Ken Burns

enslaved people and Native Americans and women and people on the margins, as the legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk says in our film, they're deeply influenced by the Declaration.

So all these people are moving and changing sides.

And in one season, more British and Asian soldiers were killed in kind of ambushes and guerrilla actions that reminded me, having the previous film on war of being Vietnam, just made me feel like we were in South Vietnam.

They're talking about

pacifying provinces and all of a sudden there's having to admit that province isn't pacified any longer.

Well, the Bible, the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes gets it.

What has been will be again.

What has been done will be done again.

There's nothing new under the sun.

Human nature doesn't change.

And that human nature superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events.

And we hear the echoes.

We see the motifs.

Mark Twain is supposed to have said history doesn't repeat itself, but of course it doesn't.

No event has happened twice, but it rhymes.

And that's exactly right.

I've never made a film where it wasn't rhyming in the present.

And our responsibility, our discipline as filmmakers, is not to point signs saying, oh, isn't this rhyming like today?

Because that not only dates the film, it makes you fall out of the complexity.

But that this thing needs to have a complex and nuanced story of what actually happened and not some sanitized Madison Avenue scene.