Ken Burns

Well, it's funny that it's a really that's a very smart question.

First of all, we'd already been well underway on the American Revolution before we even said yes to Franklin and began working on it.

Well, when I say this took 10 years, nine years and 11 months to do, it's true.

But I also released 10 films during that time.

So I've got different production teams and we're working on stuff and it's very symbiotic.

When you leave to work on Leonardo da Vinci or Muhammad Ali, it helps you come back to the revolution.

It helps you come back.

Well, what Ben Franklin represented was an opportunity to practice on the absence of photographs and newsreels.

And we could, because it was only two episodes, do it without doing any recreations with except for print shot stuff.

But here, as soon as I said it, I knew we were fully invested.

So rather than get people to have them reenact a specific thing.

I'm not crazy about it.

Why not make a feature film?

We just spent seven years collecting a critical mass of people doing reenactments in an impressionistic way, sometimes way up above from a drone, sometimes intimately where the musket, the hammer hits the flint and the gunpowder explodes or the cannon goes off or you see women tending to a burned hand or

sloshing blood off a tile floor.

And then what you have is yet another resource.

You've got paintings, you've got drawings, you have lithographs, you have print, you have maps, maps, maps.

You have live cinematography, devoted people of the real star of our film, the magnificent country that we have, the prize that had animated this fifth global war over it, the land.

And so then it could work in and you'd find a volley sort of out of focus and muzzy of redcoats firing.

And all of a sudden you're panning across a painting in which on the left side of the painting are a bunch of redcoats firing.