New Hampshire filmmaker Ken Burns has chronicled some of the most important moments and people in American history – the Vietnam war, Muhammad Ali, Benjamin Franklin and the Civil War to name a few.
With co-directors David Schmidt and Sarah Botstein, he tells America’s origin story in his new film, “The American Revolution.” He spoke with NHPR Morning Edition host Rick Ganley about how he made the time period come alive on film.
Transcript
The American Revolution [has been] recounted in countless movies, books, musicals, what have you. Why did you decide to make this time period your next project?
The decision was made nearly 10 years ago in December of 2015. Barack Obama, by the way, had 13 months to go in his presidency. And the idea is all internal, we're not influenced by external events or the amount of stuff about a particular subject. I was finishing up our series on the Vietnam War and was looking at a map of the Central Highlands that we had created, and I suddenly imagined the British moving west along Long Island towards Brooklyn in the lead up to the biggest battle of the revolution, the Battle of Long Island. And just looked up and I said, 'We're going to do the revolution next.'
I also think that our origin story is shrouded in myth. It's encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality. We don't think they're like us. We want to protect the big ideas in Philadelphia, as if nothing else happened. But it is a bloody revolution, a civil war superimposed on top of that, and a bloody one at that. And a world war over the prize of North America.
And we deserve to sort of dolly back and reveal a much wider shot that includes a lot of the stories, and maybe in the complex retelling of this origin story, shed some of the stuff that hasn't helped us – 'The Redcoats are coming, the Redcoats are coming,' 'Don't fire until you see the whites of [their] eyes,' Betsy Ross, that sort of stuff, – [and] make dimensional the familiar people – the Washingtons, the Benedict Arnolds, the Thomas Jeffersons and John Adams, but also introduce scores of other people that were new, completely new to me, but round out the picture of what this revolution is about.
How did you approach this project of a time period where there's no photographs? There are paintings that are glorified but not necessarily accurate. How do you approach a project like that and say, 'I'm going to make a 12-hour documentary with no photography and no archival material like that?'
The most honest thing is to tell you I had to get over myself and my aversion to reenactments. In this case, I made the decision, the peace with myself by saying we weren't going to reenact a specific battle. We were going to film for many years re-enactors in a very impressionistic way, usually at dawn or dusk, not seeing faces, but to give a sense of boots in mud and hands and warming themselves at Valley Forge and snow and all of that stuff to give you the sense of it, so that we could overcome whatever is trivialized or sentimentalized by the existing imagery.
Also, remember that 99% of people didn't have their portraits painted, and that doesn't mean they didn't exist. And many of them are really important people to the revolution that are unsung [and] didn't have that. So you look for their evidence and you piece together people and make them come alive.
And when we began it, we had no idea there was a 250th anniversary coming up or planned for it in any way, shape or form. But I'm now kind of happy that something that's as complex and I think as rich – you all will be the deciders of that – coming in advance of July 4, 2026, which could descend into sort of fife and drum treacle, that we could have a view of our founding that has all the complexity that mirrors the complexity of our lives now and the variety, the overwhelming variety, of our people and our continent.
