Ken Burns

I mean, the filmmaking thing was born in tragedy.

My mom got cancer when I was two years old.

There's never a moment when she wasn't dying that I was aware.

She died when I was 11, a few months short of my 12th birthday.

And my dad had a pretty tough curfew for my younger brother and me, but he forgave it if there was a movie on TV that might go till 1 a.m.

on a school night, a school night.

Or he'd take me out to the cinnamon sea like Old Silence or French New Wave that was happening in the mid-'60s.

And I saw my dad cry for the first time.

He didn't cry when she was dying, didn't cry when she died, didn't cry at this impossibly sad time.

But we were watching this movie called Odd Man Out by Sir Carol Reed about the Irish troubles in the 1910s and 20s.

James Mason, you know, very tragic.

And I saw him cry and I got it immediately.

That provided him with this safe haven to express himself in a way, nothing in his life, for whatever reasons, for his own psychology, his own history, his own traumas, his own whatever it is.

And I said, that's what I want to do.

And it wasn't about sentimentality or nostalgia.

It was about authentic emotional stuff, higher emotional stuff.

The way our founders would talk about we'd be able to create a republic where you'd have higher emotions, nothing sentimental about it.

It's that you would just get closer, be more virtuous.

And so I said, and that meant, you know, I was going to be Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford or Howard Hawks, you know, big Hollywood directors.

And I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which was a brand new experimental school.