Ken Burns
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
I like the fact that a film I made 35 years ago in the Civil War is like as durable now as it was then.
But they wouldn't give me the ten and a half years it took me to take.
A lot of what is fun about it – we've sort of taken history out.
It's the time and the ability to marinate the ideas, to do the deep dive into the scholarship, to triangulate the various scholarships.
We've placed everything over into one sort of set of educational prerogatives for getting that.
You want to build, as our founders said, these well-rounded citizens.
Everybody up until the point –
of our revolution, we're subjects, right?
And Jefferson says a few phrases beyond the famous second sentence.
He goes, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.
Meaning, the whole history of human beings is like, okay, I'm going to be under the aboot of an authoritarian.
I just, you know, that's my lot.
I'm just going to accept it.
And he's going, no, central to the success of this new thing you were creating, citizens,
Was the responsibility to educate and to be educated and to do that your lifelong.
In fact, he could have said Jefferson could have said life, liberty and property.
He said the pursuit of happiness.
That was not the chasing of happiness.
objects, things in a marketplace of objects, but it was lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas.
It was making the story of how we acquire virtue.
And they used that word all the time.
They imported it from the classical.
As you know better than anybody, there's lots of different viewpoints and perspectives, and you want to find a way in which you can –
They went over the Dark Ages, over the Middle Ages, over the medieval period and pulled back from classical times this idea of virtue, of temperance, of tolerance and all of that.
There's a wonderful moment when John Adams, who's the big worrier of the revolution, he's always worrying.
He's saying, I just don't know if there's enough virtue to have a republic.
Everybody is so ambitious and so greedy and so out to do this.
And so for him, if you were going to create this new thing, something new under the sun, you know, the world started over again, as Thomas Paine is suggesting, an asylum for mankind, he called it.
then maybe you had to figure out how to educate your stuff.
And so when you go back and say, what have we lost?
We're now just repeating, are we trying to get to the test?
Are we trying to make a well-rounded human being?
In 1838, there is this lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, who is just a few days short of his 29th birthday, who is addressing the young man's Lyceum on an afternoon.
kind of, if not average them out, you can find a way in which you can understand them and you can have a conversation, a sort of a campfire around which you can discuss the complexity and the undertow of any subject.
And the topic is foreign policy.
And he says, when shall we expect the approach of danger?
Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us with a blow?
Then he answered his own question.
All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track in the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years.
If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.
As a nation of free men, we shall live through all time or die by suicide.
He would come the closest to overseeing our near national suicide in the Civil War.
But he understood here you got these two magnificent oceans, big, relatively benign neighbors north and south.
And so what we've been able to do is incubate.
So many extraordinary things.
But we've also been able to incubate lots of less than extraordinary things.
And he was saying it's those less than extraordinary things are going to trip us up or we'll live forever.
Because if you think about it.
the greatest naval invasion in history, you know, June 6, 1944, D-Day, Normandy.
Nobody's going to land at Montauk.
Nobody's going to land at, you know, St.
Nobody's going to land at Galveston.
We'll sink or swim by the extent to which we are knowledgeable of and adhere to the blessings that we've received from that founding generation, the sacrifice made not by those boldface names.
but by the people that you've never heard of, that we are trying to tell you about, John Greenwood, the 14-year-old Pfeiffer, Joseph Plum Martin, the 15-year-old kid from Connecticut, Betsy Ambler, you know, loyalists, too.
We call balls and strikes, you know?
Being a loyalist in the revolution is what it would be like saying, well, you're conservative, right?
Well, you think I live under the greatest...
political system, the British constitutional monarchy, why would I want to change this great life, this great prosperity I have for this idea that A, sounds foolhardy and radical, but also B, has zero chance of working out.
You pick it, the Brooklyn Bridge, the American Revolution, most recently.
Zero chance of working out, right?
At Lexington, 250 years ago on April 19th, the chances of the Patriots prevailing are zero.
And to tell the story of how it went from zero to 100% is scary, violent, complicated, lots of undertow, and as exhilarating as you could possibly imagine.
Proclaiming the unalienable rights of all people.
Thomas Jefferson meant all white men of property free of debt.
But the words are beautiful.
And the door got opened a crack and everybody else put their foot in it.
Women put their foot in it, the poor, the not-landed people, the folks, the craftsmen who just had a regular job, black people.
And it has sponsored revolutions all around the world, democratic revolutions, that the greatest thing that we invented was the idea that we could govern ourselves, that we would no longer be under the boot of an authoritarian master who had just set himself up, like King George,
you know, because of hereditary privilege, you know, his grandfather and his grandfather and his father and his uncle and going back.
And so all of these people that we consider the bold-faced names of our revolution, the Washingtons and the Jeffersons and the Patrick Henrys and the John Adams and the
They didn't know they were those people.
They didn't know they were a planter and they were a businessman and they were a lawyer and they were this guy and a planter or a scientist.
And they were just risking their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for something much bigger than anything else.
I'd like to attribute some consciousness to it, and I honestly can't do it.
So we have a technical problem, which I'll share with you, or I thought it was a technical problem, which is the climax.
If you're making a film called The American Revolution, the climax is this.
The Battle of Yorktown happens in October of 1781.
The British don't leave New York for two more years until 1783.
They're occupying New York, which they took over in the summer of 1776.
I realized that I was striking out trying to raise funds from folks.
And our Articles of Convention are doing nothing
Articles of Confederation are doing nothing.
And so in 1787, we have this constitutional convention that happens in Philadelphia, four months.
They hammer together the shortest constitution in the world, and it is exactly that.
Jefferson's writing in from Paris, representing our interests, going, but what about this?
What about – they're trying to check the possibility of somebody being –
somebody who would try to take advantage of the system and rig it to their own benefit.
And so all of those elaborately beautiful checks and balances, Article 1 is the legislative.
It delineates Article 3, the judicial.
It delineates what the responsibilities are and the way in which the system has worked and fits and starts with lots of problems and, you know,
And the people who were interested in helping me, like the National Endowment for the Humanities or this, all required me to give it for free, as they still do, to PBS.
There's something encouraging about seeing how divided Americans were back then because we're always wringing our hands.
And my feeling is that if you succumb to argument, right, which is what we do.
The novelist Richard Powers said the best arguments in the world, and that's all we do is argue, the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view.
The only thing that can do that, that is to say change somebody's point of view, is a good story.
Because a good story allows contradiction and undertow.
You can have a George Washington who is complex, flawed, rash, makes terrible tactical decisions on the battlefield, and yet without him, historian after historian after historian says, without him, we don't have a country.
And you can take that and put that in the bank and at the same time understand the dimensions of we all have feet of clay.
We're all flawed in some way.
And to try to design a narrative that isn't, you know, filled with that kind of morning and again sanitized Madison Avenue kind of view of American history, nor is it that unforgiving revisionism that wants to throw out anybody who did something bad back then
you then permit a world to exist in which they suddenly seem familiar to you.
Like, you can argue with other people and see that you get nowhere, but you also know if you're married or you have kids or you have friends or you're in business that you actually are more engaged in story and tolerance and understanding and listening.
And we had foundations and that.
As filmmakers, strangely enough, it's not to impose ourselves on the material.
As I said before, we're umpires calling balls and strikes.
It's to listen to the material.
What is it saying about this circumstances of, say, the resistance in Boston in the early days leading up to the revolution?
And so suddenly that dream of being a filmmaker, which I'd had since 12—I wanted to be a filmmaker at 12—
Every school kid knows that when the 60 or 70 people, all white males, both rich and poor in Boston, dumped 40 tons of tea, 40 tons of tea in the harbor, they were dressed crudely as Native Americans.
And if you ask a kid, why were they dressed that way?
Well, you know, just to disguise, to put the blame on somebody else.
It was to say, we're not part of the mother country anymore.
We've been having complaints about British citizenship.
of the communion of strangers in dark rooms, the cinematic experience.
But all of a sudden, those laws have been broken out into natural laws.
And we're telling you that we're not trying to blame it on anyone else.
Nobody would for a second have thought that the Native Americans would have dumped the tea.
They weren't burdened by the tea tax.
What they were doing was saying we are – and it's so ironic given the history of our relationship to the dispossession of native lands.
They are saying we are aboriginal.
This is what the scholar Phil Deloria says.
We're saying we're not of the mother country.
We're in essence kind of filing divorce papers by dressing as the people who originally inhabited this country dressed.
How did you figure that out?
It's listening to scholarship.
It's thinking, of course, that you're not going to have— no one in their right mind is going to say, oh, the Native Americans did it because they're protesting the T-tax.
Suddenly I had to go, you know what, it's okay.
They're not paying the T-tax, right?
So it's like you then go and then you talk to a scholar, in this case Phil Deloria, who's been studying Native stuff, and he goes, just think about it.
You're dressed crudely as this.
to Britain, that we are no longer, we're severing ties.
Now, this is well before, this is December of 1773.
The guns are going to fire in about 18 months at Lexington, a little bit less than 18 months at Lexington and Concord on April 19th.
I'm trading hundreds or maybe thousands of viewers for millions of viewers on a smaller screen, and they're not watching it together, but they're having an experience, and I can do something over time.
But it is all of these little moments that lead up to boycotted British goods.
huge part of the role of the resistance.
You've got people like Samuel Adams, who is a failure as a brewer and a tax collector.
Who is, his whole job is to keep his fellow colonists alive to their grievances.
When things calm down, the Brits sort of retreat.
He goes, oh, no, no, no, it's just going to get worse.
And so you meet these characters that sound an awful lot like characters that occupy our large media space.
And it was occupying the large media space of the colonists from New Hampshire.
The Walpole Gazette was read all the way in Georgia.
People exchanged ideas and thought about things and were trying to figure out –
Even as late as the – even after Lexington conquered, even after the Battle of Bunker Hill, which is June of 75, even after the other things that were happening, by early 76, nobody's absolutely – not nobody, but there's not a majority will for independence, independency as they called it.
And then Thomas Paine comes in and writes this pamphlet, Common Sense.
And all of a sudden, people are going, oh, yeah.
And by June, there's a committee of the Second Continental Congress, and Franklin's in charge of it, and there's John Adams is on the committee, and there's a 32-year-old lawyer from Virginia named Thomas Jefferson who's given the first crack at doing this thing.
He writes, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.
who's the old man, the chairman, if you will, of this little committee, goes, uh-uh, we hold these truths to be self-evident.
Joe, there is nothing in the world less self-evident than the idea that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I can do a Civil War series, and it can be 11 1⁄2, 12 hours, and get deep, deep into—
But as someone pointed out, it's the old lawyer's dodge.
You know, you just tell them that it's self-evident, not just sacred and undeniable, lovely phrasing on Jefferson's part.
But if you say self-evident, then we're not arguing about this thing.
We're saying that everything that you're about to hear is without argument, which is like
like really in-your-face bold move in the intimacy, the human intimacy that gets communicated when you spend even a little amount of time trying to parse this, trying to get at the heart of the dynamics of dumping tea and dressed as Indians or writing these words, you know, that mankind are disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, meaning, yeah, we've taken it, all this through human history, and guess what?
that experience, or Vietnam, which is 18 hours, 10 episodes, or country music, the national parks, jazz, baseball.
We're not going to take it anymore.
First of all, it was true what I said.
They have experienced at a reserve and at sort of, as somebody said, salutary neglect.
People didn't pay attention to the colonists.
And they had learned suddenly they were more literate than their British compatriots.
They paid less taxes and they paid it to local stuff and they were – had land.
And most folks in England and Wales and Scotland and Ireland were –
They'd work the land of somebody else for a thousand years.
So they've got this British constitutional monarchy, which is a really strong thing.
And King George is not a bad guy.
He really does believe that Parliament has this role to play in the House of Lords and the House of Carmens.
They're kind of the checks and balances that we'd think of.
But they're also in the middle of the Enlightenment, where they're beginning to say that there are certain rights that are
I mean, there are like 40 different things.
That's the word that I think Jefferson would use.
That is to say, they are not bestowed by a monarch.
They're natural, that all men are created equal.
And this is distilling, in Jefferson's words in the Declaration, a century of Enlightenment thinking.
And the Enlightenment has been a kind of philosophical and human and kind of governmental dynamic that's coming out of the Renaissance, right?
American Buffalo, most recently, and Leonardo da Vinci, the first non-American topic, or just finishing the American Revolution.
We know what the Renaissance is in art.
Leonardo da Vinci, Bernini, all of this stuff, some music.
But what it's doing on a social scene and a philosophical scene is it's doing that.
And they're reaching back to antiquity, as you say, and they're pulling back some of the best ideas of self-discipline, of temperance, of virtue, all of these sorts of things.
But then because they've experienced all these years of this –
Misuse and distrust from the mother country 3,000 miles away takes at least a month for information to get there.
The Britain wins with our help what we call the French and Indian War, which was a global war called the Seven Years' War.
And they've got now the biggest, most far-flung empire on earth.
But they can't protect its own colonists who are trying to pour over the Appalachians to take Native American land.
uprisings and so they say you can't go over 1763 you can't go over that and oh by the way we're broke so we need you to help us to pay for this stuff but we don't have any representation there so native lands taxation representation become this thing and it goes on for so long they've watched
It's just, it was right for me.
the ineffectiveness of their government while they're prosecuting the revolution and the ineffectiveness of the Articles of Confederation that emerges from fighting the war and is trying to figure out how to make it work, that they go into that constitutional convention and they are determined...
to figure out every possible angle to forestall authoritarianism, to balance the relationships between the states, to have the checks and balances between the three forms of government, the judicial, the legislative, and the executive.
And I like the fact that they have, BBS,
And what was so incredible is that it fostered one of the greatest public debates ever in human history because they had emerged from this bloody, bloody, costly civil war.
Civil war means lots of deaths of civilians.
That didn't happen in our civil war except in Missouri and a little bit of Kansas.
You know, six people died at the Siege of Vicksburg, less than 20 at Atlanta, two in Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in North America.
has one foot in the marketplace and the other out.
But the American Revolution, lots of – there are battles in the south in which you might have one British officer leading loyalist troops.
Every person on each side is an American and they're killing each other.
And they're doing it not just in set battles but in little guerrilla actions, almost like the Viet Cong attacking patrols in South Vietnam.
I mean it is really bad stuff.
We're going to ratify this, but we want a Bill of Rights too.
We want to enshrine these things that we fought for.
And so you have no establishment of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom to assemble and redress grievances, right to bear arms, free and fair trial, end of cruel and unusual punishment.
All these things become the set pieces of—
You know, that foot is tentatively there.
I made a film a couple of years ago on the U.S.
and the Holocaust, what we knew, when we knew it, what we did, what we didn't do, perhaps what we should have done.
And I was at some event and somebody raised their hand and said, is the Holocaust the most important event since the birth of Jesus Christ in world history?
And so it also reaches all parts of the country.
And I just immediately said, no, it's the American Revolution.
It's the American Revolution.
I mean, this is a sea change in the course of
And, man, we don't know enough about it.
We don't know enough of the interiors of it that are complicated.
I have in my editing room a neon sign.
I've had it for a decade and a half in cursive, lowercase cursive.
You know, because there's not a filmmaker on earth that if, you know, if the scene's working, you don't touch it.
It's the largest network in the country.
But we have spent the last 50 years touching those scenes.
You know, I mean, going in, maybe it's lesser, but it's truer and it's got more dynamism.
It feels like it's accurate to what actually happened, which is more complicated than our sort of simple binary discussions of what history is.
And they really serve rural stations mostly.
for lack of a better word, a topic sentence early in the film is that, and I might get this slightly wrong, but the American Revolution was not just a dispute between Englishmen over Indian land taxation and representation, but a bloody struggle that involved more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American, that somehow came still to represent some of the highest aspirations of humankind.
It's not this Upper West Side, Knob Hill, snobby kind of thing.
So ours is like the fourth global war over the prize of North America.
And we're treating native nations not as them but as distinct entities.
The Shawnee, for example, in the middle of the 18th century, 1750, are as important an entity on the world trading stage with French or British or others as say the state of Virginia or the colony of Virginia is at that time.
And that they're different from the Delawares, their allies.
And they're different from the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, the six, five, and then it was six tribes, the Seneca, the Cayuga, the Onondaga, the Tuscarora, the Oneida, and the Mohawk.
And I've just walked from western New York State all the way into New England, right, and up into Canada.
It's Homeland Security and crop reports and weather and
And they had formed a union of their own.
that had operated, a democracy that had operated for centuries, that had allowed the independence of each of these separate nations, states, and yet yielded to the larger thing when their interests were threatened.
So essentially with regard to foreign policy.
And Franklin looks at this and goes, 1754, he goes, wow.
He's the only person who's been to New Hampshire and he's been to Georgia and all the places in between.
continuing education and classroom of the air as well as children's programming and what I think is a pretty damn good prime time schedule.
And he calls a conference in Albany and he's got a picture of a cut-up snake above the dire warning, join or die.
And they pass, seven of the 13 colonies attend, and they pass this thing called the Albany Plan of Union in 1754.
And then they go home to try to sell it.
And none of the states take it because no one wants to.
None of the colonies take it because no one wants to give up their autonomy.
But 20 years later, join or die is the war cry in the most consequential revolution in history.
So you're taking the Native American riffing on that, and then as you're forming this, you're bringing in what you've had and inherited for centuries of British constitutional monarchy, and you're borrowing from the New Enlightenment things, and you've got biblical references and classical references having to do with the conduct of individuals and personal responsibility, all of these things.
just utterly American, but also been out there forever.
And we end up with what we have, which is this, you know, glorious, wonderful, but also dysfunctional republic.
It's the best one out there, yeah.
You know, so it works in the context of all of America, not just some of America.
pretty well versed in American history, but nothing.
I mean, like, I've worked on two films where I made the mistake of thinking, ah, I know about this subject.
Because I grew up in the 60s and I went through it.
I lived on a college campus.
I knew all the stuff, I thought.
I was at college as the war was winding down, and I loved baseball.
Every day of both those productions were daily humiliations of what I didn't know.
And so what happens is you come in with a humility that I wish to know.
And rather than tell you what I know, the last time I checked, that's called homework.
We would rather share with you our process of discovery.
Joe, you cannot believe what we just found out.
Can I use these mugs to tell you how Daniel Morgan won the Battle of Cowpens against Bannister Tarleton in South Carolina, just below the North Carolina border?
And he trusts his militia who are unreliable.
Please just fire twice the first line of militia.
But please promise me you'll fire twice.
And the second line of militia, my more inexperienced, please just fire twice and then run behind the third line, which are these scraggly kids, teenagers, felons, ne'er-do-wells, second and third sons without the chance of an inheritance, recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany.
So Tarleton goes, oh, they're doing what all the militias do.
They're retreating, they're retreating, they're retreating.
And then the third line comes up and they go after them and the Americans actually attack, which is very rare.
thing to drive into the British line.
I mean, the filmmaking thing was born in tragedy.
Tartland gets away, but a huge part of Cornwallis' army has been diminished, and they're uttering this war cry that they have adapted from the Cherokee, from Native American tribes, which is a yell that will reverberate in southern battlefields for decades.
And like, I can take—I mean—
There's Lexington and Concord, and then maybe somebody says Bunker Hill, which is really Breed's Hill, Bunker Hill too, and then maybe Trenton, he takes over, he surprises them on Christmas night, and then maybe some people know that Saratoga is the surrender of an entire British army that gives the French the confidence to come in on our side and give us the equivalent of $30 billion plus Navy and soldiers.
My mom got cancer when I was two years old.
But there are dozens of battles that we'll tell you about.
There's never a moment when she wasn't dying that I was aware.
Like Germantown is a wonderful thing.
What's the largest battle in the entire – the largest battle?
It's the Battle of Long Island.
George Washington makes a terrible blunder, a tactical blunder.
He leaves his left flank exposed and the British –
And they completely surround him.
And then a year later at Brandywine, he leaves his right flank exposed and they go around.
He's not the greatest tactician, but he is the man of the time.
She died when I was 11, a few months short of my 12th birthday.
This leadership, this ability to understand subordinate talent, this reserve, this kind of confidence.
I mean, you cannot come away from this without extraordinary admiration for this person, without whom we don't have a country.
We just literally don't have a country.
The only time really in the film that any of our talking heads break the fourth wall – we don't have first-person voices.
I mean we don't have witnesses.
We have hundreds of first-person voices.
But we have some scholars and writers who are on the thing and there's one, Christopher Brown, who just shakes his head and he goes like –
I'm not a big fan of the great man theory of history or interpretation of history, but let's put it this way.
And my dad had a pretty tough curfew for my younger brother and me, but he forgave it if there was a movie on TV that might go till 1 a.m.
I don't see how the United States survives without Washington's leadership.
And it's this wonderful moment in which you go, right, we don't have to throw out the heroes in order to do that.
More often than not, we sort of elevated these people to a supernatural position that they don't really necessarily deserve.
He deserves it, and yet he's also deeply flawed, feats of clay, as I said.
And that's, to me, what makes a good story.
Like, how is it that he can be tactically so wrong in two extraordinary places?
He runs out at Kipps Bay, which is halfway up Manhattan.
After he's lost the Battle of Long Island, he's now abandoning New York or he's taking a good number of his men up to Harlem.
And at Kips Bay, which is sort of midtown on the East River, there's a battle and we're just being rolled up.
And he comes charging onto the battlefield and his aides are going crazy and they're grabbing the reins of his horse.
And then later on at the Battle of Princeton, he does the same thing, and one aide puts his hands over his face thinking, I cannot watch my commander-in-chief be killed.
And in the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse in New Jersey, he rides out and just is very present, turns what is a retreat of continental soldiers and militiamen into steadying their lines and basically holding their own against the prime, the elite of the British army.
on a school night, a school night.
Everybody knew you needed a Virginian.
The New Englanders where the war started – the war is a symphony in three movements, right?
The New England is the first movement, central states and then the southern states.
Or he'd take me out to the cinnamon sea like Old Silence or French New Wave that was happening in the mid-'60s.
And there is a sense early on when after Lexington and Concord where we've driven the British back into Boston and they've got ways to get in but they can't get out besides by ship.
And the army is formed, and it is very obvious from the very start that there can be no other person than George Washington.
The New Englanders want a Virginian.
And they know this person has been around since he's a 22-year-old militia officer who probably fires the first shot in the French and Indian War.
the global conflict that everyone else on Earth calls the Seven Years' War, that will set the stage for the American Revolution.
And then he acts bravely in many other situations, and he is denied a commission in the British Army, and he's like, F you, you know?
And then he's a speculator in Native American land that he doesn't own.
He wants to sell to new colonists.
And when the British put the line of demarcation in 1763 that separates, says you can't go over because we can't afford to protect you, he's now pissed again.
And then he's still this voice of reason that arrives in Philadelphia, just poised, and people look to him for leadership.
He's very good at picking out, you know, that guy.
He's got great executive function and great ability to pick subordinates without fear of being overshadowed.
And I saw my dad cry for the first time.
One of his great generals, Nathaniel Green, another great general, Benedict Arnold.
And we introduced Benedict Arnold in the opening seconds of our second episode.
And it isn't until you're a third of the way through the sixth and last episode that you go, uh-oh.
But he's a hero at Quebec City.
He didn't cry when she was dying, didn't cry when she died, didn't cry at this impossibly sad time.
He's a hero at the Battle of Saratoga.
He's been painted out of most of the paintings because he became Benedict Arnold.
But isn't it nice to know that he's that great a general before he becomes Benedict Arnold?
They say it was a mixture of... It's like an Arnold Palmer.
It's a mixture of iced tea and lemonade.
And I'm... No, it's what happens when you atrophy this interest in American history or you think that it can be so simplified that you don't have to do anything.
I mean I love it and I love the fact that we can bring back these things for people and they can experience – and there isn't a person in the country that's listening to me now or that we're going 35 different cities all around the country talking about this.
But we were watching this movie called Odd Man Out by Sir Carol Reed about the Irish troubles in the 1910s and 20s.
the eighth grader taking American history, the 11th grader making news.
It's for anybody who cares about where their country came from and is willing to say, I probably don't know the full dimensions of
I think what happens is that it's so interesting because we understand, as you're referencing the power of a book, still the greatest mechanical invention there is.
that it can go into some depths, a documentary do.
But a documentary can hold lots of different opposing points of view, not make them arguments, but allow people to have different points of view and sort of collect, almost like spokes in the wheel.
That's whatever it is that you're after.
But the wheel is much stronger by all those spokes.
And unfortunately, too often in history or in teaching, we subscribe to one particular theory of history, right?
James Mason, you know, very tragic.
That it's got to be this or it's got to be that.
And what we've done is we've found the documentary and the storytelling aspects of it hugely, hugely valuable in communicating the complexity of the subject without putting your thumb on the scale and making a political point.
We're just, you know, look, I will be totally honest.
And I saw him cry and I got it immediately.
History doesn't repeat itself.
No event has ever happened twice.
But Mark Twain is supposed to have said history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
If he did say that, he's exactly right, because human nature doesn't change.
And so you watch these events.
And when we finish working on it, I told you we began this when Barack Obama had a year and a half to go in his presidency or a year and a month to go in his presidency.
It's a totally different world, and we know that it rhymes, but we never once have concentrated on saying, oh, we're going to put our thumb on the scale here.
That provided him with this safe haven to express himself in a way, nothing in his life, for whatever reasons, for his own psychology, his own history, his own traumas, his own whatever it is.
We're just, as I'm saying, calling balls and strikes.
And when I mean that, it would be like saying, let me tell you about Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson.
I have not told you anything that is not true.
They also hit a hell of a lot of home runs.
And so calling balls and strikes is saying that what happens is the way we teach history is the way ESPN does sports highlights.
It's never the guy turned the double play or he doubled some guy off or there was some other thing.
And so nobody takes a strike in these highlights.
And what we're trying to say is...
Isn't it better to watch the game and see that even Babe Ruth can only come up to bat every nine times.
And even Babe Ruth fails seven times out of ten.
A little bit more than 300 hitter.
That's the great beauty of it.
And so I think that we don't ever now think that he is a failure.
We understand that the dynamics of life, the dynamics of this particular game, mean that the people who fail seven times out of ten and do it significantly are in the Hall of Fame.
I mean, and that's the beauty of these storytellings.
I'm not taking anything away from George Washington by making it complex.
He's not a statue out in the park collecting bird shit.
He's a real breathing human being.
He's one of the richest people in America.
He marries one of the richest people in America, a widow.
He makes one visit home I think to Monticello during the whole – I mean to Mount Vernon during the whole war.
And I said, that's what I want to do.
He's dedicated to this thing.
I mean he doesn't have to do this, right?
He's committed to this project of –
And that's the ultimate point I want to make about not just this film or Vietnam or all the things we've been talking about is that I've had the great privilege of making films about the U.S.
But I've also made films about us.
That is to say, the lowercase, two-letter, plural pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and we and our and all of the majesty and the complexity and the contradiction and even the controversy of the U.S.
And it wasn't about sentimentality or nostalgia.
And that is a privileged space to be operating in, to be having been given the permission to do this for nearly 50 years is just great.
I think I have the best job in the country.
And I'm always happy to meet somebody who's willing to contradict me.
But it's only because you have a chance to work hard at telling the story.
I mean, we lock the picture back in January.
That means you're not going to do any more work on it.
We've unlocked it hundreds of times just to make it better.
It was about authentic emotional stuff, higher emotional stuff.
Some historian said, I'm not sure if you can be that categorical.
And then we put in a perhaps.
Or you find out that image isn't as as stunning as we thought it could be.
Oh, yeah, that works better than before, even after we were done done.
And I like the ability that by the time we're letting it go, it's like your kids are still, you know, licking the smudge off their face and, you know, making sure that their their hair is is tied up in a nice bow and, you know, have a good day, sweetie, you know.
The way our founders would talk about we'd be able to create a republic where you'd have higher emotions, nothing sentimental about it.
It's a very different time, and you make a really, really good point.
When you take the judgments of what we know now, you can apply them, and then you end up with what I call that unforgiving revisionism, where you throw out some significant people with the bathwater revisionism.
But let me just tell you, they all knew slavery was wrong.
And there's a historian in it, Annette Gordon-Reed, who just says slavery is foundational to Thomas Jefferson.
It's that you would just get closer, be more virtuous.
And he knew all his life it was wrong and said it and wrote about it and tried to put in something to end the slave trade and end the Declaration of Independence, which no one would have.
And she goes, well, how could somebody do something they knew was wrong?
She goes, well, that's a question for all of us.
And so Jefferson's neighbor freed all his slaves and urged him to do it, and he didn't.
And his cousin freed all his slaves.
The question is, if you are just taking the judgments of today to cancel somebody, you've just missed the possibility of getting to know George Washington or getting to know Thomas Jefferson.
And so I said, and that meant, you know, I was going to be Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford or Howard Hawks, you know, big Hollywood directors.
And if you only do people who are perfect, you're either lying about them.
Or you've got very few characters, you know, because I don't know about you.
I don't think you know anybody who's perfect.
I don't know anybody who's perfect.
And so then it's like history becomes, honey, how was your day?
I back slowly down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb.
You know, unless you get T-boned.
In case that's exactly the way to do it.
You edit human experience and you tolerate the vast experiences that human beings are so complex.
We did an update of our baseball series called The Tenth Inning.
And being from New England and being a Red Sox fan, the whole thing was just a disguise to be able to do the Red Sox comeback in 2004.
But we were dealing with the great Atlanta team in the 90s and the great Joe Torre led Yankees and then Sosa and McGuire and then Bonds and then steroids and whatever.
At the end of it, we're really trying to come to something about steroids and try to figure out how to deal with it.
And I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which was a brand new experimental school.
And Thomas Boswell, now retired as a great sports writer for The Washington Post, said – I think it's Keats – writing about William Shakespeare, who's a pretty good playwright, said that Shakespeare had negative capability.
That means he could hold in tension the positive and negative aspects of a character.
for as long as you possibly could without making that quick and facile and easy judgment that we make all the time in our lives.
When the guy cuts us off, we give him the finger, you know, we yell, F you, whatever that is, we make judgments about it.
And Shakespeare had that ability even with the darkest characters, you know, the Iagos and the Richard III, you know, people who are deep and dark.
He said that's what we need to grow in order to understand
The steroid era in order to understand how to deal with all of that.
And I think that in a way all of us have to kind of grow that negative capability, that ability to distinguish that nobody's perfect and that if you superimpose this kind of abstract sets of judgment, nobody passes the test.
You know, it's the public broadcasting service.
Came in its second year in 1971.
And all of the teachers there were social documentaries, still photographers and filmmakers.
And they reminded me correctly that there is as much drama in what is and what was as anything the human imagination makes up.
I think it's the only way, and it takes time.
And I am very... I have to acknowledge that there's no other place on the dial that dates me, you know, than PBS, right?
Where I have the time to do it.
It's sort of like an NIH grant.
Like, here, we'd like you to explore the possible cure to this disease.
Can you have it next Thursday?
Well, no, you can't have it next Thursday.
I need it out because the other Marvel thing is coming out at the same time.
What you need is we want to set you up with a certain set of circumstances that are going to permit you to have the best possibility of doing this.
And so we've always hit our marks.
We've always come – if we haven't been in budget, it's because we've expanded the film and then I've gone out and raised the money.
So no one else was responsible for the fact that we decided Vietnam is not going to be seven episodes.
And that's 18 hours, and that's, you know, the way that Vietnam, and it had to do with listening to the material, understanding how it spoke to us, you know, committing ourselves to recording Vietnamese voices, not just South Vietnamese soldiers and South Vietnamese civilians, but Viet Cong guerrillas, North Vietnamese soldiers, North Vietnamese civilians, as well as the range of Americans.
And so one of my favorite scenes is a North Vietnamese soldier and a Viet Cong soldier and an American all saying exactly the same thing about the same moment.
But all of a sudden, my molecules are rearranged again.
in a battle, early battle, before there were technically boots on the ground.
This was an advisor, an American advisor.
But they're all talking about a helicopter flying over this one hedge.
And the Viet Cong guy is behind the hedge.
The South Vietnamese officer is, you know, next to the American guy.
It's the Declaration of Independence applied to communications, just as the national parks, you could say, was the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape.
I'm no longer just a filmmaker going to hopefully go to Hollywood.
And they all have an experience of war that is exactly the same.
I had started... What year was this?
So it came out, it was first broadcast in 81 or 82.
I had been working on it since 77.
I looked 12 years old and I was trying to sell people the Brooklyn Bridge.
And people were, you know, telling me, oh, this child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge.
I'm now a documentary filmmaker.
And I used to keep these two big, thick three-wing binders on my desk, all filled with rejections for that one film.
I mean, literally hundreds of rejections.
But I had read David McCullough's The Great Bridge, the epic story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge.
And I went out to my partners.
We just founded our company called Florentine Films.
And all of that merged with this latent joy.
We'd like maybe get a day's work or two days' work a month as cinematographers and sound men.
grips and we were paying the rent and that was that i said we're gonna do this and i'll raise all the money and and i did and it got i moved up to new hampshire so i could live on nothing in 79 and and 80 and i both those years i made less than 2500 bucks
and chopped all the wood for my stove, split it, carried it, kept the stoves going.
You wake up in the middle of the night at 4 a.m.
in February, and you go, I just heard the heater kick on.
I've got to go down and feed the stove.
But it came out, I got nominated for an Academy Award, and that was the sign to me that I needed to— I'd hit a fork in the road, and like Yogi Berra said, you take it.
I don't know how to describe it.
Love of my country and its history.
It was to not go back to New York, to not go back to L.A., but to say I'm going to be staying here because this is labor intensive.
We're going to have to raise grants to do this stuff.
I'm not looking for investors.
We're looking for underwriting so that we are liberated from the suits that would come in and give the notes and say, oh, you need to be less sexy.
I mean where everybody else growing up was reading novels and stuff like that.
or more sexy, or longer, or shorter, or more violent, or less violent.
I can sit here and tell you with a great deal of pride, and not just for me, but on behalf of the extraordinary people that work with me, and some of them have been for 50 years, and some of them for 30 years, and some of them for 40, and a lot of people.
that these are director's cuts, that we haven't let it go.
And the way the country has responded to them, like the Civil War series, still 35 years old, it's still the highest rated program in the history of public television.
I was reading encyclopedias and reading histories and trying to get at some aspect of who we are.
You know, I went to Hampshire College.
My teachers were social documentary still photographers.
I had a mentor named Jerome Liebling.
And he was so firmly rooted in a kind of, you know, another word, we've been talking about virtue, another word is honor or honorable, that is not engaged and people don't really use it in ordinary conversation.
He just instilled in all of us, I believe, all of his students, a sense of honor.
So there was this responsibility to follow it through, to work really hard.
I mean, I don't know anybody that works harder than us here.
You know, we really work seven days a week.
I put my head on the pillow.
I want to know that my girls are OK, my daughters.
And I think every single film that I've made has asked the same question.
And I want to know that I've made a film better, you know, in some way, seven days a week, seven days a week.
And it's not that you can't take a day off and you can't do something, but you're always thinking about this stuff and you want to make them better.
We're out in the road and we're showing the clips.
And, you know, we've seen these clips a gazillion times.
And I'm talking to Sarah Bostein, the co-director, and
and we just look at each other simultaneously and say, we've got to get rid of that.
We have to change that shot.
And so suddenly we're working with an editor who happens to be in Paris this semester and the editor that's in New York, and we're changing things, and I love the fact that we did that.
I'm actually embarrassed that I'm telling you about it because I feel like in some ways I'm advertising the fact that that's what we do.
I'm just trying to say that somewhere along the line I've made the opposite of decision
of what was sort of career-wise supposed to be what I was supposed to do.
In fact, Robert Penn Warren, the poet and novelist, told me that – he looked at me once and he just said, careerism is death.
Who are those strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans?
And I've never used the word career.
I've always said my professional life.
Because careerism suggests that you're following some sort of rut, and that's not what I wanted to do.
A carved path that's already well-worn.
I mean, look, if you want to be a doctor or a lawyer, you've got to follow some well-worn paths just by virtue of that.
Everybody that I know that's working in documentary that has been working at it for a long time and makes their living from it have come from completely unique paths.
And what does an investigation of the past tell us about not only –
And I like the fact that I made this.
No, I'm not going to go back to New York.
Here in this little town in New Hampshire where any number of Oscar nominations and Grammys and Emmys means zero to the people that I live with.
It's like, did you shovel the lawn, the walk of the lawn?
of the lady next door who's not doing so well.
That's the stuff that matters, and it's a good place to raise kids as well.
And then the splendid isolation.
There's a great tradition, as you know, in American history of the way in which
where we've been, but where we are and where we may be going, which is the great gift of history.
wildness, nature becomes part of the American catechism, that it's possible, Walt Whitman is saying, that you can worship God more closely in nature than in cathedrals made by man.
This is the American catechism of being out in nature, and it manifests itself in different people who are aware of the power of nature.
Nature reminds you of your insignificance, and that is inspiriting.
Even though you're feeling insignificant, it's inspiriting.
Just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self-regard.
So anybody who says, oh, I'm this, it's actually diminished.
The person who is humble is humiliated.
It's the best teacher we have, as you know.
by their atomic insignificance, as one person said about Mount Denali in Alaska in the 19-teens, a reporter, is actually inspirited by that.
And I wish to be inspirited because I think that's the only condition in which we're then able to make the kinds of decisions, the creative decisions, the personnel decisions, the thoughtfulness or to have that regard for not necessarily following the well-worn path.
Oh, you know, I feel so grateful, Joe.
You know, my best friend once said to me when we were much, much younger, we'd been friends for more than 50 years.
He said, there's only one center of the universe and you're not it.
And I don't know what I was doing or whether I was even doing anything that was inviting it, but he just wanted me to remember that there's no center of the universe.
I was thinking, you know, there is that beauty Emily Dickinson called sunsets and sunrises, the far theatricals of day.
It's like a perfect description of it.
But when you go out and it's 10 below zero in my town and I'm up a mile and a half out of town, which has five or six streetlights, so there's no glare and you see the Milky Way and you just, you are just, what can you do but just be humbled by the vastness of the universe and how relatively insignificant our lives are
But that in itself compels you, drives you to try to do something that would have not significance but just would add something.
Politics comes through all the time.
Everybody's got a lawn sign, right?
My lawn sign says love multiplies.
functioning theory of the entire universe.
It is what it's all about, right?
It doesn't matter what religion, what philosophy you might subscribe to or not.
Thomas Jefferson says in our film, if my neighbor believes in 20 gods or no god at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Like, we are so religiously intolerant today.
Well, I know that if I had been born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, I'd still be a born-again Christian.
And you'd be at war with the Shiites across the border in Iran.
You know, I'm sorry to break the news to you.
And that all of them, all the great religions, have the same thing in mind.
I mean, what was essential about the founders, particularly Jefferson, is that they were deists.
And while they all had their own particular, mostly Protestant denominations that they had come out of, and I think still to some extent in some cases practiced, less so Jefferson, is that they believed that there was a supreme being who was disinterested in the affairs of man and did not distinguish between faiths.
So that, you know, you see the baseball player who hits the home run and crosses home base and looks up and thanks.
They never do that when they hit into a game-ending double play in the ninth inning, right?
They don't say, oh, thank you, God, for giving me that.
Pedro Marcina had given up a fairly significant lead, not the entire lead, to the Yankees in one of those great playoffs.
And as he walked off and was pulled by the manager, he walked off and looked up.
And I spoke to him about it.
But this idea that all of our affairs are governed in that way is not what many of the founders believed in.
That it is our obligation to lead that virtuous life.
Don't mean to keep bringing you back there.
Moves you closer up the stairway to heaven, up the ray of creation to God.
And that it's your movement, not that supreme being's movement towards you.
Oh, let's make sure that's a ground root double.
Oh, let's – that's not happening.
It is the ongoing chaos of the sequence of events and human nature, and we've got to, A, be aware of the sort of incredible current, the force of the current of that human nature, but also the way in which my –
My individuality, my will, the discipline, the virtue that I might be able to have could in some ways be singular and do something significant.
Not because of that, but in order to be closer to that higher thing.
And that's where they're all talking about it.
that they want the founders' higher emotions.
As I said, not sentimentality, not nostalgia.
Those are the enemies of anything.
Sometimes we say that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
What is the difference between that?
If you've added up all the sum of the parts and it comes here, what's that?
And what it means is that as much as to build a table,
to build a bridge or a highway, one and one always has to equal two.
The things that matter in our lives are where one and one equals three, where we are able to see something that's bigger, that something is produced by the collision of two musical notes, by two images in a documentary, by the conversation between two human beings.
whatever in which something is possible.
I'm interested in whatever energy that creates.
I mean, you just don't know that that person at the convenience store that you just kind of like don't even look and don't even think about has a life as important as yours.
You're driving on the highway.
We're coming down from Dallas this morning on 35, you know, thousands, thousands of cars going out of the direction.
The person in that car is looking and their life is as full as what I'm seeing out of my eyes.
And I know sitting here that you're seeing something totally different than what I'm seeing.
And I think good history, good friendship, good storytelling, good conversation all have at its base the respect for the other point of view, the ability to listen, and that kind of desire...
And in our country, we've actually got lots of blueprints for it.
We're going to live forever or die by suicide.
Or then he's got two speeches, Lincoln does,
He wants a message to Congress in 62, what we'd call the State of the Union Address, and he says, fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.
The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.
He goes, the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.
As our case is new, let us think anew.
He's both those things, right?
We cannot escape history, and guess what?
He's in his second inaugural, one of the most famous addresses of all time.
He's got Old Testament righteousness.
You know, if we have to spend another 500 years
drawing with the sword the blood that is drawn with the lash, meaning fighting to end slavery.
And then he stops, very Old Testament, he stops on a dime and turns to this New Testament ending, the peroration, which says, with malice towards none, with charity for all.
And then it has that kind of unbelievable generosity in it and this ability to say, a second ago, I'm willing to keep this going for however long it takes to end this scourge of slavery.
Whatever drawn by the lash, drawn by the sword, we will do.
It's just an amazing ability to understand us.
And he took – he's the one who reached back over the Constitution and plucked Jefferson back into significance.
And so when he gives the Gettysburg Address, four score and seven years after the – 87 years after the signing of the Declaration, he's creating the 2.0 operating system that we have now.
We really do mean it, that all men are created equal, and that now, because of the sacrifice, there's not a proper word in that entire address.
You know, the guy before him, Edward Everett, noted orator, spoke for more than two hours, and he spoke for two minutes.
And Everett wrote him, and he said, Mr. President, I should flatter myself if I thought I came to the heart of the matter in two hours as you did in two minutes.
There's so many wows in the work that we have.
And people say, well, what did you learn differently?
And you go, oh, my God, are you kidding?
Every day is this revelation, this sort of tsunami that breaks over you of new information.
And then it's just, what is it that I can save?
You'd assume, you'd presume completely understandably that making a documentary film on the American Revolution is additive, right?
It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup.
We have 12 hours in this six-part series, and we've got more than 500 hours of material.
filming reenactors for years, some of them dressed in French uniforms, some of them dressed in militia, some of them in British, some of them in continental, some of them German Hessians, some of them native, all of that stuff.
And then we're using it to help the building blocks of doing it.
At the same time, we've collected more than 12,000
We've got more maps in this than in all the other films we've made combined.
Sometimes we're just taking an old archival map and leaving it alone.
Sometimes we're taking an old archival map and just putting red and blue lines showing the movement of British and Continental soldiers.
Like manifestations of really American things.
Sometimes we're taking maps and sort of making our own hybrid map that gives us a little bit more control.
But all of these things we're just practicing.
I mean, I looked at something...
Earlier today, which was just a minute change on a map that we highlight where a British admiral wanted to attack all these seaport towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and Maine.
And the last one is Machias, which is up near the Canadian border.
So we were trying to figure out how to light up Marblehead and Cape Ann and Gloucester and Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Saco.
Maine was then the main department of Massachusetts.
And then Falmouth, which is now Portland, Maine, and Machias.
And so we'll spend months trying to just get that one thing right.
No one, if we hadn't done it, no one would care except for us.
You know, I have friends who are woodworkers, and they'd never hide a mistake.
They'd never hide a mistake.
And you don't get it from churning it out either.
There's a kind of craftsmanship to all of that.
You know, out in the woods by yourself, just how you relate to nature, a kind of purity, a kind of intention that you have in relationship to it.
I know you know all of that.
So I spent five and a half years working on the Civil War, and I really was, like, daunted by it.
All of the first five or six films that I've made, the Brooklyn Bridge wouldn't have been built without this new metal called steel, which the Civil War helped to promote the use of.
I can't imagine any human being could say it better than that, Joe.
I think that's exactly right.
This disconnection that we feel has come from the fact that we have become transactional beings.
Nothing is transformational.
And that we yearn nonetheless for that kind of transformation that takes place in our lives.
And as Americans, those of us fortunate enough to be Americans, with all the problems that are attendant to that statement,
we have this glorious past that has the ability to take us out of that stupor, that take us out of that rut to be able to say, and with the exception of the film on Leonardo, the 40 or so films that I've done, some of them are hour long, some of them are 20 hours long, are all about us, right?
It may not seem obvious to us, but it seemed obvious to me that that's where I should go.
And the thing that I was describing about the U.S.
and us is that I realize that
All of our world is about them, of creating a them, the artificiality that despots or autocrats always have to make of them.
There's got to be an enemy out there in order to do that.
And the important obligation that we have is to tell our stories to everybody.
The second film on the celibate religious sect, the Shakers, wouldn't have declined so precipitously, not because they were celibate.
That is to say, I do not wish to preach to the congregation, whatever my congregation is.
I do not wish to preach to the choir.
We have an extraordinary country.
I mean, I'm interested in its voices, I realize.
I'm interested in its complicated voices, the true, honest, complicated voices of American history that's unafraid of controversy and tragedy.
but equally drawn to those stories and moments that suggest an abiding faith in the human spirit.
And particularly the remarkable role this republic plays in the positive progress of mankind.
You know, it's really, it's great.
And, you know, there's implied discipline in that.
for decades and decades, and we work really hard, and we want to do a good job, and it's sincere in that regard.
And because, as I said, it's PBS with one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other proudly out, you can make decisions that don't have to do whether it's going to enrich your bank account.
I mean, there are so many ways to measure richness that don't have to do with the bottom line.
And, you know, one of the things that Americans have done, we've incubated lots of great ideas because of those two oceans and those two relatively benign names.
One of the things, and de Tocqueville noticed this when he came here in the 1830s, was so into money and the almighty dollar, he called it, that was the religion of America.
Celibacy exists in lots of religious traditions, but because a country that had just murdered 650,000 of its own people was not interested necessarily
It obviously has some nice attributes.
It has a spiritual cost that is...
You know, the Old Testament again said it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to reach the kingdom of heaven.
And that's tough for Americans to hear.
It is so tough for Americans to hear, particularly since we have so many preachers who are certain that it's okay to be both.
And at some point you have to realize something is lost and there is richness in relationships.
There's richness in children.
There's richness in art and associations and knowledge.
I mean, your curiosity is so palpable.
You know, I was listening to you speaking to my friend Elliot West, who's written about the buffalo and native peoples and the sort of prehistory of the American West.
after the Civil War in the questions of the sole survival in the intensity that it had before the Civil War.
And you can just hear there is this preternatural sort of interest in curiosity and like curiosity.
We're all given a really short period of time.
And the bad news is, maybe it's the bad news, maybe it's also the good news, is none of us are getting out of here alive.
And then it comes back to us.
You don't have to make documentary films.
You don't have to have radio shows.
All of these things are legitimate.
It just requires your full attention and willingness to engage in that, whatever it might be.
I've got a friend in my little town.
I've known him for 40 years.
I think we probably have opposite political views.
I don't know, but I adore this man.
He's like, if you come to my house and you see the walls that he's built, it's like, you know,
you don't need to go to chartreux notre dame you just say whoa dougie did this really great job here yeah you know and and and you just love him for that dedication to saying i could just do this in this moment to the best of my ability people always say do you ever go back to your earlier films and want to change it and i go
The next film I made was on the Statue of Liberty, and it was originally a gift from the French to Mrs. Lincoln to commemorate the survival of the Union despite her husband's ultimate sacrifice.
Other people who liked what he said started a religion long after he was crucified.
So religions themselves, it's so interesting that all of them that have at the root of their philosophy the exact same thing, all of them, about doing to others.
It's essentially about love.
And yet religions seem to be sometimes the cause of most of the pain in there.
It means that somewhere along the line from the original message to the expression, stuff gets corrupted.
And you can convince yourself that having as a guru in Oregon, 52 Rolls Royces, you know,
The next film was on Huey Long, the turbulent Southern demagogue.
You know, let's not downplay it.
It's better than not having any money.
Shelby Foote, who was our talking head in the Civil War, said that money, the only thing it could buy you is privacy and service.
Meaning, you know, you can get somebody to mow your lawn if you need that to happen and you can be a little bit private.
He came from a North Louisiana parish that refused to secede from the Confederacy.
But if you think it's going to be doing a lot, lot more than that, you've already begun to atrophy those interests.
That awareness of being alive that I think everybody wants to feel that sense of vivifying oneness.
Do you know the poor in the United States?
And the studies have shown give away well more of their disposable income.
You know, if you've got $100 and your friend comes up and says, hey, man, I need $100, you give $100.
If you've got $1,000 and somebody goes up and says, hey, I want $100, you go, well, then I will not have $1,000.
I mean, refused to secede from the Union.
And this works all the way up to $100 billion.
It's so interesting that somehow this is what we think is, or even the folks who are dedicated to spending, prolonging their lives with these other things.
They saw the Confederacy, the ownership of slaves, as a rich man's cause.
It really is the quality of life is the much more important thing.
You know, I always tell my girls when they're in trouble, I say the three things and, and, and one is this won't last.
You know, I headed for the hills out of New York, you know, 46 years ago because I thought I was taking a vow of anonymity and poverty to do this stuff.
Get help from others and be kind to yourself.
You know, just there's no yes buts to those, which is where when you're a teenager, anxious, there's always, or an adult, there's always a kind of a yes but.
But, you know, just things will change.
And it's no harm in reaching out to other people.
And the hardest thing of all is to be kind to yourself.
And so they became a hotbed of kind of radicalism and populism and later would spawn this swamp thing called Huey Long.
This is what Robert Penn Warren meant when he said to me, careerism is death.
He just was saying, you've got to find that thing.
And people, when I talk to students, they want to know what the secret is.
And I go, there's only two secrets.
And that may be understanding that...
I thought I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I don't have anything to say.
And it's perfectly legitimate to do something else, to change that thing if you do it.
And the other is to persevere because there's in every single situation many more people wanting to be in front of a mic every day.
then there are the possibility of being in front of the mic every day.
So you have to work at it really hard.
You can't make assumptions about it.
Sometimes you have to do, you know, I sort of felt like moving to New Hampshire was in The Godfather going to the mattresses.
You know, it's like, okay, I got handed a job.
And I was just so worried that I was going to put the film that I had shot for this first film on the Brooklyn Bridge on top of my refrigerator and I would just wake up and I'd be 45 years old and I would have
You know, we made a film on the history of the Congress.
And so I got offered a job, which was like, you know, being offered $800,000 a year today.
Obviously, the most important time in the Congress was when, you know, there were two Congresses, one in Washington, obviously, one in Montgomery, and then later Richmond.
And I moved to New Hampshire where I could live for nothing and finished the film.
How did you choose New Hampshire?
I had gone to school in western Massachusetts and had a lot of friends, sort of hippies and others, that sort of after sort of alternative stuff, that after they had not – some had gone to New York and pursued sort of traditional –
professional lives, but others had become book salesmen or opened a natural food store or were a weaver or whatever it might be.
And so a lot of them gravitated in southern Vermont and southern New Hampshire, a little kind of nice little nook.
And so I ended up going to this town and had literally – I mean I walked in.
I rented the house for the first two years.
first few years and um bought it after my daughters were born um and i've lived i've been in the same bedroom for 46 years wow and it's and i don't feel cut off or starved i i know every part of the country my films have covered every part of the country and part of the shoe leather that we have to do with pbs you know because they don't have the big budgets to smother the
The American Revolution coming November 16th over every bus and subway and billboard is you go out and you talk to people.
And at the same time, you have this place to retreat and restore.
And every morning, I take a three-mile walk with my dog into what looks like 18th century America.
And so I began to see the centrality.
And after the Civil War was done,
I think, you know, Americans, you know, manifest destiny basically says.
Let's calculate the board feet.
What minerals can be extracted?
And it was really just brought to life by those voices of the people.
And we've done that with 98% of the continental United States.
But we also, in the midst of all of that, set aside these places that were so spectacularly beautiful.
like Yosemite or Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon or Zion or Bryce or Canyons or the Everglades or Acadia or Smokies, and just said, I want my children and my children's children's children to be able to see these.
What you're talking about, well, here we go.
That's why I said it's the declaration applied to the land.
Every other country has followed suit because we were saying land does not belong to a monarch or to the nobleman or to the very rich.
And just reverse engineer that for a second and say, okay, we don't have national parks.
So Yosemite and Zion are gated communities.
You can't – you maybe have one little observational place along the Grand Canyon to look.
The Everglades was long ago drained in its golf courses and strip malls and apartments.
It's one of the most diverse ecological environments on Earth, as flat as it is.
We didn't want to do another film on war.
It's just spectacularly diverse.
And Yellowstone would be a down-on-its-luck heyday in the 1950s amusement place called Geyser World.
The guys, both North and South, who'd been in it, who said, here we go, were... They said they'd seen the elephant.
You and I and everyone within the sound of my voice own...
the most beautiful spots on the continent, and I would argue in many cases the most beautiful spots on the earth.
And it gives us that unfettered ability to go into nature, to get off the trail, which 90% we can admit it, there's nothing wrong with that, 90% of the people stay within 100 yards of any trail, but to get off the trail and go out and see the magnificence of this planet.
And, you know, the thing I like about the parks is that it isn't just what you see.
Like you stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River exposes pre-Cambrian Vishnu Schist that is 1.7 billion years old.
That's almost half the age of the planet itself.
But the Grand Canyon works if you also are holding somebody's hand, right?
It's like who you see it with becomes central to the experience of it.
Miracle to the Grand Geological Library, all of the strata.
It was like a library of telling stories of what was going on.
It's why I love American sports.
But I focus on baseball because in football, the description is, oh, you know, Joe Montana threw to Jerry Rice with a few seconds left and we scored a touchdown and we won.
They said they'd seen the elephant.
Or Michael Jordan hit the three-pointer at the buzzer, tongue wagging, and we won.
But the baseball story always begins, my mom or my dad took me to this game.
And I remember walking out and seeing the green of the thing.
And then Babe Ruth hit a home run or Hank Aaron hit a home run or somebody pitched the perfect game.
It's all gauged with who you see it with as well as what the thing is.
exotic thing they could think of.
It's not for those of us who love it.
And it was always the national pastime.
I think one of the reasons why we sort of relegate it to this thing is that most of the other forms of entertainment, particularly in sports, are a little bit more fast-moving.
That's what combat was, something that no one else experiences, seeing the elephant.
George Will said to me, though, who's a big football fan, he says, football has two of the worst features of American life.
Violence punctuated by frequent committee meetings.
No, but baseball has this thing.
It's the only sport in which the defense has the ball.
The person scores, not the ball.
Like maybe you know how many yards Tom Brady has, the greatest of all time.
And we just even removed from it, we're just looking at still photographs, still got us to our core.
But you know how many home runs Babe Ruth hit and how many home runs Hank Aaron hit.
And you know these are things that matter.
And if you look up the 1919 World Series.
it says that the Cincinnati Red Stockings won the 1919 World Series.
There's no asterisk, but then those numbers require you to tell a story about the Chicago White Sox, known to us forever as the Black Sox, who took money from Arnold Rothstein and other gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series and give it to the much lesser team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings.
great that the statistics matter.
A 300 hitter means the same thing to my dad as it does to my grandfather and my great, great grandfather and my great, great, great, great grandfather.
But you still have to tell stories.
And we just sort of said, we're not going to do any more war films.
And then at the end of the 90s, the Civil War came out in 1990, the end of the 90s,
I agree with you completely.
There's something wonderful.
I was just talking to my best friend about this the other day, that my daughter was at school and she was the co-captain, my oldest daughter, of her softball game.
And 25, 30 years ago, we went to some misty Saturday morning game and it was like they were winning 3-2 in the bottom of whatever the last inning was.
And the other team had the bases loaded and no outs.
We were working on lots of things, baseball and jazz and biographies on Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis and Clark and Mark Twain and all sorts of stuff, Jack Johnson later on.
And we got three force outs.
And it was like the girls just immediately burst into tears.
But it was just an amazing thing.
You're driving in a suburban or a city area and there's a ball game going on.
You lift your foot off the accelerator as the...
As it goes, there's something suspended as the pitch is heading from the pitcher to the bat or something.
Everything stops and possibility is suddenly there in front of you.
That's why I love the game so much.
I get to more often than not and haven't been in a while because I'm such a dull boy and working so much to Fenway Park.
And it's always just filled with people and it's always got lots of kids and they're always there because they want to be my screen saver of my phone.
are my two daughters, my two youngest daughters at a Red Sox game, you know, 10 or 15 years ago.
I haven't been taking it off the thing.
You know, this one's now a sophomore at Georgetown University, and this one is going into ninth grade.
But they were like eight and 13 then.
And look at the expressions on their face.
It's just pure joy, pure joy.
And it's accompanied nearly every decade of our national narrative.
Even into the 17th century, there are bits of pieces in which there seems to be some stick and ball game.
And then after, before the Civil War, in the decades before the Civil War, they begin to combine rounders, sort of a British schoolyard game with cricket, and do something that's a lot better than both called baseball.
I heard that lots of graduating seniors, high school students walking off the podium with a diploma think we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War.
There was a guy in 1858 named Pete O'Brien who said, you know, they don't play baseball the way they used to when I was a kid.
I don't mean they don't play it with the same rules or the same way.
They just lost the spirit of it.
So we've always been saying something's wrong.
Something's gone out of the game.
And there's always not true.
Bill Romanowski was, you know, there was bottom of the fold of The New York Times.
But as soon as the baseball player was implicated, it was the top of the fold.
And that told you, even though the NFL had long overtaken baseball as kind of the national pastime or football had done that.
And I think it has to do with the sense that it I mean, it does allow stealing of bases.
But you're absolutely right.
There is that wonderful thing about baseball that it seems kind of pure.
And that a thousand veterans, American veterans of the Second World War were dying each day in America.
And that's why, you know, I used to say out of some—I'm embarrassed by the kind of arrogance of it.
I used to say, well, they should let Pete Rose in after—to the Hall of Fame after he dies.
Now he's died and I'm still – I sort of feel like who am I to say that?
Certainly the Hall of Fame isn't like a list of angels.
And I lived in the same house that I've lived in since then, in the same bedroom for 46 years in this tiny little village in New Hampshire.
But I also still am not sure he should go in or Shoeless Joe Jackson as much as you want to resurrect the great story of the most promising of the Chicago White Stockings in 1919 that threw the World Series, the Black Stockings.
I mean, it's very complicated.
Will, will, uh, Roger Clemens, will some of these other people that we know were juicing Barry Bonds where we, he was Barry Bonds doing interviews is clearly or arguably the greatest player that's ever played baseball.
And you could even say to the moment he looks at McGuire and says that he knows he's got tons more talent than them and they're getting all the attention and he says, I can do this.
He's still got – he's right then.
He's a first ballot Hall of Famer and would arguably – if he just stopped right then and just quit and said whatever.
But decisions are made and then it becomes back to Shakespeare, negative capability.
And can you hold in tension the great prodigious gifts and the, in this case, the sort of shortcut of the way in which these gifts were corrupted?
And you also live in a society in which you take a pill to deal with erections.
And by the way, that figure today is so small.
And one person made in our 10th inning the update to the series on baseball that came out in 94, 10th inning came out in 2010.
They said, look, you know, what if you're scraping, you know, middle infield or second baseman, shortstop?
And everybody is taking steroids in the clubhouse.
Baseball has no rules against it right now until – and it's the difference between you getting that four-year $28 million contract in which your family is set for life.
You're from the Dominican Republic.
It's just actuarially true that it's not 1,000 anymore.
You're from wherever you're from and maybe ending up in AAA and that's it.
And then you realize – and you're being told by every signal of society, take something to be better.
This then complicates the entire dynamic of our judgments, of the facility of saying, oh, I'm really absolutist.
The more I go, the more disappointed I am in the arrogance of my certainty before.
I think one of the big things is we think that the opposite of faith is doubt.
It's maybe five or six today.
The opposite of faith is certainty, which destroys the mystery of the unknown.
And so I'm always taken aback sometimes more often in retrospect than in the moment when I could possibly do something about it that I have been more certain about something and less trying to see it from another person's point of view or from the other side of the coin or whatever it might be.
And pretty soon it will be nobody.
Or maybe there's many different facets.
As we were talking about with regard to the revolution and slavery and how – what responsibility of imposing the morality of this moment on the previous moment, how much did that previous moment already understand the morality of it, which they did?
And so I wanted to make a film about that.
I think staying open to the questions I know in filmmaking has made us better filmmakers.
There are a lot of people that I work with.
It's a small little nucleus of people.
But they deserve credits, writers and co-directors and co-producers and people who are digging in the archives, cinematographer I've worked with for 52 years.
Before the ink was dry on the World War II film, I said we're doing Vietnam.
I think what it is is that whatever...
I don't want to say sacrifices, but whatever discipline has been imposed in the process of whatever it is we do, people recognize that.
And they know that they can see something.
They may not like all the aspects of it because it is complicated and you do see not just the intimacy of the us, but you also see the complexity and the contradiction and the controversy along with the majesty of the U.S.
But I do think that they know that.
we have earned their attention.
And before the ink was dry, meaning we're locking it and we're mixing it and doing all the stuff we have to do,
That's the biggest thing we have.
You're asking an extraordinary amount of people right this second.
You're asking them to devote their attention.
I mean, the longest episode I've ever done is like two hours and 20 minutes, two hours and 30 minutes.
That required every skill I had to be able to make that over 10 years of an episode, the fourth episode of World War II.
a film called The War, but mostly it's two hours.
And it is a supreme compliment if somebody will give me their attention for that amount of time.
And then maybe for 10 episodes or nine episodes, or in the case of the American Revolution, just six for a total of 12 hours.
That is a huge, huge responsibility of trying to earn someone's attention.
And that's our job is really just making sure that that person who does not know, who's ignorant but curious, which is, of course, perfectly fine.
If you're willfully ignorant, I really can't help you.
But if you're curious and ignorant, then we want to make sure that if you've given us your attention for this two hours of the first episode of The Revolution and then stay for all 12 hours that, you know—
Ten and a half years on Vietnam.
We want to make sure that we've earned it in the simplest way, that the equation is not at all above.
There's no communication in this world, you already know this, except among equals.
Like if I look up or down, already I've dislocated the possibility.
And the only communication is among equals.
And that's you treat your audience like they know something.
It came out in September of 17.
Not that they're familiar with the subject, but they're not stupid, and they don't have to be added some sort of pablum.
You don't have to simplify it.
Because if it is, they'll recognize either themselves or they'll recognize somebody that they know that's very close to them.
And that's the essence of good story, is it's human beings telling stories about other human beings and what they do that has a resonance, that...
In December of 15, Barack Obama still has 13 months left in his presidency.
accrues like the layers of a pearl imperceptibly.
You can't identify, but you know, and of course a pearl is based on an irritant, a grain of sand that's bothering the hell out of that, you know, oyster, right?
You've created this gem out of the friction and irritation and resistance and perseverance of having to do something.
It's, you know, it's interesting because one of the great themes in American history is race.
I mean, it's obvious because we were founded on the ideal that all men are created equal.
And the guy who wrote that sentence owned hundreds of human beings and didn't see fit in his lifetime to free them.
But you also have individuality.
And what is, with Jack Johnson, like a good boxing match, you have a black man who also just wants to be a man, wants to be fully himself.
I said, we're doing the revolution.
Now, the society doesn't really want him to do that, and they're going to put lots of constraints, and he's going to overcome those constraints.
And then when he does, they're going to find another way to box him in.
But James Earl Jones was really great on this.
He was almost saying, do not just be constantly distracted by the question of race.
And I am now speaking to you where we are almost done with it.
This is somebody who wanted to be a man, his own person.
And that a great deal of Jack Johnson and all the travails and all the things that he went through and all the great, great, great, great skill.
We made a film on Ali, too, which I'm really, really proud of.
But he's clearly studied Jack Johnson.
He knew they would watch those films.
A lot of that making, wearing your opponent out is Jack Johnson from, you know, an earlier century.
And this is a time—I mean, his heyday is between 1905 and 1915 when more African Americans were lynched for looking sideways at somebody.
And he's openly defeating every great white hope that came at him.
Dating white women and marrying white women.
And so, you know, we call the film – mostly we like to have kind of boring things like the American Revolution, Brooklyn Bridge, the Vietnam War.
But we call that film Unforgivable Blackness, The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.
We're still onlining some stuff.
And I did that because the great black scholar W.E.B.
Du Bois at the turn of the 20th century said boxing is in great disfavor.
Jack Johnson seems to be the cause.
But Jack Dunson did nothing that no other boxer or sportsman or even senator has done.
But what it allowed us to do in all of the cases of all the war is get exactly at that thing that you're talking about.
Why then, as it come to him, it all comes down then to his unforgivable blackness.
That by taking the crown, by defeating all comers, it was an unacceptable situation.
When in those days, being the heavyweight champion, there was a sense of this was the supreme masculinity of the world.
And that everyone went out of their way, from John Sullivan to others, to avoid fighting a black man.
paid Tommy Burns guaranteed $30,000 to fight Jack Johnson on Boxing Day.
Millions and millions of dollars.
Jack only got $5,000, but he's happy to do it.
Going after Tommy Burns, no relation.
And Tommy Burns was a pseudonym.
Anyway, in Australia, they fight on the day after Christmas, 1908.
And Jack Johnson just told you he probably could have taken care of him in the first inning.
They finally cut the newsreels off.
They actually stop the fight because they do not want the public to know.
And when, after having digested, I think is a good word, all of the white hopes that were thrown at him in the intervening year and a half, they finally convinced Jim Jeffries, the guy who'd retired undefeated, the previous champion before Tommy Burns, to come out and in Reno on July 4th, 1910, the fight of the century.
What is – what actually takes place in war?
Jack Johnson defeated – no one thought it would happen – Jim Jefferies.
And there were riots all across the country, all across the country, white on black riots.
The Los Angeles Times wrote their lead –
editorial was a word to the black man do not lift your chest up too high do not put your face up to the sun do not you are still the same lowly person you were yesterday just because jack johnson and i mean the idea that that you know it goes back to this issue washington knew it was wrong so
Like life is vivified to an extent that we can't describe.
Jefferson knew it was wrong.
It was really hard to do this.
I mean, Jefferson himself said slavery is like holding a wolf by the ears.
You don't like it, but you don't dare let it go.
And so what happens is that.
Somebody like an Abraham Lincoln is born anti-slavery, right?
But they're also a developing abolitionist movement.
So now they want to abolish slavery.
They're not just against it and understand that it's immoral.
God never – nowhere does God say that black people are inferior to white people.
Even though most of the slavers know that it's wrong, but there's so many good profits to make, what happens when the abolitionists come along, that they begin to make arguments that slavery is actually good and that black people are, in fact, inferior.
Like our imminent death right now as we speak is not a possibility.
And so one of the reasons why the Civil War happens is this sense of threat to their economic power, which are the 4 million people in the 9 million populated South that are owned by other human beings.
And it's an extraordinary dynamic.
We face it today, the reverberations.
And Jack Johnson, I think, is one of those magnificent cases where he defies your ability to put it in a neat cubbyhole.
And when the first film was nominated for an Academy Award, that was a film called Brooklyn Bridge.
He defies your ability to make it binary.
Like we live in this media culture, right?
We live in a computer world.
Everything's a one or a zero.
Everything's a red state or a blue state.
Everything's young or old, gay or straight.
And so to tell a complex story of history, particularly like of Jack Johnson, is just to have your molecules rearranged.
But if we're on the front lines, it is at any moment.
You know, it really is exhilarating.
I probably said that word too many times, but it's exhilarating.
We understand why people come home and can't compartmentalize it.
We understand why people have problems.
We're amazed at the people who don't.
Yeah, it's an amazing story.
And we told it just a few years ago in a four-part, eight-hour series.
I remember when Sonny Liston and then Cassius Clay fought in Miami, and he was such a new commodity.
He was rocking the boat with this verbal onslaught that we were, for a nanosecond—
Sorry that Sonny Liston lost because he was the person that we were familiar with.
We knew this kind of black man and we did not know this other scarier verbal person.
It obviously brings out the worst.
And my dad was an anthropologist.
But from then on, we became friends.
We're the most dangerous species on this planet, clearly.
We watched all the stuff through the 60s and then saw his opposition into the war.
And then he said, you know, you could come and mow me down with a machine gun.
And the ABC did some interviews with black soldiers in Vietnam and they all to a person said,
I'm fighting for him to say I don't want to be here.
And I just thought it was great.
And I also wanted to do this because nobody – people had done certain fights.
People had done his fight with the government.
I wanted to do Soup to the Nuts.
We wanted to do Soup to the Nuts.
My daughter, oldest daughter, Sarah, and my son-in-law, David McMahon, we made the film from birth to the death.
This guy is, in the late 60s, the most hated man in America for that stance that you were describing about the drug.
And he dies the most beloved person on the planet.
And I really loved the idea.
I loved the opportunity of being able to show how that happened in the midst of, you know,
They call it the sweet science, but there are some fights.
The three fights with Frazier are like as brutal as anything you could ever possibly imagine.
And what they went through and what he ultimately clearly, in retrospect, lost as a result of winning two of the three of the fights.
is one of those miraculous stories.
Like, Jack Johnson is defining an age and so interesting that it's in a marginalized activity.
Like, even back then, like heavyweight boxing.
And I think particularly when you take – most recently we spent so many years studying the American Revolution.
There were women of the night.
It was, you know, money was being exchanged.
Lots of throne fights, and it was in the interest.
It was so interesting that emerged this person who was so resolutely himself, just as Muhammad Ali would be decades later.
I'm not a big fan of boxing, but it's irresistible.
You can't take your eyes away from these two men when they're fighting.
They're, first of all, spectacular specimens, and they are...
We kind of accept the violence of the Civil War.
They changed the whole dynamic.
And as you said, there's no greater boxer than Muhammad Ali.
We accept the violence of the 20th century wars.
Yeah, I think this is what makes him so great.
This is like Ted Williams, only much...
bigger because Ted Williams loses a lot of time to World War II and to Korea and comes back and, you know, still hits, you know, 350 or whatever it is he hits for the Red Sox, having lost what you'd consider the prime of his career in his early days in World War II.
American Revolution, you know, they're in breeches and they're in stockings and they have wigs and the ideas are too important.
And as a fighter, this is not like the goodwill ambassador.
He's flying fighter bombing runs.
He's like, really, it's every time he can not come back and he's a magnificent stuff, but it's not...
denying it as they did in both Jack Johnson.
And he was fallow from 1912 to 1915.
And then finally they put him in the ring in Havana with Jess Willard, who's a younger guy.
It's 105 degrees, 110 degrees on the canvas.
They're going to go 40 rounds after the 26.
This guy who's got 10 years on Jess Willard, he's 37.
You know, Willard finally gets in a thing.
And it's like, oh, thank God.
And they would not let another black man fight for a heavyweight champion until he was not Jack Johnson.
That is to say, until he was Joe Louis, light-skinned, couldn't be seen with a white woman, couldn't smile at his victories.
And Louis agreed to all of this.
It was the unspoken, unwritten rule that you couldn't be an in-your-face black man.
And that sort of obtained for a couple of decades and then disappeared.
Ali came and he said, broke the mold, and essentially, basically, they used to say when he was training, Ali was training, there'd be ghost in the house, ghost in the house.
We don't want to admit that this was as bloody per capita as our civil war, that it was in fact a civil war in ways that even our civil war wasn't.
And that meant that Jack Johnson was there.
And that Ali had to be that much better.
Everybody said, oh, you're coming back to New York.
And it makes those post-Vietnam years even more spectacular, the fact that he could prevail over Frazier and over, I mean, the rumble in the jungle is just crazy.
No one thought he was going to win.
One of the greatest fights of all.
I remember I was in college still and we got soundless black and white footage of the fight, some of it in slow motion.
And my film teacher showed it to us and none of us were interested.
Our civil war was a sectional war, north and south, and that
I was like, whoa, this is stuff I did with my dad 10 years before.
And it was him delivering a blow to Foreman and seeing in slow motion this halo of sweat coming off the afro of George Foreman.
I mean, I will never forget just the – almost the beauty of this incredibly brutal sport.
We were forged in violence, and it's okay.
retrospectively yeah no he he did not enjoy any benefit of the doubt no it was really it was another time of division and people exploiting division right and making them he was the worst them that there possibly could be and i think the fact that he was able to stick to his guns
Those ideas, those big ideas that we seemingly want to protect by putting in a bug in amber, guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, it doesn't in any way get diminished.
I mean, he could have said, okay, I will go and do goodwill stuff, and it would have been all over.
He said, no, I'm not going to.
Famously, no Vietnamese ever called me the N-word.
There's a wonderful parallel.
I mean, when I said that Twain said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, like we have a failed invasion of Canada in the American Revolution.
There's a big debate over inoculation.
And I said, you know, I'm staying here.
There's an eclipse that takes place.
You know, all of this sort of stuff.
And there's always an interesting thing is that particularly in New Jersey and South Carolina, the British are always talking about we have now pacified New Jersey, the province of New Jersey.
We have now pacified the province of South Carolina.
And then all of a sudden they have to admit that it's un-pacified because the patriots have taken over and done all this guerrilla warfare that has made it un-pacified.
And at one point, George III and many others within the British government are worried about what we would call the domino theory.
If we lose them, then we're going to lose Ireland.
And if we lose Ireland, we're going to lose Gibraltar.
And we're going to lose the subcontinent of India.
And so you go, there's nothing new under the sun.
There's nothing new under the sun.
No, and every president from Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, even Ford never told us the complete truth about it and did stuff that...
that got Americans killed and lots of other people killed over what would have been... There was a Geneva Convention in 54 that basically said we could separate into two places, and in two years we had an election, which everyone knew Ho Chi Minh would win.
It makes them more inspiring and more exhilarating, the understanding that
If you left it at that, we'd be talking about 3 million people still walking the earth, at least.
And the communists, Chinese and the Soviets...
were very suspicious of Ho Chi Minh.
They thought he's not a communist.
And he knew... I'll tell you, the day that the Japanese surrendered in Tokyo Bay, officially, was September 2nd, 1945.
That same day, in Badin Square, in Hanoi...
Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence, and he quoted Thomas Jefferson.
What happened when our country was formed is one of the most important events in the entire history of humankind.
And standing next to him were OSS guys.
By the end of September, the State Department, having realized, oh, this World War II is over, but we're going to be in a new—they didn't call it a Cold War yet, but we're going to be in an epic struggle all around the world with communism, and this guy has been to Moscow and whatever, so he must be a communist—
And so all of a sudden the State Department – the OSS had saved his life.
They parachuted into northern Vietnam looking for people that could mobilize in their help against the Japanese and found a sick and dying Ho Chi Minh – we don't know what his malaria or whatever – treated him and brought him back.
He didn't see us as the enemy.
And yet we – in those two years, in 56, when they should have held an election, we had already decided to place our bets with Ngo Dinh Diem, who was a corrupt South Vietnamese politician who would eventually be assassinated by –
you know, a general who would be a one in a series of generals until we got you and Key, and those were the people who took us out of it or were on their watch when the North Vietnamese, you know, finally united their country.
I mean, you and I were talking about some of the punctuated equilibriums of comets or meteors or striking this, you know, ice ages.
It's just—and the lying, you know, that we have the tapes of Johnson and of Nixon, and it just—
You know, there's an arrogance to record yourself for posterity, you know, and to be careful what you say.
Some of the things that not all of them have been listened to, they haven't all been transcribed.
And we were fortunate to spend a lot of time just listening and listening and finding just some stuff that, you know, if Nixon and Kissinger had walked into the peace talks that were already started in January of 69 and taken the terms that the North Vietnamese were offering,
They would have had better terms than what they had in 73, and there would be fewer Americans, a lot more Americans alive, 25,000 more Americans alive, something like that, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.
But they didn't want to be the first president to lose a war.
In fact, they'd already soured the South Vietnamese, they said, as Humphrey was coming up in the polls.
He only lost by 0.7 points of a percentage in the election.
I mean, Ecclesiastes, the Old Testament says there's nothing new under the sun.
He had been way behind and was making a lot of speed.
A lot of it had to do with what people perceived as progress in Paris.
And the Nixon administration – or not the administration, the Republican Party, the Nixon's election team reached out through an intermediary to the South Vietnamese government and said –
And if you'd had another week or two to the election, you would have had Hubert Humphrey as president or if they hadn't reached out to the South Vietnamese.
They were taping the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington and the palace in Saigon.
And he goes, oh, I would never do anything like that.
And Johnson either pissed off at Humphrey because he's not as much as a hawk as Johnson had become or more than likely unwilling to admit to your allies that you had been taping them in their own embassy in Washington and their own palace in Saigon did not tell the truth of what he knew, that Richard Nixon had essentially reached out to a foreign power at the time of a national election to try to influence that election.
But for a few minutes, right here, we started something that was brand new.
Yeah, I mean, it's just endless.
Thomas Paine said, not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to do this.
And I can sit here in front of you and tell you that every single one of my films is a director's cut.
What would we look like today?
Well, I think we'd be less divided.
I think a good deal of the divisions now were sort of born in there, the entrenched positions that people take now.
I think there's also a sense, you know, the Pentagon Papers were McNamara going to a gentleman that we interviewed, Robert Gard, and saying, I need to find out all the decisions.
And he learned, not only was he lying at times, you know, going and getting battlefield reports and then coming back and saying it's all rosy, but everybody had been lying back to the Truman administration about what was going on.
And it was just a series of lies.
And so we've just plowed ourselves into hearing stories.
And that's what, when they asked the Rand Corporation to sort of analyze some of the data, that's when Daniel Ellsberg, who worked for the Rand Corporation, surreptitiously, illegally copied them and then released them online.
to various newspapers, and they became what we call the Pentagon Papers, but they were always the Pentagon Papers, and they detail exactly what you just described, just a complete presence of both parties, a military-industrial complex.
When Eisenhower leaves, just before he leaves, he warns of the military-industrial complex.
He's not saying this is something that happened last Thursday.
Not just those top-down voices, the bold-faced names that we all know, the Washingtons and the Thomas Paines and the Jeffersons and the John Adams, but also the people you've never heard of, right?
He's saying this happened the second World War II was over.
There was so much money to be made that nobody wanted to ramp down the armaments.
And so you end up having these proxy wars.
You end up having, you know, these places where you're going to not have a hot war because that means the end of the world in a world of nuclear weapons.
But you're going to fight these proxy wars in different places.
And in Kennedy, it's a doctrine that Eisenhower and Kennedy and they all sort of embrace and
Figure out that they that they can do it.
And then, of course, Johnson, who, you know, Kennedy inherits 700 advisers from Eisenhower.
Johnson inherits 17000 advisers now in quotes when he comes in and he still has to wait until he wins reelection overwhelmingly.
A year later, and it's only into the following March of 65 that he commits ground forces, First Marines and then Army, to Vietnam.
And then we have the boots on the ground, even though we'd had boots on the ground for a long time and engaged in combat.
These advisors were very much engaged.
At its peak, it's well over 550,000 soldiers, American soldiers in the country.
0.01% of people have a painting made of them.
It is so interesting to look, and I've got in my office this wonderful two-framed maps, if you will, and they're the intertwining of the various two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, over time.
So the Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party of emancipation, of whatever, and the party that invented progressivism in the first part of the 20th century.
Everybody else is visually anonymous, but somewhere they wrote their name down, somewhere they're in a church record, somewhere they're here, somewhere they wrote a memoir and got handed down.
Democrats had been not that place.
But in the 60s, it began to change thanks to Lyndon Johnson of Austin, Texas, who understood that it was the right thing to do to put in those civil rights and voting rights acts and other things that we call part of his great society.
A film, by the way, that we're working on now will be out in a few years.
But he knew that the bargain would be to give up
uh... the solid south mean you woke up on election day if you're a democrat you had every one of the states of the former confederacy all of them in your in your tally and that's flipped and now you wake up on on election day and you more or less have had heavy all the states of the former confederacy on the republican side who abandoned what they were about is interesting to see in which for self-interest for whatever i mean nixon begins it
Jackie Robinson is a Lincoln Republican, didn't go over as many black people did to FDR during the new deal.
He was supporting Nixon for president, but Nixon wouldn't come to, to, um, Carlin campaign.
So he ended up voting for Kennedy and, and he, and Goldwater fully understood that we're just going to now switch the Republican party and go after just white voters who are disaffected with changes in civil rights.
It's an interesting story of the way in which parties can change places and be the very opposite of the thing they were just a few years before.
Well, I just find the thing is, you know, the bad word is progressive today.
And this is this is the you know, the Republican Party invented progressivism and they joined forces with some more liberal Democrats in the big cities.
But the opposition to the civil rights bill is coming from Southern Democrats.
And so we could bring to life a 14-year-old kid who joins the militia surrounding the British in Cambridge after Lexington and Concord, a 15-year-old.
Lyndon Johnson, knowing that he will have to use every bit of his powers of persuasion to get it over and he will require lots of Republican votes.
So you do have something positive happening in American history where the two parties are coming together and not just lockstep where every single Republican votes for something and every single Democrat votes against it.
And you you just feel like somebody's there from two different planets.
I actually think you have young officers like Colin Powell who are learning the lessons of Vietnam.
And so what you find is extraordinary reticence in the late 70s and the 80s and the early 90s.
So the first Gulf War is very much a reflection of Vietnam chastened by the excesses of Vietnam.
We're going to do it with a coalition.
who is from Connecticut who fights during the war, a 10-year-old girl who's from 10 to 16 from Yorktown who's a refugee for most of the time as her family's well-to-do circumstances are diminished and she has to be on the road because Yorktown is so vulnerable to attack from British in addition to all of this.
You know, we're going to do it with one arm tied behind our back.
We're going to stop a little bit sooner.
We're not going to have the full destruction of this.
All these sorts of things are in Vietnam inherited.
But then real politic comes in.
And then all of a sudden you realize we're in Afghanistan because of of 9-11.
It's not we had a chance to get him.
And we then switched the focus to Iraq.
and then ended up in both places in a kind of, you know, terrific stalemate that, as you say, just was, I think, back to being Vietnam.
I mean, I always say this, that if we, you know, we made our film when Vietnam came out in 2017, if I had done the film 10 years, and this is why history requires perspective, if I had done it 10 years after the fall of Saigon,
There's a recession going on in the United States, not big, but we talk about the Pacific Rim.
We think Japan is going to be the best thing.
Vietnam would be this ball and chain that we would be dragging around us forever.
If I'd waited 20 years to 1995, we're the sole superpower.
We're in the middle of the largest, to that point, largest peacetime economic expansion in the history of our country.
And Vietnam would always be important, but it wouldn't be this symbol of our decline, right?
If I'd waited 30 years to 2005 when we are bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq and people are beginning to use the language of the Vietnam and getting stuck in these unwanted perpetual never-ending wars –
And so the do-good history is to actually get some distance and perspective.
So you can look at the Vietnam War from the mountaintop of 85 and 95 and 2005 and then realize I've still got other experiences.
Classified material has been released.
More of those tapes have been listened to.
There's been a mellowing among the veterans and a willingness to speak.
Gold Star mothers realize they can't hide their grief.
She knows that by telling her story, she will help.
thousands of other people who've lost their children.
You can interview soldiers from other sides of the conflict that seem to speak exactly like our soldiers and that you begin to develop a way to see it more holistically than in just a kind of journalistic and almost political response.
I'm not going to sit here and give you an excuse.
You can see it for this hugely, hugely complex situation.
It just ate up human beings and ate up credibility, as you're saying, that the United States had built up as the greatest power on earth and certainly the good guy in what we euphemistically call the good war, that good war is the worst war ever.
More than 60 million people's lives were extinguished in World War II.
But as we said it in our film about World War II called The War, one of our pilots said it was a necessary war.
And that's what we should be thinking about fighting, necessary ones, not the ones that are going to, you know, have all these ulterior things that you described.
Who are the Germans, the hired soldiers?
The thing that the Depression did is it got used to Americans doing without.
And it made it very easy for Americans to segue into the Second World War because it was about shared sacrifice, something they'd learned on a domestic level.
They could now learn it on an international level.
We had an opportunity at 9-11, it seems to me, and I haven't made a film about it, and I imagine once we get enough years out, it might be interesting to sort of look at that.
Who are the Irish and Scottish and Welsh grunts of the British Army?
We had an opportunity to collectively turn the energy that we had, the grief and the sense of purpose, even anger of that moment, as well as the world's
unabashed symphony sympathy for what we've done and turn it into something productive and yet we didn't we then as you were saying we moved into sort of rationales and justifications for Iraq that were as we know in retrospect completely fraudulent yeah from the outside like me looking at your work
Day one is making sure that you're looking yourself in the mirror and you're going to commit to that because I'm now off like a congressman trying to raise money from foundations and corporations and individuals of wealth and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and things like that.
But you're immediately reading.
You're immediately talking to scholars who spent their life maybe on this aspect or that aspect of Vietnam.
We had I think it was 23 scholars, all who knew one aspect.
Well, that one, they wouldn't let me do this or they didn't give me this amount of time.
And I knew we were on to something when we'd have these screenings.
And a scholar would comment and all the other 22 would like whip over like they hadn't heard that.
And then if you charge yourself with that, you can't turn that out in a year and a half.
And so the film would do that.
I asked Shelby Foote about U.S.
Grant and he said Grant had what they call four o'clock in the morning courage.
That meant you could wake him at four o'clock in the morning and tell him the enemy had turned his left flank and he'd be as cool as a cucumber.
And so what you develop is four o'clock in the morning courage.
You wake up and go, and we're still doing it.
I didn't like the way that sounded.
Why didn't we trail that stuff?
So you just put one foot in the other.
We're all impatient, and impatience kills process.
Just like comparison is the thief of joy, if you're impatient, then process is squandered.
And process teaches you really important things of how to relate to a subject, how to collect the material, and then how to figure out how to digest that material and
into something that's a cohesive story that I can give to you, who may be ignorant of that story, but it's daunting, it's terrifying, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
And I think I'm speaking for the people who work with me because there's something...
Everybody responds at 3 in the morning.
Everybody says, yeah, why don't we do that?
We'll find an alternative to that to make it better.
And sometimes it's the niggling tiny things or sometimes it's really big to have the courage to take out an entire scene that really is working really well but destabilizes the film a half an hour later.
And marinating that stuff, finding out what's too much.
And I did that in our Mark Twain film.
I took out this beautiful prose thing from Life on the Mississippi called Whitetown Drowsing about Hannibal, this disguised Hannibal sort of waking up from its slumbers as it sees the puff of smoke north as the steamboat's coming down.
And the whole town is industry and activity and loading and unloading and whatever.
And then by the time the puff of smoke is around the bend south, everybody's back asleep again.
It was just fantastic and written so beautifully.
Mark Twain never wrote a bad word.
And I just realized we weren't getting out of the early biographical stuff soon enough.
And I said to my partner on the film, the co-producer and the writer –
You know, you don't want to make an encyclopedia.
who'd found that quote from Life on the Mississippi, I said, we're taking it out.
And he looked so hurt and so pained.
I said, look, I'll put it back in if you want it.
So we left it out and I thought it worked, Brian.
I said, I'll put it back in.
And for about six months, we went back and forth.
I mean, you started off by talking about entertainment, that you could make something that is, you know, technically educational, entertaining.
And then finally he came to me and he said, you were right.
We'll put it in the DVD extras.
We'll do all the things that you need to do.
But that's the kind of 4 o'clock in the morning courage you need to do is take out something that, like, it worked so well.
And yet, you remember the movie Amadeus?
And you just go, you got to do that.
The reason why we have the it's complicated is because there's not a filmmaker on earth that doesn't want to change a scene that's working.
But we have spent our entire professional lives changing scenes that were working when we found out new compromising sort of contradictory information.
And maybe it made the scene less.
Maybe the scene disappeared, but it actually serves the honor and the virtue of whatever that story requires.
And this is true of so many things in the American Revolution that are close to me because we're just coming off the months and months of these events.
Unbelievable sacrifices of having to take out one phrase of a sentence or changing one little thing just to help fine tune it.
Nobody would notice if I left it in and you looked at it twice and then I took it out the second time.
I don't think you'd notice it, but I'd notice it.
And that's the beauty of public broadcasting, too, is that it gives you that chance.
I don't think there is another platform.
I assume that A-list directors in Hollywood who have, you know, the final say enjoy that.
Steven Spielberg, who is, you know, one of the great directors of all times, I'm sure.
I mean, the word history is mostly made up of the word story plus high.
But there's still suits that are coming in.
There's still people who are giving him notes.
We get notes that are sort of like this.
You've got lots of voices of loyalists in there and that's really good because people tend to ignore the loyalists.
They're just de facto bad people and you don't make them bad people.
But you don't have a loyalist who goes through several episodes that you follow throughout the film.
So we had this loyalist quote in our fourth episode in the Battle of Bennington.
where this guy named John Peters, who's been in Vermont, been driven out by the Patriots.
The family, his wife and small infant kids are driven out.
which is a really good way to begin a story, right?
They find a British patrol boat somehow on Lake Champlain.
He starts a regiment, a Loyalist regiment, his 15-year-old son.
They find themselves with Burgoyne's army around Bennington, where they've been told there's great Loyalist sympathies and not that many Patriots.
There's no Loyalist sympathies.
or none that anybody's speaking up for, and there are lots of patriots, and they're defeated.
But at one moment, this man, John Peters, is on a parapet of a quickly made redoubt of a fort that they've put up to try to repel the attacking Americans.
And he hears the voice of a man named Jeremiah Post, who is saying, Peters, you damn Tory, which is the other insult that you would give to a loyalist.
And he recognizes the voice of,
of his best friend growing up and cousin of his sister.
And at that moment, Jeremiah Post, the rebel, the patriot, stabs him with the bayonet into his bone, but it's deflected by the bone of the ribcage.
And so I've tried to treat it as that way.
At that moment, as Peter said, I was obliged to destroy him, and he kills him with his pistol.
That's the American Revolution.
So we had that quote, and it was like, wah!
But why don't we go and put John Peters in episode one and episode two and episode three and episode four and then episode six when he's leaving and moving to Nova Scotia permanently and not going to be a part of this new deal.
I understand, and PBS is really good, and one of the reasons to stay with them is that they can reach every classroom in the country.
But you want to know what the American Revolution is about?
Killing your best friend on a hill west of Bennington, Vermont.
And so I could, with the reputation I have, go into a streaming service or a premium cable and say, I need $30 million to do a history of the Vietnam War.
I mean, we say kind of without thinking about the Civil War, brother against brother, you know, and it's I guess it's true a few times.
But the revolution is like that.
Henry Knox, who's this sort of big, amiable bookseller who Washington somehow figures out, picks out of a crowd.
And he said, oh, go to Ticonderoga and get those cannon we captured earlier in the year and bring them back here.
I got to drive the British out of Boston.
Sleds, impossible, hundreds of miles over land and over Lake George and, you know, terrible weather.
But he's married to this young woman named Lucy whose parents are loyalists.
So today's a school day in America, and hundreds of classrooms are showing a little bit of the Civil War, a little bit of baseball, a little bit of jazz, Lewis and Clark, the Roosevelts, country music, you name it.
And so she loses in the revolution her father, her mother, her brother and her sisters.
That's the choice she made by marrying Henry Knox, this sweetheart of a bookseller who learned most of his stuff about artillery and gun emplacements from the books in his bookstore and from serving in the local militia.
And he puts the guns, he gets the guns up top.
And the British wake up and go, uh-oh, we're out of here.
And they go up to Nova Scotia to regroup.
Massachusetts thinks the war's over.
They thank General Washington for his service and enjoy his retirement.
He goes, are you kidding me?
I'm going to New York, which is exactly right because that's where the British will attack next.
And the largest battle of the American Revolution is the Battle of Long Island.
And I won't spoil it for you what happens.
And I love that idea that it isn't,
Like broadcast television or even just the release of anything like Skywriting, the first breeze and then all of a sudden you can't see the words anymore.