Ken Burns

Oh, we're so divided.

Okay.

Human beings are divided.

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 so part of our job...

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 telling us?

What is it saying about this circumstances of, say, the resistance in Boston in the early days leading up to the revolution?

to try to understand nuance.