If I were given 1000 years to live, I would not run out of topics in American history.

Ken Burns shares his thoughts on the American Revolution and his approach to documentary filmmaking.

We are subtractive, we're making maple syrup, right?

We've got 400 hours of stuff to come down to 12.

Jane Lindholm hosts a conversation with America's storyteller with a live audience at the flynn.

You say the Civil War was inevitable as soon as the Declaration of Independence was put to paper.

Yeah, Jefferson and everybody else meant all white men are created equal, you I talk about needing no introduction.

I mean, I think it's impressive that you want the work to speak for itself, but boy, does it.

Well, you know, I live in Walpole, New Hampshire, which is not too far from here, and I've had for 45 years this old and faded New Yorker cartoon, now framed carefully, and I see it every single day, and it shows three men standing in hell, the flames licking up around them, and one guy says to the other two, apparently my over 200 screen credits didn't mean a damn thing, so Which is of course, which is of course true, right?

Particularly in Northern New England, right?

Yes, absolutely.

You know, Ken has been working for nearly 50 years now, longer if you include your college career, made just about as many films.

Let's talk about one of the most recent.

Okay, the American Revolution.

We know we also have the Thoreau film that has come out as well.

But you have said of the American Revolution this was the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ.

I knew you're going to bring that up.

I'm very predictable so in the film we say the most consequential revolution in history.

At the end of the prolog, I'm out on the road for a year and a half, and people are interested, and there's no trying to get attention, but I threw that out as a way to try to remind people of how just extraordinarily significant this idea was, that people could govern themselves, that everybody had been heretofore subjects subject to authoritarian rule, and that all of a sudden there are a few people, not everybody in the East Coast of the United States who actually would have a say in that sacred and undeniable self-evident truths, and that's a big deal.

There's a moment after the second sentence of the Declaration where Jefferson says, you know, that all mankind, that that that human beings suffer while evils are sufferable.

You know, and that what he's sort of saying is that it's easy to accept the yoke of the authoritarian, and that it's going to require a lot more energy to be free.

It's going to require the pursuit of happiness, is not as many people interpret it to be the pursuit of objects in a marketplace of things, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas, and that that makes you more virtuous.

If you're more virtuous, then you earn the extraordinary privilege of citizenship, but which is not a passive spectator sport, but something that's very active, and I wanted to try to rivet people's attention, and it was interesting, because you'd get a little bit of pushback.

I remember I was at Brown University, and there was a French scholar, and she said, "Well, what about the French Revolution?

I said, "How did that work out?

And someone else I thought very carefully said, 'You know what about the Renaissance?

They go, and the Renaissance is this rebirth after this horrible Dark Ages, and part of the Renaissance is artistic, most of it is artistic, but also intellectual.

That's the Enlightenment.

And out of the Enlightenment comes the United States we are actually an invention of the Enlightenment, and so you can have those kinds of conversations, and it was a way of trying to engage people, not to be told by a filmmaker on stage that this is what it was, but to have a kind of set of questions about it but there's also, I think, the possibility that someone could roll their eyes and say, boy, there's that American exceptionalism coming in, and it's not.

What it was earth shattering around the globe.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think we fully understand what took place here.

Still, first of all, it's so bloody, and we don't want to deal with the blood.

It's a revolution, it's a civil war, it's a global war, but it also sets off more than 200 years of revolutions, and I'll just give you one example.

On september 2, 1945 that is the same day that the Japanese are surrendering on the USS Missouri unconditionally in Tokyo Bay.

Ho Chi Minh is addressing hundreds of 1000s of people in Ba Din Square in Hanoi declaring Vietnamese independence, and he quotes the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, and standing next to him are some OSS officers who are totally down with him.

One month later, not so much, because the State Dept is going, 'Get out of there, he's a commie, you know.

And then you could think of the six or 7 million lives that might still be alive if we just said okay to Ho, who the Russians and the Chinese thought he was like a nationalist, and they were very suspicious of his communist credentials.

But I mean, this is the far-ranging effect, and he could have followed John Locke, right?

He could have said life, liberty, and property, and it was a reasonable argument, but in the passion of the moment, this notion of pursuit of happiness, and the key word is not even happiness, it's pursuit, so it gave us unusually in the world a kind of restlessness, in a sense that we were always in the process of becoming that we had a job to do to be better, and 11 years later the same, the rather dull kind of IKEA instructions of the Constitution is matched by the poetry of the preamble written by Gouverneur Morris, and it's a more perfect union, it means it's not perfect, and and Madison said that it's just a dead letter, he said, unless life is breathed into it by the will of the people, and it's, you know, it's this is big stuff, it's big ideas.

Well, just the words these men chose have had reverberations, not not just life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but the words in the Declaration of Independence set the stage, you say the Civil War was inevitable as soon as the Declaration was put to paper.

Yeah, I mean, we all know this.

This is pretty obvious.

Jefferson and everybody else meant all white men are created equal, and yet articulating, moving an argument between British citizens into a discussion of natural rights, that is what the Enlightenment is saying.

You've moved it into a position where everybody knows that you're limiting it, asterisk white men property, but it's hugely significant.

The legal scholar in our film, Maggie Blackhawk said it's deeply significant to people at the margins, women, the poor, Native Americans, black people, who are then going to be fight and push the levers to make it less hypocritical in its original configuration, and I think they also knew what they were doing, that democracy was not the intention of it, it was an unintended byproduct of having to suddenly go, oh, we're actually doing this, we're actually separating, we actually have to fight, oh, we actually have to win.

How are we going to win?

And then the people who make it happen are often not white, certainly often more often than not without property, not the kind of gentleman, not the aristocracy, but just not even the yeoman farmers of New England, the militias, not the obviously the elites, the planters, and the and the lawyers and the businessmen from all 13 colonies, but it's just getting to be so-called ordinary people who aren't going to do the fighting, they're going to do the dying, and they're to defeat the greatest far-flung empire on earth, which is like the chances at Lexington Green are zero, and it's just to me, by the time you get to Johan Evel, the guy who's commenting over the, you know, the continental uniform that's been decayed by by fighting, he's openly contemptuous.

We meet him at the very beginning of the third episode, at this is the at the end of the sixth, and he's openly contemptuous.

And then he has to admit, you know, that who would have thought out of a century ago that out of this multitude of rabble could arise a people who could defy kings.

I mean, I can tell you the myriad reasons why it happened, why it was successful, but the fact that it did happen and set in motion slavery was done, it's four score and nine years before the 13th Amendment.

Women, it is an impossible and irresponsible 144 years, but it's done.

Gay marriage, it's going to happen.

I mean, these things, the walls of.

Jericho are knocked down by that sentence, as much as we spend an inordinate amount of our time quite correctly pointing out its flaws, and it's, and it's oops, and it's yes buts but boy, nothing could be perhaps more poignant than that word pursuit put there, because we have still not, reached it right, but it also means that it's a journey, like we are not an already arrived at end, which is a way of being stagnant, and that's to our credit.

I mean, we, Lincoln has this incredible speech when he's a young lawyer, he's not even 29 years old, he addresses the Young Men's Lyceum in Springfield, and he says the topic is foreign policy.

He said, "When shall we expect the approach of danger?

Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow?

And he goes, "Never.

All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River, or make a track in the Blue Ridge in a trial of 1000 years.

If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.

As a nation of free men, we will live through all time or die by suicide.

And he presides over the closest we ever come to that suicide, but what he's saying, it's an amazing thing.

He's saying these two relatively benign neighbors, north and south, and these two big oceans have insulated us, and they have permitted us to incubate really extraordinary things, and at the same time incubate lots of not so extraordinary things, you know, money, guns, certainty about everything that exceptionalism that you quite correctly bring up, that is, you know, we're constantly being hoisted on our petard of the presumption of exceptionalism without what it takes to actually be exceptional, which is constantly pursuing that exceptionalism rather than sort of saying, well, we're just the greatest, we're going to rest on our loyals.

It's like Tom Brady won Super Bowl, he said, "Eh, I don't have to train anymore, right?

No, you know, you actually have to be even more self-critical, and unfortunately, many of us just rest with the greatest country on earth, and that's fine.

You have already spouted off a couple of quotes.

Do you just have these all in your head forever?

Okay, okay.

Can we just.. can we just dismiss this?

Has anybody ever flown in an airplane?

If you see a very young flight attendant, they're reading off their iPhone, right?

If you see somebody that's five years older, they are just reciting this long complicated stuff.

If you sit into an editing room for years and years and years working on this stuff, you know, if you want me to do some more singing for my supper here, we can just stop, and we'll just do Abraham Lincoln for the rest of the evening, and it's really great, and I can tell you why it's really great, but it's everybody here knows that from their own work and their own things that you just, so the answer is yes.

Forever, I could probably recite the entire Brooklyn Bridge film, which is like pushing 50 years since when I started it.

You include a lot of information in the American Revolution documentary, as you do in all of your films, that are designed to illuminate stories that most of us may not have heard before, and particularly a subsection of Americans or people in the story who may have been missed in history textbooks and in previous retellings.

One tiny example in the American Revolution, that really struck me, because it was never something that I had heard in a textbook, was when you talk about the fact that many Native American settlements in the time of the American Revolution were integrated into colonial culture, lived in the same towns, in the same style houses, wore the same style clothes, and that just was the in antithesis of what I was taught in school, so how do you balance the need to create a timeline that goes through the battles that continues what we need to get through this piece, but also bringing in these just tiny little nuggets and these, these stories of the voices who have been left out.

This is the way we've always rolled, and it's no different in this film.

It's maybe more complicated because there are no photographs or newsreels, so you have to use different strategies to help bring it alive.

But the thing is, is that we live in the way we teach our history.

The way we live is kind of in a highlight reel, so Babe Ruth always hits a home run, right?

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

And more importantly, he comes up to bat only once every nine times.

So, if you call balls and strikes in history, you've got.

To actually, I mean, if you take the last World Series, seventh game, it hinged not on the highest paid players on the Dodgers, but a second baseman, and so you always want to be open to that, and so we're always following footnotes.

We discovered Betsy Ambler, a 10 year old in 1775 who lived in Yorktown, Virginia.

She's a refugee for most of the war, we don't think of Americans as being refugees, and she has a younger sister, born as his, as her father said, my only independent daughter, because it happened after the Declaration.

And then the daughter, the younger sister admits to Betsy that she doesn't really remember much about the revolution.

So Betsy sits down and writes a memoir, and if you get Maya Hawk to read it off camera, you've got somebody that means something.

You've got Rebecca Tanner, who's just a line in an archive that we found.

She's a Mohegan woman, to your point, that would put her in North Central North Eastern Connecticut.

She loses five sons fighting for the patriot cause, now, mrs.

Sullivan, in World War Two, the famous mrs.

Sullivan, whose sons were killed on the destroyer, and so the War Department, then called the War Department, and actually was the War Department, said, "We're going to separate, you know, separate sons, family members, can't do that, and gave us Private Ryan, saving Private Ryan as well, but she lost five sons.

It's the greatest loss I've ever come across in any war, and it's just a line in a thing, and essentially they're fighting for the patriot cause which means they are either assimilated or coexisting with their colonial and now American neighbors.

They are, of course, the original Americans.

They are hoping that by fighting, that somehow Native American decisions are always based on somehow maintaining or reestablishing sovereignty.

So, those that fight for the British think that forestalling the people they called the hated Bostonians.

Anybody who is moving west was a hated Bostonian, particularly for the Haudenosaunee in upstate New York, and into Canada, and in western New England, and that's the, that's the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, and Mohawk peoples who form their own confederation, that is a viable kind of democracy, confederacy, they called it, for 150 years, and they're, they're world players, they're diplomatically and economically and militarily on a world stage, and it's their model that seems successful that inspires Franklin to think 20 years before the revolution they can do it, but nobody wants to give up any authority or autonomy to any other state.

People from from Massachusetts and Georgia think they are from different countries, and they kind of are, and and so it's going to take another 20 years, but essentially we're going to arrive at essentially what the Haudenosaunee felt and was expressing was the idea of union and coming together.

It's this is it is so complex and so interesting, and I think because we want it to be pretty simple and be about the great ideas, we don't see as a civil war.

It's the enemy is them, 3000 miles away, the age of sail.

They're imposing these taxes on us.

What we're really pissed off about initially is that we won't let the British won't let us take the Indian land we want to take, and yeoman farmers 125 acres, and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin are speculating in 10s of 1000s of acres of land they don't own.

They've had their surveyors go out, and now they want to make real estate killings on it, and the Brits can't afford to protect us, because they've won.

And be careful what you wish for, they've got the most far-flung empire on earth, and because they're bankrupt, they can't afford to protect, and because they know about the Roman Empire, they're also anxious that if we don't have a tighter grip on all of our far-flung possessions, we'll begin to lose them, which is of course exactly what happens.

There's so many interesting interiors to this revolution that you can't not do it, and I want to stress that it's not additive.

We're not building a house called the American Revolution.

We are subtractive, we're making maple syrup, right?

We've got 400 hours of stuff to come down to 12, so it's like working through dozens of people.

There are 401st person voices in the film, 150 different human beings read by 61 of the finest actors, but we had way more than that, you know, and we just had to cook it down, and not every George Washington quote is in, not every Abigail Adams, who is, you know, probably next in line of the number of extraordinary quotes, and maybe the best writer of the period, she's amazing, amazing, and her.

Good friend, Mercy Otis Warren.

Everybody knows about, right, Mercy Otis Warren, right?

She's a philosopher, a poet, a satirist, and a historian, and she writes the first history of the revolution.

But, of course, I, you all know that you read her book, Mercy Otis Warren's book, in high school, right, about the revolution.

Well, Mercy Otis Warren, voiced in the American Revolution by Meryl Streep.

Yeah, she can.

I tell you something?

She is so good.

I think she's going someplace.

We, we've, we've used her, we've used her as a voice now for a while.

Just keep an eye out for her.

She's really, really good, like she's also a lovely human being.

You can't see it.

All these voices are reading off camera, so you can't see them performing.

But do you just call up Meryl and say, "Yo, Meryl, it's Ken?

Or, "Hey, Tom Hanks, you want to.. you want to just read some lines as George Washington?

And 60 of America's Finest Voices and some non-American voices say, yeah, sure, Ken.

I don't say yo, but pretty much mean Tom.

I was, I was at an event, and I was with my two older daughters, and I saw him, and I went to this event because it was a good place to troll for voices, and the one I really wanted was Tom.

This is 25 years ago and he was talking to some people, and the girls were going, 'Dad, go and I'm going, 'No, no, no, he's talking, and suddenly he broke away, and he walked right toward me and volunteered, so it was like that's what I'm saying.

Ken, Ken Burns has Tom Hanks walking towards.. Can I just.

can I just tell you that apparently my over 200 screen credits didn't mean a damn thing.

He is not Tom Hanks, he's Tom Hanks to us as we're talking right now.

He is one of the finest actors in the world, and he comes in and goes, "I'm not giving you George, and he goes, "I know, because they will say, "It's Tom Hanks every time.

I said, "Right.

So it's Josh Brolin, because you don't immediately know it's Josh Brolin, and I said to Josh, you, this guy is opaque and unknowable, so help me get to understand him, right?

So he has to hold him at arm's length and be that.

So Tom reads 14 voices, all of them are in the film, completely unusual, eight different people, including Dr.

Albigence Waldo, a doctor at Valley Forge, who has these moving things about these half-naked men that are trying to survive, and then the death of a Native American soldier at Valley Forge.

He's Ebenezer Denny, who is the guy who sees the little drummer drumming on the ramparts at Yorktown, and then somebody grabs a white flag, and then the shooting stops, and he goes, "It's the sweetest music I ever know.

He's a minister, an Anglican minister in Boston, talking about civil war as the worst war, not revolution, it's civil war, because our civil war is actually not a civil war, it's a sectional war, and the whole brother against brothers stuff, it happened, but nothing like the way that it happened in the revolution.

Give you an example, Benjamin Franklin's son, William, was the royal governor of New Jersey, he was deposed, he ended up imprisoned and sent to a camp in Connecticut finally was released, assuming he'd go back to his beloved England, and instead he starts a terrorist organization that kills patriots, just as there are lots of patriot organizations killing loyalists.

So it's a really rough territory to be in, and particularly in New Jersey and in South Carolina, you don't want to be part of this war.

There's nothing glamorous or fun about it.

It's sort of old scores being settled, retribution being carried out on both sides, and often, like in the Battle of Kings Mountain, which is, I think, just over the border in North Carolina, there is one British officer, a Scotsman named Ferguson, and everyone else in this battle, bloody bloody battle, are Americans killing other Americans and that's the Revolution too.

I don't want to spend too much time on the voices, but I want to just touch briefly on the idea that, you know, in many cases the voices are just voiced by wonderful people, but sometimes there's a what seems to be a deliberate choice, for example, in the American Revolution, having the poet Amanda Gordon Gorman voice Phillis Wheatley, and Amanda Gorman was made famous speaking her poetry at the inauguration, she wrote for Joe Biden's inauguration and my co-director, Sarah Botstein said, let's get Amanda Gorman, and I said absolutely, and she did it, and it was wonderful.

Phyllis Wheatley is young enslaved girl woman who is brought over, she is named for the slave ship, the.

Phyllis, that brought her, and the Wheatleys that bought her, and she becomes a published poet, respected on both sides of the Atlantic, corresponds with George Washington, first published African American in history, and she's really, really good.

How do you think about noise, ambient sound, scoring the sort of not incidental, really crucial but not voiced moments of sound in your film.

It's most of filmmaking.

The last three weeks, I was saying to someone earlier, the last three weeks of editing, it's me just opening up two frames, which is a 12th of a second, or closing down two frames, and so you're changing 16th notes into eighth note, and eighth notes into 16th notes, and it's all important.

These, the music we got Johnny Gandelsmann, who is the Silk Road ensemble, Yo-Yo Ma, Rhiannon Giddens, people to play tune, she has Celtic as well as African roots, so she's got an amazing Celtic song that she wails in the film, and then she also does just one of the most energetic and beautiful versions of Amazing Grace, which was written, believe it or not, just before the revolution, not a post-revolutionary, pre-civil war moment, and sound effects, everything we get is silent, everything we get is silent, and so there are some cases, more often than not, it's a battle, but not every time, where we might have 160 tracks going, and I can't distinguish between, I mean, we're, we have stems of music, so you might take 25 down to one stem and then mix it with several other stems, so by at the end you're maybe dealing with 12 or 15 stems, but they each are reflecting what is already a mix down several things, just and we are working so hard, and we're in unbelievable studios in New York, where we will never hear it this good again, unless we get to a theater, you know, like the Letterman Theater in the Presidio in San Francisco, Lucas's thing, where you know the floor rumbles when the guns go off, and you go, oh, I guess I'm not going to introduce the film and then leave, I'm going to watch the whole film, because I will never ever hear it this way again, but it's very important to us to wake up those moments, particularly in a subject matter that is pre-photographic, and so you, you know, we, I don't like reenactments, so instead of filming reenactments, we filmed reenactors, right?

So I didn't go to get somebody to reenact the Battle of Monmouth, we filmed people reenacting in every season at every time of day, from New Hampshire and Maine to Georgia, Native American costumes, French white French uniforms, British scarlet red coats, American Continental, the American militia, the motley crews, the different things, and then you know did it microscopically and sort of impressionistically, and the telling thing is it was so nice to come down, as it always is in Burlington, and see Lake Champlain, because this is a water war, right?

Nothing really happens, battles happen on land, but you move things by water.

And we filmed at Ticonderoga for many, many years, and they were so happy.

I bumped into a lot of the folks in New York, and they said we saw in that scene in Valley Forge, there's us, and we go, and we were there, and I go, yeah, we collected over five or six years hundreds, not hundreds, maybe scores of hours of reenactments, and then we had a critical mass of them that we could pull off the shelf to use, and it might be a musket volley, it might be extreme close up on them, where the flint is hit.

It may be, you know, an aerial drone shot or a helicopter shot.

So these were just solutions, and the and the oral ones, the script, the first person voices, the music, the effects are as important as the visual ones, really, when you talk about filming reenactors or getting a scene of a sunset with a canon, you know, sort of silhouetted against it, as in the Civil War, and then you think about all of these moments that you've had to film of still photographs, for example, where you've been in some archives, and you work with the videographers to film a photograph, and then zoom in on the photograph, and then slide the camera over to give a sense of movement for times and time periods that had no video, and hours and hours of this, why not just use A.I.?

Because it's artificial, right?

And social media isn't, um.

Um, so I, you know, for the Civil War, I went for like nine straight weeks, from 830 to 530 at the paper print collection at the Library of Congress's building, and set up this two scoop umbrella lamps, and this table had a two by four with a groove in it, and we put a metal piece of sheet metal, and with magnets hung up the photographs one by one, and I with a fixed lens, not a zoom lens, a fixed lens camera with lots of what are called diopters, allowing you to get extremely close, so that I can get as close to an image as my thumbnail, which is about the size of the 16 millimeter image frame size, and just would film over and over 1000s of photographs.

Sometimes you do 10 photographs on 110 refilm 10 different shots, tilts and pans.

Couldn't do zooms.

You might buy a copy print of it, and then take it to the animators, which were in those days pretty expensive to do, and, and do zooms now.

You can do everything in, in the programs, and so it's a little bit easier, but also you're separated from the human eye making the decisions about it.

And I'm always sort of saying, where that's a zoom to nowhere, where is it going?

Where you want your zooming, so you want my eye to go someplace, or you're pulling out.

We're put.. what are we pulling out from that?

Where's my first attention, and what is my expanding attention?

And you sort of have to reassert the primacy of a of human eyes and human dimensions and failures and framing in order to do it, but it's.. it pays off.

I mean, it took us almost 10 years to do this, and, and you know, I could have gotten the money from the streaming service or a cable, but they wouldn't have given me 10 years to, I could have one pitch gotten to $30 million I spent, you know, almost the 10, all of the 10 years raising the money for it, but we needed the 10 years to tell the story, to be able to distill that down to the time that we have, and it's PBS who's giving on its own.

I don't think I don't think I could have made any of the films, all of those endless films anyplace else, and you know, I actually, if we want to beat this pursuit of happiness thing, if it's lifelong learning, then then public media is the pursuit of happiness applied to the world of communications, and don't let them take it away, right?

Don't let them take it away.

It's in the interest of people who have authoritarian impulses that we are beset by misinformation and disinformation and superstition and conspiracy, and the opposite of that is an informed citizenry, and that's what the pursuit of happiness means, is to be to do the hard work of discerning and discriminating between what's true and what ain't.

You've worked with one public media station in particular over the last three decades or so worked a lot with WETA in Washington, DC, which you've called the best station in the whole system, and I'll let that slide tonight.

Well, yeah, when you're in Washington, you have to say that no, it was.. it had to do.. I had done the first couple of films, had been accidentally out of WNET, and then I was working on Huey Long Film, and I had was working with Louisiana Public Television, and I realized they didn't have enough national muscle, and so they weren't one of the big presenting stations, and so I had gotten to know the head of the WETA, and he actually gave me the finishing money.

Nobody has ever done that before or after at a public television station.

Said, oh, you need $50,000 here.

I think I can write a check for 25 right now.

Is that okay if I mail you the rest?

I mean, you could blow me over like with a feather.

So Ward Chamberlain was his name, and so the proximity to the archives that were the center of all of our stuff was was part of that, but you know what, I watch is both New Hampshire and Vermont, because I, I get like four different PBS things on my, on my cable, I cut the cable, and then I hated it, because it took me 13 operations to get into something that would go to a commercial, and it would take me 12 operations to get to something else that would go to a commercial.

I said, Why can't I just surf, and I get WGBY in, in, in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Vermont, and New Hampshire, and GBH.

Remind me.

To tell you about the PBS Passport app, when we get off stage.

I'm not sure my kids would figure out how to use it.

You mentioned that one of the things that working in public media and with public media has given you is time.

Is that the main way that this distribution relationship has affected your work.

Do you think that you, this working within the public media system, shapes you work or PBS just happens to be the best fit?

Well, it's all of those things.

Best fit sounds like accidental, you know.

Quite frankly, Jane, even more than that is being in Northern New England, I moved 47 years ago out of New York City because I'd shot most of the Brooklyn Bridge film, and I needed to get a job.

My rent was going up in Chelsea, a five floor walk up from 275 to 325 and that was a deal breaker, and I got offered a big job at WNET, more money than I thought anyone had ever made at any job anywhere, and I suddenly, and I went, you know, remember in It's a Wonderful Life when mr.

Potter offers him the job, and he shakes hands with him, and he goes, no, wait a second, you know, no, no, no, I'm not doing this, because I realized that I'd put the footage up on the refrigerator, and I'd wake up 15 years later and not have finished it, so I moved to the to the house I'm living in now, to the bedroom that I'm still sleeping in 47 years, and I realized that that the privilege of being in Northern New England to be in proximity to perfect nature, which holds a mirror to our imperfections, which is tough for some people, is really helpful, and it helps the labor-intensive nature of this, and because of the structure of PBS, if I raise the money myself, sometimes from PBS, sometimes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, not anymore, foundations, individuals, et cetera, et cetera, then it can proceed along the lines of almost a research project, as if it's a National Institute of Health, as it used to be configured grant that would allow you to explore something, right.

And so we work with scholars, and a lot, I have a lot of colleagues who sort of hate that they kind of do that as window dressing, and we love it.

I mean, we invite them back, they become lifelong friends, they want to come to every screening, they suggest stuff, and then they're totally surprised when four months later they see that we've actually done it, and that we've.. they suggest new scholarship, or that the emphasis might be here and we'll think about it.

They leave, we go, you know, that's right.

Let's try to do this, and we find compromise, not always accepting everything, but they're shocked at that, and we are so hungry and almost greedy for the information that they have.

We're not, we're not taking their historiography, their particular perspective, we're taking the years of scholarship, the balls and strikes that they know about, and if you combine, you know, Kathleen Duvall, who just won the Pulitzer Prize for this wonderful book called Native Nations, with Christopher Brown from Columbia, or Vincent Brown from Harvard, or Annette Gordon Reed from Harvard, or Maya Janeoff for Howard, or Jane Kaminsky, late of Harvard, and many other Colin Calloway from Dartmouth, and scholars from all around the country.

You know, Christopher Brown's expertise is not in black troops, it's in British economy.

They don't have 13 colonies in North America, they have 26 We're the least profitable, the profitable ones, only Virginia and South Carolina, and you all know why, are profitable.

Massachusetts is the least profitable.

You don't exist, by the way.

Sorry, not yet.

We were okay with that.

And it's Jamaica and Barbados that are 90% enslaved people, that's this is the engine of profit for the British Empire, which makes all of the complicated discussions and the Lord Dunmore and different times when the British are sort of offering what they hope will derange the patriot economy by offering freedom to enslave people, it just makes the thing worth figuring out and delineating, and that's why it takes a long time to do that.

I mean, even after we lock it, I went, Sarah Button and I went and just exploded the whole introduction, like completely changed it after, and by lock it, you're not supposed to touch it, we're not supposed to touch it, and in the old analog days, I had an assistant editor, the only person that never, that stopped talking to me, because I unlocked the Civil War, because he had to make the.. if you change one frame, you have to change it on all the things, so when you lock it, you're working with five or six tracks, and every time you make a cut, you cut on five or six tracks physically, and then when you sound.

At it, you're exploding that out to 30 or 4050, tracks, and if you change one thing, you have to do it 50 times.

So Bruce stopped talking to me for a while, but now in the digital age, they can complain and they can moan, but they can actually do it a little bit easier, but you just don't want to let it go until you just feel like I was just moping around, and Sarah called me as we talk every morning, and she called me up, 'What's wrong?

And I said, 'The introduction goes yeah, me too.

And so we on the phone, I'm someplace in Manhattan, she's in another place in Manhattan, and I just said, 'Okay, we do this.

She goes, 'What about this?

And we called our editor, because we knew we could conspire with her, and she wouldn't be freaked out that we were changing stuff, and by the end of the day it was like radically changed to what you now see, and we were kind of like, I am bearing in mind the New Yorker cartoon that you keep in your house.

And that you know your 200 IMDB credits don't mean much, especially maybe, maybe, perhaps beneficially in the community that you live.

However, I also want to point out that there are not very many documentarians who attain rock star status, and you have, and not just with the PBS crowd, wait, you case in point, Ken Burns appeared within the course of a few months, not only on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, which is where you might expect him to appear, but on The Joe Rogan Experience and on all of the late night TV shows, and you said today you did what, four interviews before this.

Yesterday was six?

No, yesterday was six, today was four, but four, and it's still revolution.

I'm trying to work on the film, it's going pretty well, and there are people that are not as actively engaged in talking about it, but there's a big pent-up need look.

I mean, the elephant in the room is that we are in an existential crisis right now, and when a human being's in a crisis, they go to a pastor or a professional, and that professional wants to know, where'd you come from, who are your parents, how'd you grow up, what's your origin story, and it's this film has been incredibly helpful for people to reengage with the complexity and Ken, you're back to talking about your work.

What I want to ask you about is how do you come to terms with yourself as a celebrity?

I live in Walpole, New Hampshire, which means that means that apparently my over 200 screen credits don't mean a damn thing.

How many times do I have to hit you with this joke?

So, so Mark Twain, and I actually reproduced it, and it's in it's in every place that I've laid my head, right?

So I see it everywhere I go, and I see it every day, and I look at it, and I just say, thank you.

And Mark Twain said, if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

So I said the same thing to Joe Rogan as I said to Terry Gross, as I said to the New York Times editorial board, as I said to Stephen Colbert, as I said to you, know all the people that we spoke to, to inner city kids in Charleston and Detroit, and to suburban kids in Chicagoland, and to 40 in 40 cities, and 80 screenings, and at least 250 interviews, and at least 100 podcasts.

I now think that there are 342 million podcasts in the United States, and that I have now done half of them, and it's just.. it's a Ponzi scheme.

They all.. the people go, 'Oh yeah, this is really important, it's a really popular thing.

And you just, after an hour, you go, 'It's just the two of us, no one else is ever going to listen to this thing before, but it's okay.

It's another soul to convert, you know.

This is an evangelical pursuit, you know.

Let me preach the gospel of the American Revolution.

Oh, did I tell you it's the most important event since the birth of Christ?

I want to make sure we have time for some questions from the audience.

Great, so we have two people with microphones, so you can raise your hand.

We're going to lift the house lights a little bit, so we can see you and you can see them, and they will choose for us who's going to get to speak.

Hi, and thank you.

I don't want to be a downer, but we live in a time of incredible polarization, and it's hard to remember a time where such polarization has ever been resolved without violence and dislocation, and can you think of such a time, or how do you view what.

Might be happening in our future with the kind of conflict that you see.

Well, historians, and my goodness, I'm an amateur one, make lousy prognosticators.

I don't know what's going to happen.

I can tell you that we were way more divided during the revolution, which, of course, was a very bloody affair.

We were way more divided during what we call our civil war, that number 600,000 has been revised upward to maybe 750,000 It's really, really bad.

Working on a film on Reconstruction right now, which is the post-civil war period, and it's really bad.

We did a series on Vietnam.

It's really bad.

The violence in the Vietnam stuff is moderated, and a lot of that has to do with the complexities of modern life.

At the end of the Declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

The people back then, whether they were yeomen farmers or recent immigrants from Ireland or Germany, or teenagers, of which they abound as the fighters of the American Revolution, particularly on the patriot side.

They actually were willing to do this.

You can think of George Washington, may have been the richest person in the country, and he got home between July of, or June of 76 and December of 83 for three nights, and he rode out in the middle of battles, risking his life.

Unlike most of the landed gentry, unlike most, I mean, Thomas Jefferson didn't fire a gun in anger, nor did John Adams, nor did Benjamin Franklin, too old, but he Washington did, and there are very few people today that are willing to do this.

I don't know what it is.

We're, we're the divisions aren't as great, and yet we also feel that the fabric is tearing, and the only thing I can suggest is just to reinvigorate your own personal commitment and those that you have influence over to be actively engaged in the process of what this is, because what did Joni Mitchell say?

You don't know what you got till it's gone, don't have to let that happen.

I we have a question over here.

Yes.

Thank you for all of your work.

Jazz is my personal favorite.

Are you familiar with Colin Woodards' Republic of Pirates book?

No.

What is it?

Pulitzer Prize-winning author, he talks about how pirates in the early 1700s had a democratic society, and they may have been part of the zeitgeist, or maybe an inspiration for our founding fathers, or founding mothers.

Well, you know, it's interesting.

I don't know the book, I can't comment on it.

The amazing thing is that the great, the greatest, the biggest empire is the Spanish Empire.

The most far-flung is the British Empire, which has the greatest navy on earth.

But American privateers captured 2500 British ships, so we were better at that navy business than they were with no navy, and smuggling was a hugely proud tradition, and many of the early attempts at taxation were incredibly vexing, shall we put it, to New Englanders, particularly the richest Bostonian, John Hancock, who made an enormous amount of money smuggling, and the Brits were always trying to way figure out ways to curtail the smuggling that's going on.

So, I can't really comment on the pirate aspect of it.

I don't know about the democracy.

I think there's that's a little bit of a stretch.

It means let's take this and let's divide up all this stuff.

The amazing thing is that the privateers were invested in, like you would invest if you're George Washington in a privateer, and that meant you split the profits depending on your investment with the people who did the pirating, the stealing, right?

It's an amazing thing, and if you add it to their land speculation on the other side, right, it's you know, maybe we're suggesting a much more complex dynamic than just yo ho ho and a bottle of rum arg, maybe you know somebody was yelling at me.

Yes.

Hi, I wonder just whether or not with the rise of Shohei Ohtani and the World Baseball Classic, and some of the interesting things that are going on right now, whether we might ever get an 11th inning.

Thank you so much.

Okay, so the 11th inning, I got it made one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

It was like TR saying, after he won in his own right in in 1904 he said, I won't run again, and immediately.

Regretted it, I mean, like literally before the sentence was done, he regretted it, and of course tried to manipulate Taft, and then ran again in 12.

It was a thing, but I had done a 10th inning, obviously.

I had to go through the Braves, I had to go through the Yankees, talk to Joe Torre, be polite about them, do big salaries, McGuire and Sosa Peds Barry Bonds, but there was only one reason to do the 10th inning, and that was 2004 the ALCS, which we've been talking about.

At 430 this evening.

I got a call, and it was Bill Lee, known to many Vermonters for his unsuccessful gubernatorial run in 2016 but also for being a pitcher for the Red Sox and the Expos.

Good friend of mine.

yes, Bill said, "Where are you with Ken?

Can I.. is he around?

Can I buy him a beer?

I said, "Well, I'm not there right now and I imagine Ken's probably getting ready.

We filmed him up in the Northeast Kingdom, in Cresbury, and in, like, you know, 93 and he wore a cap that said CCCP, you know, he said that when the Red Sox got rid of him and traded him to Montreal, like he thought that people were booing him, that they were throwing this, this stuff at him all the time, and it was little rolled up tin foils of hashish, and he goes, they love me here, they love me here, and one of the great things is he pitched game seven of the 1975 World Series, which the sixth game had ended so dramatically with Carlton Fisk's walk-off home run, and they interviewed Sparky Anderson, who is then the manager of the Cincinnati Reds, the Big Red Machine, and he was pitching a guy named Don Gullett.

Everybody's got his card framed, and he said, "He said, 'No matter what happens tonight, my pitcher is going to the Hall of Fame.

That didn't happen.

They went to Bill Lee, and he said, 'No matter what happens, I'm going to the Elliot Lounge.

Bill Lee was in your film about baseball the first many times, many, many times, which was what, 14 hours.

Baseball was 14 hours, and then you made a short four more hours, nine episodes 18 and a half hours, and we've added four.

What I said, and I didn't finish the gentleman's question, I apologize.

That is, I said it when they said, 'Well, when's the 11th inning?

And I'm kind of like going, 'Wow, we just had to shoehorn this in.

We got all this other stuff.

I said, "When the Cubs win the World Series, I'll do the 11th."

And I am so screwed, and then I kept saying, well, you know, it's been now a decade since they won, and I'm going hemina, hum, and a, you know, like, well, you need a few more things, like I couldn't do the Red Sox until I also had PED, so I'm neat, you know, and then people will throw out like 10 different themes that are, of course, absolutely right, that you could cover, and so I'm just at some point going to have to figure out when the 11th inning happens.

This is the one of things you didn't mention in your list of things people want you to do, but this is one of the topics that a week does not go by that someone does not tell you who you left out.

Oh God, oh, so the best story of that, I'm working on the Frank Lloyd Wright film, it's a few years after baseball.

I'm in Racine, Wisconsin, which has the Johnson Wax Building, which is.. you've been to the Guggenheim, wonderful.

The Johnson Wax Building is even more beautiful, a public space.

It's a.. it's a.. it's a business.

Everybody knows the Johnson Wax Company in Racine, Wisconsin, right?

So it's this beautiful May day, and it's like, you know, just a glorious day, perfect temperature, you know, 75 degrees, the birds are chirping, the bees are buzzing, the trees are blossoming, and I'm getting a tour of it, and we're going through this room that was a storage room, and the woman said, and I think mr.

Wright would approve, we've, in adaptive reuse, we've turned it into a gym for our employees, and I said, okay, and we're sort of diagonally going through this room.

There's one guy on a stationary bike paddling furiously, like Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz.

Why he isn't outside, I have no idea, but as he, as I pass him, he goes, my brother hates you, and I'm thinking there's no brother, right?

So I turn to him, and I go, baseball, huh?

And he goes, yeah, how'd you know?

Now I know there's no brother, so I think where I am and I go Harmon Killebrew and he goes yes like that, so we'd had a big scene again, it's like reductive, it's maple syrup, had a big scene on Harmon Killebrew, who was in this scene, this episode that's already our seventh episode, which is just busting out.

It seems two hours and 25 minutes, or something like that, which is way too long to ask for somebody's attention, and anyway, except if it's Akira Kurosawa Seven Samurai, in which case I would watch it at any time, but anyway, we had cut this thing, he'd been a childhood hero of mine who played for the Twins not too far away, the Braves were had left for Atlanta.

There weren't the Brewers yet, I guess, at the time of Killer Brew's sort of rain.

In any case, I called it right away, and it is more insane than that.

Almost every week, somebody's got a baseball, and some of them are quite moving too.

I mean, because baseball, you know, when you talk about football, you always describe the action, or basketball, the action, but baseball always begins, my mom or my dad took me, and then you describe the action, so it's very much who you saw it with, not the thing that you was seen, and that then adds dimension and importance to the subject.

Well, quick, before we think of anything depressing to ask him.

Let's end it there.

Ken Burns.

Thank you so much!