Ken Burns

I looked 12 years old and I was trying to sell people the Brooklyn Bridge.

And people were, you know, telling me, oh, this child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge.

No.

And I used to keep these two big, thick three-wing binders on my desk, all filled with rejections for that one film.

I mean, literally hundreds of rejections.

But I had read David McCullough's The Great Bridge, the epic story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge.

And I went out to my partners.

We just founded our company called Florentine Films.

We were starving.

We'd like maybe get a day's work or two days' work a month as cinematographers and sound men.

grips and we were paying the rent and that was that i said we're gonna do this and i'll raise all the money and and i did and it got i moved up to new hampshire so i could live on nothing in 79 and and 80 and i both those years i made less than 2500 bucks

and chopped all the wood for my stove, split it, carried it, kept the stoves going.

You wake up in the middle of the night at 4 a.m.

in February, and you go, I just heard the heater kick on.

I've got to go down and feed the stove.

But it came out, I got nominated for an Academy Award, and that was the sign to me that I needed to— I'd hit a fork in the road, and like Yogi Berra said, you take it.

It was to not go back to New York, to not go back to L.A., but to say I'm going to be staying here because this is labor intensive.

We're going to have to raise grants to do this stuff.

I'm not looking for investors.

We're looking for underwriting so that we are liberated from the suits that would come in and give the notes and say, oh, you need to be less sexy.