 Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm here with Ken Burns who needs no introduction. He is America's best known documentarian, but most notably we are recording today, November 1st, the publication date for Ken's new book called Our America, A Photographic History and it is written with also Susanna Steisel, Brian Lee and David Blisstein. Ken, welcome. Thank you Tyler, great to be with you. I have so many questions. Let's start with photography. As a nation, what is it that we have failed to photograph adequately? You know, I'm totally taken aback by that wonderful question because I sort of feel that we have over-photographed. I say in my introduction that, you know, the cliche that a picture is worth a thousand words has now probably been devalued or diminished to 500 or 250 or maybe 100 and the attempt of this book was trying to return full value to an individual image and its ability to convey complex information without undue manipulation, meaning captions or explanations. And so what you have here is a photography book that I've worked on in nights and weekends for years and years and years with my colleagues, one photograph per page, minimal caption, more than 250 photographs covering from the very first photograph taken in America up to more or less the present because I am in the history business and we get a little bit nervous when you get within 25 years and you begin to have conversations between the two photographs on the page and what we do is we have back matter in which there's a thumbnail of that photograph and a much fuller description, the photographer, the credit, other related information that might be of interest but we first wanted the photograph to have full value. So having said that and established sort of the raison d'etre for the book, I think that there are lots of areas in which our attention doesn't go into. It may be that the photographs are taken, they're collected and this is a book filled with famous photographers like Matthew Brady or Lewis Hine, but it's also filled with many anonymous ones or people that we've never heard of but just photographs that we've stumbled across in the nearly 50 years of exploring American history and what we've done. But the thing I want to say about my work, no matter how much footage is in it, newsreels or whatever it might be, the still image is still the DNA of what we do and this has been a labor of love for me for many, many years because I wanted to honor my roots. My father was a cultural anthropologist but an amateur photographer and my first memory is of him building a dark room and developing pictures when I was two, three years old. It was just an amazing thing and then my mentor at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts where I went from 71 to 75, Jerome Liebling whose cover of a kid in 1949 in New York City in front of a car holding his jacket with a certain way was one of the formative forces like my father in this respect for the still image. He was a still photographer even though I was a filmmaker. He'd made some films but he helped remind me and ground me and though he's been gone, my dad's been gone for 21 years. He's been gone for 11 years. Jerome Liebling, they still influence me every day and so the book is dedicated to them but also to this idea that even in this era of inattention we tend to take too many pictures and not stop and permit the photograph to just be and to just communicate that complex information that I said. We're all familiar with the concept of a photo face, right? You tense up a bit, you become less relaxed. How have photo faces in America changed over time given all the photographs you've studied? Another great question, Tyler, that in the beginning like painting which was accessible mostly to the very wealthy there was very few genre paintings in the 19th century certainly not in the 17th and the 18th century you sort of show ordinary life to an extent that we could really get in painting a photographic sense. So at the advent of photography and because of the long exposures beginning in 1839 the first American photograph, same year that Daguerre is working, Louis Daguerre is working in Paris perfecting it and is the inventor of it. You get people sort of presenting themselves to the camera with a kind of formality that feels almost Calvinistic as if you're doing it. A lot of it is the way when you had your painting done you did it because you wanted to present your face to a god in a world that was mostly about suffering and it was the next world where maybe there'd be some rewards. But photography quickly developed into something that could be playful, something that could be self-reflective and now in some ways we've gone to the far extreme and it's kind of cheapened. You can be, as I do in New York City, my first film was on the Brooklyn Bridge and I have an opportunity to walk over it two or three times a week and I take that opportunity and it's filled with people not taking pictures of the bridge and it's magnificent lattice work of cables and these great gothic stone towers and compression and the cables in tension with their network but they're going to themselves or they're putting the bridge in the background and they're doing it and there's now another instantaneous kind of false thing, a false pose and I think we've all become perhaps too susceptible to that. So I take selfies if I'm meeting somebody at a talk that I'm giving and they want a picture with me. That's fine but I don't take selfies of myself everywhere that I go. I'd rather look at the Brooklyn Bridge and try to compose a view that I haven't yet seen because of light, because of angle, because of disposition of photographer and that's where I want people to understand the real power of photography. How do you listen to photographs? Yeah, that's something that has been part of my work, being the son of an amateur photographer and being trained sort of as a filmmaker by still photographers. The still photograph was the DNA but then when I was trying to make come alive the historical subjects that became my life work I had to treat a photograph as if it was an arrested moment of a reality that had had a past and would have a future. For example, a cart moving through a city street. We see the photograph of that. I'll just make up a date 1855. And so I wanted to believe that that cart a minute or so before was out of the frame and that in just a few seconds would be out on the other side of the frame. So as I was filming it to help bring alive the past, the still photograph was an opportunity for a visual thing. How do you not just hold a still photograph at arm's length and just wait till you can get some newsreels, but how do you go in and energetically explore with a roving camera eye the wide shot, the medium shot, the close up, the tilt, the pan, the reveal, the insert of details and that at the same time if you were trying to will this photograph alive, wake the dead and my late father-in-law said of what I do for a living, you also had to listen to it. So as I'm looking through, I'm thinking is the horse clip cloppeting, is the wagon jostling, is the bat cracking, is the crowd cheering, is the cannon firing, are the muskets ricocheting. Even just simply are the leaves rustling in the trees. And so that has become part of the animating process, is not just seeing it liberated from just one focal point of view visually, but orally getting in and trying to understand the complexity. So our soundtracks and from the beginning have been as complex as feature films that almost rarely record full sound. They will add it on and you have what's called Foley artists. They're people who sit in these booths with cement services and dirt services and hard shoes and sneakers and they make all the effects of people walking down the street because the sound is so corrupted and they want a clean sound. So we've kind of been applying that kind of mentality to the old photographs that are the left blood of what we discover and find. Why were hats ever so popular? It seems to me that their carrying costs exceed their liquidity premium. They're not good for very much. Old photographs you see so many men in hats or women. Why? Well, it's just fashions. You know, it's so interesting. I was talking about this book and in 1903 I have a picture. This book is arranged chronologically from that first picture in 1839 and more or less every year not all the time and sometimes multiple pictures for a particular year and sometimes we don't know precisely the date so it might be circa 1900 and give the location every 50 states represented almost all my projects are the many photographs of a particular subject I've covered that's not in that film. It's something new that this last 10, 15 years of night and weekend work discovered but people go through fashions. We're clean shaven and then all of a sudden everybody had a beard. Everybody had a hat. The change in fashions and so I've got a 1903 picture of the royal rooters who are the Boston Red Sox or what was the team before the Boston Red Sox would become the Red Sox. Passionate rooters in the first year that they won the first World Series ever against the Pittsburgh team from the National League and they're all men for the most part and they're all wearing ties and hats and whatever. Now, you go to a ballpark and besides the announcers finding someone a coat and a tie and a kind of formality is long gone. It used to be that every football coach roaming the sideline had a hat and a coat and a tie and now you've got cut off sweatshirts and various kind of informal things. So these are all the impositions into the photographic frame of fashion. Let's say we give you a time machine and enough currency and protection against any diseases. You can go back in time to the American past. Which place and decade do you most want to visit? Well, you know, it's interesting you said that I'm speaking to you from my barn the loft of my barn which is doesn't keep animals, it's got bedrooms and it's got a sort of informal great room where we bring in folding chairs and have screenings and tables and work with our consultants when we're not limited by the mix and it's where I up in this loft I've spent sharing my space with my youngest child toys on the other side where I've done all my editing work and mixing work for most of the last two and a half years. I, and this barn is in a tiny little village I've lived in for more than 43 years in Walpole, New Hampshire and I would like to go back to Walpole, New Hampshire in the 1870s provided I had access to antibiotics to be able to enjoy my beautiful town I've got pictures of it in fact there's a picture of it in the book of a young woman standing by a country road, a track, you can just see the wagon ruts wheels up and grass in between, by a stone wall with some flowering trees nearby it must have been nirvana in a way a kind of, you know the winters were severe, there were diseases that took people but it was a special place and I've never had the courage to leave this place nor do I wish to have it it was where I retreated from New York City to be able to pursue historical documentaries strike one on PBS strike two about American history strike three taking I was positive back in 1979 a vow of anonymity and poverty I'm very happy to say the first film that I was halfway through making when I moved up here was nominated for an Academy Award and all of that stuff didn't happen but the great courage was actually to stay here and continue to make the films from here and I've always wanted that time machine to take me back to this beautiful town and to see it and to hear those sounds I've imagined the birds free of the traffic from interstate 91 about five three, four miles due west in Vermont the Connecticut River divides us from Vermont and is not too far away to hear the silence to also hear the new set of associations and sounds that come from the bustling of skirts or the wagon wheels or the horses or some of the other things and then the things that are the same the wind and the leaves and children laughing and playing and so this is my world and usually it's like who would you want to meet and I can tell you that it would be Abraham Lincoln or Lewis Armstrong or Frederick Douglass these are hugely important Elizabeth Katie Stanton hugely important people that I've delved into but I think with that simple time machine I just go back where I am and see what it was like in 1875 whatever it would be. Do you accept the common stereotype that New Hampshire residents are a bit ornery and non-conformist does that ring true to you? No, you know it's a state that's undergone a lot of changes since I've been here but also a state that has a kind of fundamental unchanging, you know we're the granite state we're not the green mountain state across the way that our Vermont brethren we there is a little bit of that kind of rock-ribbed sense but people are pretty direct they tell you there's not hidden behind the niceties that some areas of the country one thinks of Southern hospitality which is often just a mile wide but only an inch thick or Midwestern nice which often betrays a great deal of stuff but you know what you see is what you get so maybe the ornery is just honesty right how should we improve intellectual property law for the reproduction of photographs you must have incredible experience with this is it perfect or could it be better you know what it's imperfect of course as all things on in on this earth are and I suppose it could be I I have to see this Tyler from both sides of the equation right I'm forever searching you know in the Civil War series alone we got photographs from over 163 or 163 different sources one time it would just be one photograph from a single private individual sometimes you might spend 8 or 10 weeks at the Library of Congress filming off an easel the Matthew Brady collection he went bankrupt and Congress took pity on him and bought some of his negatives that began the beginning of their remarkable photographic stuff so you know we're always wanting and thrilled when our government gives us access essentially for free or for a nominal reproduction cost if we're ordering a photograph and then other places that can charge a huge amount and you want more access at the same time I am a filmmaker making things and I have to survive on the selling of my images and so one understands it so I think the protection of intellectual property rights is important but at the same time there's gotta be a moment where it moves into the public domain and we have the ability to have a freer exchange because if you think about the huge costs and I made a film on in succession two big series in succession on the Vietnam War and on country music and the budgets were in the tens of millions for those films they were many episode series but a lot of that was just rights for music for the music publishing for the film of that music but also the film itself for the still photographs often commercial houses and millions of dollars of that budget went not to inflated executive salaries you're looking at them but in fact to rights and so we'd always love a much more inexpensive way and then you begin to think that because of my track record and the ability it's never easy to raise money who's not able to raise money who can't tell the story that they want to tell and that's I think a really important thing and PBS I think has been in the forefront of trying to figure out a way in which we can support those projects that would not here to for in a completely unfettered marketplace be able to do it they just wouldn't be able to afford it and so we're excited about recently being able to hear stories that probably in another age wouldn't be told because PBS has one foot in the marketplace tentatively and the other proudly out of it and I think I've spent I've not think I have spent my entire professional life making films that will be shown to on PBS because that is the condition that I need to give me the artistic independence the time it takes to do these things I could easily walk over to a premium cable channel or a streaming service and get the money I need to do the Vietnam war maybe one conversation instead of 10 years of raising money but they wouldn't give me the 10 years to make the film they'd want it in a couple of years and I wouldn't be able to do the deep dives that I'm able to do because PBS sets a pick for me if you will there's not a bunch of suits giving notes so it's it's been another I think important decision that I made that was the right one and staying in New Hampshire living in the same house, sleeping in the same bedroom that I moved to 43 years ago 43 and a half years ago has made all the difference and has liberated me in a way that maybe some of my colleagues have become richer but I'm not sure that if you only treasure richness by the bottom line you've missed an important component of what you're bringing up to which is intellectual freedom and artistic freedom which I've been able to enjoy. What do you take to be the ethical limits on displaying photography say in a public exhibit or in a book so if you consider say photographs of lynchings it's a very important part of our history but obviously deeply disturbing where do we draw that line what is too explicit put aside pornography but take violence well let me go back to the pornography discussion that the Supreme Court had in the early 70s I know it when I see it one of the justices is supposed to have said it's a moment to moment calibration Tyler it's a hugely important part of our work we just the last film we released in September was a film called the U.S. and the Holocaust and one of the things we were absolutely certain about is that we didn't want to re victimize the victims by exploiting the images the graphic images of it and so we're always pulling out the fuel routes of that we're not showing even in the Civil War series the most gruesome photographs that we came apart we film them we have them they're permanently edged in my brain I'm sorry to say they haunt me but it is really important that we're we're careful about it now it's interesting that you brought up shots of lynching because one of the main projects I'm working on right now is called emancipation to exodus basically from January 1st 1863 when the emancipation proclamation took effect through the period of the rest of the Civil War and the period known to us misrepresented by birth of a nation and gone with the wind reconstruction probably the most misunderstood period in American history the collapse of reconstruction the reimposition the brutal reimposition of white supremacy in the south the building of the monuments but more importantly the enforcing of Jim Crow laws and using lynching as a terrorist device by terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan through the the decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson in the late 1890s to codify this discrimination and to permit it to continue and then finally the African-American various leaders of various kinds like W.E.B Du Bois or Booker G. Washington or Ida B. Wells even Marcus Garvey who was a separatist to figure out what the strategies were to survive and then finally African-Americans all mass beginning towards the end of the second decade of the 20th century an exodus a great migration it's called that took place over six decades to move as Richard Wright said and enjoy the warmth of other sons to get out of the brutality of Jim Crow in the south and so I it's a it's a project I've been thinking about it's a subject that I've covered in many other films but not as sort of rigorously and of course lynching in the graphic images of that will be a huge part of it and it will be a moment to moment calibration as it has been in every film of what to use and once you put it in it doesn't mean you can't take it out and you know what we do is you know we make in our town maple syrup here and it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup but that's exactly our ratio basically 40 to 1 in the films we make and so that means that any given time you have 39 other gallons for every hour of film 39 other hours that is not going in and we're constantly putting in and putting back painfully aware of kind of not a line in the sand there's no set moral that you just have to have one and each thing has its own moment so you know it when you see it and you know when we finish and lock our films we unlock it not to put our thumb on the scale but to remove that thumb to change an image to make it less graphic to qualify add the percept perhaps or some might say or some said or it was thought just to help us qualify so that we don't fall into that kind of ethical quicksand that your excellent question is alluding to why are women so prominent in the early history of American photography compared say to painting or sculpture you know it's interesting I think because at the beginning we're recording ourselves our families the first one is a self-portrait it would of course be in America it would be a self-portrait but families are involved and so families are you know we begin there's so many ways in which we transcend that you know the declaration of independence did not apply to any women it's 144 years after the declaration that women get the right to vote you know basic thing when the declaration and the Constitution were there they had no rights but they were part of the landscape they are a majority of the population and have been and so what you have is the beginning of photographs being a much more democratic and accessible meeting a medium that is going to be populated by the people who actually exist and so I think it's that that's helpful to break down and so as you see in this book there are lots of images of women from the earliest time involved in things like abolition involved in things like slavery unions involved in things like women's suffrage involved in just playing having a good time on the beach in Massachusetts in your Bloomer swimming suits dancing or three gals stealing a cigarette in the early part of the 19th century you know this film is about darkness and light about black and white both in the photographic process but in the American dynamic it's there are many Native Americans there's lots of landscapes of the beauty of their country there's lots of horrible signs of discrimination and war and death and suffering and grief and that's us you know that's the that's the story of us and I've been trying to tell that complicated history with my films and this was an opportunity to kind of stop and allow the viewer this time to be the director so that is to say in most performance art as film is I set the time that you get to look at that photograph and you see what you're able to see in that if you want to spend an hour with one photograph in this book you're welcome to and if you want to go through this over amount of time these photographs and then hold your thumb in the back matter and go back and forth between the full page of the photograph that might say Gettysburg 1863 and then the description of people reading the list of the dead outside a newspaper in New York City just after the battle of Gettysburg in July of 63 you can learn a lot more about the photograph but in a different way I first wanted the photographs to speak for themselves on sort of diminished I guess is the word by words are Amish quilts the peak of American quilt making? No I think there's stuff that's going on there's a cooperative of African Americans in Alabama called G at a place in the bend in the Alabama River called G's band GEE and they still in fact one of my most favorite quilts was made I violated my own stuff of collecting antique quilts was made by a woman named Lucy Mingo who's in her 80s but still alive as far as I know and several years ago I bought a magnificent quilt I do like to point out something I have behind me on the other end of the loft a beautiful Amish quilt and people like to talk in the in the 1930s about one of the epitomies of modernism is the bold colors and geometrical rectangles that the painter Piet Mondrian would do that was sort of a kind of an apotheosis of modernism at the time this quilt I have filled with bright geometric rectangles red kind of almost a neon red and a neon blue is from the 1830s 100 years before from the people that we in silo and in trap and discriminate against because we think of them as simple they've chosen not to live with electricity and a lot of things and so we think they're sort of frozen and we don't give them the kind of artistic or the just basic human idea of having lives lived as full as we do because of the way they've chosen to live their lives which is entirely their right. There's another religious sect not too different from the Amish called the Mennonites I've got on the opposing wall and the other end of that dark loft Mennonite quilt is one of my favorites but I also have quilts that we know little about I mean I spend my life finding out the story. Most of my quilts that I collect are mysteries. You might have a name stitched into it Hannah Brooks or something like that and you may be able to figure out a town record that she could be somewhere 18 or 21 is she married did she make it with anyone else is it a solo project how long did it take what was life what were the all of that is a mystery and so the quilts become I think a perfect evocation of who we are and of course in this case dating back to the beginnings of our Republic these are made by women so once again this group of people who were considered incompetent to serve on a jury incompetent to testify at a trial who had no rights in marriage if you came to your marriage rich from your family your husband automatically owned that if you were divorced you left with the clothes on your back not your children not any of the property you brought all of that has begun to change but you can see in the quilts a great evocation of who we are and in fact coincidentally a touring exhibition location of some of my quilts published a beautiful book that came out in September about my quilts called Uncovered the Ken Burns collection and it's as gorgeous in full color as I think this our America book is and another way of getting at us in a non-verbal fashion and that's an element I think that we too often distrust in our general accounting of things and need to trust for us to be healthier not just as individuals or as families but as communities and states and countries in the world so what is it that quilts bring to bear on your conceptualization of the American experience the documentaries or a book of photographs do not how does that all hang together well you know I don't I would just remove from your question conceptualization what I do all day all night seven days a week as I conceptualize the past I'm always trying to figure it out to cipher how to tell the story how to make sure that the telling of a story doesn't in some way diminish I've got a neon sign in my editing room down in this off the center of town off the town green that says in in lower case cursive neon sign it says it's complicated because there's not a filmmaker on earth that doesn't if the scenes working doesn't want to touch it but more often than not the process of learning for us is to learn contradictory and complicating information there's undertow for every placid you know surface of the water and we tried to work that in the quilt so are enigmatic and mysterious I'm drawn to them for their their design the composition and then you move in and and you wonder what they're doing and you see the details of the when a quilt is about the stitching that is not immediately obvious it's not the things that hold the pieces together it's the stitching on top of that the quilting that that holds together the two sides of the quilt the front the art and the backing and then the batting in between and so if it has it and so it's they're just wonderful mysteries in the way a painting might be and for me fabric is a way to get at an essence of of a culture even if it if it resists that kind of conceptualization so it's it's a kind of it's a relief for me right it's a kind of I can enjoy them I mean down underneath all the quilts came back from the touring exhibition and down underneath me are all are maybe 40 quilts folded up and laid out on a big long 14 foot table and to me it's like standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon to me it's like looking at a giant Sequoia to me it's like one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen and somebody will say where did this come from I'll say well we think it's Pennsylvania Lancaster County from the 1870s but we don't know but isn't it beautiful yes you take it out you hold it up it may be American flags and crosses made by Red Cross nurses in World War one just incredibly poignant and beautiful and elegant and simple but so moving that that thing behind me is not a quilt it's not a flag it is represents our flag but that's a Navajo blanket which I got because that has to have meaning upon meaning upon meaning right what is it to accept the people who have taken away most of your land and to build this heavy thick thing that represents the the durable symbol of that country and yet the history of you with that country is so complex and so fraught and so filled with that kind of undertow that's what I'm trying to accomplish with the book of photographs where with the minimal captions you can find out more if you want in the back material as I said but you can also just let it be and you can understand and perhaps intuit which is perhaps the opposite of conceptualization into it something that that reflects or touches something emotional rather than necessarily intellectual it can do that as well of course and we can conceptualize and talk about that for hours but at the same time there is that moment of reception that you feel in relationship to something that you love in your faith in your art and your family and in the people your friends the people that mean something and I'm kind of interested as much in the mysterious and the unexplainable as I spend most of my professional life trying to explain. Who is the most underrated American painter in your view? Well I happen to it'll be somebody no one knows a man named William Siegel who I got to know at the end of his life who was a painter by avocation and he made some really startling portraits self-portraits and still lifes and I began through friendship to collect some and after he passed away he had already he and his wife had given me a couple dozen paintings and then asked if I would be an executor so I'm always kind of trying to get people to wake up to him having said that I don't know you know it sort of each Louis Mumford said each generation rediscovers and reexamines that part of the past that gives the present permanent gives the present more meaning and helps us understand it so what you see is that things get lost to time there wasn't a school kid at the end of the 19th century that couldn't recite from memory George Washington speeches and knew everything about George Washington now you ask a kid and they go first president never told a lie not true you know chop down the cherry tree not to throw through a coin across the Potomac not possible you know it the mythology has grown up and encrusted him and I'm working on a history of the American Revolution right now that is trying to make him a real and dimensional figure and so you know the joke is George Washington slept here now it wasn't a joke before if he spent the night in Morristown he spent a winter in Morristown New Jersey or he was over here he spent a night in this house outside mom of courthouse this was hugely important and I want to try to to return fair value so what I'm saying is that with regard to your question about paintings there's going to be periods when somebody will rise up and periods when it will be less fashionable and you know it's it's a very interesting process to watch you know we tend to think of the past understandably as fixed but it's not it's incredibly malleable not just as new information arises but as our perspectives change you know I I like to tell people with our Vietnam film if I'd made it 10 years after the fall of Saigon in 1985 America was in a recession the Japan was ascendant we're talking about everything shifting over to the Pacific Rim Vietnam would be the symbol of our decline if I'd waited 20 years to 1995 when America was the lone superpower we're in the middle of what was then the biggest peacetime expansion in the history of the United States we had just won the first Gulf War with one arm tied behind our back with a coalition of dozens of other countries it was just you know we were in Vietnam would have significance but would no longer be the symbol of our decline you wait 30 years to 2005 we're bogged down in both Afghanistan and Iraq and comparisons are being made to Vietnam so all of a sudden Vietnam has a new centrality nothing about the Vietnam War has changed it's only we're on a different mountaintop and so we made ours in the in the teens mostly and came out in 2017 and it was speaking exactly to the present and yet it was benefited from kind of averaging all those different perspectives so you know it may be the future that's pretty set we may not know what it is but it's the past that remains I think delightfully marvelously wonderfully malleable and there's nothing definitive nothing I've ever done is definitive nor should it be it is always my principle collaborator Jeffrey war says a conversation to be had and you're what you're offering is as comprehensive of you as you subjective you know just as this book is called our America which is so presumptuous it's my America right I'm sharing it with a spirit that we've lost a sense of what we share in common and I want to share with you the complexity of my country and be able in these times of not just division but of the myopia that comes from self selecting your information how complex we are and how rich we are for that complexity good bad and indifferent does baseball have a future yes of course it does it's a great isn't it too slow people have stopped watching I just don't get this like I every I am a big fan of football much bigger fan of baseball the games last about the same time and as George will said of football it has two of America's worst features it is violence punctuated by frequent committee meetings right and if you are a a lover of baseball which is the best game by far ever invented there's no clock right the defense holds the ball tell me another sport in which the defense holds the ball right that it isn't the ball scoring or the puck or the pigskin it's the person every park is different every other place is uniform I mean it's just got so many things in it that are about speed and infinite chess like combinations that I you know I just love it and you can live within it it's just we've been told over and over again that this election has been stolen so people believe it we have been told over and over again that this is a boring game neither are true does jazz have a future yeah yeah it's it used to be more than 75% of American popular music that would be at the height of the swing era in the late 30s and early 40s and then as bebop came in just as abstract expressionism changed you know changed representative painting moved to abstract expressionism it's a function of the atomic era then you get into more esoteric things and you know as Harry Truman famously said of something that looked like scrambled eggs and a lot of people didn't go into it so jazz moved to a different place but it's always you know the American art form it's the one we've invented you know that is you know recognized around the world even if we don't recognize it at times I mean things change people as I'm saying these habits and things matter and the fact that it isn't malleable as part of life it all happens and all decays and you know I mean I you know there's never been a period like the American a popular American song book of the 20s and the 30s and the 40s and nobody writes lyrics like that anymore these are just spectacular combinations of words and wordplay about love and you know now things are reduced to just slander and kind of profanity as the substitutes you know these foolish things or let's do it by Cole Porter or things like that there's nothing's there but they're there and mechanical reproduction permits us to live with Lewis Armstrong who's you know heyday in the 20s 30s 40s and 50s these he's it's like he's still here how would you improve the New York Times crossword puzzle well I am a devotee of it and I do it I used to do it pre covid in ink every single day and I go to bed every night doing the anthologies of it in ink but I do it online so I'm not chopping down as many trees as I used to to do it you know it Mondays easy today Tuesday we're recording on a Tuesday is pretty easy too and it gets more complicated Saturday is the hardest Sunday is the biggest I don't know what to do I read various blogs after I finish the puzzle in which people are criticizing them and I'm just going I enjoyed it it's okay you know and so I don't you know it's just like film criticism when I was in high school I used to write a lot of film criticism as soon as I started making films in college I didn't buy another film book and I don't write criticisms of stuff it's so hard to complete a film if if you're a crossword puzzle collector yeah maybe it wasn't as good as last Friday's which was so super tough or so super interesting or so super fun but you know I just do it it's part of my interior stuff it's like somebody who has that cup of coffee in the morning that they just need and love and that's my relationship to crossword puzzles I wouldn't touch them and I admire Will Short who is the current editor of it and I've talked to him a couple times met him once or twice and I do them I'm pretty good at them and everybody tells me oh you should go to this competition and I go that would ruin it you know it's just like my four daughters have spent my entire life telling me go on Jeopardy and I go uh-uh I love sitting with you and getting all the answers I don't want to and ruin the experience by competing for it so how do you think the art of making documentaries is most likely to be next disrupted the metaverse artificial intelligence tick-tock what what will do it well I think it's going to be a combination of those things which you've just referred to our technological changes and and I think the proliferation has had a profound effect but at the end of the day storytelling is storytelling and I can tell you that when the that when Samuel F. B. Morris developed the the telegraph people were like oh this is the death of words right yeah nobody's going to write letters anymore and so we've undergone all these huge technological changes but at the at the end of the day we all whether we are college professors writing um papers for journals uh whether we are kids reporting on what happened at our day or documentary film makers trying to understand reconstruction we're bound by the same laws of storytelling Aristotelian poetics big fancy schmancy $10 word but it but it just refers to Aristotle's poetics which is an essay that people either read in high school or in college or somehow avoid to but it tells you there's a beginning and a middle and an end and there's characters and they have to have development there's protagonist and there's antagonist and there's a climax and there's a Daniel and there are no real laws but everybody knows how it works and we kind of have to learn with each of the ways we tell our stories how to tell that story so yeah we'll be bombarded um I'm I'm usually very conservative about it I waited a decade after most of my colleagues switched to computer editing around 1990 I didn't do it till 2001 and while they had long since abandoned shooting actual film I didn't abandon it until 2011 and I still will shoot film now and then to add to the thing what I didn't want was the technological tail to be wagging the dog I didn't want to be so seduced by the fancy schmancy stuff that you can do that you miss the fact that the introduction is great but so does the end of the 10th episode of a 20 hour film and that that's um you know been really important to me that every single moment have the same attention given to it and that's what we maintain and part of it is living in rural New Hampshire and having the time to do it and being insulated from the vagaries of things that attack that and some of it is being wholly suspicious of technologies that might alter stuff in a way that you didn't want to but at the end of the day if you don't know how to tell a story it just doesn't work and whether it's you know YouTube with a kitten and a ball of string or you know an 18 hour series on the history of the Vietnam War or a gigantic 3 volume book about Winston Churchill say or whatever it might be How much of your time do you have to put into managing content distribution marketing things other than actually making the documentaries? I do a lot you know for most the thing that I complain about a lot but I don't really mind is the fundraising it's just it's hard you know and we get it from a variety individuals of wealth corporations Bank of America supported us for over 16 years the corporation for public broadcasting government granting agencies foundations Arthur Vining Davis Park Foundation folks like that individuals have funded us David Rubinstein the patriotic philanthropist Jonathan and Jeanne Levin from Boston who have contributed more than anyone to our work over the years and created a prize in my name with the Library of Congress that funds other documentary filmmakers having the hard time that we all do with that last final $200,000 to finish the film to pay the rights for the photographs that we are talking about so yeah and then you know PBS I made my decision I'm happy with that decision but they don't have the marketing budgets and they add budgets to do that so it's shoe leather and whether it's you know going to 21 cities on a jazz tour all in succession or you know traveling all across the country it's tough but you do it and you feel like a politician with a stump speech that you give five or six times a day and you meet with the local PBS station for lunch and their big donors you go to the local editorial board of the newspaper you go on TV you talk to reporters you do an evening event with the public and then you move on to the next city and hope that you've gotten some interest peaked among people in a media environment with literally now with the internet millions of options and how do you stand out and distinguish it's part of it and I would say the three things I love the most are shooting when you you know see something either live or an old photograph or even an interview where you go man this is going to be in the film I know it then when you're editing because nothing edits itself where you rewrite something or you've switched something around or you found a new way to tell it there's an exhilaration and then finally what you the question you asked is I like the evangelical part I love the fact that once we're done with the film it's kind of in a way no longer ours it's yours and so I want to go out and and and be that preacher who's converting not the congregation or the choir but going out and trying to get new converts to say this is an important subject I think we told this story in an interesting way do you agree here are some clips from it please watch when it's on in September so let's say you meet a young person and they want to become a major documentary maker other than just intelligence hard work what what quality or qualities do you look for in that person to see if they can do it you know you part of part of the answer is in your question the way you framed it I just I apologize in advance and say I'm going to tell you that there are two things and their platitudes the first one is Socratic kind of know yourself film is incredibly apparently glamorous and people do not realize the hard work involved or what what's involved in kind of having a of the discipline of consistency and of hard work to do that so to me there's no shame I tell people and saying you say you're 18 years old or you're 22 years old you want to be a filmmaker you got to be able to have some means testing to go you know what I don't actually have something to say or I don't want to do this I'd rather you know write a symphony or tend to garden or raise a child these are all admirable things to do so having that kind of courage to be able to to look at yourself and understand what you can and cannot do and then finally perseverance are a lot more filmmakers I'm sure smarter than me they just didn't have the stick to it of this to just keep going I mean I my first film on the Brooklyn Bridge I was in my 20s I look like I was 12 and people would say this child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge no haha I used to keep all the rejections for one one hour film that filled two three-ring binders each three or four inches thick with literally hundreds and hundreds of rejections from that film used to sit on my desk to remind me of what I overcame and was able finally to do it moving up here and I we calculated that I was paid less than two cents an hour over the five plus years it took to get it made in large measure because no one would take a flyer and back in those days you weren't looking for a half million dollar grand or a million dollar grand you were looking for a thousand bucks or twenty five hundred dollars to just you know round it out it makes you so well suited to work together with Lynn Novick. Oh well Lynn has been one of many colleagues that I've worked with for dozens of years it's really great we've made a lot of films together Sarah Botstein Dayton Duncan Jeffrey Ward who I mentioned I think it's fact that we've never yelled I've never yelled we're just you know this isn't brain surgery and I think even in brain surgery it doesn't make sense to yell if somebody hands you the wrong implement you just you have to do documentary films we're not it's not it's not the end of the world and so we want to do it we're all the people who end up working with me and Lynn's case it's been a little bit over 30 years and Sarah Botstein's case it's been 25 years and Jeff Ward's it's been over 40 that we've been working together Dayton is over third Dayton Duncan is over 30 I have editors who are 45 years I've been working with editors who've retired now it's you there's a sense of process and a sense of yielding to the process and no you know I I have a couple of skills I often have lots of credits from music director to executive producer to producer to writer to director whatever it might be cinematographer all of those things I do but the only one that really matters is that when things are darkest I kind of know what the next step is even if that next step the next morning I go whoa that was not so smart let's try this and so everybody's in this together it's gloriously collaborative and Lynn has just been one of the very very special collaborations that I've had and she's now we're still working together and will continue through this decade to work together but I kind of kicked her out and up and said look a project that I was going to do with you and with me as the boss I'm just going to step back and be the executive producer and you do it. She did that on a film called college behind bars with Sarah Bodzine where I was executive producer we were going to do a big thing on the history of crime and punishment that's now Lynn's Sarah is not working on it Jeff Ward is not writing it she's doing it and I'll serve as executive producer and help her as much as I can but she won't really need my help Do you find selfies interesting as photography? Yeah I guess you know it kind of depends they do as I was suggesting earlier represent a kind of diminished value to a photograph but you know there's something really great I mean I did a film on cancer and I ended up in a lot of hospitals talking to a lot of people including some very young people who were sick and sometimes the immortalization of that moment is to just the intimacy of a selfie and the kind of the two heads kind of put together in which the background is kind of secondary or tertiary or not even important at all but it's just the witness of two people being together that can be really important and yet we also know the way in which it kind of represents distraction and a lack of presence in the moment it's saying that the moment's important but in some ways it's forgetting the moment you know it's like the people who take pictures of their food and then post it do they actually taste the food you know I mean that these are these are important things you know Susan Sontag wrote an amazing essay called on photography in which she understands the negative parts of it you take a photograph you've appropriated something from somebody and Jerome Liebling my teacher would have said you are required to initiate a kind of reciprocity as you take that photograph and that helps to make the exchange more equal and less you know either kind of narcissistic in the case of selfies or all this constant posing that we see people do teenagers particularly as they're ready to post on Instagram or TikTok or whatever it might be all places I'm blissfully ignorant of I don't you know social media is not social if you've ever been in a room of adults let's not blame it on teenagers adults are teenagers and they're all on their phones they're not they're not relating in a way they're tangentially relating and I'm interested as Cartier-Bresson said the great French photographer in the decisive moment I'm happy to mention your book again which I recommend Tiley Our America a photographic history by Ken Burns and last short question what's the next thing you'll do to continue things but pick one well so we're we're finishing a film on the American Buffalo a great parable of de-extinction we're doing a history of the American Revolution we're doing a history of reconstruction but extending the borders of that we have my daughter one of my producing teams and her husband are in Florence for a year we're making our first non-American topic on Leonardo da Vinci we're doing a history of LBJ in the great society and we're collecting interviews for a few other films we cannot make it to a formal thing but we'll certainly hand off to the next generation if we don't make it to to make films on Martin Luther King and and other I think really really interesting subjects so I I know what I'm doing for the rest of the decade that's either a glory or a prison or more than likely Tyler both Ken Burns thank you very much my pleasure