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What if I a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton? Tim.
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3:49
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs.
3:51
This is Tim Ferrris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferrris show where it is my job to deconstruct worldclass performers, people who are the best or one of the best at what they do.
4:01
My guest today is certainly that Ken Burns.
4:04
You can find him on Twitter, Ken Burns.
4:07
Has been making documentary films for more than 40 years.
4:10
Since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including The Civil War.
4:21
I'm going to pause at this point in the list because not everyone who's listening to this has seen The Civil War or realizes just how massively popular it was.
4:31
Now, critics thought no one watched Civil War. Why?
4:37
Because it's more than 10 hours long.
4:40
And at the end of the day, it was broadcast on PBS on five consecutive nights in 1990.
4:45
And uh almost 40 million viewers, more than actually 40 million viewers, tuned into at least one episode.
4:54
And viewership averaged more than 14 million viewers each evening, making it the most watched program ever to air on PBS.
5:00
Now, this is 40 million plus people watching something that is produced to be 10 plus hours long.
5:10
That's this is not a 5-second cat video on YouTube.
5:13
So, let that sink in for a second. But back to the list.
5:15
So, the Civil War, baseball, jazz, the Statue of Liberty, Huey Long, Lewis and Clark, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mark Twain, Unforgivable Blackness, subtitle, The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.
5:25
For those of you who don't know, Jack Johnson was an incredible boxer.
5:28
The War: The National Parks, subtitle, America's Best Idea, The Roosevelts, Jackie Robinson, Defying the Nazis, Subtitle, The Sharps War, The Vietnam War, and The Mayo Clinic, subtitled Faith, Hope, Science.
5:42
Ken's films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including 16 Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, and two Oscar nominations.
5:49
And in September of 2008 at the News [snorts] and Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken was honored by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences with a lifetime achievement award.
5:59
His newest work is country music.
6:02
I have it here right next to me.
6:02
It explores the history of uniquely American art form, country music.
6:07
From its deep entangled roots in ballads, blues, and hymns performed in small settings to its worldwide popularity, learn how country music evolved over the course of the 20th century as it eventually emerged to become America's music.
6:22
Country music features never-before-seen footage and photographs.
6:25
Of course, this is Ken's trademark, so to speak, plus interviews with more than 80 country music artists.
6:32
The eight-part and 16-hour series is directed and produced by none other than Ken Burns, written and produced by Dayton Duncan, and produced by Julie Duny.
6:41
It debuts on PBS on Sunday, September 15th at 8:7 central.
6:43
Again, that's Sunday, September 15th at 87 central.
6:51
The first four episodes will stream online on the PBS platforms, including PBS.
6:55
org and PBS apps timed to coincide with the Sunday September 15th premiere and the second four timed to the broadcast of episode 5 on Sunday September 22nd.
7:06
So each episode will stream for a period of 3 weeks.
7:08
The simple version of that is on TV Sunday September 15th at 8 Eastern 7 central 8 Eastern 7 central.
7:18
And uh if you do not have television if you're a cord cutter you can go to PBS.
7:24
org or use one of the PBS apps.
7:26
PBS Passport members will be able to stream the entire series for a period of 6 months beginning Sunday, September 15th.
7:32
So, all that said, without further ado, please enjoy, and my god did I enjoy it, this wide ranging conversation with none other than Ken Burns.
7:46
Ken, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
7:50
I am thrilled to be having this conversation.
7:52
and I've been a fan of yours for effectively as long as I've been uh consciously aware of what I'm watching in front of me.
8:00
So, I can't say the first few years, but [clears throat] shortly thereafter.
8:04
And uh I thought we might bounce around quite a bit in this conversation and begin with something that came up in the research I did for this podcast episode and it relates to mmentotos in your pocket.
8:19
Do you still carry momentos in your pocket?
8:23
And whether it's past tense or current tense, present tense, can you describe what those are and why you carry them? Sure.
8:32
I've just I've just dug into my pocket and amidst some change.
8:34
I have four items which I've had for many many years now.
8:40
They no no one's been retired.
8:42
Um, one of them is a coin palm to me by an ex-Marine who was the headmaster at the Greenwood School in tiny Putney, Vermont.
8:51
The Greenwood School is equally tiny and is a school for boys with learning differences, meaning they suffer from dyslexia or uh ADHD or executive function, a host of things.
9:07
This school addresses this problem head-on.
9:09
It's been around for about 40 years.
9:10
And after Thanksgiving, when the boys come back, ages 10, 11 to 17, when they come back from Thanksgiving vacation, they are all asked to memorize the 10 complicated sentences of Lincoln's Gettysburg address and then publicly recite them.
9:27
A difficult task for any one of us, but if you have these learning differences, it can be a nightmare.
9:35
And when the boys successfully complete that um they they are given a coin by the headmaster in typical kind of military fashion even though it's not a military school and he's anything but militaristic.
9:52
But I was asked once many many years ago to be a judge.
9:55
I found myself in tears at the effort of these boys to to do it and said somebody's got to make a film about it.
10:04
It obviously would be a cinema very tay film which is not my style but as the 150th anniversary of uh the Gettysburg address came up in 2013 I thought you know what I got to dive in and do it.
10:16
So we embedded in the school with a soundman and a cameraman and an assistant and recorded 300 and some hours and when the whole thing was over he and we made the film and realized that the kids had never in the then 35 years history of the school been to Gettysburg I rented two buses and took the whole school there and put them up for a night and gave them a tour of the battlefield as the kind of kota to this film.
10:42
when it was over, he he palmed a metal in my pocket.
10:45
So, I have that Greenwood school thing.
10:48
Um, the oldest thing I have is what's called a feeling heart.
10:54
It's a stainless steel uh shape of a heart with a little indentation in it, so you can sort of hold it and palm it. It's not like a coin.
11:02
It It has a little bit more dimension to that.
11:04
And it's maybe, you know, much bigger than the silver dollar.
11:08
And it was sent to me by a woman in upstate New York, an artist who had fashioned this.
11:12
And she had written after the Civil War series was broadcast in uh September of 1990.
11:20
And sometime in the first few weeks after that, she had uh sent me a heart.
11:25
I then got another two hearts for my two oldest daughters and recently got two more hearts to give to my uh two young daughters who are, you know, 14 and and and eight.
11:36
And so it's it just is always there. I can feel it.
11:40
And sometimes I find myself just um you know uh uh holding it in my hand.
11:45
I'm I'm sure doing exactly what she had intended the heart to do.
11:49
Um another object I have was given to me by a friend and it's a mini ball now polished and free of all the calcification that attends to it.
12:00
The mini ball is a bullet that would have been um used during the Civil War and it was found on the on on Gettysburg as well.
12:10
And so I carry around a reminder of the time when we came closest to our near national suicide when now it turns out through the work of Drew Kilp and FA the uh former president of Harvard's extraordinary scholarship that instead of the 600 or 620,000 that was generally accepted as the death toll in the Civil War.
12:29
It looks like it's more like 750,000 3/4 of a million well more than 2% of the population.
12:37
an extraordinary death toll in a in in as the poem Casey at the Bat says in this favored land.
12:43
And then the fourth and final object that I've carried around for years and years is a button off a jacket of a friend of mine uh father uh his son gave it to me.
12:53
So a friend of mine's grandfather as well um wore on an army uniform and he had landed uh at D-Day uh at Normandy.
13:02
And so I've just I've kind of kept these reminders um uh in my pocket and they're comforting.
13:13
Uh I do have one object that I can't fit in my pocket, but I have next to me at my desk at home in New Hampshire.
13:20
Uh and it's leg irons uh that I purchased at auction.
13:24
Um heavy, weighty, horrible things.
13:27
They are a human invention whose only purpose is to keep other human beings in bondage which is a legacy of a very difficult part of our history and reckoning we still not have fully completed and um it turns out that though I don't necessarily go looking for it in my projects um that that that question um is always lingering in in in our American story and whether it's country music, it's there.
14:02
Whether it's in uh the national parks, it's there.
14:05
In unlikely places, it's there in likely places like a biography of Jackie Robinson or Jack Johnson or jazz.
14:12
But it it seems to this question of the fact that we know we were born under the sign that all men are created equal.
14:20
But the guy who wrote that second sentence of the declaration, our creed, owned more than 200 human beings when he wrote it and didn't see the contradiction nor the hypocrisy and more important didn't see fit in his lifetime to free any one of those human beings who had inalienable rights.
14:37
And so, you know, if you're going to do a deeper dive and just mere regurgitation of conventional wisdom, then you have to deal with this everpresent subject of race.
14:50
And so, I wish I could tell you that I could carry around those leg irons, but they don't fit in a pocket and they have a weight and a disturbing heaviness to them that that is nevertheless very close to me when I'm at home.
15:06
Ken, you have a a remarkable memory and you also must receive, be offered, be exposed to thousands of different objects that you could keep.
15:19
Uh what you said as reminders uh earlier, are there particular reasons why you chose of all the other options, let's start with the objects in your pocket.
15:30
Uh what is what purpose did those serve for you?
15:34
Well, you know, you're asking a question which requires an answer from the head, and I'm not sure the head made the decision to keep them. I think the heart did.
15:44
And the heart doesn't necessarily have a rational or easily articulated response to the question, which is a good one and an obvious one.
15:54
And I wish I could be truthful and uh and honest.
15:57
I mean, I do get lots of stuff, objects, and mainly these are things that are close to me.
16:07
I mean, I never thought when I received this healing heart that I would put it in my pocket, but I did instinctively and it's never left.
16:13
I mean, I can't tell you how many times I'd emptied it to go through TSA screenings, you know.
16:22
uh it's it's it's really there and uh there's a kind of commitment and loyalty to it that that I can't explain.
16:29
And the bullet was given to me by a friend. Um and he I adore him.
16:36
He's one of my closest friends.
16:39
And it he's a he's a big bearer of a loving man.
16:42
And I just sort of felt the, you know, there's something so contradictory about a bullet being anything but a bad thing.
16:54
Uh, and yet it it represents all of the totality of the Civil War.
16:57
The woman who had sent this feeling heart wrote in her letter that she saw the series that we made on the Civil War as an American bahagavita, you know, with this, you know, story, you know, and you just kind of went, whoa.
17:12
And I I don't think I was it was the flattery of that that stuck it in my pocket.
17:18
It was the something of it.
17:18
And it may have been the struggles that it took me to go through, the growth that I'd undergone.
17:24
Obviously, these kids at the Greenwood School had moved me to my core.
17:29
And I just presumed that some other filmmaker better equipped to do a cinema verite film uh would do it, but found myself having to do it.
17:37
and found myself with a a crew that was really excited and and was able to get a lot of fly onthe-wall stuff.
17:45
And it meant a lot um to me and uh the button is the button is the button.
17:53
You know, the greatest uh invasion in human history took place on June 6th, 1944 on the northwest coast of France.
18:02
That that ended um what Adolf Hitler had in ended began to end in in in 12 years what Adolf Hitler had intended to be a thousand-year Reich.
18:14
Well, let's talk about I would like to talk about the heart.
18:17
And maybe that's almost a contradiction in in terms uh but I have been very hyper analytical my whole life and I think have neglected to pay attention to signals from uh the body and I've been trying to cultivate this over the last few years in particular and a woman named Diana Chapman and Jim Deetur introduced me to this concept of the whole the whole body or the full body. Yes.
18:45
And I've read that at least in response to questions like when you start one of these big movies, what's the first step?
18:52
That you talk about uh looking for the big wholehearted yes that isn't coming from your head but your heart.
19:01
Kind of like falling in love.
19:02
And so what I've been trying to do is pay attention to the sensations whether it's heart centered or gut- centered to assess whether something is a full yes for me.
19:12
What what does a full wholehearted guess feel like to you?
19:16
And and could you give us an example of a project where that was a clear signal? Sure.
19:24
Uh I think the best example is the one sort of right in front of us, which is country music.
19:30
I had had country music as an intellectual didactic expository idea if that's what it was on a list that I've recently found from the 1990s and from another list from the as meaning that I was thinking about it right and there might be 50 different things you you know the lottery where they've got all these pingpong balls bouncing around and then one drops down if imagine these are all just completely arbitrary head things uh I just an idea. Oh, we should do this.
20:01
We should think about that. What about this?
20:02
And so, you just want to write them down, so don't forget them and whatever. But nothing happens. And nothing did happen.
20:07
And I I I I had forgotten that they were even there.
20:12
But I remember visiting a friend of mine in uh Dallas, Texas, who had been raising money for us and wonderful, dear friend.
20:20
And I came down for breakfast one day. We'd done an event.
20:22
I was staying at his house.
20:24
And um I guess we were the first people up.
20:26
And he said, "You ever thought about country music?"
20:29
And when he said it, it was like this huge fullbody explosion.
20:32
And I looked at him and it was just I could feel it in my chest and I could feel it in my gut.
20:40
And so it wasn't I started to answer yes.
20:46
And then I realized that that yes was so feeble and so partial because it had to do with sort of trying to be oh yeah well it's on a list you know like that that I realized that the my my my physical and more importantly my emotional reaction to that had
21:02
completely obliterated what little blip it was as a kind of mental construct that had worked its way in the '9s and later the as onto a sheet of paper with 10 20 30 other subjects some of which I've done some of which I haven't done, some of which I'll get to, some of which I will never get to. And so this was
21:19
And so this was something else.
21:22
And so as I I kind of felt like I got down on one knee, I didn't physically and proposed to country music at that. It was a big yes.
21:30
Now the the biggest thing I knew is that this project would have to go through one of my partners who I knew knew more about country music.
21:39
And more importantly, he and I had been thinking about another big project.
21:42
and we're just throwing around some ideas and doing a little research.
21:46
Could we possibly pull this off?
21:47
And we were not in quicksand, but we were, you know, our back rear right tire was stuck.
21:51
And I went back to New Hampshire and I went to him and I said, "What about look, we don't need to abandon this other thing, but what about country music?"
22:00
And it it like he looked at me like, "Yes."
22:02
like he looked at me like, "Yes." and the two of us I mean that from that moment I mean I do remember what the other project was but it it you know we hadn't shot anything we hadn't written anything there had been no budget raised for it was just early conceptual stuff
22:19
it was dropped in favor of the next eight and a half years of work and it was you know you say total this is wholeheartedness that's what it is it has to be the integration so that you you physically commit to it you you mentally commit to it, but you emotionally commit to it. And that yes,
22:36
And that yes, is very similar to the chemistry we feel with others when we fall in love, either romantically or as friends.
22:44
And as um as all the films have been, it's just been a wholehearted yes because you realize that the story is fire or the stories are firing on all cylinders that they're complex.
23:00
They represent challenge and opportunity and uh difficulty.
23:02
You know, I once was with a group of students recently and I told them that every film that I'd done was at least a million problems.
23:15
But I didn't think but I didn't think that the word problem was necessarily porative that it represented friction that needed to be overcome.
23:23
It was the necessary friction of the creative process of the making progress.
23:30
You know, you just that wall won't hold itself up.
23:35
So builder, you need to have scaffolding and false work that once you've reached a certain stage can be disassembled.
23:44
So this is what we had to do.
23:44
And how do you take you're not going to be the encyclopedia, you're not going to be the reading of the telephone book.
23:50
How do you take something as monstrously big as the Civil War or baseball or jazz or the national parks or World War II or the Roosevelts or Vietnam or now country music and say, "What do we tell? Where do we start?
24:06
How do we go back and pick up its ancestors? Where do we end?
24:11
Um how do we tell this story?"
24:14
are just really practical things that have to do with the craft and the art of filmm and larger big question things and all of that represents in the case of a series maybe millions of individual problems in quotes.
24:26
But if you look at them as as as as just whatever a runner takes to overcome that brain that's screaming stop as you're running a marathon then you understand what we're engaged in because people always come up and say wow you just spent 10 and a half years on Vietnam, eight and a half years on country music. How do you do that? I said I'm sad.
24:49
I don't want to leave it.
24:51
You know, it's not like [laughter] the the the fact I'm talking to you is one of the paliotative kind of aspects of this.
25:00
The promotional stuff permits [laughter] is the is the airlockcare that permits you to to leave the projects because all of a sudden you've been attending to the stories.
25:13
been attending to the stories. you lift up and and you begin to share it with other people and they begin to synthesize some ideas and you know they're saying oh you intended this and and you say no we didn't we just wanted to tell the story but now that you're saying this we realize the way in which
25:29
this historical moment say resonates in the present Harry Truman once said the only thing that's really new is the history you don't know people are so fond of saying history repeats itself it does not mark Twain is supposed to say that history is supposed to have said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And if he did say that, he
25:48
And if he did say that, he he's so on the mark because I believe that human nature doesn't change.
25:56
Ecclesiastes put it this way.
25:56
You know, there's nothing new under the sun.
25:59
That's the Old Testament.
25:59
And that may be the best.
26:01
What has been will be again.
26:03
What has been done will be done again.
26:04
There's nothing new under the sun.
26:06
And so I think that that suggests that human nature doesn't change and that it superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events and we begin to perceive patterns and echoes and themes, rhymes, Twain would say.
26:20
And um I love that we attend to the storytelling part of it.
26:26
I happen to work in American history the way somebody painter works in oil as opposed to watercolor.
26:33
And fortunately, the word history is mostly made up of the word story plus hi.
26:37
You know, you don't have to get into the um binary his story or her story.
26:44
It's just story plus hi, which is a wonderful greeting.
26:47
And you know, we finish it and then we look up and go, my god, it is resonating with the present.
26:56
And every single film I've done, like you will look at country music and you will cannot believe that we were editorially complete before the Me Too movement started. You will go, "Oh no. Oh no.
27:08
They were aware of the Me Too movement and they and they they they just worked it in."
27:12
Or I used to start my stump speech for the Vietnam War series that came out in 2017.
27:19
So imagine where we'd been for the first nine months of 2017 and for the preceding election year.
27:26
election year. And I said, "What if I told you that I had been working for 10 and a half years about mass demonstrations taking place all across the country against the current administration, about a White House in disarray, obsessed with leaks, about a
27:42
president certain the press was making up stories about him, lying, about asymmetrical warfare that confounded the mighty might of the US military, about huge, big document drops of stolen classified material into the public sphere. that destabilized the political
27:56
that destabilized the political equation and accusations that a political party reached out to a foreign power during the time of a national election to influence that election.
28:06
You would say I'd been working on the last year and a half.
28:11
But all of these things were true of the Vietnam War when I started in December of 2006 and were also true when we finished locked the picture.
28:23
no more work on it in in December of 2015, a month before the Iowa caucuses out of which Donald Trump was not supposed to emerge as a candidate.
28:36
That's and that's I could take any film any film and do that that I've worked on and it's nothing that we're prepared for.
28:45
It's only an afterthe- fact kind of collection of accounting that bittersweet period when you get a chance to you finish the film you don't want to leave it and so you're obligated because of the shoe leather necessary to promote um public broadcasting films you do in
29:04
40 cities and you begin to construct something that talks about how you related to it but it's true of every film every film including the Civil War you know, every film I've made, it just resonates in the present and suggests that Twain is absolutely correct. Yeah, it is a that's one hell of a
29:20
Yeah, it is a that's one hell of a rhyme.
29:23
And I have a question about motivation.
29:25
You mentioned 8 and 1/2 years, 10 plus years.
29:26
Some people have signs in their office, these motivational quotes of [snorts] various types, effectively some version of go get them tiger, you can do it, etc.
29:38
I have read that you have a neon sign in your editing room.
29:42
Uh yeah, what does it read and how did you choose this particular sign?
29:52
Well, you know, filmmakers are notorious uh for once something works, you don't touch it, right?
29:59
You say, "Leave that alone. It's working." Right?
30:01
And that may be great in Hollywood, but if you find out new and contradictory facts, you're kind of obligated to to do it.
30:12
And we never have a set research period followed by a set writing period followed by a a script that's now etched in stone that informs the shooting and the editing.
30:21
We never stop researching.
30:23
So we're always finding out stuff.
30:23
And we never stop writing.
30:25
So we're always cageible and willing to be flexible in in what we do.
30:30
And we're often filming interviewing before we've even written a a word of a script.
30:35
So that every time you see a talking head in our film, it's a happy accident.
30:39
It's not that I've gone to you and it said, "Hey, you know, Mr.
30:43
Ferris, could you please um get me from paragraph 2 to paragraph 3 and episode 4? Uh, thank you. Uh, thank you.
30:52
You know, could you say that again, but do it with a little bit more economy?" Yeah, that was it.
30:56
But now, could you end the way you did the first? We've never done that.
30:59
We just go and have an interview and if it doesn't work, it's our fault.
31:03
If it works, it's their greatness, right?
31:05
And so we have this complex process that uh I think serves us very well in the in the pursuit of a complicated story. So what's the neon sign?
31:19
It says it's complicated and it's the license to say even if it's perfect, even if it's working, let's open it up and add in that that complicated, conflicting, contradictory fact.
31:32
And sure, it might destabilize it, but let's let's do it anyway.
31:37
And so it just says in cursive lowercase, um, it's complicated in a neon sign.
31:42
And it's something we've said to each other for a long time.
31:47
It's it's sometimes like a scarf or a muffler, warm gloves on a cold day.
31:52
It just arms you against the the the scariness of of going out into that unknown region.
31:58
And other times, it's just like, yeah, this is what we do. And I wanted it.
32:02
I finally immortalized it by putting it in neon so that we could all remember that this is what we celebrate.
32:09
That's that I remember was making a film years ago on the Statue of Liberty and I interviewed the now past uh statesman Saul Linowitz um wonderful interview and he was quoting judge learned hand.
32:22
Could there ever be a better name for a jurist than learned hand?
32:28
And apparently learned Han said um liberty is never being too sure you're right.
32:37
And I'm sure he meant it in a rather narrow political perhaps juristp prudent sense but I took it in a broad spiritual sense.
32:46
You know that the opposite of faith is not heresy. It's it's not doubt.
32:54
It's it's just conviction. Right? So faith requires doubt.
32:59
It doesn't require um it doesn't require certainty.
33:07
And and what we've tried to do is instill in ourselves, which is the hardest thing to do.
33:11
It's much easier to try to instill it in others.
33:13
Um this idea that that we're not done.
33:15
We got to open this up again.
33:19
open this up again. Uh we've learned contradictory stuff and we're you know for a while our Vietnam script its footnotes were longer than the script itself like we would say four regiments of Vietkong uh former regiments of NVA
33:36
went down the Ho Chi Min Trail that month and we'd have an asterisk or you know footnote 117 and footnote 117 would say you know this scholar says this scholar says that this scholar says that because it's in these two places, we're going with four. But later on, we found
33:53
But later on, we found out after we locked the film that yet another scholar had said three.
33:58
And we were beginning to feel a little bit more comfortable with that and would rather heir on the conservative side. And so we changed.
34:06
We found where the narrator had said the word three and we cannibalized it and moved it over.
34:11
Sometimes we call it a franken bite.
34:14
And we um put the three in instead of the four.
34:17
so that we could just exhale a little bit.
34:19
No one would ever in a million years, not even a scholar, take us to task force.
34:24
But that was not acceptable for us.
34:27
So, we'd rather uh and if we hadn't been able to find that that that tree, we would have asked the narrator back in, Peter Coyote back in and and and um record it.
34:36
I I'd like to talk about the Civil War and uh maybe we could start with a question about the Civil War.
34:45
Just do do you have any idea how many people have seen have watched the Civil War?
34:49
Do you have any estimates? Uh no idea.
34:52
I know we reached about 40 million people who watched some or all of it.
34:58
Uh the first time is broadcast about this time uh 29 years ago in September of uh 1990.
35:03
And uh I know that in subsequent broadcasts it's done very well.
35:10
It's you know in worked itself into schools.
35:12
Um many many other people look at it regularly.
35:15
Uh so I assume it might be you know a couple multiples of of that original 40 million uh as it's gone out.
35:26
Those are astronomical numbers.
35:26
I mean they're huge huge numbers.
35:28
And yet, yeah, 20 plus years ago, television critics, at least some, thought nobody would watch the Civil War uh for for for many reasons, including that, you know, this new musical cop rock was going to blow you out of the water.
35:43
That didn't end up being the case.
35:45
And what what I wonder especially given that we're we're just talking about faith and conviction and so on.
35:53
Have have you have you as someone who comes across say in an interview like this as [snorts] uh completely confident and uh and clear in focus?
36:06
Have you ever felt lost or had self-doubt?
36:09
Are there any stories that you can paint just to provide a um maybe a fleshed out human picture of you?
36:18
Could you talk about a difficult time or any difficult time that you've gone through?
36:22
Well, I am a very very anxious person and uh I now don't have too much time for anxiety because people that I love are anxious now too and I've got to give my attention to them.
36:35
So the early days, the first film on the Brooklyn Bridge through the Civil War were agonizing every morning up at 4:00 a. m.
36:43
I I remember I asked Shelby Foot about Grant and he said Grant, meaning US Grant, had what they call 4:00 in the morning courage.
36:53
That meant that you could wake him up at 4:00 in the morning and tell him the enemy had turned his left flank and he'd be as cool as a cucumber.
36:58
And I remember thinking, "Oh my god, I wish I had four o'clock in the morning courage."
37:04
And I think I've developed it now and I've I've learned how to harness it and turn it around.
37:08
But it was debilitating, crushing anxiety about whether this would work.
37:13
You know, I I was told while I was making the Civil War that, yeah, sure, these first six films on the Brooklyn Bridge and the Shakers and Huey Long and the Statue of Liberty and Congress and Thomas Hart Benton, an hour and a half, an hour in length, people will watch steel photographs for that long.
37:29
but they're not going to look for the five one hours that initially we proposed the Civil War to be.
37:35
And it ended up being nearly 12 hours in length.
37:38
And that that was terrifying to be told that over and over again.
37:43
And I remember I knew the film was good when it was done, but I remember arriving in Los Angeles for the Television Critics Association meeting and several of the critics would say, "Ken, it's terrific, but you know, nobody's going to watch it because of this copros show by Steven Botchko."
37:56
but more because we were in an age when people were addicted to uh MTV cutting and that the two and a half minutes was the length of the American attention span.
38:11
And I remember thinking, wow, that's too bad.
38:15
Uh you know, it was le it didn't produce anxiety the way the actual making of the film did.
38:20
And I'm so grateful for those loved ones and colleagues and sometimes they were both who shored me up and pretended that I was okay or you know uh covered for me if it was just too too much.
38:34
Um really really important people still in my life to this day.
38:40
Um, but I remember thinking that I thought that all real meaning acrewed in duration, that the work we're proudest of, that you're proudest of, I would presume, that the relationships you care most about, have benefited from our sustained attention, and that it's okay to have both.
38:59
that we do need the fast-paced, fast cutting 2 and a half minute MTV uh music video just as today as people were telling me during the as that no one would watch the the the national parks or the World War II because of YouTube which you know meant that kitten with a ball of yarn.
39:19
um the these could coexist that that the that the stuff we cared about that all meaning acrewed in duration was an important thing and what was true was that the Civil War bore it out.
39:33
that the Civil War bore it out. I mean then as soon as we were working on baseball they said geez 18 and 1/2 hours not not even 11 hours and 40 minutes the Civil War but 18 and 1/2 hours nobody's going to watch that and then there was a strike and everybody did and jazz oh man
39:48
nobody's going to watch you know 18 hours of black people right and I just said I think so or or the national parks that's not a traalog that's not a you know which lodge or inn to your you should have your family stay at and So, I just started trusting at some point along the way. And I got I got a
40:07
And I got I got a I I It's funny that you asked this because I've just been dealing it recently with a loved one.
40:15
I developed in the early to mid 90s a sort of sense of three things.
40:21
I call them my one of my daughters calls them the three truths.
40:27
I'm not willing to elevate them to that.
40:29
I just call them the three things that I try to do as I help others, friends and and loved ones with anxiety of this debilitating kind that this will pass.
40:40
You know, all things are transitory.
40:42
Get help from others and be kind to yourself.
40:45
And if I had to do a neon sign, another neon sign, I think I'd do the three things.
40:51
And I've learned to internalize them and in large measure because like that alcoholic or drug addict who becomes the most effective counselor, somebody who's been through the ringer of it is I think a much better um is a much more authentic spokesperson.
41:10
And this goes back to country.
41:11
this is at the heart of it is the sincerity or the authenticity that is at the heart of these relatively simple songs um that are as the songwriter Harlon Howard said three chords in the truth.
41:23
So it's acknowledging that there's a simplicity to it.
41:26
Doesn't have the sophistication or the complication of classical music or some forms of jazz.
41:31
But that back end, the truth, it means it's dealing with universal human things.
41:36
And I find the universality of those three things similar to the effectiveness of a good country song.
41:44
Charlie Pride says in the introduction that I think there's a country song for every mood you're in.
41:49
It might make you cry, but you'll feel better for crying.
41:50
So if you hear Hank hear Hank Williams say, "Hear that lonesome whipper will.
41:55
He sounds too blue to fly.
41:57
The midnight train is whining low.
42:00
I'm so lonesome I could cry."
42:04
It's you know I don't you know if you've got music which went Marcales says in this film and country music not just jazz is the art of the invisible.
42:11
The only art form that's invisible is music.
42:16
And you add to it poetry, which is the distillation of language, our form of communication.
42:21
Then you're mainlining a completely benign form of heroin, emotional heroin, right into your bloodstream.
42:29
And it gets there really quick and it's it's it's its effects are only positive.
42:34
This is the Hank Williams who also wrote, "I've got a hot rod Ford and a $2 bill and I know a place right over the hill."
42:41
you know, and he goes on to talk about the joy of young love or the possibility of new love.
42:45
Uh, in that just as he speaks, you know, the silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky and as I wonder where you are, I'm so lonesome I could cry.
42:59
You know, there's just there's no one within the sound of my voice that has not experienced that.
43:06
I uh moved to Austin, Texas a few years ago and spent a lot of time on Willie Nelson Boulevard.
43:12
I saw him per uh I saw him perform recently at Austin City Limits and uh my I think my memory serves me right that he uh was part of the pilot for that series in 1972.
43:23
So it's it's and it was just spectacular.
43:29
Just absolutely spectacular.
43:29
Uh so I'm looking forward to digging into uh country music.
43:34
I did have a follow-up question on the three truths as your daughter calls them.
43:39
[snorts] The third in particular, be kind to yourself.
43:45
Could you Man, that's the hardest.
43:47
Yeah, it's the hardest for me, too.
43:48
Could you describe what that looks like for you?
43:51
Are there any practices or things that you now say to yourself uh in your own head that's different? Yeah.
43:59
I I I can I can talk myself down from the first thing.
44:04
I'm smart enough to surround myself with people that are willing to put up with uh doing what the second thing and but I'm a complete failure on that last thing, too.
44:16
I I can pay lip service to it only because I know it's true and it's therefore not phony. It isn't lip service. It is the truth.
44:26
But I think this is the hardest thing for all of us is how to be kind to ourselves.
44:31
How do we how do we not murder this moment?
44:34
Uh how do we how do we prepare ourselves for the next moment whatever it is and to to try to liberate ourselves from the prison of the contemplation of the past which may promote depression.
44:49
not to not to deny the chemical uh origins of of that nor anxiety which is an anticipation of the future.
45:02
Thomas Jefferson had a wonderful thing.
45:04
How much pain has caused us the evils which have never happened.
45:10
And it really surprised me that Tom, who was really good at ignoring some fundamental things right in front of him, like the fact that he lived in a plantation and his comfortable life was due entirely to people that he owned and did not pay could realize too that these these basic elements of the human heart are often have to do with worry.
45:33
What that is is a great late 18th century uh or maybe he wrote it in the early 19th century um commentary about worry.
45:41
How much pain has caused us the evils which have never happened.
45:49
Thomas Jefferson uh was was also a fan of Senica the Younger and the the philosophical school of stoicism as was uh George Washington who had uh a play about Kato performed at Valley Forge to bolster the morale of the troops.
46:04
Are there any uh do you gravitate to any uh particular philosophies or philosophical writings if uh not that not that you have to but I imag I mean you're very well read clearly.
46:18
Well well you know I love what um Jeffrey Ward who's my longtime writing collaborator uh along with Dayton Duncan.
46:28
Jeff has been writing a little bit longer and he wrote the Roosevelts and and he was uh uh quoting Franklin Roosevelt when I asked it what his philosophy was.
46:38
He said he was a Christian and an American and left it at that.
46:44
And you [snorts] know at the end of the day I'll hide behind FDR's skirts.
46:49
You know I am I think a Christian.
46:54
I'm not a practicing Christian, but I'd like to believe that I'm a believing Christian and that I'm an American.
47:01
And uh that basically says that I do not need to hue to any one political philosophy because there's always the the the possibility and in fact it isn't a possibility.
47:16
There's always the certainty that the opposite of what I might believe in might also be true.
47:24
And that requires the nimleness of human that that requires a human dexterity that the binary aspects of politics don't um subscribe to.
47:34
And that's why I think FDR said it exactly right.
47:41
And I have friends as close colleagues as possible who I guess would call themselves atheists and others who uh have other faiths uh in addition to Christianity. But this is what I am. I am what I am.
47:55
I think Popeye said and I like I like both, you know.
47:58
I like I like that American part.
48:00
You know, it's for all the things that we've screwed up, for all of the things we've gotten so wrong.
48:07
I do believe, as Lincoln said in his message to Congress, what we'd call the State of the Union in December of of 1862, that we were the last best hope of Earth.
48:19
That that this myth of exceptionalism poisons us and pollutes us and allows us to incubate isolated as we are by these two magnificent oceans that have protected us as well.
48:29
Permits us to incubate so many horrible tendencies.
48:34
an addiction to money and guns and uh suspicions of the other.
48:37
It it you know I I have spent my entire professional life um living in a kind of space I like to think about it.
48:48
It will sound now absurd to you as I explain it.
48:52
Um between the twolet lowercase plural pronoun us and its capitalized uh version the US.
49:01
That is to say, all of the intimacy and warmth of us along with we and our and all of the breadth, the majesty, the complexity, the contradiction, even the controversy of the United States.
49:17
And what I've learned over 40 plus years of practicing in my professional life telling stories in American history about us and the US is that there's only us. There's no them.
49:33
You know, country music has been since the very beginning an alloy, a mixture of things, stronger because it has constituent elements that make it stronger.
49:44
And that at any time in our history when we suggest that pulling out one aspect of it will make it pure American, you have a priori weakened the ally and made it brittle and more breakable.
49:58
And I like our suppleness. I like our muttonness.
50:02
I like our mongrelness, which is of course abhorrent uh to various currents that are boiling and swirling in the United States.
50:11
Um this is what makes us stronger.
50:14
The banjo, one of the key instruments of country music is from Africa.
50:19
Um AP Carter of the Carter family, the original Carter family.
50:24
original Carter family. uh Bill Monroe uh the founder of bluegrass uh uh the forementioned Hank Williams and Johnny Cash people who deserved to be on the Mount Rushmore of early country music all had an African-American tutor that
50:42
took their chops from here to way up here to qualify them for consideration in that pantheon on that Mount Rushmore and Jimmy Rogers the first superstar at the same times as the Carter grew up sused with the blues sung by the black uh train crews that he worked with in southern Mississippi. So while he
51:02
So while he didn't have one mentor the way Hank Williams did, Rufus Tat Payne, about whom he said, "Everything I learned about music I got from Rufus, that's that's not bad for arguably the most important country singer songwriter."
51:17
It just tells you that whatever superficial thing you've got about country music in your head, whatever conventional wisdom that you think you're now gonna uh enjoying, it ain't true.
51:29
That it's always been a mixture and it's always been mostly workingass.
51:34
This is a story of women, really strong women, from the very very beginning.
51:39
It's a story of people coming out of poverty, black and white, and changing the dynamics of their lives.
51:45
And if they didn't bring other people out, they gave them at least the tools to dream how to do that.
51:51
It's about geographical dislocation and psychological dislocation.
51:54
And at the end of the day, this extraordinary marriage of this invisible art form combined with the poetry of the words and the for us as filmmakers startling emotion we did not ever expect to find in the story of country music.
52:13
I'd like to ask a question about the making of Ken Burns because you said, "I am what I am," which is true. You are what you are. I can't deny that.
52:23
But uh I my my girlfriend said to me recently over dinner, she was she was she was uh quoting someone else, but she said that every every child is born into a different family in the sense that if you have two or three siblings, as people change over time, you're born into a different family.
52:39
And likewise, I would imagine that there are certain aspects of keness that have remained the same for a long time, but you made choices that have shaped who you are today.
52:51
And I wanted to ask about one in particular, and this is Hampshire College.
52:57
Could you could you talk about Hampshire?
53:00
Describe Hampshire College and how you ended up there because I I actually do not know. Okay.
53:06
So, I I am the son of an anthropologist and a mother who had a an advanced degree in biology but couldn't really use it.
53:17
She raised two sons until she died of cancer in 1965, which is the dominant event of my life.
53:23
Uh, shortly afterwards, I watched my father cry at a movie and decided I wanted to be a filmmaker.
53:30
I had seen the safe haven that it had provided for him.
53:32
A man who I had never seen cry, not during my mother's illness, not at her death, not at her funeral, a point uh pointed out to me by friends uh which I knew meant that was there was an implicit criticism and I saw my dad cry at a movie called Odd Man Out.
53:49
Anyway, I was going to be a Hollywood director.
53:51
So flash forward, I am in my senior year at high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
53:56
And my best friend subscribes to a magazine apparently that I have never heard of called Newsweek.
54:03
Our family subscribed to Time magazine.
54:06
I didn't know there was anything else but Time magazine for a Newsweekly, which I devoured by that time uh cover to cover.
54:12
And here was a description of a tiny experimental college that had just opened in the last few weeks.
54:18
This was October of 1970.
54:21
It had opened in September of 1970, which was, for lack of a better word, u a graduate school experience at an undergraduate level.
54:33
That is to say, you were trusted to either know what you wanted to do or to find out what you wanted to do.
54:38
And you proceeded in much the same fashion you would in graduate school with a deemphasis on classwork and more emphasis on independent study and the assembling of your own examinations, your own proposals and the assembling of a faculty small faculty group of two or three who would judge it along the way and finally pass on it, pass or fail.
54:56
I like falling in love with country music.
55:01
It just lit me up and I said, "I want to go there."
55:03
And he said, "I'm applying."
55:05
And um I was supposed to go to the University of Michigan where I could get in for free or nominal stuff cuz my dad taught there.
55:12
Um I I Hampshire was the most expensive college on earth.
55:15
Uh room board and tuition in the fall of 71.
55:18
The class to which I hope to enter in was $4,730.
55:27
$30 more than Harvard University. Wow.
55:29
And I basically moved all my chips. I quit school early.
55:33
I had advanced placement courses that permitted me to interpret the Michigan laws that said I needed x number of credits, not four years of high school or three years of high school.
55:43
And that I had that and that I was leaving after Christmas.
55:45
And the guidance counselor said, "You were making a big mistake."
55:48
And I worked in a record store part-time.
55:51
I now went full-time to that. Saved up money.
55:54
My grandmother gave me $1,000. I had inherited $1,000.
55:58
that pushed all my chips into year one fully intending to come back to Michigan just having, you know, blown it all on that, you know, uh, experiment.
56:08
I so fell in love with Hampshire.
56:11
I am so a poster boy for it that I couldn't not do it. So, I quit.
56:15
I took a leave from Hampshire my second year and worked literally as an indentured servant to a dear friend still who ran the bookstore at the college and got enough money uh to pay for the next two years of Hampshire.
56:29
And though it took four years, I spent only three years actually uh metriculating there and ended up with a a bachelor of arts in film study and design.
56:39
Uh, and I left there with this sort of naive and perhaps arrogant assumption that I could start uh, my own film company rather than do what everyone else was supposed to do, which is go to New York or LA or whatever big city and apprentice at a film company and work your way up.
56:58
So, I started with two other Hampshire grads, Florentine Films, in 1976, the year after I graduated, though we'd been talking and thinking about it for a long time.
57:09
And that's been my only employer, meaning I've got the worst boss ever, which is me.
57:17
[laughter] Two two quick questions. Thank you. Hampshire was central.
57:22
Miss Central, we had two teachers, film and photography teachers, mostly still photographers, social documentary still photographers, Elaine Maize and Jerome Lee.
57:30
They became mentors in the best sense of the word almost in a medieval renaissance sense of of a real master student relationship and my relationship with Jerry Leeing was complete uh true to the ends of his life. He died in 2011.
57:46
I still worship him and uh all that he gave me.
57:49
I if he did not exist you would not be having this conversation.
57:54
I said that, you know, once Dizzy Gillespie said of Lewis Armstrong, know him, know me.
57:59
Know Jerry Leeling, know me. Period. Full stop.
58:05
What are some of the things that uh stuck with you from Jerry or were imprinted upon you that had such a tremendous impact?
58:12
Or was it his care for you?
58:14
I mean, how would you describe what was important?
58:16
was a he was a keroginally uh uh kind of tough guy.
58:21
uh uh kind of tough guy. I remember I was a precocious film student all through high school, not having any formal courses to take but studying and reading and I knew stuff and I had a sentence which I think I can still do from Andrew Saris, one of the great
58:39
critics and proponents of the French Uour theory that the director is the author of the film and he was talking about Nicholas Ray who made Rebel Without a Cause but he also made a film called Johnny Guitar whose screenwriter was Philip Yordan who was eventually blacklisted. did uh during those
58:54
did uh during those terrible Hollywood days in the 50s.
58:57
And so there was a sentence that I had looked at as a perplexed and you'll understand exactly why perplexed uh teenager where it said Jordan set out to attack McCarthyism.
59:09
But Rey was too delirious to pay any heed as Freudian feminism and Marxist masochism prevailed over pyandelan transcended pmics.
59:21
[laughter] And to me that was my holy grail, right?
59:26
So I finally got up a nerve second semester of Hampshire to I I'd been in a lane maze his his colleagues and younger colleagues and somebody he had imported to Hampshire the year I came the second year he'd come the first year and um I I I I showed this sentence uh I I went into his office and I suddenly like just said blurted it out.
59:48
I was showing off, right, that not only had I memorized it, but I think I knew what it meant and I'd like to have this discussion with him.
59:56
And when I finished the sentence, he looked at me and he got up from his desk and he walked around the desk and he took me by the elbow, which he always did to everybody, both in affectionate ways, but this was clearly not in an affectionate way.
1:00:09
He sort of lifted me out of my chair, moved me to the door, opened the door, and pushed me out into the hallway and shut the door.
1:00:19
[laughter] And I sat out there contemplating suicide because Jerry was known for this to being a terrifying person.
1:00:25
And I thought here I'll go in I'll disarm him with this wonderful sentence which I was going to attempt to deconstruct and everything would be great and my career such as it is and I rarely use the word career after that um would be launched.
1:00:42
and he had reminded me this was just absurd gobbledegook that Hollywood called itself the industry which ought to be warning enough and um we were interested in something else.
1:00:56
He was a great great still photographer.
1:00:57
I urge you to Google him.
1:00:59
Leeing L I E B L I N G extraordinary photographs which he put up in our in our classes along with our photographs and and our films and they're stunning.
1:01:11
He was about his he wanted us to know history.
1:01:13
He wanted us to know ethics.
1:01:15
He wanted us to be humanists.
1:01:17
He understood there was a there was an essential reciprocity that took place. Stuff didn't occur.
1:01:22
Stuff wasn't imparted just during classes.
1:01:26
Often he'd say, "My car is broken down.
1:01:27
can you drive into Northampton, the next town over, and I'll pick up the laundry? I said, "Sure."
1:01:32
And along the way, you get, look at the way that angle of that light hits.
1:01:36
You see the the way that woman uh brushed her arm there.
1:01:38
And he wasn't trying to say this is a good thing or a bad thing.
1:01:43
He was just saying notice, as his daughters say.
1:01:45
He would always say, "Go see, do be.
1:01:47
Go get out into the world. See, look around you.
1:01:52
do make something you know relate have an exchange with somebody be take it in go see do be and that to me along with Hampshire's sort of secret sauce of how they organized it was it I do not recognize the person who went into Hampshire in September of 1971 and the person who left in May or June of 75 I just completely rearranged my molecules and I have always had this extra extraordinary devotion and affection for it.
1:02:27
And when I lost Jerry, um when we lost Jerry, his family, obviously, um his teaching had reached so many people that we all still gather and collect to talk about him, what he and Elaine had had given us over those years, and how transformative that exposure to their generosity, whether it was artistic or human, it really doesn't matter.
1:02:51
And I loved the fact that in retrospect those lines were blurred.
1:02:58
You know, some of the best times I've ever had in my life were at his house.
1:03:02
You know, where we could we would just go and listen. Yeah.
1:03:06
I really look back also on my own history and the mentors who had the largest impact certainly had no clear boundary between sort of work work hours and off hours.
1:03:18
Uh and and that's the same now true for me.
1:03:22
That is to say, I I don't distinguish.
1:03:22
I mean, I I I I understand that the world sort of Sunday night gets a little bit unhappy and that I know Friday afternoon is some thing that's supposed to be good. I don't have that. I don't have that.
1:03:41
Um the cliche is if you love your work, you don't work a day in your life.
1:03:46
And you know, it is a cliche and stoifying one at that.
1:03:49
But it's um it's pretty true.
1:03:53
Um the people I love are the people I work with. I work with my daughter.
1:03:58
She's one of my producers.
1:03:58
She teaches me stuff as does my son-in-law all of the time.
1:04:02
And uh people I mean my cinematographer, we barely talk to one another.
1:04:08
We have been working together for 46 years. That's incredible.
1:04:13
That's incredible. I mean he was at H he was at Hampshire and now we just we go into situations and it's just sort of it's almost like telepathy where we just through him you know look a little gesture whatever and all of it if he if you were talking to Buddy Squires who is
1:04:31
this extraordinary cinematographer about Jerry you'd be hearing different sorts of thing but the meaning would be exactly what I've imparted about Jerry Leeling Jerome Leeling how did your how did your other respond if at all to your decision to put all of your chips, push all of your chips under the table for this one thing. Uh
1:04:52
Uh particularly given that you only had funds for one year.
1:04:56
Uh was that a conversation? Our our No.
1:05:02
Uh I think a lot of it had to do with some stuff that was that that befell him.
1:05:09
He was not as mentally sound as he should be.
1:05:12
I came across a few years ago a letter from my mother to his mother, her mother-in-law, in which she's saying, "I'm dying.
1:05:22
What am I going to do with my little boys?
1:05:23
He can't he can't possibly take care of them."
1:05:26
And uh we muddled through. We did okay.
1:05:29
And I think when I decided this, he knew in some respects that I needed to get out of dodge, that I couldn't be at the scene of the crime, that is the death, the place where my mother had died.
1:05:39
And uh I think because he wasn't financially involved, he had no resources.
1:05:45
He was in a kind of publisher parish uh situation with the University of Michigan, which eventually ended up with the parishing.
1:05:52
Uh he was in no position to help.
1:05:56
So, it was really I was going to do this and I think he was happy for me that I had found the clutch necessary to put myself in gear because he's still the most brilliant man I've ever met.
1:06:10
Like a Maserati, [clears throat] my younger brother, Rick described him as, uh, without a clutch.
1:06:15
So, you can rev the engine in the driveway, but you can't go anywhere. And that was my dad.
1:06:21
Was the the presenting symptom of the missing clutch depression or something that resembled depression?
1:06:30
And what if you don't mind me asking? I believe so. No, no, no.
1:06:32
I I believe I I think we would all generally agree that it was probably bipolar, but uh no significant attempt was made at a diagnosis.
1:06:44
he was eventually ended up at a uh sort of tertiary level university in Western Michigan and uh got somebody who was supposed to help him who didn't really and so we never really he was never really treated for that but it it was uh you know it it was a sad sad lifetime.
1:07:05
However, he's the smartest person I've ever met.
1:07:07
He was an amateur still photographer and a professional anthropologist.
1:07:14
And my very first memory, the first little film strip that runs through my head is him just couple seconds of him building a dark room in the basement of our tracked house in New York, Delaware, where he was the only anthropologist in the state of Delaware.
1:07:28
And then uh the next clip is of me being held in his very uh strong left arm as he manipulated the tongs in that finished dark room.
1:07:38
One of the few things he finished uh in that eerie red light with those ghastly smells of the chemicals as I watch the miracle of a picture come out of a blank page.
1:07:48
And if you think about what I do, there is an anthropology to it.
1:07:55
And it is rooted in the DNA.
1:07:58
My DNA of my work is a still photograph.
1:08:02
Even if I've got all the footage in the world, I will still often default for real meaning to communicating with a single still image.
1:08:11
And that's my dad as much as it is Jerome Leeing and Elaine Mays.
1:08:13
It's my dad with the kind of anthropology, the story of us.
1:08:19
Um, and so a lot of, you know, strength and I hope goodness comes came from my mother who I had a very short time with on this earth.
1:08:30
I mean, I we just passed this past April um 60 55 years without a mother, which I have to tell you, Tim, is way too long to be without a mother.
1:08:44
But at the same time, she is present every single day of my life in the way my father isn't.
1:08:49
And yet, I actually have to pay him the honor of having created not only me, but my brother and my mother, too.
1:08:57
And my brother Rick is much more um understanding of this.
1:09:03
And we just had an interesting conversation together at the Turide Film Festival, which was supposed to be talking about us as filmmakers.
1:09:11
And we immediately went to this dynamic.
1:09:13
And uh he spoke about him as feeling the physical love of my mother and me always kind of pushing away and going out and doing things and having projects.
1:09:26
And so the thing that I'm lacking is that sense of ultimate security which he actually has if not the ability to execute in quite the same way that I am.
1:09:37
And so it was just one of the most amazing conversations I've ever had in my life uh with the gift of my brother uh speaking truth to a situation that informs every film I made.
1:09:49
I mean, my I was going through a crisis and my father-in-law, my late father-in-law said to me, um, I said I seem to be keeping my mother alive because I couldn't be present on the day she died, April 28th.
1:10:02
It was always is always approaching and then always disappearing, but I was never aware that day.
1:10:09
And he said, "I bet you blew out your candles as a young boy uh wishing she'd come back."
1:10:13
I said, "I did it my last birthday, you know."
1:10:15
And he said, "You're kidding."
1:10:18
And he said, 'But look what you do for a living.' And I said, 'What?
1:10:21
He said, 'You wake the dead.
1:10:21
You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive.
1:10:26
Who do you think you're really trying to wake up?
1:10:28
And from that moment on, I plowed towards finding a way.
1:10:33
I've never not been present on um April 28th.
1:10:37
For a long time, it took me going to Ann Arbor with my then small children and renting a car and making a picnic out of it and visiting a grave that we had finally established.
1:10:46
My father had not bothered to pick up the ashes uh and became one of those forgotten repressed memories of childhood.
1:10:55
And all of a sudden at this crisis, we my brother and I realized, you know what, we have to uh to do this.
1:11:02
And so we track down her ashes at some godforsaken cemetery way outside of Ann Arbor and put a plaque there.
1:11:06
And uh for many many years I would go there every year uh with or without my daughters and turn it into an event.
1:11:14
And uh my mother's name was Laya L Y L A um an old 19th century spelling.
1:11:21
She was named after her mother who was born in the 19th century.
1:11:25
And when my oldest daughter Sarah had her first child, she named her Laya. L Y L A.
1:11:32
She was born on uh January 18th, 2011.
1:11:36
And uh I can't begin to tell you that we never said Laya.
1:11:41
We still in even at this talk at Tellide Film Festival, we refer to her as mommy.
1:11:46
Two men in their 60s, their mid60s referring to mommy because that's who she was, right?
1:11:53
Our father went from daddy to dad.
1:11:55
Uh our mother always was mommy.
1:11:55
And I can't begin to tell you that though we never said the word, it was always draped in black crepe from April 28th uh 1965 until my granddaughter Laya was born.
1:12:12
in which case we say it 20 times a day and we talk to her and she's beautiful and she um you know the birds sing and flowers bloom and it's a wonderful wonderful thing and has helped uh immeasurably with what we were talking about before anxiety and and the burden of that.
1:12:34
That is uh that is really beautiful.
1:12:36
Thank you so much for sharing that and being so forthcoming uh I I think that uh you know not only is your personal experience uh informative I would imagine for a lot of people listening as you mentioned I mean the similarity of blowing out the candles and wishing your mother to be back I I'm sure that transcends the experiences of the two of you to many people who are listening who have lost a loved one of of one type or another.
1:13:08
And I also think it's really important and uh courageous of you to talk very directly about your father's struggles with with mental illness with depression.
1:13:20
I have uh very severe bipolar depression on both sides of my family and that applies to blood relatives but also relatives by marriage.
1:13:31
Uh my aunt died of a percoet plus alcohol overdose last year which was certainly correlate correlated to depression.
1:13:38
And so [snorts] this this this is really just a way of saying thank you for talking so vulnerably.
1:13:45
My my my late father-in-law was an eminent psychologist and I felt when he had given me this gift of saying waking the dead that that's what I did for a living.
1:13:57
I realized that I was obligated in some ways to to be transparent in my in my individual biography and life if I were going to continue doing what I was doing seemingly so successfully.
1:14:12
That is to say, if I was going to feel uh the ability to uh talk about Abraham Lincoln, I needed also or Jackie Robinson, I needed the ability to talk about Laya and Robert and about my brother Rick and about uh my granddaughter Laya and my daughters Sarah, Lily, Olivia, and Willa.
1:14:35
And do so with, you know, no differentiation.
1:14:38
I I'm sure they at times would like to have uh a free and separate life which they do have.
1:14:49
Uh and because of the notoriety of the film, sometimes there's uh people come up to me and talk to me about things that are emotional.
1:14:59
You know, a veteran will say about the Vietnam film, "This is the best thing I've ever heard. This helps me."
1:15:06
or I hear from another veteran that his best friend watched it and said he thinks he's okay now.
1:15:12
I mean that's what happens and I realize that that the emotional archaeology that I have said at the very beginning of my first film I wished to pursue.
1:15:23
I was not interested in merely excavating the dry dates and facts and events of the past, but looking for an emotional archaeology that would sort of glue those shards, those dry, brittle shards together.
1:15:36
And I have to by saying the word emotional put an asterisk.
1:15:41
I do not mean nostalgia or sentimentality.
1:15:44
That's the enemy of good anything.
1:15:46
But I do believe that there are higher emotions that we are frightened of.
1:15:52
And so we would retreat to a rational world uh most of the time where one and one always equals two.
1:16:01
When in fact what we want out of our love, out of our sex perhaps, out of our faith, after out of our art, out of maybe just something simple like a cup of tea or we're looking at a sunset.
1:16:11
We want one and one to equal three.
1:16:14
And I'm looking for that periodically that that improbable equation to obtain in the films that we are working on.
1:16:27
Well, Ken, I think that uh as a narrative alchemist of sorts that you you have managed with many uh of your films, much of your work to create that uh that unlikely synergy of 1 plus 1 equals 3.
1:16:47
If you look at all of the ingredients, all of the elements that you've pieced together over decades, uh the the this the sum is greater uh I'm going to mess up this one.
1:16:59
I always mess this one up. What is it?
1:17:00
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There we go.
1:17:04
Well, [laughter] but you know, Tim, that's exactly it.
1:17:05
When we say that, let's just stop for a second and take a rational approach.
1:17:09
Let's say the sum of the parts comes up to here, but the whole is up here. What is in there? What is in there?
1:17:21
That's the only question there is.
1:17:23
There's the phenomenal world that we can see and and we know is reflected light filled with colors and sounds and all of these sorts of things.
1:17:33
And there's a numinal world, an unseen world, which is actually much more compelling if we knew how to trust and access it.
1:17:42
And that's the big human dilemma.
1:17:44
There's nobody gets out of this alive.
1:17:47
No one gets out of this alive.
1:17:50
And and this is a an amazingly depressing sort of thing if you wish to take it that way.
1:17:58
And we could be reasonably um excused as a as sentient species for lying in a fetal position sucking our thumb waiting for that inevitable end. But we do not.
1:18:12
We raise babies and we tend gardens and we build buildings and we paint paintings and we make films and we are in conversation with each other and we're keeping as Whiton Marcel calls it the wolf from the door.
1:18:26
The wolf is the apprehension of our own mortality.
1:18:30
And that's what storytelling is, you know.
1:18:33
Storytelling is basically, honey, how was your day?
1:18:35
You know, and then you're required to edit human experience.
1:18:39
And how you edit human experience is really what it's all about, you know, honey, how your day, you know, it doesn't begin I back slowly down the driveway avoiding the garbage can at the curb.
1:18:53
Unless, of course, somebody t-bones you.
1:18:55
And that's exactly the way you describe it.
1:18:58
But you say, "Oh, you'll never believe what an sob my boss is."
1:19:02
And then all of a sudden, aristoilian poetics, that's not so scary.
1:19:06
Aristotle wrote an essay called poetics about storytelling.
1:19:08
Beginning, middle, and end, protagonist, antagonist, climax, damal, you begin to obey the laws of the editing of human experience.
1:19:21
And by sharing a story like raising a baby, like tending a garden, like building a building, we ensure a kind of immortality. Well said.
1:19:33
And the editing of the human experience is also one of those ever so valuable invisible arts right alongside music.
1:19:44
And uh I want to remind people that your newest work is country music explores the the history of a uniquely American art form, country music.
1:19:53
And uh I have a a long description here that I'll include in the show notes.
1:19:57
It'll also have already been heard in the introduction.
1:20:01
Uh I'm holding it in my hand right here.
1:20:04
A story of America, one song at a time. I cannot wait to dig in.
1:20:08
And it premieres Sunday, September 15th, 87 central.
1:20:13
You can also stream it and it's available on the PBS video app.
1:20:16
Uh so you can find that on pbs.
1:20:19
org and also on the apps.
1:20:22
I'm very excited about this and I'm so thrilled that we were able to spend some time in conversation today.
1:20:30
Uh is there anything else that you would like to say, Ken, before uh before we wrap up? No.
1:20:37
I think that I would let Merl Haggard, who we were very fortunate to be able to interview for this country music thing many, many years ago, six years ago, and he passed away soon afterwards.
1:20:47
Um, he said, "It's it's what we believe in but can't see like dreams and songs and souls."
1:20:59
And I love that idea that songwriting, creating songs, combining music might be these things that we believe in but can't see.
1:21:07
I've quoted you a couple lines from uh um Hank Williams.
1:21:10
You know, I could do Johnny Cash.
1:21:15
Uh at my door the leaves are falling.
1:21:18
A cold wild wind will come.
1:21:21
Sweethearts walk by together.
1:21:25
And I still miss someone.
1:21:25
together. And I still miss someone. I don't know that's all unseen and it is a com if I sang it it would be a combination of music and words and it's stuff that we believe in like dreams and songs and souls Merl Haggard one of the greatest of all Amy Lou Harris in our film later on five
1:21:47
episodes later this is in the introduction that he says this but five episodes later she said you want to know what country music is get a Merl Haggard record any Merurl Haggard album and put the needle uh just dating her, put the needle on any cut, any cut, it doesn't matter which one, and begin from there. So, I think if if you take it from this,
1:22:06
So, I think if if you take it from this, I always think whenever he appears on our film, he's like Zeus.
1:22:12
And uh I just think if you take it from this this God from Olympus uh that it's the things that we believe in but can't see like dreams and songs and souls.
1:22:25
dreams and songs and souls. you feel like you're dealing with that numinal world that I was speaking about that um you are apprehending or trying to apprehend something that is just beyond our ken no pun intended and is is there for us if we expose ourselves to it and I think that's the business of
1:22:53
art that Leo Toltoy said art is the transfer of emotion from one person to another sounds pretty sounds pretty straightforward and simple and I will sort of leave you with two great philosophers Merl Haggard and Leo Toltoy [laughter] and it seems easy but sometimes it's complicated and it's worth the comp it's worth the complication. Ken, thank you
1:23:14
Ken, thank you so much for taking this time.
1:23:16
I had I had just a a a wonderful experience bouncing around here in the ether having this conversation and um I I highly recommend everybody check out country music pbs. org/countrymusic.
1:23:34
They can say hello, give a give a handwave on the internet, ken Burns on Twitter.
1:23:38
And this has been such a pleasure. Thank you, Ken.
1:23:43
Tim, it's been my pleasure. Thank you so much.
1:23:46
Hey guys, this is Tim again.
1:23:46
Just a few more things before you take off.
1:23:48
Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday.
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Do you want to get a short email [music] from me?
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Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend?
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And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week.
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That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered.
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It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird that I've somehow dug up in the the world of the esoteric as I do.
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It could include favorite articles that I've read [music] and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.
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It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head [music] off for the weekend.
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So, if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4ourweek. com. That's 4hourweek. com all spelled out.
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And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.
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This episode is brought to you by Pelaton. I love Pelaton.
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