Ken Burns

You're going to L.A.

And I said, you know, I'm staying here.

It's so labor intensive.

And I can sit here in front of you and tell you that every single one of my films is a director's cut.

I'm not going to sit here and give you an excuse.

Well, that one, they wouldn't let me do this or they didn't give me this amount of time.

And so I could, with the reputation I have, go into a streaming service or a premium cable and say, I need $30 million to do a history of the Vietnam War.

And they'd give it to me.

But they wouldn't give me the ten and a half years it took me to take.

You see what I mean?

It's the time and the ability to marinate the ideas, to do the deep dive into the scholarship, to triangulate the various scholarships.

As you know better than anybody, there's lots of different viewpoints and perspectives, and you want to find a way in which you can –

kind of, if not average them out, you can find a way in which you can understand them and you can have a conversation, a sort of a campfire around which you can discuss the complexity and the undertow of any subject.

You pick it, the Brooklyn Bridge, the American Revolution, most recently.

I'd like to attribute some consciousness to it, and I honestly can't do it.

I realized that I was striking out trying to raise funds from folks.

And the people who were interested in helping me, like the National Endowment for the Humanities or this, all required me to give it for free, as they still do, to PBS.

And we had foundations and that.

And so suddenly that dream of being a filmmaker, which I'd had since 12—I wanted to be a filmmaker at 12—

of the communion of strangers in dark rooms, the cinematic experience.