For more than forty years, Ken Burns and his collaborators have created some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made. Sarah Burns and David McMahon join him to discuss his legendary career, new film, and the people and events that molded our history.
Debbie Millman:
Leonardo da Vinci is probably the most famous painter who ever lived. He was also a great architect, a great military engineer. He was a great cartographer, a great scientist, inventor, botanist, and atomist. He’s probably the person most of us think of when we try to think of an example of a genius. He’s been the subject of fascination since the 15th century.
Ken Burns’ latest film is about Leonardo, and it’s the first time he’s taken on a non-American subject. His career started with a documentary about the Brooklyn Bridge. And he and his collaborators have since chronicled the Civil War, World War II, the Vietnam War, Thomas Jefferson, the Roosevelts, prohibition, the history of baseball, jazz, and country music, and so much more. His brand of visual storytelling has brought more history into the culture than perhaps any American alive.
In this episode, I’m going to talk to Ken Burns about his career, and then I’m going to bring in his collaborators Sarah Burns and David McMahon, who wrote and co-directed Leonardo da Vinci. The two-part four-hour film will air on PBS November 18th and 19th. Ken Burns, welcome to Design Matters.
Ken Burns:
Thank you, Debbie. It’s great to be with you.
Debbie Millman:
Ken, I understand you collect American quilts.
Ken Burns:
I do. They’re everywhere. I’ve got dozens and dozens. I’m sure I now have over 100. And they’re wonderful because the work that I do professionally is about finding the answers to the questions, and the quilts are almost uniformly mysterious. We may know they come from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, 1870. They may even be signed Hannah, but we don’t know whether Hannah is 16 or 26 or 66, happy, sad, made it with other people, made it alone. And so they remain these artistic mysteries. And because most of history excludes more than 50% of the population, it’s really good to have around you, as also the father of four daughters, that feminine energy and reminding us, as Abigail Adams said, “Remember the ladies. You husbands have messed things up, and if you don’t watch out, we’re going to take over.”
Debbie Millman:
I love that. What made you decide to start collecting quilts? What was the first inspiration?
Ken Burns:
For the longest time, I would’ve even refused to say that I was collecting quilts. I had always been drawn to vernacular country furniture. I was drawn to the Shaker furniture and for decades, couldn’t afford a single one, and finally was able to collect some Shaker pieces. But I was drawn because they hit me in my heart. And so somebody says, “Oh, you’ve got the star of Bethlehem or you’ve got a postage stamp,” and I go, “Yeah, I guess.” But I just love them. And they became friends.
In fact, there was a traveling exhibition of them that went to Nebraska and Illinois, other places, and I missed them. I didn’t get to see them for two and a half years. And when they came back, I spread them out on this long table folded up, and I refused to put them away because I would just circle the table. Nobody could eat there. It was just a place where we could remember the friends that had been missing for a while.
The collecting thing, I do collect quilts, but I don’t feel a collector per se. I don’t need to collect, like Noah, one or two of everything, I need to just be drawn. And I’ll tell you, I drew the line about five years ago. I said, “Okay, I’m nearly 70. I’m not going to collect anymore.” And I went to my girls, I said, “You guys, let’s talk about the five or six that each of you can have, and then we’ll give the way to the International Quilt Museum in Nebraska.”
And then I have someone who works with me who is sabotaging all of that. He’ll say, “I know you’re not collecting, but somebody sent this one,” or, “Here’s a picture of…” Like an addict on the street corner, I’m going, “Okay, have them ship it. Let’s take a look.” And more often than not, I reject it, but I still…
Yesterday, my employee Chris, he sent me pictures of two quilts and I just went, “Okay, let’s send them.” He said, “I thought you would.” There’s a little bit of an addictive quality of this, but I love them. They’re just so great. And I wish I could pick up this desktop and move all around just this barn because they are about 25 hanging and they are about 60 or 70 in a glass cabinet. And just bring them out and show you, my friends.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, I would love to see them. Maybe another time. Ken, you were born in Brooklyn, New York, as was I. Your mom was a biotechnician and worked at Kings County Hospital, and your dad was an academic and a cultural anthropologist, but he was also an amateur photographer. And I read that the first memory you have of him was building a dark room in the basement of your house. And you described it as this spectacular alchemy that takes place when a little boy is privileged to go into a dark room with a funny light on and watch an image come up from the developer and just appear before your eyes.
Ken Burns:
It’s just magic. And I’m two and a half, three. I can remember sneaking between the stud wall of this Masonite closet he was building in our basement of a track house in New, Art, Delaware, and then just being held in the crook of his left arm while his right arm stroked the paper and just the funny smells. I won’t even say amateur. He never sold. He wrote an article for National Geographic of our first year of my life was spent in the highest village in France. I’m sure they paid him for the photographs which he took to go along, but it was much more than that. There was a visual commitment. He loved movies. Everything that I am comes from him. And for the longest time, I’ve just assumed I’d be an anthropologist.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you are in a lot of ways.
Ken Burns:
And in lots of ways, I am. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Your dad gave you a Brownie camera in the late 1950s when you were about eight years old, and I read a wonderful story about the experience that you had of first looking in the viewfinder, and I’m wondering if you can share that with our listeners.
Ken Burns:
Yeah, I’m still embarrassed. It still makes my cheeks burn a little bit, but I knew the difference that we had black and white film, but I was looking through my viewfinder, and of course everything was color. And I asked my dad if the pictures would be color, and he said, “Son, we have black and white film. There is color film that we can get.” And I was just so humiliated. He was thrilled at the question. And even in retrospect, as embarrassed as I was, I realize that I was just dealing with these very fundamental things about life and seeing and understanding the exterior world and knowing that there were perhaps burning, but certainly a lot of questions in the interior world.
Debbie Millman:
I’m sorry to bring up a story that you’re embarrassed about. I was actually really charmed by it because I think it reflects some of what is so magical about photography and the taking and making an image that potentially could last forever.
Ken Burns:
Yeah. Oh, it’s great, it’s so great. And it’s a close representation. It doesn’t have the abstraction of painting and drawing and things like that. It’s really, you trust it to be true. And so there it is, so there it must have been.
Debbie Millman:
And as much as your visual interests were born in your father’s avocation and his professional life, it seems that you were also really impacted and influenced by your mother. And you were told when you were six years old that she had cancer and that she was going to die in six months. She didn’t pass until you were 12 years old. And-
Ken Burns:
Almost 12. 11. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. While you were certainly impacted by all of those extra years together, you’ve said that you lived in a shadow of impending doom. How did you manage through that?
Ken Burns:
Well, I’ll tell you, they sat us down when I was six or seven to say that she was going to die in six months, but we knew. We knew that there was something terribly wrong from when I was two or three, that she was already sick with breast cancer and metastasized. And so we didn’t know any of those words or the facts of it, but we knew the scars of it, we knew the pain of it, the dynamics of the family. There’s a Damocles hanging over everything.
And so while she was incredibly heroic and said, “I’m going to see you to junior high school,” which was to me way distance, and that was seventh grade, and she just… It was April of sixth grade just before my 12th birthday, and it’s the most important event. There’s not a day that I don’t think about it that’s influenced all that I do. In fact, my late father-in-law who’s a psychologist said that I wake the dead. I make Jackie Robinson and Abraham Lincoln and others come alive. And who do you think you’re really trying to wake up? When I realized that I hadn’t at age 40 dealt with the death we did. My father had some sort of mental illness and was unable to fulfill his obligations. It was never an urn of ashes. There was a funeral and then nothing in a repressed no place where she was until about that time when my brother and I tracked her down to a pauper’s grave.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I read that.
Ken Burns:
26 other cremains. And from that moment on, I began to own the day that she died instead of avoiding it, seeing it up ahead and seeing it receding, but never being present. And I have to tell you that 59 and a half years without a mother is way too long, way, way too long.
Debbie Millman:
When asked about whether you’d ever make a film about your mother, you say that, “Here’s the secret. I’ve made the same film over and over. All of my films are about my mother.”
Ken Burns:
Yeah, she’s there. She’s just there. I just think there are a couple of things about me that you really have to know about the history, or maybe three. My dad’s interest in photography and anthropology and film are super important. Her courage in the face of her illness and her death and her absence were the single most important thing. And then I went to Hampshire College in ’71, and I don’t recognize the person who went in there and the person who came out in ’75. And so all those three things, if any one of those were missing from our conversation, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that your first films were foolish and stupid, dramatic little shorts that were ridiculous, and you’re sure if they ever turn up, they would be an embarrassment to see.
Ken Burns:
They will never turn up because they were never finished. Nothing was ever done. There was only one film that we made in college secretly called The Something of Harry Lot that had just… It was a zen-like film. It could only be shown at one place at one time because the character in it in this inane thing ends up running towards the place where everybody’s watching it, and then the guy actually comes in and everybody’s head exploded, and smoke was coming out. And it was a wonderful, only could be shown once. And that I have, but you look at it, it’s crazy.
But I’m really glad that I learned at Hampshire College that I actually didn’t want to be a feature filmmaker, which I thought I would when I decided at 12 I’d be a filmmaker. I saw my dad cry at a movie, and I just went, “I get it.” I’d never seen him cry before. And clearly this provided him some emotional safe haven. And so I said, “I will be a filmmaker.” And that meant John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks. But I went to Hampshire, and all the teachers there were social documentary still photographers who also did film, and so all of a sudden you were immersed in a different world in which you realize that the stuff that is true, what is and what was is equally as dramatic as anything the human imagination makes up.
And so by 18, I’m a documentary filmmaker. By 22, I just accidentally made a film about history as my senior… Well, Hampshire doesn’t have that, but my final division three project for Old Sturbridge Village. It’s all live except for the last picture is a pan across a painting. If you’d said a la George Bailey, “That’s what you’re going to be doing for 49 and a half years later,” I would say, “You’re out of your mind.” But that’s what I’ve been doing; I’ve been panning paintings and photographs ever since.
Debbie Millman:
The Ken Burns effect. I’ve just learned about that term, that panning and zooming. Your first film, your first documentary film, The Brooklyn Bridge, you got an Oscar nomination for your first ever film. Did you worry at that moment that that was setting you up for potential failure? Where are you going to go from here?
Ken Burns:
Of course. People say, “What’s the difference between now and then?” I said, “I don’t worry as much. I don’t have as much anxiety.” But the emphasis is as much about the whole process. I shot a lot of it, and then my future wife and I came up to New Hampshire to the house that we’re living in now, that I’m living in; she passed away. And we, in this little cabin that had to be heated up with a wood stove and take three hours to get up to a place where you could wear your winter coats and sit down, we just figured out how to edit it and then sent it out in the world. And we had this response.
We’d moved here from New York because I needed to get a real job. And I was so terrified that I’d take the footage and put it on a shelf and wake up 45 years old and not have done the thing I wanted to do. We moved up here and lived on nothing, chopped wood, heated the house with wood. And then when it got nominated for an Academy Award, it was like, whoa. And then of course it was, what have you done for me lately? Which is the age-old question that continues to haunt, but the best decision. Everybody said, “Oh, you’re moving back to the city; you’re going to move to LA.” I said, “No, I’m staying here.” And so it’s now over 45 years that I’ve been living in the same house, sleeping in the same bedroom and making films the same way.
And so the Ken Burns effect, which is something my later friend Steve Jobs did, and that’s how he introduced to me was just a superficial way of panning and dissolving and adding music to stuff. It’s really our attempt to take that old feature filmmaker that I wanted to be and take each photograph and treat it like it was the master shot that had a long shot, a medium shot, a close shot, a tilt, a pan, a reveal, a zoom out, an insert of details. And not just look at the photograph with an energetic and exploring camera eye, but to listen to it, treat it as a frozen moment of something that had had a past and would have a future. “Are the cannon firing? Is the bat cracking? Is the crowd cheering?” You ask those questions of yourself as you’re filming it, and then later in the editing room, you get to try to will them alive to wake the dead, which is not just the idea of bringing back my mother, some sort of resurrection of her and by extension other people, the biographies that form the building block of our stuff, but also moments, places, things.
And so all of that has been part of the process, and all in service to a story. That’s the most important thing. I’m just a storyteller. That’s what I’m interested… And I happened to choose American history. It was a good mix. I was early enough that I found what I was supposed to be doing. But that’s like choosing oil over watercolors or choosing still lifes instead of landscapes. That’s just what I do. And it was, up until Leonardo, all American history.
Debbie Millman:
Right after the Brooklyn Bridge, you moved into this home. Now, I know that at the time you were convinced that you would have to take a vow of anonymity and poverty to do what you wanted to do. And I’m assuming that you didn’t care about that.
Ken Burns:
Right. No, no, no. This was the conscious choice. when we moved up in the summer of ’79 to this house, we had just fully expected… And in fact, for the next two years, we made less than $2,500 a year. Literally in the middle of February at 4:00 AM when you heard the oil burner go on, I would get up and feed the wood stoves because it was terrifying to consider how we would ever pay for somebody to come and refill up the oil tank.
And there was a wonderful kind of optimism there that Amy and I had. And we were inventing a wheel. People would say, “Oh, a film about a bridge; 10 minutes tops.” I go, “I don’t know; I’m going to keep it to an hour.” If I were making the Brooklyn Bridge film today, it would be five episodes because I now know how to open up those moments.
But it was so exhilarating and so thrilling. And I’d worked as a crew member, just a lowly PA on a film that was being shot in Amherst, Massachusetts. That’s where Hampshire College is. But an Amherst College professor’s wife was making a film about Emily Dickinson, and Julie Harris was starring in it. And we all became friends. She was a lovely woman. And I told her that I had this dream, and she didn’t laugh. Everybody else laughed. This child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge. No. And I would get turned down thousands of times for funding for that. But she said, “Let me know if I can help.”
And then at some point, I just called her and I said, “Could you read the voice of Emily Roebling off camera?” She said, “I’d be happy to.” And we went to a recording session. And then she said, “Who’s reading Washington Roebling?” And I said, “It’s funny; we can’t find anybody.” And she goes, “What about Paul Roebling?” A guy that had called me the great-grandson of Washington Roebling and said that he was an actor. And it was like, oh, sure. And she said, “You don’t know who he is? I acted across him in The Lark on Broadway in 1957.” And so I called up Paul, and I apologized. He said, “I wondered when you’d call back.” And then he was a principal voice for us for the next many years until he passed away prematurely.
Debbie Millman:
In the last 40 years, you’ve made 37 documentaries, and you have at least three in production now. And you’ve talked about how the novelist in poet Robert Penn Warren once told you, “Careerism is death.” And it terrified you. Do you still feel that way? And if so, how would you describe your practice?
Ken Burns:
Well, I just say my professional life. That’s all I say. He said, “Careerism is death.” And he had these snapping turtle goggle eyes. And I was very, very close to him, and whatever he said was like God. I’ve been so fortunate in every film, Lewis Mumford in Brooklyn Bridge, the Shaker Elders in The Shakers and Red War in Huey Long, Shelby Foote in The Civil War, every time I’ve had him as a great mentor. And he said, “Careerism is death.” And he’d said it before, and I just took it to heart that we sometimes sacrifice what we really want to do, what Emerson said in Self-Reliance, “Whatever inly rejoices for what’s expected to us.” Not just the parent, I want you to be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever it is, but just that thing in us like, oh, I got to make money, or I have to do this. And so I’ve never used the word career unless consciously in a meta way, as we’re doing it now; I always say my professional life. And that’s how I understand it. That separates from my love of my children.
Debbie Millman:
The very first interview you conducted was in January of 1972 for a film called Bondsville. Were at Hampshire College. That means you’ve been conducting interviews for over 50 years.
Ken Burns:
Still a student.
Debbie Millman:
Well, that’s what you’ve said. Why do you feel that way?
Ken Burns:
You go in with what you think you want to get, and that is in the way of hearing what they want to say. At the same time, what they want to say may not be what you need to get. And so all of a sudden, this humility comes in again, this sense of insignificance that you have to say… I always say that if the interview doesn’t work out, even if they’re horrible, it’s my fault, and that if it’s great, it’s completely their responsibility. And we’re so lucky to have put ourselves in that place.
A couple of films have gone in without anything written down. I made a film on Huey Long, and I just say, “We’ve been traveling all around Louisiana, and people either love him or hate him,” and then we just go from there. I would just go from there. It was wonderful, wonderful. And the film still survives. You should watch it now because it’s terrifyingly echoing in rhyming, Mark Twain might say in every single sentence with what’s going on today.
And yet, I started then being more prepared and asking questions. But I realized that sometime that imperative to get through your list didn’t allow me to hear that somebody that maybe that questioned seven had an A, B, C, D, E, F, G. That’s why I feel like I’m always perpetually reminding myself to listen, learning how to listen and hearing the question or the next question that’s really behind the way they’re responding.
One of the films that we’re working on is a huge biography, multi-part biography of Barack Obama. And he’s sat very kindly and patiently for so far eight two hour interviews. And we’ve got, he would say one to go, I would say two to go, but we’ll figure that out. He’ll win. But it’s just magnificent. And I have to learn to just sit on my hands and listen. Interviewing him is like going to a John Coltrane concert. I don’t mean a record, I mean a concert. When he starts to play and you go, “Okay, whoa. Can I skip up with him? Can I follow this thing? Yes, I’m following it. I’m following. Oh my God, is he too far away? How’s he going to come back?” And then at the end, he’s back. And you just went, “My God.”
I have two times in my professional life have I stopped the camera mid-roll; once when he answered a question and 10 minute long answer. We’ll never be able to use the whole thing. But I just said, “Mr. president, that’s the finest answer I have ever heard from anyone, let alone a politician.” And the other one was when I asked Rachel Robinson, Jackie Robinson’s widow, what it was like in the days after he had passed away, and she said, “I had a framed picture of him, a photograph of him stealing home, and I took it from room to room to room.” And I finally realized I could not ask the next question because the tears were staining my paper and me, and so I just said, “Cut,” and we just composed ourselves and started again.
Only two times in those 52 years, almost 53 years of asking people questions on camera, which is terrifying because back then the expense was… I cannot begin to tell you what in January of ’72 what it meant to shoot a roll of 16-millimeter film 11 minutes and 40 seconds, a 400-foot roll in a sound silent camera. And that cost a certain thing. Cost an equal amount to develop it and another amount to create a work print of it. You’ve hired a cinematographer, you’ve hired that… We are students, so we didn’t have that expense, but you had the sound equipment and the tape, and you haven’t gotten anywhere. You’re nowhere near beginning to cut it, that’s your baseline.
Oh my goodness, the money going through the meter on the world’s most expensive taxi cab. And you can hear it. And I’ve learned that now that everything’s digital, I’ve lost that touch. But I would stop and I’d turn back to Buddy Squires, my partner in cinematography for more than 50 years, and just say, “We close to the end?’ And he’ll look back and he’ll go, “15 feet,” meaning we’re at the end. He said, “How did you know?” I just had that length of a 400-foot roll built in on my hard drive. And all of a sudden, I was going, “I’m not going to ask the next question yet because we’re going to run out of film.”
Debbie Millman:
Are you ever faced with an interviewee that is reluctant to talk or is anxious about what they’re saying or cold? If so, how do you deal with that?
Ken Burns:
All of those things. All my fault again, all my fault. I’ll name one name because he’s no longer living and because it resolved itself spectacularly, but we were shooting the Huey Long film in Louisiana, and I talked to somebody who was in on all of the graft and corruption, and he said, “Please come. I’m going to tell you everything.” And then I asked my first question and he goes, “Well, how can any of us really judge?” I tried again, and he just had decided that it was Michael Corleone at the Senate hearings; no comment. You know what I mean? It was gone. And so we actually invented a thing where we said, “En Francais,” meaning we weren’t going to run any film the next time. En Francais, meaning we’d just keep going. I could talk him so that we didn’t feel we wouldn’t dishonor him by suddenly pulling up stakes after two minutes, so we just kept going but we weren’t recording anything. There’ve been things like that.
In one case, in our film on World War II called The War, I was interviewing Paul Fussell, who was a writer and a teacher at Princeton celebrated and retired in his 80s. And I think he went in there with a self-consciousness that he’d be the next Shelby Foote. And it made him nervous. His mouth was dry; he couldn’t really do anything, and it was just awkward. And I couldn’t figure out what it was. And finally, he was talking at the end of reel three, which was already, come on, come on, come on, come on. We were thinking of going en Francais for four. And I just said to him, after we were changing the reel, I said, “Paul, you just said the kids who came to replace.” I said, “How old were they?” And he goes, “They were just 18. Maybe some had lied; they were 17.” I said, “But Paul, how old were you?” Because he was referring to them as if they were like whippersnappers. And he said, “Oh, I was 19.” This is a time when the average lifespan of a first lieutenant, second lieutenant on the line in combat was about 17 days. Either you were killed, severely wounded, or you went crazy. And he spent six months on the line. Didn’t take a shower, didn’t change his clothes, didn’t brush his teeth. He was good at his job.
And so I started the fourth thing, and I said, Paul, “You saw bad stuff.” And all of a sudden the 19-year-old came. The cheek started to twitch, and the eyes started blinking. And he then, for the next couple of reels, just gave us unbelievable… We could only use it sparingly. It was so God-awful what human beings do to each other. And you have to realize when he did finally get wounded fairly seriously, he was put at the head of the line because he was so good at what he did, which is killing other people, that they wanted to fix him up so he’d be ready for the invasion of Japan, which was going to kill a million Americans.
And he didn’t have to go. And when he heard about the bomb, he just walked out of the hospital tent and just sobbed like a baby. And he brought all of that back. And it’s gold. Just horrible things, Debbie, that are so chilling. And his contribution was so central to understanding because we tend to glorify war as soon as we get far away from it, and particularly World War II, which was the good war. No war is good. And it’s the worst war ever; 60 million people died. It’s good to have somebody who can tell you what it’s like to come across two dead children that are in German uniforms because they don’t have anybody left so they’re sending 14, 15-year-old, 12-year-old boys in, no helmets. It’s just horrific, but what a great gift.
Debbie Millman:
Ken, so much of your work has centered on racial justice, civil rights. And as I mentioned before we started the formal interview, I am preparing for our talk today, I’ve been re-watching a number of your films and was binge watching Jazz over the last couple of days. And though it’s almost 25 years old, it’s still very current in terms of what we face as a species in how we treat each other, how we take advantage of each other, how we appropriate. How do you balance what you learn about humanity and what we’re really capable of with what you hope we could be on our best days?
Ken Burns:
Yeah. Well, we like to say that humankind is made in God’s image, and there’s almost nothing that we do that would suggest that that’s true. And then you find moments sometimes even in war where that’s true. And that’s what keeps hope alive.
Look, we are born, we know exactly when we were born, July 4th, 1776. We know where, in Philadelphia, and we know what, the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence. And it starts, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” He had wanted to be sacred and undeniable, but his editor, Benjamin Franklin, said, self-evident, which is a lawyer’s dodge. Nothing about what he’s about to say is self-evident. Nothing in human history up to this point would suggest that what’s coming up is that all men are created equal. Okay, I’m a third of the way through the sentence; let me stop. The man who wrote that owned hundreds of human beings.
Debbie Millman:
Thomas Jefferson.
Ken Burns:
Thomas Jefferson. Our story, particularly the American story, but as you suggested, the human story is one of othering. To my mind, Debbie, I’ve made films for 50 years about the US, but I’ve also made films about us, all of that intimacy. What I’ve learned, if I’ve learned anything, is that there’s no them. That’s what every dictator, every authoritarian wants to do. They cannot promote themselves without making them.
And the successful part of our story, the part that is inclusive is a priori, about us, all of us in all of our diversity. And so how could you not make films about American history for 50 years without… If you want to do it superficially, I suppose, down in Florida, let’s not talk about slavery. “And they may have actually,” DeSantis said, “had some good job skills that they learned.”
Debbie Millman:
I can’t even.
Ken Burns:
Because you don’t want to upset people. But everybody’s upset all the time by the video games that you play, by the movies that you watch, by the coaches that yell at you, by the preachers that threaten eternal damnation, by scoldings of the parent. The world out there is real, and the idea that you want to sanitize history is crazy.
I can count on the fingers of one hand and still have a couple fingers left to snap those fingers, the films that don’t deal with race. And it’s not because you go looking for it, but because always there. I’m just finishing up a big series on the history of the American Revolution. Now, we will accept the violence of World War II and the Civil War and Vietnam, Korea, First World War, but we have protected our revolution as just guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts. And that’s true, it’s really true. But it is a complex civil war where our civil war was not a civil war, it’s a sectional war; one part of the country against the other.
Debbie Millman:
And there was nothing civil about it.
Ken Burns:
And nothing civil about it. Our revolution is the Civil War that we need to understand.
Debbie Millman:
I’d like to talk with you now about your most recent film, Leonardo, which explores the life and work of the 15th-century polymath, Leonardo da Vinci. We are joined now by Sarah Burns and David McMahon, your co-directors and writers of the film. Welcome, Sarah. Welcome, Dave.
Sarah Burns:
Thank you. Thanks for having us.
David McMahon:
Hi, Debbie. Thank you so much.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Ken, the first question is actually for you. I mentioned in the introduction that Leonardo is the first film you’ve made about a non-American person or subject. Why Leonardo and did this require a different approach in any way?
Ken Burns:
There are three people that are responsible for it. The first is Walter Isaacson and the other two are listening in right now, Sarah and Dave. Walter Isaacson, I was making a film on Benjamin Franklin and Walter was a biographer of Franklin and we had interviewed him and he’s been an old friend for years and years and we were out to dinner and he had also written a biography of Leonardo and so he was pushing a two for. That I would do this, here’s the great scientist of the 18th century and the great artist of politics and of writing and then, Leonardo, of his time is the greatest scientist and the greatest artist. And I said, “Walter, you know I don’t do non-American stuff,” and he pushed the whole dinner. I was finally exasperated and I left and was talking to Sarah and Dave and expressed my exasperation and they said, “Oh, let’s do Leonardo,” and then of course I go, “Yeah, why was there this barrier there?”
So, it’s all their fault Walter and then Sarah and Dave, mostly Sarah and Dave for overcoming that. And I called Walter back the next day and I said, “Okay, we’re in,” and he’s one of many interviews in the film and it was exhilarating but it also required this old dog to be taught a few new tricks.
Debbie Millman:
The three of you have collaborated for years now on a number of films including, The Central Park Five which is based on a book that Sarah wrote, Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali. What is it like for you three as family to work together?
Sarah Burns:
Yeah, it works quite well. We’ve been doing it for 15 years now altogether, we started with The Central Park Five and I think that felt, not quite like an experiment, but it was the first time all of us working together. Dave and I sat down at the beginning to write a treatment for the film, literally the two of us in front of a computer with a blank screen to write this thing together. If we can survive this, maybe that part could work and we literally sit next to each other most of the time all day long. And the three of us as a team is actually really great.
We get in the editing room and we … I think having multiple voices, and that includes our editors who are really important creative partners also and the rest of our team, but getting in the room together to wrestle with this material that we’ve written and gathered and researched and to figure out how to tell the story, it’s the great thing about what we do is how collaborative it is and how we each have our own ideas about things but everyone listens to each other and everyone trusts each other and it ends up being this really wonderful process.
And there are those times when we don’t agree about stuff and, usually, it means someone is outnumbered and you go, “Okay, if everybody else really feels strongly about this, I can accept that we’re going to cut this out or leave this in or whatever it is,” and it’s really fun.
Debbie Millman:
How were you able to convince Ken to do the film on Leonardo?
David McMahon:
Oh, it didn’t take much. As he explained, there was a phone call and we weren’t hesitant at all. I think that we didn’t really know much about Leonardo and so there was a process of learning but we read Walter’s book and, right away, it presented some challenges that we thought would be a great opportunity. Wrestling with a subject from so long ago that lacks the archival materials that we have relied on in our collaborations together meant that we could try and come up with a new way to see Leonardo, we could come up with a new visual language. We maybe wouldn’t want to use period music and so perhaps we could do an original score wall to wall. And so, I think we right away saw the challenges as ones that we would want to take on.
Debbie Millman:
Da Vinci is considered one of, if not, the greatest painter to have ever lived but I actually learned from your film that he actually painted less than 20 paintings and less than 10 were actually completed paintings. What makes those paintings so special?
Sarah Burns:
I think there’s something about Leonardo’s process and his curiosity and his interest in the world and the way that he pours all of that into the paintings that sets them apart even from his extraordinarily talented contemporaries in the Italian Renaissance. There are many of them who are doing amazing work, he’s not alone here but his interest in nature and the world and the human form and on the outside and the inside I think is the thing that brings his paintings this additional level of humanity, of personality of life. He brings these people to life, not just in the physical sense of making them feel three-dimensional and existing in space, but of actually making them feel alive, giving them emotions and thoughts and inner feelings and that comes from his interest in studying literally the inner workings of the human body.
He dissected cadavers, he did anatomy drawings, he wanted to know what the muscles of the face were that are acting when someone smiles but also thinking about human emotions and how those can be depicted through facial expressions, through physical motion. The way that hands gestures, he would go and draw people in the piazzas in Florence to try to think about how people, what they look like when they’re talking or laughing or arguing. And so, that obsession with that, I think, elevates his work to another level.
Debbie Millman:
One of Leonardo’s most famous paintings is the Mona Lisa who, in real life, was the wife of a wealthy silk merchant. And Ken, you’ve talked about how many jokes are made about Mona Lisa’s smile but, when you see this film, you won’t ever joke about it again. Why is that?
Ken Burns:
I hope not, Debbie. I hope not. And it is so funny, I said this the other day that people always say what do you want people to take away from the film and we’ve worked on it. Once it’s done, it’s your film. You know what I mean? You’ll take what you want to take from it but, in this one, I want you to want to be more like him because he is just, as Sir Kenneth Clark said, the most curious man ever. He just wants to know, as Sarah was describing, more and evermore. And then this idea that Sarah was also saying about how you could take something that is on a two-dimensional poplar panel and make it, not just three-dimensional in appearance that is a person, but to give them their spirit and their life and their anatomy.
So, the rapturous responses by people to the Mona Lisa was that you could see the blood in her veins moving, you could see her pulse in her neck, that’s what he did. And that the smile contains all of the things that animate a human life and make the mystery of life so compelling. And the fact that he could do this, not with a photograph, not with a piece of film, but with this painting and it adds a commission that he never delivered. He just worked on it and carried it with him and dabbled on it and it’s the most famous painting on earth and, therefore, there’s layers, there’s patinas of inattention and inaction. Everybody, their Mona Lisa story is how many people were blocking their view of the Mona Lisa, how small it was.
And then so our response to something that big and that powerful is to forget why it’s big and powerful, to make up stories about it, draw mustaches on them and make jokes about the smile. What is she smiling about? But if she’s speaking to the highest aspirations of humankind or just this mystery of life and the questions that he was always asking, who am I, where did I come from, what am I supposed to do, where do I go, how does the earth work, how does everything work, then she represents the epitome of the human project, period. And the Renaissance is a rebirth, literally what it means, that is emerging from the Dark and Middle Ages and trying to free center human beings in a world that has basically told them that they are insignificant cogs in this other religious dynamic and he liberates this in a way and Lisa Giocondo is his great gift to us.
The husband didn’t get it. At least she had five children by 24 when it was painted, they don’t have it nor do the grandchildren, who knows where they are, but we have it. She is his great gift to us about what the human project is about, period, full stop.
Debbie Millman:
Sarah and Dave, I know you spent over a year in Italy doing research and without any real photographs or newsreels or any of the things that we’ve come to see as part of the Ken Burns effect. This is a man that lived in the 15th and 16th centuries, how did you find, aside from the 20 or so paintings, enough visuals for the film?
Sarah Burns:
It was definitely a challenge but it is, as Dave was saying before, one of the really exciting challenges of this film, this opportunity to figure out new ways of telling this story. And I think we really took our lead from Leonardo himself who was such a lateral thinker, who looked at all of these different things in nature, in the world and was interested in all these different disciplines, not just painting of course, but science, anatomy, engineering. He designed machines, he studied birds in flight, he had a endless number of interests and he was thinking about them all at the same time. These were not separate pursuits for him, it was all part of one grand exploration of the world.
And so, what we wanted to do was think about ways to get inside his head and to see what he was seeing and think about what he was thinking about. And so, that liberated us from feeling like we had to be in his time and only in period paintings from the Renaissance, either his or contemporaries or something, to see that we could be in nature in Italy. And we did a lot of filming of Italian landscapes, of the places that he might’ve visited and things he would’ve observed. We used a lot of nature photography, the animals that he observed, birds and dragonflies and these patterns that he was looking for in nature, we could use all of that. And we used a lot of footage from the 20th century, things that are related to what he was studying.
And so, as you see these ideas, these things he’s imagining, he has extraordinary creativity and imagination. These things he’s imagining, human flight machines, he never achieves that but it is ultimately achieved and so we can see that too. Or we can see an Archimedes screw that some French farmers are using in the early 20th century that is similar to a drawing that Leonardo did that is similar to a drawing that Archimedes did and so it all ties together. And so, we see all of those things and we often see them side by side. We split the screen, we see two things, four things, nine things at a time sometimes to help show Leonardo’s lateral thinking.
Debbie Millman:
I love the direction of the visuals. The documentary really marks a significant change in your collective filmmaking style, the split screens as well as the video and sound from different periods. Talk about how you developed this new visual language.
David McMahon:
Well, right from the beginning, we felt like, as Sarah was saying, that we wanted to make this an experience for our audience where it felt like they were inside his head. And so, we actually, early on in the shot, we plunged in through the eye and we want to stay there from the beginning. But we did early on begin to experiment with splitting the screen and playing with 20th-century footage, as Sarah said, and things that we shot and things we observed but it had to work. We’re using the same research team that we worked with, our colleagues on the last project and they’re looking in the same spaces. We’re working with the same cinematographer, we’re going up and down the Italian Peninsula looking for the kind of beauty that Leonardo observed, timeless beauty, landscapes that he would’ve studied and we want to share all of this, put people in time and inside Leonardo’s had but it has to have a rhythm, it has to have a pace, it has to work.
And so, we did play and so, in many ways, it is a departure because we’re not accustomed to splitting the screen but we’re drawing from similar resources. We’re still getting up before the sunrise and we’re ending up in the spot where we’re going to see a beautiful sunset in a spot that maybe Leonardo would’ve observed one. And so, we can choose to slow it down and watch the sun come up or we can bombard you with a whole different set of images that Leonardo would’ve received and help our audience try to make sense of them in a way that he would have. But it’s all in the service of getting the Leonardo story right and sharing it with our audience and we’re going in chronological order. But where we took liberties, we played around a little bit until we all believed that it served the story well.
Ken Burns:
And so, therefore, it’s both a departure and not. Storytelling is and then, and then, and then particularly with biography and so it is very much of the kinds of films that we have made together and I’ve made with other colleagues but, at the same time, in order to get into that space, to go into that eye, as David said, is going to require the liberation from the tyrannies of old forms and that’s always a good thing.
Debbie Millman:
How does it feel to experiment when you’ve made so many films and have had so much success in doing something in a certain way?
Ken Burns:
It’s funny, it’s really hugely different than experimental having to explode the screen. And I would say the soundtrack as well and there’s animation in this film that is particularly effective, that sometimes is just memories and sometimes is just understanding his unbelievable view of the cosmos at a microscopic level, and he doesn’t have a microscope, and at a macroscopic level and he doesn’t have a telescope. So, it’s Leonardo, you just have to climb on and just take the ride of your life. It’s spectacularly exhilarating and it’s so aspirational that you’ll do anything to make it work. And what’s so great about working is that you always want to serve the film, not your vision of it, it’s our vision.
Debbie Millman:
You really do use music in a new way in this film. David, you chose the composer Caroline Shaw to score the film. Can you talk about why you chose Caroline and what that was about?
David McMahon:
Yeah, well, I’ll back it up just a little bit. On our previous project, a biography of Muhammad Ali, we used something 160 needle drops from the period between 1940 and his death in 2016 and the music really puts, I think, the audience in a particular time, we can move through Muhammad’s life with this popular music. Popular music from this period didn’t feel right so, early on, we began talking about what kind of sound might work well here and we wanted something that seemed timeless and we settled on the idea of strings and percussion together and Caroline Shaw was suggested to us and this is very early on.
I went to see a ballet that was set to her music, it was amazing and what was also present on that day was a Roomful of Teeth, a vocal group or, as they would say, a vocal band and their sound was extraordinary, it just filled the whole theater. And we began to think about maybe it could be strings, percussion and vocals, even though we worried a little bit with the vocalizations, this wouldn’t be lyrics, it would just be vocalizations, would it compete with our dialogue tracks. Anyway, we reached out to Caroline, she said yes, we’re so grateful for that, and she created a completely original score using music that she had written for all three of these groups, a taka quartet, so percussion and a Roomful of Teeth. It was immediately clear that the vocalizations, that the Roomful of Teeth’s contribution was only going to elevate Leonardo and get us closer to him.
There’s so much joy in her music and I think that’s what connects most for me with Leonardo is he was a man who he’s not a diarist, he doesn’t leave behind a lot of what he’s thinking and feeling about his days or his times or the people in his life. But if you look between the lines, you can sense a guy who’s prideful about his work and you can see a guy who finds great ecstasy in his job and what he’s doing and her music seemed to point to that.
Debbie Millman:
The vocals do feel very instrumental in a really beautiful ecstatic way and they do add a lot to the film. You begin the film with a quote by historian Paolo Galluzzi who states nature is God, nature is perfection, nature is proportion, nature is the entity which obtains every effect with the shortest and direct way that is possible. The best a scientist or a painter can do is imitate nature. What made you decide to start the film with this declaration?
Sarah Burns:
Well, that moment, I think he’s really paraphrasing what he thinks Leonardo’s view of the world is. It’s a few minutes into the film but he, I think, really sums up Leonardo’s idea about his role in the world. That his goal as a painter is to try to reproduce nature, to recreate nature through his work, through his art because he grows up surrounded by nature. He’s born in this small town of Vinci, outside of Florence and, because he’s born out of wedlock, he does not have the same access to education that he might otherwise have had and so he’s not classically trained in an academic way. So, he’s largely self-taught but he spends his childhood as a result, it’s probably the best thing that ever happened to him, he spends his childhood as a result, exploring in nature and that becomes his guide and teacher, the most important one.
And so, for him, that is at the center of anything. And he eventually … He does read all of the ancients and he studies his contemporaries and, in his 40s, he tries to teach himself Latin because that was something he’d never been taught before. But nature is the ultimate teacher for him and so all of it flows from that.
Debbie Millman:
Another thing that I learned from your film is that Leonardo did not categorize his work. He’s a scientist and a painter. When he’s painting, he’s a scientist, when he’s doing science, he’s a painter. He didn’t see the distinctions between them and there’s a quote in the film that I loved, painting is not of the hand but of the mind. I love it for so many different reasons but one thing that I’ve been thinking quite a lot about is that, when somebody is as talented as Leonardo was, so innately talented, capable, a master of so many things, you can say painting is not of the hand but of the mind. But for those of us that are still aspiring to become better painters or better anything, it’s of the hand as well. So, I’m just wondering how you thought about his genius and how that was incorporated into the striving he had still in his life.
David McMahon:
Yeah. Well, there’s a leap that takes place in Leonardo’s time, and it’s not just Leonardo, it’s some of the other painters as well where they become superstars. The artists, I think up to that point, had worked in these bottegas and these are spaces, as I said before, where they’re learning anatomy, they’re learning physiology, they’re learning nature, they’re learning math but they’re still being commissioned to produce works of art for wealthy merchants or for the church. And Leonardo and some of his other peers take this to another level and you can tell in part because he left some works behind that he didn’t finish where you can see that, rather than doing this in the style that had been done forever which was to create a cartoon or an outline of this painting, he’s instead going to work out on the panel what he wants the thing to be.
And so, if he doesn’t complete a work, let’s say the Adoration of the Magi, you can see that he was having a philosophical argument with himself about what to do with this work on the panel itself and no one had done that before. And so, that is a point where you start thinking less about these artisanal things that these artists are doing and more about an intellectual process. And if you take the notebooks and the paintings, you begin to see that Leonardo is, not just seeking to be remembered or thought of as a painter, he’s seeking to be thought of as an intellectual. And in these notebooks that he leaves behind, there are treatises and he’s unpacking a subject, he’s learning all he can about it and then he’s organizing it in these treatises for publication. Now, none of it gets published in his lifetime but, whether it’s a study of water or geology or preparations for a painting, he wants artists to know his thinking behind what he was doing. He wants scientists to understand what he learned about geology.
And so, at this time, as there’s an explosion of talented artists, there are some real superstars who are now, as Adam Gopnik says in the film, these are princes of the mind. They’re no longer just making crafts, they’re doing intellectual work on the panel and so big transformation there. But it also makes him, again, of his time. It’s just that his combination of curiosity and imagination allows him to take this further than the other superstars of his day.
Debbie Millman:
One of the interesting things that I was thinking about as I was watching the film, I’ve seen it now several times and so many intellectual pioneers of our history have been criticized, ostracized for thinking differently especially in the realm of science where people have been seen as heretics or witches. Why was Leonardo outside of that treatment? He seemed very much to be admired, celebrated as opposed to excommunicated?
Ken Burns:
Well, it’s a pretty interesting thing. Part of what Dave is saying and I think we haven’t talked enough about, the notebooks, thousands and thousands and thousands of pages and exquisite drawings and observations which are written in a mirror script. He’s a lefty, he’s writing backwards so as not to smudge and he’s left us all of this stuff but it’s not published in his lifetime. And so, unlike, say, a Galileo who’s going to get in trouble with a church, which we know already knew that Galileo is right, what you have is this charismatic figure that is incredibly wonderful to be around, who has a joie de vivre, who’s a musician, who stages pageants, who obviously got these handful of paintings that are great and, sure, The Last Supper is out of sight in a monastery’s dining room and, yes, this wasn’t finished. But everybody understands that, when he does something from his very first painting, The Annunciation, on his own solo thing, he’s the bee’s knees, there’s nobody like him.
And so, there’s this sense of a reputation that develops that I think also insulates him and the biggest thing is that all of these scientific observations aren’t going to be published until he’s gone. He’s insulated from the dynamics of politics. Remember, he’s involved in Machiavelli, he’s got a competition with Michelangelo, Raphael’s the young squirt that’s coming on, this is all the dynamics between Florence and Milan and Venice and Rome and it’s all going on and yet he’s got a plausible deniability because of this lack of output and the fact that all of the great stuff … Look, he’s got experiments on a heart, on how the heart works and how the heart valves particularly work and how blood flows through those valves and does things in the heart that aren’t going to be confirmed for 475 years until we have MRIs in the 1970s. And there’s no cardiac surgery back then so it’s not like somebody could say, “Oh, Leonardo’s doing,” even if it was published, “Leonardo’s doing some interesting work there in Florence or Milan or Rome,” it’s that he’s doing it for this sense.
At one of them, another scholar says it’s about prophecy, it’s aspiration. He doesn’t to … The machines don’t have to work. It’s just I want to fly. I think human beings want to fly, someday they’ll fly, here are some ideas of how they might fly and, guess what, we do fly and we do lots of other things. And so, just imagining to come back and thinking, “You went on the moon? Tell me how you did that. I want to know everything.” He understood about gravity and he did lots of experiments with it but he’d want to know how’d you figure and what did you do this and how did you get back. And a parachute? Really? I invented a parachute, kind of. So, I think that he misses the negative political stuff. He’s involved in it, he’s courting dictators and saying I can draw you military stuff and he got the first overhead map which has purely strategic military purposes even though it’s the first bird’s eye map with no drones, no balloons, no nothing, he imagines it, this village of Imola.
It’s incredible and I think that how incredible he was just, in some ways, is an insulation from that.
Debbie Millman:
I loved to learn that building the machines often seemed beside the point for Leonardo, it was the ideas of the machines and that he visualized them. Leonardo’s notebooks are also works of art, they’re not just notebooks, they’re not just journals, they are, in many ways, blueprints for living. I’ve been reading them and studying them for decades and there’s never a time when I open up the notebooks where I’m not learning something or realizing something in a new way. Can you talk a little bit about how you were able to bring to life, not only his art, but his scientific explorations and drawings because I think that’s such a beautiful part of the film.
Sarah Burns:
Yeah, it’s central to understanding Leonardo and I think, from the very beginning, we went in with this idea that we wanted to go so far beyond what it is that we think we know about Leonardo. He’s the author of a couple of the most famous works of art of all time but that’s not the whole picture. And we tend to look at him as this wizard with a long beard that we see in the paintings and, from the beginning, we wanted to figure out how to reach past that and get to know him in a different way and that’s through the notebooks. That is where we get this access to Leonardo’s extraordinary mind and so it was always going to be central. We were going to tell the stories of the paintings, many of them, but the notebooks is where we get to really know him and so that is where he puts all of these ideas, what we’ve been talking about, the science, the questions, the constant questions about everything and all of these incredible drawings as you’ve said. They’re beautiful to look at, those pages.
Mathematical, geometry problems that he’s trying to figure out, grocery lists and everything in between.
Debbie Millman:
How babies are born.
Sarah Burns:
Yeah, it’s really extraordinary. And so, it was, I think, clear to us from the very beginning that a huge part of telling his story was going to be around all of these other things. We maybe know him best as an artist but he would not, I think, define himself that narrowly and so we were going to spend a lot of time also trying to understand what else he was doing, these scientific experiments. It’s part of why we were, of course, going to interview for the film the art historians and biographers, the experts on Leonardo who’ve dedicated decades, in many cases, to studying his work, his art and his other work, his notebooks as well. But we also wanted to hear from people who were coming at Leonardo from lots of different angles and perspectives.
So, we have Guillermo del Toro who we found as an interview subject because we saw his notebooks and they look a lot like Leonardo’s except he’s drawing fantastical creatures and monsters and then filling in with writing all around it in this way that looks a lot like some of Leonardo’s notebooks and so we thought maybe he’s inspired here and has something to say about Leonardo and he absolutely did. We talked to an engineer who has looked at Leonardo’s studies of gravity and studies of bird flight, we talked to a heart surgeon who’s fascinated by Leonardo’s anatomical drawings and studies of the heart, we talked to a theater director and playwright who’s done work about Leonardo’s notebooks. We wanted to hear from lots of different people, from a painter, Kerry James Marshall, who all could bring some other perspective to our understanding of Leonardo.
Debbie Millman:
Ken, you said this about Leonardo. He’s a human being and he’s closer to what our purpose here on life is which is unanswerable. And I think he asked that question more firmly and more resolutely than anybody else I’ve ever come across, the people I’ve come in contact with who seem to be really pushing the boundaries of the big questions, who am I, where did I come from, what is my purpose in life, where am I going. So, my last question is what is the biggest thing that you learned about our humanity and our mind from making this film about Leonardo?
Ken Burns:
There is a joyful byproduct of the sometimes painful pursuit of all of those questions. That, when you come in contact with somebody who is engaging so many aspects of their senses that are so alive, that the world is vivified to them in ways that we sometimes let that sunset go by, even the dramatic one and he’s as passionately interested in the beautiful sunset but also the ant crawling on a log. And so, you have a sense of your own possibility that we are imperfect machines ourselves bound by very earthly desires and passions and flaws and imperfections and yet there are places and opportunities in our lives and the choices that we make and the way we see in our relationships with other people that offer what Leonardo seems to be constantly beckoning to which is to know more, to know more. And the fact that what comes out of that, which is incredible friction and conflict and difficulty, is so joyful and so powerful. As I said before, you just want to be more like Leonardo.
Debbie Millman:
Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon, thank you so much for making this beautiful film and for making so much work that matters all these years.
David McMahon:
Thank you. Thank you so much. Your questions just have been great.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, thank you. Leonardo directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon will air on November 18th and 19th on PBS. To read more about their extraordinary body of work, you can go to kenburns.com. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Milman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
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