And that when you begin to animate their lives in a complimentary movement with the top down, you begin to synthesize something.

In fact, as we were working on the film about the Second World War called The War, the tagline became there are no ordinary lives because we tend to sort of distinguish.

And we began to wonder, I mean, why would you land at that boat at, at at Omaha Beach?

Like you're not in it for the pay.

You're not going to get the spoils of war.

There's no empire, no geography that's going to be gained.

They are.

And they could be farm boys from Nebraska or, you know, kids from Brooklyn.

What's in it unless there's some animating thing.

And that was what's been inscrutable in all of these things to see in the revolution, for example, this new, completely untried and untested idea of liberty that could animate these people in the face of the greatest military power on earth, certainly the greatest navy on Earth, the greatest far flung empire.

And then in World War Two over an idea of freedom.

And you see that again and again and in more murkier circumstances, like Vietnam, you see that the corruption of the story comes from the lack of of purpose and intention.

Well, those individual stories, I think that's a hallmark of your storytelling.

And that's what makes it so powerful, because we learn about the generals and the admirals, but we also learn about the farm boys from Indiana and the, you know, the clerks from Brooklyn.

So that's that's powerful.

The the writer of all of these films, Geoffrey Ward, said an amazing thing the other day.

It was, PBS had made a lovely film on the making of the American Revolution.

And he comes on, Geoffrey comes on very near the end, and he says essentially that you know, when if we see the people in the past as sort of heroic and perfect, we do ourselves a disservice because we know that we're flawed.

And unless we understand that they're flawed and they become human, then they can't be serviceable to us.

Nor can we dream that we might be able to do things as well.

And so the great gift of history is the responsibility for those who are communicating it, to make those people who are well known dimensional, no longer these all perfect heroes or all evil villains, and to also simultaneously exalt and introduce scores and scores of other so-called ordinary people.

There are no ordinary people that that flesh out this.

These are the people who do most of the fighting and dying.

Rather than the heroes We're we focus on, on, on those boldface top down names and forget to our detriment the passions and the understandings and the commitments and the sacrifice of ordinary people.

So how many films have you made overall, Ken?

You know, Is it two dozen?

Three dozen?

It's 40, I think, but I have not counted But that means that Brooklyn Bridge, the first that PBS showed, which is an hour long, counts as one, and so does Jazz, which is ten episodes and 20 hours counts as one.

So the the main thing is that if you really want to do something cuckoo, you can sit down and look at them all.

And if you don't take a bathroom break or sleep, it takes it takes something like two weeks.

I won't ask if you've done it.

No no no no.

With all those films.

How do you hope your work has better informed us, we Americans, about our own history?

I, I don't know how to answer that in any kind of objective way.

I have lots of really gratifying, sort of anecdotal comments that people make.

You know, I've had so many extraordinary experiences over the last 40 years or 36 years since the Civil War series was broadcast, where people come up and tell you the extent that it's open them up, but it's all been individual.

We know that, for example, today is a school day in a good deal of the country and that hundreds and hundreds of classrooms have looked at some of that Civil War series, some of Lewis and Clark, some of the Roosevelts, the national parks.

And that's gratifying that films that are decades old have that, that sort of thing.

I, I'm in the good story business.

That's it.

I'm a filmmaker.

I'm interested in telling stories.

I've been very fortunate to sort of mostly play in this, this area of American history and that if you tell a good story, you have, I think a priori, the opportunity to move the needle.

If you're not interested in moving the needle, if you're just interested in telling a good story, because the second you you're, you sort of work in, you bake into your intentions that I wish this to happen.

You've lost the ability of a story or an image to carry complex information.

The novelist Richard Powers said the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view.

All we do is argue the only thing that can do that is a good story, because a good story is able to remind us that there's nothing binary in the world that is not an on off switch.

It's not a good or bad.

There's no binaries in nature and that we're able to understand the complexity and undertow.

George Washington is not perfect, and understanding that he owned 577 other human beings.

The historian Rick Atkinson, who you saw a few minutes ago, says, you can't square that circle and you can't.

It's not he's not a man of his time.

Slavery is wrong.

They knew it was wrong then.

He knew it was wrong then.

And in fact, freed slaves by the end of his life.

No glory to him.

He made unbelievable tactical mistakes during the revolution.

But he's able to convince people from New Hampshire and from Georgia that they're not from separate countries, but they're this new thing called Americans.

He's got extraordinarily amazing humility.

It's just preternatural humility.

He defers to Congress.

He's able to pick subordinate talent that is better than him.

Benedict Arnold and Nathanial Greene are much better battlefield commanders than than he is.

And he's able to inspire people to fight in the dead of night, which is a rare talent.

Again, Rick Atkinson saying this in our film and most importantly, at the height of his military powers, he gave it up at the height of his political powers.

Yeah, he gave it up.

And we are here today.

We have a country.

And this is funny from a person interested in the bottom up and exalting the unknown, we know exactly why.

We know the one person most responsible for our country.

His name is George Washington.

And we also have this extraordinary legacy of this yielding and a moment of power.

He needed no monuments to himself, and yet each generation would create monuments, right?

He didn't.

And I remember something David McCullough used to say is that the late historian David McCullough, he said, you know, there was no foreseeable future in the past, which we always assume, right?

He didn't know he was George Washington.

Like, he didn't know there'd be a dollar bill and a quarter, that there'd be this tall, spiky thing in the middle of the national capital named for him, that across the continent there'd be an entire state.

And then in every other state there's a county or a town that's named for him.

He did not know that.

And yet, like the thing they say at the end of the declaration that we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

He may have been the richest man in America for the time.

He accepted the head of the Continental Army in early summer of 76, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He got home in December of 1783, and he spent in the intervening years three nights at Mount Vernon.

So it damn well matters where George Washington slept.

A joke to us now, right?

It's a joke, right?

Why is it a joke?

He was willing.

Can you think of the richest man in America willing to sacrifice his life and his fortune and his.

I don't think he knows what sacred honor is, but no.

So I want to ask you about the American Revolution because it shattered PBS streaming records, propelling it onto the Nielsen Streaming Top ten list for the first time in PBS history.

It's wonderful.

And I mean, Ken, even before the American Revolution, you were a celebrity, but now you're really a celebrity.

This is why I live or I should say, hide in Walpole, New Hampshire.

So here you are.

You know, celebrity status, this film shattering records and yet all of your films, the American Revolution and all of them unfold, let's just say a thoughtful pace.

You know, in an era when things seem to zip by in an instant.

And I wonder what this says to you about the American appetite for your brand of storytelling?

Well, I'm not sure it's mine.

I think all real meaning accrues in duration.

The work that you're proudest of, the relationships you care the most about, have benefited from your sustained attention.

Yeah, they took the most time.

It does not mean it's a false dichotomy to say that you can't watch a kitten with a ball of yarn on YouTube.

It's not, it's not.

These are not mutually exclusive things.

I was told when the Civil War series came out at the press tour in Los Angeles in the summer of 1990, that this was really great, but no one's going to watch it because there was new, this new thing called MTV videos.

Right?

And nobody's going to do that.

The attention span, they said the same thing for the baseball series and jazz.

And by the time it got to the national parks or the war and national parks, it was now switched to YouTube and all of that stuff.

They didn't say it about the Roosevelts.

They didn't say it about Vietnam.

They didn't say it about country music.

They didn't say about the revolution.

Because in the midst of the tsunami of options that we have people binge, they self curate, they choose what they want.

My daughter will spend as much time with a series of a film on a weekend as any one of my longest films might be, so that we are always aware of the fact that we can be, our attention can be eroded and divided.

And let's remember when the Telegraph came out, everybody threw up their arms and said that's it.

It's all over.

Nobody's going to write another letter again, right?

You know, it's like the sky is always falling, right?

For whatever is new.

And yet, you know, this gal writes, you know, poetry and extended papers and and does it.

We are all we have that in.

And I think a good story is a good story is a good story.

And if you learn how to tell it, then I hope that I'm learning how to tell good stories.

People will want to to sort of pull that out and say, and I think particularly because this is our origin story is as, as Atkinson says, our origin myth.

And we're in a time of sort of existential threat.

And so if an individual was in a crisis, they would go to a pastor or a professional, and the first thing that person would want to know about is what's your story?

Who are your parents?

What's your early life like?

And if you can do that, then it helps you sort of reset or reconfigure the narrative that works for you, that allows you to go on.

And and communities and countries are no different than that.

And we are desperate to find a story.

And it's there in that revolution.

It is.

You know, we the thing is, we've never dealt with and you brought it up in your question.

We've never dealt with the violence of the revolution.

We've accepted the violence of the civil war and our 20th century wars it should be said.

But we don't accept the violence of the revolution, you know, and I think in some ways it's to protect the big ideas at Philadelphia.

But in fact, those big ideas are even bigger when you understand that we were, as the historian Maya Jasanoff says at the beginning of our third episode, born in violence.

Well, I want to ask you about that sort of origin story of the American Revolution.

And, you know, as you said, we think our revolution is about high ideals put forth by white men in powdered wigs and in Philadelphia.

But the film really gives us that full, messy picture, including attention, Ken, to the many, many, many Americans who were completely excluded from that, you know, creation myth.

How often is that juxtaposition a reoccurring theme in your films, Ken?

And by that I mean our country's lofty ideals, right alongside, you know, exclusion, violence, oppression and so forth.

So we waver between a kind of bankrupt, top down version of the past that would tell you that American history is only great men, thinking great thoughts.

Capital G, capital M, capital G, capital T, and then it's also populated by an unforgiving revisionism that wishes to throw out anybody with the slightest flaw.

So what you have to do is go back to a balance and and resist the temptation to reduce it again to a dichotomy.

Thomas Jefferson, who owned many hundreds of human beings, said, distilling a century of enlightenment thinking.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain, he said, inalienable.

He meant unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

John Locke had said life, liberty and property.

Thank God, he said.

Pursuit of happiness.

He meant he meant lifelong learning, not pursuit of objects in a marketplace of things, but lifelong learning.

Kind of what public radio and public television do, which is the Declaration of Independence applied to communications.

Right.

But there's a moment when the legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk in our film says everybody knew that they meant all white men of property.

But the second the cat was out of the bag, the second, the Jeffersonian foot went in the door.

That door was opened a bit and it would never close.

And she said it was deeply the declaration was deeply significant to people at the margins, meaning women, half the population, meaning the poor, meaning free and enslaved black Americans and the native people that were both coexisting and assimilated, and those on the borders fearing the expansion.

All of the declaration was about this argument between Englishmen got broken out into big arguments about what what each human being has.

And Jefferson says a few phrases later, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.

It's not hard to parse.

It means everybody heretofore has been a subject living under the boot of an authoritarian, and that we tend to put up with that.

And we don't have to anymore.

We can trust ourselves to self-government.

But in order to do that, there has to be extraordinary personal discipline.

We have to pursue happiness not for our own aggrandizement, but to become more virtuous, to make us more visible to our citizens in the political act and more visible to our creator in a spiritual dimension.

Remember, we're also the first country.

The First Amendment isn't freedom of the press or freedom of assembly.

Those are number two and number three.

The first one is no establishment of a religion.

We are going to allow you to worship God as you wish.

And we are not going to put any constraints on what kind.

Jefferson said, if my neighbor believes in 20 God's or no God at all, it either picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

That's how we were founded.

And that is a liberating spirit in the history of humankind.

I remember that quote from the film.

I thought that was incredible.

I thought that was amazing.

Well, and I love the image you just gave Ken, of that Jeffersonian foot in the door and who really takes that foot and runs with it, but Thomas Paine, one of my favorite characters from the film and as a journalist and author and, you know, person who's worked with words her whole life, that was one of my favorite, favorite parts.

And I feel like that's a thread also in your work Ken, and in all the films, not just the American Revolution.

So in what films especially do you feel like that is really central?

The power, the influence of words and speech and expression?

Well, you know, we are a country.

You know we're not here because of language or race or geography.

We know exactly where we when we were born, you know, we know where we know what and the what is ideas and words.

And that's very important.

In fact, you can give Thomas Paine credit before because common sense comes out in early January, the 9th of January I think of 76.

And the declaration isn't being drafted until June of 76.

And he's saying everybody up to that point is hoping you can get back to way things were.

They're not supporting what was called independency.

Even George Washington wasn't so sure.

But by the time common sense comes out and he is no longer saying it, mean Americans felt like, oh, it's just the Parliament.

They don't understand us.

The king's our savior.

He'll come in.

All of a sudden he said, no, no, no.

Hereditary succession.

Where does it say this in nature is a good idea and it doesn't.

Right.

And so he's liberating us from all sort of old and tired methods of thinking.

And, and this occurs because of words and the I mean, look, you know, let me quote a book I read in the beginning is the word right.

So, you know, this is this is the heart of what it is.

And I think that maybe things in our world, we've devalued that.

But I think one of the things we've tried to do, or one of the unintentional consequences of the work we do, is to exalt the power of words to come, and not just from the great writers like Paine or Jefferson, who is a magnificent writer, or Washington, who is to, or Abigail Adams, who is maybe the best of them all.

Yeah, she's she said, remember the ladies.

And that's all we kind of remember.

Oh, sure.

Abigail, you're way ahead of your time.

And she.

But if you go on as we do and do the whole quote, which never happens anymore, it's all, remember the ladies.

She said, if if you are not going to see that our interests are represented, she's writing to her husband and scolding him.

He's in Philadelphia.

She's in in Massachusetts.

Thank God they were apart, because we've got the most extraordinary exchange of conversations between a husband or wife you could ever want.

But she says, if you don't see to our, you know, our representation, we're likely to form a revolution, you know, and rebellion.

And so you begin to see that all of this stuff is bubbling up.

Everybody wants it.

Lemuel Haynes is a free black man who's at Fort Ticonderoga, the survivors of not only the failed invasion of Canada trying to make it the 14th state.

What and and this horrible smallpox epidemic And he just immediately sits down and writes an essay about liberty further extended.

He understands, you know, and it's going to take fourscore and nine years before the 13th amendment is going to take an unforgivable 144 years before you get to vote.

But the the foot in the door, the foot's in the door.

Nobody can close it.

And you still can't close it, you know, I mean, I, I said that the other night, I got very anxious about it as I was saying it, but I, I do not want to diminish the suffering of the Second World War.

But they thought the German Reich, the Third Reich would last a thousand years.

It lasted 12.

And how did that work out?

Not well.

This is the example we use of the worst of the worst of tyranny.

Right?

It's actually not.

There's lots of other, you know, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin.

And the 20th century is just filled with killers.

But it's it's it doesn't work.

We already know that.

When he wrote that sentence, just the door, the air got in, and it's not going to go out.

The American Revolution made me a huge fan of Thomas Paine.

I mean, obviously I'd heard of him before.

Every episode is named for something he said.

He is amazing.

And the actor Matthew Rhys, the extraordinary actor, read, read all of a of of Paine's quotes in the film.

Well, as we talk about Thomas Paine, I do have to ask you, Ken, about the recent cuts in public broadcasting funding, public media, since we're talking about American press and media.

So how have those cuts affected your work as a filmmaker?

Not yet.

I mean, they're they're deep, deep cuts by the for the last maybe 15 years, the the share of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting percentage in our film is about 20%, one of the largest things.

So we're already waking up now going forward, minus that stuff.

20% is a lot.

It's huge.

When you have a $30 million project like this, it's a lot of money and we'll we'll find it.

I'm not worried about doing it.

What I'm worried about is that for many up and coming filmmakers, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting share might be 75%.

For a big station in a big city, it might be 15 or 20%, but in a small rural area where it may be the only signal that people can get, it may be back up to 75.

So there's an incredible short sightedness in zeroing out something that has been part of the fabric of of bringing us together.

And short sighted for a really long time.

And then I began to realize maybe it was intentional.

Maybe they want news deserts.

Maybe it is in the interest of authoritarians for people to be distracted by disinformation and misinformation, superstitions and conspiracies, and not be pursuing happiness.

This rigorous pursuit of virtue and the truth.

And then I think that having an independent voice like public broadcasting that adheres to very strict journalistic and ethical rules is troublesome to some.

And I find it incredibly disappointing that you can mean, if you look at the prime time schedule of, say, PBS on a particular evening, please show me how destabilizing or wrong or anti-American or whatever the thing is.

I mean, my goodness, this was the home for 32 years of a program called Firing Line, led by William F Buckley.

He hosted Firing Line, the most eminent conservative in America.

And that show's still on and still hosted by conservative Margaret Hoover.

So I mean, it's you know, the rationale for this is only the rationale of fear that a populist that's informed can see that, you know, the emperor has no clothes.

I want to ask you about the Declaration of Independence 250th, very timely that the American Revolution came out.

I know you didn't plan it that way, but it's just been great watching it, especially during this time.

And as you know, Ken, there's a lot of debate now about so-called woke history.

The argument that raising these darker attributes of our nation's history, which your films do, that it fosters division, that it assigns guilt, that it focuses on grievances instead of greatness.

And I just wonder how you feel about that argument Ken, that we, you know, we shouldn't show all these less than beautiful aspects of, you know, founders like George Washington.

If Tom Brady took his first Super Bowl ring and said, well, I'm the greatest of all time, I don't have to do anything.

I you know, he didn't I mean, you are constantly evaluating, constantly being self-critical.

If you don't do that, you don't improve.

So I don't know about woke or what I just I call it calling balls and strikes.

You know, we we've reduced ourselves to a highlight film.

And in a highlight film, George, you know, the Babe Ruth hits home runs every single time.

But Babe Ruth struck out many more times than he hit home runs, many, many more times than he hit home runs.

And he also comes up to bat only once every nine times.

Somebody else, somebody who's not being paid like he is, is going to be.

In fact, the last World Series, the 7th game, hinged not on the big players, but the second baseman.

Right.

He was the hero for the Los Angeles Dodgers in that.

So we've always been and everybody wants this.

This is not a left or right thing.

This is what, people want complicated stories.

Keats wrote a letter about William Shakespeare, saying that he had negative capability, that he could hold in tension the the strengths and weaknesses of any one of his characters for as long as he could.

When the moralist in us wants to decide one way or the other.

This is the great sportswriter Tom Boswell talking to me in In Baseball about steroids.

But it applies to everything.

Shakespeare's negative capability that you don't decide, you hold in tension somebody strengths and weaknesses, you tolerate undertow.

And I think there's no one on earth that wants a simple story.

Dick and Jane story.

Right?

Nobody wants that.

The darling of conservatives is supposed to be the series Yellowstone, right?

You've heard this.

Well, Yellowstone has a patriarch, a kind of George Washington, played by Kevin Costner, who is a really great and wise men, who periodically kills the people who piss him off.

And he dumps their bodies across the border in Wyoming into a cavern, never to be found again.

He's got three children.

One is a daughter cut from his mold.

I'll get to her in a second.

The other two.

One son is incredibly troubled.

He's married to a Native American, and his is incredibly troubled by the world that he's inherited.

The other son is Benedict Arnold, right?

The daughter is married to the chief farmhand who oversees a group of ranch hands that are male and female, young and old, black and white and gay and straight.

Surrounding this is a whole big issue of Native American sovereignty.

And beyond that is the impending tsunami breaking over the heads of Montanans.

It takes place in Montana of development.

Right?

That's a complex story.

How how is this any different about the foibles of human beings.

The idea to to have a sanitized history is to be a dead country.

Well.

Ken, you have been on the road with the American Revolution.

Oh my goodness.

And in just about every interview that you've done recently, you've been asked to relate the themes of the American Revolution to our current political moment.

And every single time.

Ken, here's what you say.

This is the great gift of history.

It invites you to calm down.

So how do you think history helps us calm down?

And how does history help you personally Ken Burns, calm down.

Well, it's the same thing.

I'll give you an example that's off topic, which is in in 2008, when the meltdown happened in September and October and the economy fell apart and all of that happened, I had a friend who in financial services who came up to me and he says, we're in a depression.

We're in a depression.

And I just said to him very calmly, in the depression, in many American cities, the animals in the zoo were shot and the meat distributed to the poor.

If that happens, I'll agree we're in a depression, but for right now it's a recession.

So what history is, is essentially a lot of mountain climbing.

It's hard work.

You get to know things intimately.

You get to know yourself because the struggle against the impulse to say, let someone else climb it is great, but you get a perspective on things and you begin to understand.

We were way more divided during the revolution.

We were way more divided during the Civil War.

We are way more divided in the period after the Civil War, which we call reconstruction.

Nobody can even agree on what it was.

And we're working on a film right now that we hope will be illuminating, way more divided during the Vietnam period.

So it's possible to sort of check your chicken littleness at the door that get out of the fetal position and say, what is it that I can do?

There's a wonderful character that we just adore in this film, and it's read by Christian Friedel, a great German actor, and you've seen him in many places.

In Zone of Interest, and also in The White Lotus as a kind of scared, skittering guy in Thailand as a kind of a concierge type.

He is Johan Ewald in our film.

Johan Ewald is a German hired German soldier, Captain Johan Ewald who comes in the summer of 76 and lands in Staten Island, is part of the biggest battle of the American Revolution, the Battle of Long Island, which, because of Washington's mistake, is an unmitigated patriot defeat.

And all the way through, he's openly contemptuous of these rebels with their new ideas.

But he happens to be part of the surrendering army at Yorktown.

And afterwards he sort of has to say, who would have thought a hundred years ago, out of this multitude of rabble would arise a people who could defy kings?

So the ingredients, the recipe for human happiness.

I remember remember that movie National Treasure, in which Nicolas Cage is supposed to steal the Declaration of Independence because there's a treasure map on it.

And I remember somebody asked me about it and I said, the treasure map's on the front.

You know.

It's, it is a recipe for human happiness.

I mean, a lot of the declaration is a whole bunch of complaints, 18 injuries and usurpations that the that the King is fostered on it, but the opening and the ending are as beautiful a recipe for human happiness that I know.

Well and you heard it here first, folks.

Check your chicken littleness at the door.

Thank you Ken Burns.

Yeah, I want to ask a little bit about your own evolution as a filmmaker.

You told us a little while ago that you made roughly 40 films.

How do you think you've changed as a filmmaker over the last 50 years?

You know, I was looking at the introductions of all the films, and there was a moment about Wilmer McLean, the guy who the Civil War begins in his his front yard and ends in his front parlor.

And when we cut to his house at Appomattox Court House, which is really true, we do a series of dissolves, three shots, we get closer, and I realized I would have cut in.

Now, that's not an answer to your question, but you just always trying to refine and make it better.

And you learn not tricks, but you learn ways of relating and listening to it.

The last.

First of all, they're not my films.

These are hugely collaborative efforts, and while it's a fairly close knit group of people that the, you know, maybe 18 or 20 made the revolution, we thank 250 people correctly for their work in helping us do this.

But but the last few weeks of editing are just me, with the editors opening up two frames, which is a 12th of a second, or closing down two frames, which is of a 12 a second makes a huge difference.

And it is no, it's you know, it's we use musical analogies.

And I and my brother once said that all our other art forms, when they die and go to heaven, aspire to be music.

It's the only art form that's invisible.

It's the fastest art form.

It works on you two notes and you can sometimes be in tears.

And so music in our films is really important, and the language of the editing room is always holding that a bit longer, or cutting it off a beat or extending it.

So the difference between a 12th of a second and a sixth of a second, four frames is is gigantic when you get down to it.

And I live in that space, and the older I get, the more attuned I am to the rhythms of what it what it needs in order to honor you all by.

I'm asking a tremendous thing, which I'm asking you for your attention, and I am obligated to honor your gift of your attention by providing something that you don't fall out from.

That is to say that I haven't over explained something.

I haven't assumed that you knew too much, that I haven't rushed something, or not held it longer because you needed to marinate in an idea.

And all of that is incredibly exhilarating in those last few weeks in the editing room that are essentially singular about opening up, these moments or closing down.

And it's, you know, sometimes it's four frames, sometimes it's six, sometimes I will look and I'll say 24 seconds, and they will look at me like I've just said, an hour and a half.

Really?

Oh yeah.

And that 24 seconds is nothing.

I mean, it is.

I mean, there's a huge amount of time, but we are we are dealing with this arbitrary division of things.

And and if you think that the, that music is a kind of celestial representation that, that these notes and if you make it a cut out of 12th in a second, it's like turning something from an eighth to a 16th note.

If you add it, it's like taking from a 16th to an eighth.

You understand what I mean?

You're you're playing a kind of music of attention.

And that's the this is what it's all about.

And, you know, there's only one rule in filmmaking that I know, just one rule.

And that's a shot lasts as long as it lasts, there's no other.

You can't do this.

You can't do that.

Whatever it might be, no superimposed stuff other than it will begin to tell you.

And once you put two things together, you've created at least three things.

And when you talk about the complexity of a single image and another image, remember it may be worth a thousand words.

Maybe it's devalued a little bit now because of the proliferation.

But, you know, all of a sudden you're dealing with a kind of three and fourth dimensional chess that you just have to yield to.

You'll never know it all.

You'll never understand how even the use of the color red in the background of that still photographs, or that painting has a psychological effect on.

But you can't calibrate it.

But you can begin to have a quietness inside that can appreciate what that might mean.

And you're not.

This is not about calculation.

This is about calibration and a kind of respect for the process and respect for the audience and respect for yourself.

So I think that, I mean, I got the best job in the country, you know, and I'm happy to be told by somebody else that they've got the best job.

That overjoys me.

But but you feel that this is an opportunity to do what I was supposed to be doing.

Well, and you're expressing just the beauty of working in a team.

And you said, you know, Ken Burns the face, the name, but you really you're expressing it right there.

Well, it is.

It's a magical thing.

You know, people talk about writing by committee and it's horrible.

And it is, except when it's not.

And we have these days, like last week was the first day in about a year and a half where I've actually been working on not just sound, but picture as well on a new film.

The film on reconstruction that I mentioned a second ago, and it was exhilarating, where we were working together with a group of maybe 15 people, all with this objective of trying to make it a better story.

And what was the better image, and is it fewer images or is it more images?

Is it movement within the images?

Is it holding it static?

Is it allowing the picture to marinate?

I mean, you look in the Civil War film, the opening film after the canon and the story of Wilmer McLean, is a pan of Richmond that looks like Berlin and nobody says anything.

And the next shot is, you know, a tilt up, two guns in a holster up to this innocent face in which you wonder, who is this mother's son?

And the next shot is a pan across a dead Confederate and Devil's den at Gettysburg.

And the next.

You know what I mean?

You.

And there's no commentary.

It takes until the seventh or eighth shot of three soldiers warming their hands at a fire to hear the Civil War was fought in 10,000 places.

Right.

Right.

Well, it's a beautiful collaborative effort, and I can I love that description of how it all comes together, all those creative spirits putting it together.

Because we're here in New Hampshire.

Hometown crowd.

I have to ask you a couple of questions about your work here in the Granite State.

And first of all Ken, when did you move to New Hampshire and how did that decision come about?

So I have lived in the same town, in the same house.

I have slept in the same bedroom for this early August, 47 years.

Wow.

I moved to Walpole, New Hampshire in 1979.

I had finished most of the principal photography in New York, where I was mostly living on the Brooklyn Bridge film, and I realized they were raising my rent from 275 a month to 325 a month in a in a fifth floor, a fifth floor walkup in Chelsea at West 25th Street and Eighth Avenue in New York City.

And I realized I needed to get a real job.

And I was offered a real job at an unbelievable salary.

And I had this vision that I would take these, you know, 10 or 12 big, huge cans of film that represented what we shot.

And I put it on a shelf, and I'd wake up 15 years later and not have finished the film.

So I said, we're moving to New Hampshire.

I had many friends.

I went to Hampshire College and Amherst, Massachusetts, and many friends sort of headed for the hills of southern Vermont and southern New Hampshire, out of western Massachusetts afterwards.

And so I just wanted to move where I knew I could live for nothing, because I presume that because I could, I was taking a vow of anonymity and poverty.

Right.

And the film was nominated for Academy Award, and everyone said, now you'll come back.

I said, nope, I'm staying.

And I used to think the best decision I ever made was moving to New Hampshire.

That's the second best professional decision I made.

The best professional decision was staying because, you know, it's it really.

This is such this is such a labor intensive thing.

It's very expensive.

And you want to be able to tell the incredibly, amazingly generous people who give you the money, foundations and individuals and corporations.

Bank of America has for 20 years been our underwriter.

I mean, just incredibly great corporate citizen.

You want to be able to show that it's all on the screen.

There's not this massive overhead.

And we're I'm still living in the same house making it.

And I have, I have to say, everywhere I lay my head, particularly in Walpole, I have a frame picture of an old 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.

And and they and they actually don't.

And and so I bring that out and I have it as a daily reminder.

I mean, it sits there staring at me every single day to remind me, you know, that there's a lot of artifice and distraction in our world.

Well, Walpole, New Hampshire, not necessarily known as a hotbed of filmmaking.

And when I meet people.

It is now.

When I meet people from around the country.

And, you know, Ken Burns is from New Hampshire and Ken Burns is from New Hampshire?

Nobody believes They said, well, you really live in New York and you go to New Hampshire on the weekends.

I go, no, I actually live in New Hampshire, and I resent it when I have to go to New York.

You know, I mean, I love New York.

All of my all of my children live there.

All my grandchildren live there.

I love it, don't get me wrong, but Walpole a place that has nurtured me, and the Granite State has done that.

And it's great to be home.

I can say that I've been home for several weeks in a row and it makes all the difference.

Well, last question for you, Ken, because I know we have to wrap it up.

The American Revolution was almost ten years in the making.

Yeah.

You mentioned a new project, cooking at Florentine Films.

What's bubbling on the stove there?

So there are several projects there, actually five that are going.

Two are super active there.

You know, editing rooms are open and things like that.

One is on reconstruction called emancipation to Exodus four parts, eight hours.

Very complex story of of the most misunderstood period in American history.

You saw that picture in the opening of the Vietnam War, of the the honesty and candor of the government.

There's an in focus general in the foreground whose head you cannot see.

And behind it is an out of focus Lyndon Johnson.

So one of the great tragic figures of the Vietnam War is Lyndon Johnson.

But he had this incredibly ambitious domestic agenda passing the Civil Rights Act that was proposed by his predecessor, who probably couldn't have gotten it through.

He could get it through the Voting Rights Act much more, even more significant, and then Medicare and Medicaid.

And, oh, by the way, public television that helped, you know, it's a very active agenda.

He wanted to be very much like his mentor, FDR, in fact, made sure that he was no longer Lyndon Johnson but LBJ, so that he would have a three initial moniker as well.

I did not know that.

It was the guns of Vietnam that sort of began to do that.

We didn't.

We covered that whole thing in one sentence in the Vietnam series, in front of a portrait of of FDR at the white House.

And so we wanted to come back and reverse the story and tell the story of the domestic agenda.

We have, I've had the great privilege over the last five years of conducting eight, two hour interviews with Barack Obama, the former president of the United States.

And no rush, but with the idea.

And I say no rush because I don't want it to be journalism.

I want it to be, you know, that there could be more scholarship about it, that we could have a measured look at the eight years of his presidency and more importantly, I think the whole arc of his life.

And to also get his impressions, I think we have at least one more to go.

He'd probably say one more and I'd want two more interviews.

Once the dust has settled and we can sort of look back with a little bit more distance.

We've also been filming for years and years and years, dozens of hours of footage on people who knew Doctor King, not just people like John Lewis.

I think we got the last interview that he gave and Harry Belafonte, I know we got the last interview that he gave, but also foot soldiers in the civil rights movement who knew him in Albany, Georgia, Montgomery or Birmingham at really amazing unsung heroes of that.

And then we've just, over the last year, begun to gear up for a big production on the history of the CIA.

Okay.

So if I were given a thousand years to live, I would not run out of topics in American history.

I will not be given a thousand years.

So there's a kind of greediness and a kind of like anxiety to sort of keep jumping at all of these great topics.

And they're all self-initiated.

It's it's not somebody hiring us to do something.

It's saying we like to figure out how to tell this story as completely as possible.

And the only place that we could do any of these things is public broadcasting.

I mean, I could go to a streaming service and get $30 million or a premium cable and get $30 million, but they wouldn't give me ten years to do it.

Well, we in the audience have a lot to look forward to.

God and funding willing.

I really appreciate you coming here tonight, Ken.

It's been so nice to talk to you.

And I want to thank everyone in our wonderful audience here at the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord.

And to those of you watching at home, keep the American idea alive.

Ken Burns and The American Idea was written and hosted by Laura Knoy and produced by the staff of New Hampshire PBS.