Ken Burns

The guys, both North and South, who'd been in it, who said, here we go, were... They said they'd seen the elephant.

That's how they described it.

They said they'd seen the elephant.

I assume it was the most...

exotic thing they could think of.

That's what combat was, something that no one else experiences, seeing the elephant.

And we just even removed from it, we're just looking at still photographs, still got us to our core.

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,

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.

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.

And that a thousand veterans, American veterans of the Second World War were dying each day in America.

And I was like, fuck.

We're losing them.

And by the way, that figure today is so small.

It's just actuarially true that it's not 1,000 anymore.

It's maybe five or six today.

And pretty soon it will be nobody.

And there will be no memory.

And so I wanted to make a film about that.