Ken Burns

And you don't get it from churning it out either.

So I spent five and a half years working on the Civil War, and I really was, like, daunted by it.

But the first...

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.

The second film on the celibate religious sect, the Shakers, wouldn't have declined so precipitously, not because they were celibate.

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

after the Civil War in the questions of the sole survival in the intensity that it had before the Civil War.

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.

The next film was on Huey Long, the turbulent Southern demagogue.

He came from a North Louisiana parish that refused to secede from the Confederacy.

I mean, refused to secede from the Union.

They saw the Confederacy, the ownership of slaves, as a rich man's cause.

And so they became a hotbed of kind of radicalism and populism and later would spawn this swamp thing called Huey Long.

You know, we made a film on the history of the Congress.

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 so I began to see the centrality.

And after the Civil War was done,

And it was really just brought to life by those voices of the people.

What you're talking about, well, here we go.

We didn't want to do another film on war.