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HISTORY This Week
Extended Interview: Ken Burns on the American Revolution (HTW+ Preview)
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The History Channel original podcast.
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Hello, History this Week listeners. It is Sally here and I have a little announcement. What you're hearing in the feed today is a new thing that we are offering to all of our listeners called History this Week Plus. And some of you may be thinking, wait, I already subscribed to History this Week plus. Because, yes, that is a thing that exists in Apple podcasts. You can sign up and pay a small subscription fee to get an ad free version of History this Week. But today we are extending that to all platforms, so not just Apple Podcasts. And we are adding a new thing. It's still called History this Week plus, but if you pay a little bit more per month, you can also get some occasional bonus content, including extended cuts of our interviews, maybe some conversations between me and the producers. And you'll be supporting the show and helping us continue to make it. So today in the feed, we have an extended cut of my interview with Ken Burns to give you a sense of what that's going to be. I hope you enjoy it. And sign up if you want for history this week plus, you can do that@historythisweekpodcast.com subscribe. I'm going to say that one more time. You can sign up for history this week plus@historythisweekpodcast.com subscribe. All right, Sarah Botstein and Ken Burns, welcome to History this Week.
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Thanks for having us.
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C
Happy to be here.
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B
So you have noted in the past, Ken, that you and your team have not approached American history in chronological order. You have already covered the Civil War and the Vietnam War. I'm curious, why was it that you decided nearly a decade ago that it was time to turn to the American Revolution?
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Well, we tell our stories chronologically, within them, but we choose them in the most elemental way. You know, what hits your heart, what hits your gut, and make decisions based on that. There's some films that have incubated in me for 30 years. The history of the Buffalo that was just out a couple years ago took 30 years. I'm so glad we waited because Native American scholarship sort of caught up and it needed to be there and be centered in that story. Other films took a decade or more. Some are instantaneous. Somebody says this or you get a thought and you're in it. And we were in the middle of finishing In December of 2015, our series Sarah and I on the History of the Vietnam War. And I said, I just looked up with all conviction and said, we're doing revolution next.
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B
What was that conviction? Where did it come from?
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Well, I think there's, it's got a built in anxiety because there are no photographs and there's no newsreel and so
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anxiety producing for a filmmaker.
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Yeah, I mean I've dealt with a lot of stuff in the 18th century. In fact, our previous film was on Leonardo da Vinci and that was two centuries before that in the 16th century. And we know what to do. But there's something huge and mammoth about the American Revolution and it's our story. And the problem is that the absence of photographs obviously and newsreel make our relationship to it a little distant. And so there had to be ways that we could intuit that would permit us to get across that Delaware river in the middle of an ice storm. Right. You needed to figure out what it was. And I remember at one point in the Vietnam, we were looking at an animated map, kind of three dimensional map of the Yudrang Valley, which is in the central highlands in advance of a battle. And you could see American and Viet Cong and North Vietnamese positions. And you're moving. And I suddenly went, man, if we can do this, then we can do the British moving west in Long island towards Brooklyn in the biggest battle of the Rev. The battle of Long island or Brooklyn. And at that point it sort of coalesced not just as the possibility technically to do it, but more importantly how central it was for us to get the story right. Our founding is encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia. We don't touch it. We accept the violence of the Civil war and our 20th century wars, but we don't want to touch the Civil War and the bloodiness, the hand to hand guerrilla fighting, the neighbor civ, civilians killing civilians aspect of our revolution. In part, I assume maybe that we're afraid that those big ideas in Philadelphia will be diminished and they're not. They're only made more impressive by telling a much more accurate story. And that those people in buckles and hose and breeches and waistcoats and powdered wigs aren't any longer unfamiliar people to us. They are real and very much like us, filled with the same quantities of greed and generosity, venality and virtue that we, we find among our own populace and within individuals. That's the thing. It's not just white hat, black hat. These are struggles within individuals. And it isn't just the famous names. It's also a bottom up story that involves Native Americans and black Americans enslaved and free and Spanish and French and German and women is left out almost Entirely from the Revolution. This film is populated with women that are at the center of this story, children as is. There's a 10 year old girl from Yorktown that we follow throughout the war. There's Abigail Adams, who may be amidst a crowd of really great writers, maybe the best writer of them all. There's a woman probably you haven't heard of, Mercy Otis Warren, who is a philosopher and historian of the revolution, who is a friend of Abigail's, but very much in the thick of the discussions about this that somehow get winnowed out of our standard histories of this period. And so we try to restore them. And it really helps if you've got Meryl Streep reading Mercy Otis Warren and you've got Claire Danes reading Abigail Adams to help them seem less inaccessible.
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Yeah, it goes a long way getting over, I mean, as you say, the sort of buckled shoes and stockings problem. It really is a problem. We feel quite distant from those people.
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There's a wonderful quote when John Adams, Abigail's husband, arrives in Philadelphia for the first time and describes how Philadelphia is laid out. It is so cute and wonderful and anybody who's ever been anywhere near Philadelphia knows exactly what he's talking about. And yet here's a guy from the 18th century who's like, you know, some people don't like it. I do. And there's a kind of sense that there are real people involved in a story that we tend to turn into these, you know, statues, you know, out collecting pigeon, you know, what. And not real human beings.
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B
Sarah, let me ask you a bit about that. It's true that the revolution, it's so mythologized, it's really hard to believe it really happened. It's really hard to believe that it was contingent, that it could have gone a different way. I'm curious, Sarah, were there parts of it that you encountered that you felt. This is a part of it that I've never heard of. Where you really felt that you were turning over new stones.
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It's a great question, goes to the heart of, I think, why telling history before photographs and newsreels and contemporaneous reports and living witnesses is. Is hard. I mean, first, I will say that for me personally, I'm really glad that I. I've worked on three of the four big films about war that Ken has done, and it sounds a little upside down, but I'm really glad that I did World War II and then Vietnam and got to go back to the Revolution because making the. Each war has its own set of questions. It's asking anyone who studies it to think about it, tests our humanity in the best and the most tragic, the most wonderful, the most awful ways, and go back to our origin story that is so wrapped in mythology and is kind of bloodless. And it's this complicated thing of big ideas when I don't think we even understand sort of culturally, the difference between the Declaration and the Constitution, how long it took to go from one to the other. And then an endlessly complicated, nearly decade long, very bloody war fighting 18th century war is really, really, really, really gory and awful and unmechanized and so far away. So that's just centrally hard to get at the story. And then you want to, I think, for us, find stories that our audience 250 years later can latch onto, which is a combination, as Ken was just talking about, getting to know the founders. I think Hamilton has been successful in some ways because it presents those founders as young, hip, energetic people you really want to get to know.
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Right. Hamilton the Musical, it takes a certain approach of putting these people in a totally different context, so you see them afresh.
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And one thing that it does is it reminds you that they were really young. So Jefferson is in his early 30s when he writes the Declaration. Ben Franklin is an old, stodgy guy. He's in his 70s. Everyone's somehow like 30 to 45. George Washington is 43 when he takes. I mean, these are young people trying to figure stuff out. They weren't famous and the story wasn't told. And we use the word complicated all the time. It was complicated, but it was really surprising. It is so unlikely that we were gonna win the war. And it was unlikely we're gonna win the war for all kinds of reasons. I don't remember being taught now. It might have been like four sentences of all the other stuff I was taught. But it's just such a surprising, unlikely story. It's a world war. It's a civil war, it's an intimate war. It's war. It's just endlessly long and fascinating, and it's filled with all kinds of great people and great stories that you've heard about and that you haven't heard about, let alone, as Ken was just saying, the vast array of Native American indigenous people who were living here, north to south, the enslaved and free and women who, without whom the revolution couldn't have gotten off the ground or happened, and they don't have any rights. So it's a great story, and we're really excited about it, and it was really Creatively and artistically fun to figure out how to make a film out of it. And it was, from a history perspective, just unbelievably hard and rewarding and amazing academically to work with the scholars and writers and historians who just hung out with us for almost a decade trying to do this because it's really fun and it's really surprising, and it's really hard.
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Ken, I want to pick up on something Sarah was just saying about the idea that we're not taught that the war might have been lost. We're actually going to be opening our episode with Washington's retreat from Manhattan. And that's a moment when it really feels like the Americans are on the brink of defeat. And it is so hard to remember that it was not a preordained outcome, that it could have gone a different way, and that people fought hard to make it go one direction or the other. What were some other moments where it really felt like the Americans were gonna lose? Can you help bring that alive for us?
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Yeah, it's so funny. It's almost continual. Even after the French come in, you're not sure, you know, Charleston falls, the French, you know, the first couple of engagements of the French are utter disasters. So you think, oh, as much as they're giving, this isn't gonna work out. We don't win without them eventually. But I think you have to unravel it. One of the things is we tend to, in the superficializing of history, if that's a word, is we make good people and bad people. So loyalists are bad and patriots are good. Whereas if you're a patriot, you're a conservative, you believe, quite correctly, that the greatest form of government on earth is the British constitutional monarchy. You are not wrong. If you go across the channel, it's hell to be a French peasant, right?
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You mean loyalist.
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I mean a loyalist. What did I say? Patriot. Yeah, yeah, loyalist. And so we don't make the loyalists bad. In fact, there's one poignant scene when a Loyalist, in the losing battle for him of Bennington, kills his best friend growing up. That's the revolution in a nutshell. So we're just umpires calling balls and strikes. So if you're at Lexington Green On April 19, 1775, more than 250 years ago, the chances of success are zero, right? And it ebbs and falls. And I think the word that you used, Sally, earlier, about contingency, this is what you have to do, is put people in good. History is watching because you think it might not turn out the way you know it does, right? Like you go to Ford's theater. People have told me, hoping that the gun will jam this time. The gun won't fire, right? And we've had this visceral experience as filmmakers putting that scene together of just weeping at that possible power that you had to hold off the murder of Abraham Lincoln. And here it's the same sort of thing. So obviously, the terrible mistake, strategic, tactical mistake that Washington makes at Long island, leaving his left flank exposed, which causes the rolling up of his army. And if it isn't for the sort of hesitancy of General Howe and for a fortuitous rain and then a really fortuitous fog, but maybe the whole thing is over right then and then, even after we've won a major battle, Washington not involved. He sent his best guys, Daniel Morgan, and one of his best generals, Benedict Arnold, to Saratoga, and they win. And they take a surrender of a British army, and the French say, yes, we're in wholeheartedly. Even then, it doesn't seem, because there's a whole other series of battles and Charleston is lost. And so it's really not until Cornwallis chooses Yorktown. It's not really until the French fleet finally arrives at the right place at the right time and engages. Doesn't block the entrance of Chesapeake, but goes. Engages the British army. That permits the big guns from the French fleet that have been in Newport to slip by and then up the James river so they can be loaded at Williamsburg and then carried over for the siege of Yorktown. That you go, whoa, wow. All of this stuff, I mean, it just. It's.
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It's.
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You know, when I say calling balls and strikes, you know, Yogi Berra said, it ain't over till it's over. You can be losing 10 to nothing in the bottom of the ninth inning if you're the home team with two outs and two strikes, and you can still win. And so there are times we go, how did they do this in. In retrospect or why weren't they completely rolled up? What was the hesitancy? Some of it is just beautiful. Sometimes the British just sort of feel like, you're our kids. We don't want to kill you, right? And other times, they're very happy. Hamilton like to kill you, right? And to show you about our love, as the Hamilton thing says. So there's lots of stuff going on, and Sarah alluded to it, too. There are so many players in this that it cannot be reduced to a bunch of guys thinking great thoughts in Philadelphia That's a huge part of it. But they're native populations and they're the women, as we've discussed. There are free blacks who are making decisions and enslaved blacks too, that are making decisions about to go with the British, who are offering them freedom cynically in one instance, or to fight for the patriots. And we meet lots that do both. There are the French, the Germans, who are coming as mercenaries and deserting and disappearing into the German populations and going home and coming back with their families because they've seen the promised land. I mean, it's so rich and it's so dimensional that you begin to realize. Realize I've said this, and I don't expect anybody to necessarily. I think the American Revolution is the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ, and it just changed it. Everybody before that moment is a subject. And a few people clinging to the eastern seaboard of the United States are citizens. A new thing, brand new thing in the world. That's a big deal.
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I'd love to hear you say just a little bit more about that because it is the case, as we've been saying throughout this conversation, that it's so hard to rec. The texture of it, the real fact of it, the fact that it was flesh and blood people fighting their brothers and neighbors and friends. But also one thing that struck me, watching excerpts from your film, is that it really, really was a war of ideals. And that was a very important thing about it. So it's hard to sort of hold in mind that it happened and that it was motivated by these ideals. So just you spent years immersed in this. Now, like, why was this important? Like, what were those ideals and why was that so important?
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Well, the ideals are expressed. You know, we know the second sentence of the Declaration by heart. Everybody should. I think it's the most important sentence in the English language after I love you and, you know, it's a big deal. And a few phrases later, Jefferson says, all experience has shown that mankind are disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. Meaning we choose this state of being under an authoritarian rule for all of human history. And we're actually inventing this new thing. We don't really know what it's about, but it's gonna require virtue. It's gonna require lifelong education. That's pursuit of happiness. It's gonna require all this stuff that we're not even sure that anybody has the ability to do it. And we don't mean it for everybody. We mean it for us elite, you know, the sort of Republican Ideal of aristocracy, of talent, of white male. And all of a sudden, because this begins as a fight between Englishmen over English law and it gets broken out because we're in the Enlightenment into a much bigger thing having to do with natural laws, all of a sudden, you've opened the doors. And even for, as Maggie Blackhawk, a scholar, says in our film, even for people at the margins, the Declaration is deeply significant because no one's ever said this before. And all in the buildup, the run up to the war, people are talking about liberty, they're talking about free and the opposite of being slavery. And the people who are tending them and serving them, many of them enslaved people, are going, there's a choice that I can also have. And so despite the limited scope and we always focus on how limited it was and what it means, this is big ideas being let out. It's the opposite of Pandora's box. It's not ills being released. It's great ideas into a world that has been suffering from the miasma of not big ideas. And the big ideas is that human beings can govern themselves. They do not need to be under an authoritarian rule. And that eventually, as vague as the. Thank God, as vague as the language is, it's gonna mean not just men. And as Jefferson meant white men of property free of debt, it's gonna mean everybody. And that cat is out of the bag and everybody knows it at the time. The great historian Bernard Bailyn, who passed away before we finish our film, says on camera the revolution, you know, slavery was not talked about. There were a few people, he said, who made an argument about how evil it was and they made. But nobody talked about it. Once the revolution started, that's all anyone talked about. Anyone. By the end of his life, George Washington is freeing his slaves. They all know. Jefferson knows this is. They're anti slavery inside. They know morally it's wrong. They're just making so much money. The whole British Empire's economy is based on slavery. We're only half of the 26 colonies that Britain has has and we're the least profitable. Only Virginia and South Carolina are profitable. And you know exactly why. The other 13 are in the Caribbean. And sometimes they're 90% enslaved people. Jamaica, Barbados, they're making money off slavery. Nobody can let go of it. Right. Jefferson said, it's like holding a wolf by the ears. You know, you don't like it, but you don't dare let go. And so you've got this dynamic that's suddenly changing the second you say we hold these truths to be self evident. They are not self evident evident. Nobody's ever said them before. You know, it's just not self evident. But once you say them, it's the cat's out of the bag, the wolf is let go. And eventually it's going to take four score and five years before a war. Four score and eight, nine years before it's over. And then slavery is over. And then after that, women have the right to vote and Native Americans get included. And we debate the unborn and we talk about the elderly. So all of that, that white men of property just suddenly gets exploded. This is a great, great story. And the origins of it, as Sarah's been suggesting, are so new and so untaught and therefore fresh that what we find when we've been traveling around the country and sharing clips is people go, I had no idea. I had no idea.
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I want to ask something. Sarah, I'm gonna put it to you. You mentioned a fact that Native people are an important part of this story. And it's a striking thing. At the begin your film, you turn to the Iroquois Confederacy and sort of make the comparison, point out the ways that sort of, you know, there was a democratic society on this land before. That's so interesting to me. Why? Why did you do that? Tell me, tell me about that choice.
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Well, Ken should talk about, I mean, how we start and end our films is always the last thing we finish. So we'll talk about.
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Your team is not into chronology. You do it all, whatever order you want.
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Well, we. The meat of the show is definitely God is the greatest dramatist, as Shelby Foote like to remind Ken.
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Great point. In some ways, you're very much into
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chronology to remind us that every day. Look, I think the Native American story is central to the American Revolution. That is another piece of this war that I don't think is as infused into the history that we're taught as it should be. And the Native populations, north to south were not a monolith. They were different. They had different cultures, different ways of being. They split themselves during the war, as Ken was just speaking about whether they were going to decide side with the British or with the Patriots because of their history in the Seven Years War. And we have a lot to learn from them. And I think when thinking about why to put that quote up front, Ken should talk about, you know, the building blocks of those first 15, 20 minutes take us a lot of time to get right and. And you have to really live with it and think about it and the prologue is centrally important. And that prologue, I think, works for a number of reasons. One is it talks about land. Land is important to this war, to the American Revolution, to the prize for North America, which everyone on the global stage was thinking about. Right. Land. It's about democracy. Who is representing you? How do you solve problems? How does your government work? How does your community work work? Who is in charge in your community? And how were the founders in America thinking about those things and understanding them? So you get all those things in a minute. And then I think it says to the viewer, there's going to be stuff you know about people, you know about things you think about little breadcrumbs, and then there's going to be a whole bunch of stuff you haven't thought about. We hope. I mean, Ken, how would you, you know.
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Yeah, I think that's exactly it. We had a scene about the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, a little bit later in episode one. And I said, we got to move this to the beginning. If Franklin looks at this and goes, wow, we could do this too. That is to say the five and then six nations that make up the Haudenosaunee, that is to say the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida and Mohawk Hawk, they have for centuries had a sort of democracy, a union of their separate nations that allowed a degree of autonomy within those nations, recognized borders, recognized independency and autonomy, but also had a kind of common defense against enemies. Franklin says, this is a great idea, right? And he, he, you know, he convenes in Albany, New York, seven of the 13 colonies, and they pass Albany plan of Union. He does a picture of a snake cut into pieces representing the various states and says, join or die. It's 20 years before the revolution. Everybody goes back to their individual states to try to sell it, and nobody wants it. Not a single state wants to give up an ounce of autonomous. So it dies. But join or die becomes the war cry, as we say in the introduction, the prologue in the greatest revolution in history, the most consequential revolution in history. So it seemed important to do that. So if you go into a school and you say, why do the revolution. Taxes and representation. Very, very true. Really important. But the number one thing, as Sarah is saying, is land. The prize of North America is great, except the North America is not there for the taking. It is 300 different nations, right? And so you've got people that have already absorbed in the couple hundred years that we've been there, and are living among and intermarried with and coexisting and not coexisting. And then on the western borders, you have lots of different Native nations, as different and as important as, say, Virginia or France. And we tend to say them, but the Shawnee or the Cherokee or members of the Iroquois, you know, say the Mohawk, they're as important a figure on the world global economy stage as Virginia is. And so if you give them their importance, and we say it would involve more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American, you are suddenly saying that it's not just them, it's all sorts of separate cultures and identities, even languages and ways of being that are on the western flank. And because the Brits have won the Seven Years War, what we call the French and Indian War, they're bankrupt. Be careful what you wish for. And so they say you can't cross that over. Which enrages ordinary folks who think for the first time their families worked some land in Wales or Scotland or England for a thousand years without owning it. And now they're gonna own land. And what you're telling us, we've helped you win this war. You're not gonna let me pass over there. And it enrages these ultra rich land speculators like Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry and Benjamin Franklin and George Washington who are hoping to make a killing selling land to those people that they don't own, that are owned by Native peoples. And so let's lay the cards out on the table. This is hugely important. This land is great. And when they start meeting in Philadelphia, when things get really tense with the British and they start meeting, they call it the Continental Congress. When the war starts, they start the Continental Army. They're just clinging to the eastern seaboard. They know where they're going, going. We know where we're going. And it involves ultimately, over the next 150 years, the dispossession of 300 nations of their land. And that's a reality of the American Revolution and the reality of the American story that you can't avoid. It's not to make people feel guilty. It's just what it is. It's balls and strikes. I'll tell you right now, there are more Native Americans living in the United States today than there's ever been.
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C
To piggyback on what Ken was just saying in terms of how we start, you know, the story of a war tends to. Our first episode, the first sort of significant date that you hear is 1754 with this Albany plan of Union Right. And then the next really important date is 1763, which is this proclamation line. And the show takes you to 1775, which is when Lexington and Concord happens. But two episodes later, you're only dealing with 11 months of the war. So your time and how long it takes to get to the meat of the story and why the revolution is so significant and so important and is both this war of ideas and a bloody battle is just really. These are the pieces of the puzzle we spend a decade trying to get right.
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B
I want to turn and ask you a bit more about the filmmaking process. We've talked about how it takes a decade. We've already touched on some of the challenges with this war in particular. Ken, I'm curious. This is clearly a long process. The finished product is a long documentary. What are the first steps when you first start approaching a new topic? What do you do?
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Feed the baby? It's just like, you know, I just let my 14 year old go off to school, you know, off to boarding school, you know, and it's sort of like making a film is like that. We're reading, we're talking to scholars, we're interviewing them, we're filming, we're collecting archives, we're talking to reenactment groups. We're saying, yeah, we don't want you to reenact the Battle of Long island or the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse, but we want to film you and then use it as grist for our mill so that it's more impressionistic. What are the paintings? Can we film this extraordinary landscape from Maine to Georgia, what's happening there? Even Canada, because there's a failed invasion of Canada, hoping to make it not the 51st, but the 14th state. There's just so much you want, you have to collect. So you would be completely. It would be understandable to think that this is an additive process, right? But it's actually subtractive. We collect. Like I'm talking to you from New Hampshire, you make maple syrup here. It takes 40 gallons of SAP to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. And we have a shooting ratio of at least 40 to 1, 1, maybe 50, maybe 60 to 1. And so what you're doing is if you boil it really easily and fast, you get rock candy. And that's like quick and dirty production. If you evaporate it, which is keeping the temperature just below boiling, then you get the elixir. And so Sarah and I and our colleagues have worked for years, nearly a decade, to try to distill all of this stuff. Stories that Are Our cutting room floor is filled with. With unbelievable stories that you'd look at and go, whoa, what's wrong with you? Why isn't that in there? And they just didn't fit. And we understand that the laws of storytelling are relentless and merciless and difficult. And that we also have to get it right. So we have in our editing room a neon sign in lowercase cursive that has been there for years and years and says, it's complicated. And I put it there because when you're a filmmaker and something's working, you don't want to change. But if you're in the history business, you're always finding contradictory material. You're always finding that undertow that belies the calm surface. And you're obligated to destabilize a scene that's working. And so I wanted to put that up there as a signal to people that it's okay. That even if it's not as good as it was, it's truer to what's going on. And so Sarah and I locked the film in January. We have unlocked it a hundred times to add a word, perhaps just to qualify something. Because the sixth historian that we were involved in. Wasn't quite sure that that number 16 was right. Whether it's dead, you know, months, battleships, cannon, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. But we had always gone. And there are footnotes on the script. Say it's somewhere between 16 and 18. And somebody's saying, we're not even sure that's that many. We go, perhaps 16. You see what I'm saying? And we are down to that kind of fine tuning. And when we're in the last days of editing. It's basically me saying, open it up two frames. That's a Tor 12th of a second. Close it up two frames. That's A 12th of a second. And it makes a difference across 12 hours, six episodes. And so the process is really long. It's exquisitely torturous. And also, there's nothing I know better than the love of my family than making a film better in a day. And you can walk in the next morning and go, what idiot thought that? Meaning me? And then start all over again. But somehow to figure something out like Sarah. We had this situation we'd already locked. And we had had for the year. The introduction. The prologue and the introduction were running just the way it was. And I was on the Upper east side of Manhattan at an appointment. Sarah was down in Lower Manhattan. And I called her and I said, I'm not happy. And she goes with the introduction. I go, right. And within like, maybe 20 minutes, we had blown both the prologue and the introduction up, which is like, editor really almost killed us.
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C
But it's okay. She recovered.
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A
She recovered and then added extraordinary things to it. But we moved a quote that was in the middle of the introduction to before the prologue. We kept the prologue exactly as it was, but we had to protect it now because we had something in front of.
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B
What problem were you solving, Ken? What was it that made you sit up and say, we have to change this?
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A
There was a didacticism in a couple of paragraphs, which we lost entirely. Like, we'll get there. We don't have to put everything into the introduction. As if it's like, you know, those old 19th century novels wherein Sally interviews Ken and Sarah, wherein Sarah discovers that, you know, Ken is talking too much. Right. Ken finally realizes it's time to shut up. I mean, we just were doing a little bit too much of that.
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B
You were like, don't tell people what to think. Just, like, let it unfold.
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C
That's a real role. We definitely follow that one.
- [34:55]
A
We never want to tell people what to think. But we just had loaded it with just a little bit too. You know, our cart was too full and that it was okay to just have a more emotional thing. So what happened was, is something that was static in the middle of its introduction suddenly became dynamic at the beginning of the film. Things in which were done by painting suddenly got broken up into many paintings. We even imported a quote, the back half of a quote that we had just recorded and put at the very end of the film, the next little last moment of the film recorded. Abigail Adams quote to follow, not immediately, but to follow. Her husband John, talking about, we're in the middle of a revolution. It's the biggest thing ever. And the lives of millions unborn are at stake. Which is exactly right. And she's saying, you don't want to get into this overthrow of empire business too lightly because it's about blood. It's about sacrifice. It's really a bad business. And the American Revolution, as Sarah was saying, it's a bad business. A lot of killing is done with a bayonet, which is. Let's not even go there, right? It's really, really, really bad. And so all of a sudden, we had an energized and revitalized prologue and introduction that, you know, after we locked the film, it was just. It was miraculous. And the fact that the both of us were at the same time thinking the same things. And what it is, is that our process is you have to remember to listen to that weakest voice inside of you that says, you know, I'm not 100% sure about that. And you go on and people compliment, oh, this is great. It's wonderful. And then you say, say, no, it's not. It's not wonderful for us. And it was. One of the more glorious moments of this production is when we did this. Be politened. I was like, what?
- [36:44]
C
I think what Ken's getting to is we're constantly struggling in a serious way between two things. One is telling really good, important history, and one is making art and the dynamic of those two things. And we're very flexible, and Ken talks about this a lot, but we're always. We do have to put one foot in front of the other, and we are notoriously punctual, and we deliver on time and we don't go over budget, and we're very disciplined that way. But we have to do research and figure out the scholars and the advisors, and Jeff has to write it and we have to gather material. But all the time that we're doing those things, which do have a kind of. Of obvious order to them, we're also mixing it up all the time. So we're shooting while we're editing, we're rewriting every day. We're trying new pieces of music. We never score a film. That music is found music or music that we've recorded in a studio. And then the editors work with the music, not the other way around. So it's a flexible and somewhat organic process of making a film and art, all the while worrying about the interpretations of history, the facts of history, the story of history.
- [38:05]
B
Sarah, we talked earlier in the conversation about the problem of not having archival footage, not having photographs. Is there a moment where you feel that you all solved that problem particularly well? Is there anything in the film that you're really proud of in terms of. Of bringing this alive with the visual?
- [38:26]
C
We probably both have some favorite shoots and some favorite shots. But I think as we were shooting the live, Ken kept saying to us, and it was really helpful way to think about that. The live cinematography started to sort of become our still photographs. They became the building blocks of the film, and the paintings became moving images in a funny, upside down way way. And then we started. I mean, Buddy Squires, who's been working with Ken for literally almost 50 years, 51 years, right. We really wrestled with, okay, are we going to shoot? We don't want to see people's faces. We don't want it to be hyper realistic. We want it to be somewhat impressionistic. And we don't want to be going from A to B in a script. We don't have the script with us whenever we're shooting. It's all kind of. Kind of an imagination. Let's see what would will work. And so we started shooting through old glass and through smoke. And we would always have sometimes actually two drones along with Buddy on sticks or Buddy dressed like one of the reenactors in the line with them so that you could just. We wanted to be moving and feeling and giving an impression, an impression and a feeling and have it be beautiful but not too literal. And it was really, like creatively scary and fun and rewarding and energizing. And then one thing we haven't talked about, which is really fun, I think, thinking about history again, that I don't think we think about telling the story of the revolution is the vastness of the continent and the weather. And there's no weather channel, so nobody knows that there's going to be a blizzard or it's going to be so stifling hot, or it's going to be an unbelievable rain, or there's going to be a hurricane or wind. And in addition, it's going to take three months for information. To go from one important part of the station, like the White House to the palace is a long way to go. I mean, there isn't the White House, obviously, but you know what I mean, like the center of Philadelphia and the center of London, you can't send a text or have something on Twitter go out. So you're dealing with. With time, space and weather in a really fun way to make a movie.
- [40:45]
A
So I take a walk every morning with my dog Chester, three miles. And it's in an area that's a little unchanged from the 18th century. So I took along my phone and maybe 40 images, maybe 35 images in the final film or off my phone and looks like. Like the period. I mean, we're using much more professional equipment. But it was exciting and exhilarating because I go at dawn and it's atmospherics that are beautiful and they appear throughout the film. And I think also for me, the success is when you've got. You're talking about how bad things are, say, at Valley Forge. And, you know, we're not. We don't have Steven Spielberg's budgets. We're not, you know, we've got lithographs of the cabins there. We've got, you know, one or two of the cabins been reconstructed, so you get a feel of there. This is now the fifth largest city temporarily in the new United States. But there's some people in dawn with their hands over a fire, and it's cold, and you know it's cold and you feel it's cold, or you see just the shimmering heat at the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse, where men died of heat exhaustion. You feel that stuff. And then when the battle's over and the British have protected their supply wagon so they left, and even though it's a draw because they've left, we can claim it as a victory. And we do. The next thing you see are women and children's bare feet, because you think of all of this as an utterly male, masculine exercise war. But women are accompanying this army, their children around there, and. And the first job after the battle is to go there and tend to the dead and tend to the wounded and to, you know, and there are these little feet, women and children over the battlefield, and it's stunning. It's stunning. And there's one realization that the militia, who we exalt in our sort of prettified version of this as the heroes of it, the farmers that left their fields to go fight for independence, they did, but they also went back to sow their fields or to harvest the crops that they sowed earlier. And they're unreliable and they're scared, and they come, as Nathaniel Green, the General, says, read by Liev Schreiber, you know, with all the affections of home. They are not battle tested. They are not immune to blood and guts and disemboweled boweled people and missing arms and legs. And there is a shot of a tripod of rifles, more than three, sort of in a tent shape, and then a pan across a floor of dead bodies and a ground of dead bodies with smoke and people stepping around them and, you know, there's no distance anymore. It's not the breeches and the waistcoats and the buckled shoes. You say, go. This is real business.
- [43:49]
B
Ken, as you mentioned, you've been doing this for a long time. You've been making these documentaries for over 40 years. And, you know, you have a specific style, of course, that you've become quite known for, that you've retained over that time. At the same time, I'm curious, because media has changed a lot over that time. People's attention spans have shortened. Are there ways that you feel like your style has evolved that are important to you and what are the things that you feel it's important to be consistent about, to sort of necessarily ever let go of.
- [44:22]
A
So let's define a term. Style might be the authentic application of technique. You okay with that? Lots of ways to skin the cat. Lots of ways to tell the story. So. So. So, you know, when you stand at the Musee d' Orsay in the center of a gallery of Cezanne paintings, they all look alike. And you go, that style. That's his style. And you go into each one and they're different. Totally different. Same with our films. Completely different. I don't mean to equate ourselves on the level of one of the greatest painters of all time, Cezanne, but, you know, if we bring up the question of art, then. Then that's what it is. We haven't really changed. It's just each thing is an adaptation to the exigencies of that particular project. No photographs, no newsreels. You know, in Vietnam And World War II, we could say, no. No experts, just people who were there.
- [45:11]
B
That's.
- [45:11]
A
That's it. We're waiting for somebody to come back. That's it, you know, but you have to have experts here because there's no living witnesses. And while there may be a handful of first person voices in World War II and even fewer in Vietnam, there's this whole film is first person voices. Hundreds of them, Hundreds of them, personifying not just George Washington, but, you know, Betsy Ambler, 10 years old in 1775 from Yorktown when the war begins, and how you read them and all of that. So I hope that we've gotten better. I think we've gotten better. I'm glad, as Sarah said, that we waited all this time before I said revolution, because I'm not sure we could have done it without having grown over the years. But the process is exactly the same. Exactly the same. And Sarah was really right. It's really important to know that most processes begin with a set research period, three weeks, three months, whatever it is, followed by a set writing period, three weeks, three months, out of which is produced a script that looks like it's an inscribed tablet from Mount Sinai. And then it is shot and then edited. We never stop researching and we never stop writing. By the time we're done, we're on draft 15 or 20. And a draft changes because you've marked it up and crossed it out so many times that you actually need a new draft in order to see and read the changes that you'd made before. And it is a process that goes over and over. It requires extraordinary patience and trusting to that process so that it's building a superhighway through the woods. Like, if you expect to be going 70 miles an hour on this thing, just after you've cut the trees down, you're crazy. The stumps and the boulders will be in your way. But over the years, you begin to accumulate. And all of a sudden, you're bringing in the new archives. You discover something new. You find a new quote, you record. You bring Claire Danes back in to do that last Abigail Adams quote. You know, you get somebody to read this. Somebody says, I go, I don't like that painting of. I don't think that's a good Benedict Arnold. And then all of a sudden, after months and years of, we find a better Benedict Arnold, right? And so he's a really important character. He's not Benedict Arnold until our last episode. By episode two, he's like one of the best generals. And so there's this constant, constant working on it that we just love to get in there. And the scholars who become the workhorses of our production, many of them we've interviewed, and then they come back, and it's not just once. We're not paying lip service to them. They'll make a suggestion in January and be totally surprised that we understood that and executed their suggestion when they see it again in May. And we're not ceding any artistic ground. We're saying, you're right. We needed this and we've done that. Is that a fair thing? Have we calibrated this right? Is the exhalation and inhalation that every episode represents. Sarah talks about the braided. The complex braided narratives that we have to master over years and years and years of work. It doesn't happen overnight. And what's great about this, which is exhilarating about this, is the people that you work with and you get nobody else. Everybody comes to work. It works really, really hard. Nobody punches a clock. Everybody's always there. As Sarah said, early and under budget and on time. But we're dedicated to making it better. No egos. The lowest intern has the right to say something and contribute, just as the most senior producer does.
- [48:52]
B
We've discussed. You started thinking about this project nearly 10 years ago, and it's coming out now. Now in the year 2025. And it's coming out in a really divided time. Like, it's hard to imagine the country coming together for something as collaborative and huge as the Continental Congress. How do you think this story speaks to our Moment.
- [49:15]
A
Well, we've always been divided. That's what one of the aspects of the story will remind people. And in that alone, believe it or not, is a. What's the right word? It's something refreshing, Sally, to know that we have been this place before. I mean, the Civil War killed 700,000 people of our own. I mean, we'd been divided. And Vietnam, which Sarah and I worked on for years and years, we've been divided. And so I think this possibilities of a good story, so sort of not disarming that division, but reminding us actually how close we are in the midst of that division, that many things that people say are dividing points. Part of it is the Internet, and I'm not sure that attention spans are done. People binge. My kids binge. They watch something for 28 hours. I've never made a 28 hour film. They'll just binge. So I just think people like cats playing with balls of yarn in two minutes. And that's great. And people also know that all meaning accrues in duration. So we've got a complicated story. The story of anything is always complicated. And that I think when we started it, you know, as I said, Barack Obama had, you know, 13 months to go in his presidency. Now we're in a completely different place and we feel a kind of existential threat. And maybe going back to an origin story permits you to reacquire the things that distinguished us in this most important moment in world history. That is to say, the creation of the United States of America. Does it have undertow? Does it have bad stuff? Is it violent? Yes, in the extreme to all of those stuff. But it has the very best ideas that human beings have come up with. And that the story of not just the United States, but of the world has been the continual expansion of that. Have we taken steps backwards? Yes, we have. But when we remind ourselves of the elements of our origin story and the struggle to forge out of nothing that had ever been done like this before in the history of humankind, this nation, that's a big deal and may have. You know, the novelist Richard Power says the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. We're not into prescribing what that point of view is. We're just saying, look at this complicated story. It's possible now to disarm all of the binary. Red state, blue state. I'm right, you're wrong, you know, one and a Zero. That our whole lives seem to be about and don't exist. None of that binariness exists in nature or in human nature. And so what we've tried to do is tell an accurate story, bottom up as well as top down, about this amazing, amazing origin story. And maybe as we begin to approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of independence, independence next July 4th, our semi quincentennial. It's already been going on Lexington and Concord was several months ago, 250th anniversary. We've already passed Bunker Hill. You know, we're doing lots of different things will be coming up over that that will have a chance to go, wow, I didn't know that. And in the wow, I didn't know that. There's a momentary humility that we all need to have in the midst of our certainty. Right now, everybody's certain. My way or the highway. And what this tells you is it's so much more interesting and so much more complicated. And it's really beautiful, too. It's ugly, as Sarah was saying. It's brutal, it's horribly gory, but it's also really beautiful.
- [53:07]
B
Sarah, from sort of a craft perspective, as you're putting things together. I mean, this is a historical documentary, of course. How, if at all, are you thinking about the present as you're making decisions about how to frame this information and what to put in?
- [53:21]
C
So people have a hard time believing this, but we really don't really. We really do not. I mean, I'll speak for myself and Ken. You know, I shut the noise of the current moment out entirely when starting a project, because I think that, first of all, each of the historical resonances, echoes, parallels, lessons to take, things to think about, ways to interpret change over the course of a decade, as Ken was just talking about. So obviously you're making a film in a moment, so you can't pretend you're in some dark room where the world is not happening in the way that it's happening. But you're talking about history from 250 years ago. So I think the guiding principle for me is to tell good history and get the story right. And the. Let the ways that it feels so topical and so resonant just happen organically and they change. So the things that we thought were really interesting resonances and echoes and things in 2020 are completely different than they are now, let alone 2018 or 2017. And that has happened, happened when making Vietnam, it happened when making us in the Holocaust. It happened when making Making Prohibition, it happened when making Ernest Hemingway. Because we made Ernest Hemingway at a time where sort of debates and discussions about, okay, can you celebrate a great white man who was really, really flawed and appreciate his art? That's a central question to art and biography. So you're. You know, every film we make, I think the thing that keeps us up at night, and I speak for Jeff and for Ken and for David, is just, do we get the story right and does the film stand the test of time? And if it does that, then we're. Then we're doing a good job. And we will have all the discussions that everyone. All the questions people have about. But what about now? Okay, you're gonna find it's gonna feel different two years from now. I'm telling you.
- [55:18]
A
Yeah, that's it. And you don't wanna. It's so phony. And you see this a lot of time where you're sort of building these neon signs saying, they always take the out. We just, like, just leave it alone, because we always take it out. When the German. The wife of the German general comes to America, she's worried that she's heard that Americans eat cats. If our film had come out last fall, not this fall, eating cats was a big, big deal. They would have go, oh, you put that in because of the Springfield, Ohio thing of the immigrants eating. You know, there's a pandemic. There's an invasion of Canada.
- [55:52]
C
There's a massive map of smallpox. If we hadn't had Covid. Every kid's gonna know what a map like that. And think about inoculation and vaccines. Okay. But again, like, I think when it feels too much like that, we feel like, oh, something's not right, and we take it out.
- [56:06]
A
We'd rather. We'd rather expend a good thing than think that, oh, you put this in because of today.
- [56:13]
B
That's so interesting. You're saying that you work on this for so long that you experience the shifting of the present and the way that that makes us look at the past differently.
- [56:21]
A
Yeah. So the Ecclesiastes said, you know, what will be again, what has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes, Sally, is the Old Testament, okay? And what that says is human nature never changes. And so what we see is human nature superimposed over all these different events. And the same qualities of venality and virtue and generosity and greed are there back then as they are right now. So Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself. Of course, he's absolutely right. No event has happened twice, but it rhymes. He's supposed to have said if that's right. That's exactly right. We're always hearing rhymes, Always hearing rhymes, but you can't write to it, you can't structure to it. You just have to say that Today's rhyme in 2018 is not gonna rhyme in 2020, when we're instant of a Covid. But certainly the smallpox epidemic and the arguments about inoculation or not inoculation will be big. They won't be as big now in 2025 as they were. But you'll go, whoa, I just came out out of this. And I remember the debates, and we're still talking about vaccines now in the headlines today. But we can't worry about what that is. We had a total eclipse last year. Remember that? We got a beautiful scene on a total eclipse.
- [57:36]
C
Yeah.
- [57:36]
B
You filmed that? Actual eclipse. It's amazing.
- [57:38]
C
We did, yeah. That was an insane shoot because. And again, there was a really important eclipse in 1778. But it's all, you know, you find these little threads. Threads, yeah. Throughout human history. And they. And they rhyme and resonate just in always shifting ways, I think the balance of power. How much power should a president have? How does a Congress check the executive branch? What is a judicial? Like, the founders were debating this and debating this and debating this and debating this. And 10 years ago, I don't think we would have thought that was such an important part of the film. And now that seems really relevant and important because we're in a moment where we're talking a lot about that.