Ken Burns

of human events.

And, man, we don't know enough about it.

We don't know enough of the interiors of it that are complicated.

I have in my editing room a neon sign.

I've had it for a decade and a half in cursive, lowercase cursive.

It says, it's complicated.

You know, because there's not a filmmaker on earth that if, you know, if the scene's working, you don't touch it.

But we have spent the last 50 years touching those scenes.

Right.

You know, I mean, going in, maybe it's lesser, but it's truer and it's got more dynamism.

It's got more contours.

It feels like it's accurate to what actually happened, which is more complicated than our sort of simple binary discussions of what history is.

Completely unaware.

We wrote a –

for lack of a better word, a topic sentence early in the film is that, and I might get this slightly wrong, but the American Revolution was not just a dispute between Englishmen over Indian land taxation and representation, but a bloody struggle that involved more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American, that somehow came still to represent some of the highest aspirations of humankind.

So ours is like the fourth global war over the prize of North America.

And we're treating native nations not as them but as distinct entities.

The Shawnee, for example, in the middle of the 18th century, 1750, are as important an entity on the world trading stage with French or British or others as say the state of Virginia or the colony of Virginia is at that time.

And that they're different from the Delawares, their allies.

And they're different from the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, the six, five, and then it was six tribes, the Seneca, the Cayuga, the Onondaga, the Tuscarora, the Oneida, and the Mohawk.