Ken Burns

But for a few minutes, right here, we started something that was brand new.

Thomas Paine said, not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to do this.

And so we've just plowed ourselves into hearing stories.

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?

0.01% of people have a painting made of them.

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.

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.

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.

Who are the native players?

Who are the black players?

Who are the Germans, the hired soldiers?

They're real people.

Who are the Irish and Scottish and Welsh grunts of the British Army?

Who are the generals?

Who are the diplomats?

Who are the French?

And then if you charge yourself with that, you can't turn that out in a year and a half.

You have to spend a decade.

And marinating that stuff, finding out what's too much.

You know, you don't want to make an encyclopedia.