What kind of effect will the loss of funding of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting have on filmmakers and documentarians such as yourself’s ability to produce new work?  KEN BURNS The rescission vote this past summer that eliminated the funding and called back the funding for CPB is going to be incredibly difficult to overcome. I know that for me, I lost maybe $14 million in funding—$4 million that was already in contracted work, which I might still get—and then another $10 million for future projects that we were in discussion for. I think that I’ll do okay, I’ll just redouble my efforts. I’m worried about that new filmmaker coming up and what their chances are of being able to succeed. More importantly, I think that the rescission vote is going to harm the rural news stations, both PBS and NPR, and create news deserts in places where we’re the only signal. That’s a terrible consequence to come in a democracy in which you’re really looking forward to people throwing fastballs down the middle of the plate and calling balls and strikes. It’s going to be difficult to climb out of it, but the response amongst people who have dug a little deeper has been awesome. 

What advice would you give to young filmmakers? My advice is the advice that I found the most helpful, which is you have to know who you are. I was in film classes in college that were really oversubscribed, and then all of a sudden, the next semester, there were half as many students. And then half as many as that the next semester. In my small school, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, three of us ended up graduating and we’re all still making films. One of us passed away, but he’d still be making films if he were alive.  The other thing is perseverance. There are a lot more talented people than there are spaces or funds to make films. There’s a real need to persevere. I live in rural New Hampshire, which I moved to 47 years ago, in order to offset what I thought at the time was taking a vow of anonymity and poverty—becoming a documentary filmmaker on American history on PBS. I’m very happy to report that didn’t happen, but we still have that same kind of freelancer mentality as we did when we began.

Is there an area of American history that you have yet to explore or a topic that you’d like to delve deeper into?  I’ve said that if I were given 1,000 years to live, I would not run out of topics in American history, which is true. We’ve got maybe 30 or 40 topics I’d love to delve into and we’re already working on several—on LBJ and the Great Society, on the history of reconstruction called Emancipation to Exodus. I’ve been filming with a lot of folks who worked early on with Dr. Martin Luther King in anticipation of a project there, I’ve had the great privilege of interviewing Barack Obama for eight two-hour interviews and still have a couple of sessions to go, I’m talking to a lot of scholars and ex-CIA agents to do a project on the history of the CIA. There are eight to ten other ideas bouncing around like lottery balls in my head.

How do you decide what pieces of American history to explore in your work? The glib answer is that they choose me, and there’s some accuracy to that. In the case of The American Buffalo, which came out in 2023, it took me 30 years to make. We were talking in the ‘90s about doing something on the buffalo, but I’m so glad that we waited because it allowed the scholarship, particularly the Native American scholarship, to catch up. Here are people who have more than 600 generations’ worth of experience with this animal and we have maybe eight or nine, so wouldn’t it be great to hear from those Native Americans who have a sense and a relationship to the arc of the buffalo?  While I was fundraising for The American Buffalo in Texas, my friend asked me “Would you ever think about country music?” and from the word music, I was making Country Music. I went to Dayton Duncan, one of my production partners, who had been working on something else in early development with me and said, “we don’t have to put this aside, but what about country music?” We’ve never spoken about that other project to this day.  I’m fortunate enough, however, to say that every project I’ve fully started, I have finished. Because of public broadcasting, every film is a director’s cut—there are no suits hanging around telling you what to leave in and leave out. 

In today's age of digital media, where screens are a constant presence in our lives, have you noticed a shift in who your audience is and how they consume your work? We’ve held on and retained, I'm very happy to say, that sort of PBS audience, which is growing older, but we’ve also been able to add younger parents because of our children’s content. I buried the lead, however. The great news is that for the first time in the history of PBS, one of my programs, The American Revolution, broke into Nielsen’s top 10 streaming list. We know that people aren’t reading books anymore. Nobody is reading books, we are constantly distracted by the thing in our pocket. Because there is so much content out there to stream, however, we are self-curating or binge-watching, as people like to call it. When Civil War, Baseball, Jazz and the National Parks came out, everybody was always lamenting, “nobody’s going to watch this.” And of course, those programs had huge audiences. They didn’t say that when The Roosevelts came out in 2014, because by that time, everybody was already binge-watching, which is self-curating. My kids will spend the weekend watching 20 episodes of something, which is way longer than any film I’ve ever made. There’s some bad news, which is the erosion of attention and the ability to not read books—which are the greatest mechanical invention—but then there is also the proliferation of all these digital possibilities that make it possible for people who you wouldn’t necessarily think to be in our traditional audience to watch, digest and respond to our work.

Where did your process begin with the American Revolution and has that process changed at all over the course of your career? The process hasn’t changed insofar as we’re different from the way others do it. Traditionally, you’d have a set research period, then a set writing period and then with whatever was produced, the script would inform the shooting and the editing. We never stop researching, we never stop writing and we’re constantly shooting, even to the end. So when we’ve locked the series—which means you’ve promised the sound editors that you’re not going to change the relationship of the sound—we unlocked American Revolution a hundred times, easily, sometimes just to find a single word that our narrator, Peter Coyote, had said.  That kind of practice has never changed from Brooklyn Bridge, the first film I did with PBS. We have really actively, for the last 10 years, engaged our scholars in such an important way. In American Revolution, we represent almost two dozen different scholars’ work—not their points of view, not their philosophies or theories—because we’re narrative film, we’re telling a story. That allows us to escape this limiting factor of anybody’s theory of history. In regard to the American founding, there are at least two if not three competing, “absolute” visions of how the story should be told, and we can rise above that. We’ve adopted a scholarly rigor and discipline for telling stories in filmmaking in that we want to make sure that it's right. In my editing room, I have a neon sign that reads “it’s complicated” in lowercase cursive, and it’s right on so many levels. Human nature is complicated. If you’re a filmmaker and a scene is working, you don’t want to touch it. But if you find new and destabilizing information, then you have to change it. In the case of the tension between the facts and art, you always want the facts to win—that’s not easy to do, however, because sometimes those facts don’t cooperate with storytelling. Our main job is to have the willingness, the enthusiasm even, to change things to match those facts, even if it makes the scene lesser or not as good as it was. 

What are common misconceptions about the filmmaking process?  You would assume that filmmaking is additive. I just put out a six-part, 12-hour series on the history of the American Revolution. It’s actually subtractive. We collect 40 to 50 times that amount of material and I have to be aware of what’s left out, because it’s a story. It’s not an encyclopedia—not every general or battle or founding father or British soldier is included—but we have this large chorus of characters that we get to know and I hope to put a real and more human dimension on the familiar boldface names, the Washingtons, the Jeffersons, the Adams. But we also introduce you to scores of people that you’ve never heard of before like Mercy Otis Warren, a philosopher, satirist and poet who wrote the first history of the American Revolution.  Now all of a sudden the idea of the Revolution, which is men in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, is offset by the fact that there were lots of women, lots of Blacks—both free and enslaved—Native Americans, Germans, French and all sorts of other dynamics to this time that we don’t acknowledge in our rush to make the Revolution digestible. People say that “we’re so divided today” and we are, but it’s nothing like the Revolution. As difficult a truth as that is to understand, it may be ultimately optimistic that history is a great teacher, because it reminds you of how our views of the past are almost clouded by a simplicity, a superficiality and a desire to wrap these time periods into a known, quantifiable thing. The past is very malleable; it changes as we discover new things, new people, new diaries, new records and new ways of understanding it. That’s thrilling—in 15 years, somebody else could make a film about the American Revolution that has new ways of looking at it.