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 Ken Burns Interview |
key: culture / arts |
| part two |
key: history |
| key: war / veterans |
key: media |
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| Ken Burns Interview |
key: culture / arts |
| part two |
key: history |
| key: war / veterans |
key: media |
| Ken Burns Interview Return to index of stories... |
00:56:07 THE WAR TELLS A STORY OF WORLD WAR II, SOLDIERS AND PEOPLE ON THE HOMEFRONT, AND IT TELLS THE STORY FROM FOUR TOWNS, MOBILE, ALABAMA, SACREMENTO, CALIFORNIA, WATERBURY, CONNECTICUT, AND LAVERNE, MINNESOTA, WHY THESE FOUR TOWNS? We knew we couldn't tell the story of the whole second world war, it's the greatest cataclysm in history there are millions of stories you couldn't have a series that would last 1000 hours that would do it justice, and you follow the poet William blake and decided you could find the universe in a grain of sand, so for this 4 towns, one in the east, south, west and Midwest. We felt by getting to know the towns, we could feel the human dimension of the war, we could send there sons off to this horrible cataclysm in history that would in its duration consume over 60 million lives and by doing it from the bottom up, there are no experts in this one, if you weren't sent off to the war or weren't waiting for someone to come home from hit, you're not in the film. By doing it from the bottom up we can get a sense of what it was really like. Most world war II stories are distracted by celebrity, the famous people, distracted by strategy, tactics, and weaponry and in the case of the second world war to me inexplicably interest in all things nazi. We're interested in the young men who helped saved the world and its an amazing story. And by looking through there so called ordinary lives, you see that in extraordinary times there are no ordinary lives. NOW AFTER THE CIVIL WAR YOU TALKED ABOUT NOT DOING ANOTHER WAR SERIES, WHAT CHANGED YOUR MIND? If you do a war right its gut wrenching and the soldiers in the civil war have said they've seen the element of combat, you've seen it. They said it was something that nobody else had ever seen before, this horror of combat and no one ever forgets it, its this paradoxical thing that is horrifying and terrible and life threatening but its also vivifying, you never live your life higher when your in combat. I think we were drawn to that and also repelled, and after the war you cant go back there again. People wrote to us and realized a thousand veterans of the second world war were dying each day, that our school kids have atrophy about what happened, many think we fought with the german's against the Russians and we just said we have to do this and for last six and half, seven years we had to delve deep to what one of our characters in the second world war film calls the abyss, this horrible combat and anybody who worked on the filmed and hasn't been affected by once again getting down into the nitty gritty which was what it was about. 01:39:06 ARE WE DOING ENOUGH TO CAPTURE THE MEMORIES OF OUR WWII VETERANS? To me this loss of memory is just to irresponsible, and we cant do this so we set in motion history projects that will permit the very kids who don't know the history of the second world to take off there cameras and ask grandpa what happened, but also if they are willing to make a copy and send it to historical sites to essentially add to the common wealth of our country and there experiences in totality make up a much fuller portrait a more complete portrait in what happened in WW2 and times a wasting. |
| part two Return to index of stories... |
01:01:12 SEVERAL VETERAN'S GO YEARS WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT THERE EXPERIENCES, WAS IT DIFFICULT TO GET VETS TO OPEN UP? It was difficult, you know we interviewed many more people than we used and some just didn't want to talk about it, some would start an interview and then just burst into tears. We think about Vietnam and korea being the post traumatic stress situations, many many more in the second world war that had that, and men in there late teens and early 20's were asked to become professional killers and when they came back they were asked ok don't be killers anymore move on with your lies. And they have seen unspeakable things, that even our relatively graphic footage doesn't even do justice to, and they had to lock many of those horrors away, that many couldn't understand, not their mothers or fathers, wives, siblings, they had the most secret corners of their soul and only as their intimation of mortality came, as their grandchildren came not just their kids, but grandchildren saying grandpa what did you do, they begin to feel they had an obligation to tell no matter how painful and what we had to do is put ourselves in the way of their recounting and honor whether they could say a little or a lot and bless them for the service they gave to our country and to share what is there greatest inheritance, the memory of what took place when they were teenagers, to me I know of no more remarkable story in all of American or world history. IS THERE SOMETHING IN THE SERIES THAT REALLY RESONATED WITH YOU, STAYED WITH YOU? There's not a moment that I didn't learn something new, that I wasn't struck by the incredible cost of war, the incredible bravery, of the men and women we bore witness too, the people who fought and died and wrote home and waited, this is about the worst thing human beings do but also this strange place in which incredibly heroic places take place and we were after all of that, so I don't think a day didn't go by where we didn't look at each other and shake our heads, just honored to be present to these people remembering these things who spent most there lives trying to hide them or are just now speaking about them, such great reticence and comradery with the people left behind, and sympathy for everything else. When the second world war took place it was the single reatest concerted effort in us history, there were no read states or blue states, people are always on television now trying to say how I am different than you but we were trying to find how we were similar and together so the lessons of the second world war reverberate down to the present day when in fact its even more important now as a country of 300 million, and yet we still yearn for community and the second world war reminds us is that its still possible in America to have community and study that example will only serve ourselves. 01:05:10 THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS THAT PEOPLE EXPECT FROM A KEN BURN'S PRODUCTION AND YOUR STYLE OF FILM MAKING, BUT THERE WAS TALK OF SOME DEPARTURES IN THIS PRODUCTION, HOW IS THIS DIFFERENT THEN THE ONES YOU DID BEFORE? I think there's something about combat that really forces all the old forms to sort of take a break, we essentially engage 8 elements, 4 are visual 4 are oral. The visual is live cinematography, interviews, footage, and the soundtrack we have oral side, complex sound effects, music, first person commentary and third person narrator. There all there, but somehow the power of the story liberated us that we wer eable to engage these 8 elements in much more dynamic ways. You'll see after stepping into this film after the first few moments where we set the table you'll be getting on to one of the more wild roller coasters you've ever been on and it isn't just a physical ride through the war but an emotional war through the interior of remarkable Americans who aren't very much like you an me, we don't have john waynes, or roosevelts and churchills, their minor people, they pass through our scenes but this is about regular folks that you and I could have had thanksgiving with and that's what makes it more available when you get engaged in a battle with them your that much more concerned for them. Its not just some aloof figure in a pantheon that you hear about in history books, but someone like uncle Charlie who after dinner loosens his belt and watches the football game, and some time before that you ask him what happened, what did you do tell us please. And then this film just becomes a kind of rock in the pond and the ripples go out and we collect more stories. 01:07:24 CELEBRITY NARRATIVES IS SOMETHING YOU USED EFFECTIVELY, CALLING ON TOM HANKS IN THIS PRODUCTION AGAIN? Well I don't like to call it celebrity, we like to use voices that help to bring the past alive and when someone isn't alive and we have their letters or newspaper accounts, we look for people that we can do it, we've used amateurs and we've used celebrated actors and the only reason we use them is because they are good at what they do. I can't think of anyone better than tom hanks. We discovered in Laverne, Minnesota a newspaper editor who had turned down big city jobs just to own his own newspaper company and found himself in a position where he had to explain the unexplainable to his towns people, there's sons went off and some didn't come back and his columns were so moving and so poignant and he wrote me a letter and said I'm dreaming of al mcintosh do you have any more. And so we went back ont the microfilm and found more, and tom hanks is the one man greek man back home, not in danger, but always reminding us of what the cost of war is on the most intensely personal level. He can sit on the corner of main st and watch the depot agent and hand it to a dad and said which one and the depot agent would tell him and Al MacIntosh witnessed these seemingly minor details of the war that really are everything to a family and that night they'll turn their blue star gold which means they lost a son to the war. 01:09:15 IT'S ALMOST INEVITABLE THAT THERE IS GOING TO BE CRITICISM OF EXCLUSION WHEN YOU COVER A BROAD PERIOD LIKE THIS, WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO CRITICS THAT WOULD QUESTION THAT BECAUSE THE WAR AFFECTED EVERY FAMILY IN SOME WAY? This is the thing you can try and be the manhattan phone book and try and be encyclopedic, what you have to do is suck it up and decided your going to pick a few emblematic stories. We weren't after including or excluding any group of people we were after universal experiences of the war and with the exception of Japanese Americans and African Americans, we don't even focus on any one group, we just focuse on combat experience, so when you see a Japanese soldier in italy and france in its first day of combat, breaking down on camera for us saying the two dead germans he says before him, he realizes they are the same age as him and if he were back in the states he might have gone to school with them. You realize he is not being Japanese-american, hes not representing the Japanese-american community, he's representing the human community. The late historian Arthur schlesinger jr said we suffer today from too much pluribus and not enough oonum. Our film is about oonum finding individual experiences, everyone's story, so everyone is included in this film even though everyone isn't here. 01:10:52 YOU TALK ABOUT THIS DRIVE TO MAKE HISTORY COME ALIVE IS THAT A DIFFICULT PROCESS? Making history come alive is one of the hardest things I know, I know its not rocket science I know its not surgery, but taking morbid, static images, taking footage and variety of stories and shaping them into coherent narratives takes years and years and years. We worked on this for 6 years, we have a huge Russian novel of a film, theres 40 and 50 people in the foreground whose lives are interconnected and you have behind them just gigantic world wide cataclysm, just trying to tell that story all of us are hallow eyed and you look at him and said where are you, he says ?, this horrible pacific island battle, and you say battle of bulge and we shake our heads and we massage it and work and re work the material until you can tell a story. That's what it is, narrative is the way human beings communicate to one another and telling a good story amidst thousands of hours of material is the toughest thing I know. 01:12:19 YOU TALK ABOUT IT TAKING 6 YEARS, LONGER THAN THE U.S. INVOLVEMENT IN THE WAR ARE YOU HAUNTED BY THINGS THAT WERE LEFT OUT, IS IT DIFFICULT TO LET GO WHEN THE PROJECT IS DONE? You know the proverbial cutting room floor is not full of bad stuff, but good stuff that you had to let go of and that's part of the torment of doing this, that whatever gets cut, isn't something you didn't want, its something that didn't fit. You remember the movie Amadeus, there is too many notes, and you have to be tough about that, 01:13:41 01:14:57 GIVE US A SENSE OF THE PROCESS IF YOU WOULD, ITS TAKEN YEARS, HOW DO YOU BREAK THAT UP? We never stop researching, a lot of people will have a research period, then shooting period, then they shoot with their head buried in the script and they edit to that script and finish. We never stop researching, constantly reading and writing, not worried about images, we are shooting in the archives, collecting footage of people, not in the sense you need to say something cogent, but because we're interested in who you are and what you have to say. We collect this over years constantly working and reworking and to figure out what are the important stories. Most important, spending years and years patiently editing this material. We painstakingly researched all the sound effects, it may be in a still footage there's 100 effects behind it making it come alive, all footage comes silence and we have to build layer upon layer, and we patiently melt down huge body of material down to 20 hours then 15 hours to 14 hours which is where we are. 01:16:58 WHAT WOULD YOU WANT VIEWERS TO COME AWAY WITH AFTER VIEWING THE WAR? I want them to have there own experience. I don't want to tell them like some documentaries do, this is what you should believe, this is what you should feel, this is how you should vote, I want them to come away an dhav ea sense what it was like to be in that war, the amount of courage and sacrifice needed to prosecute that war 01:18:36 I KNOW YOU STARTED TO TAKE THE MOVIE ACROSS THE COUNTRY, WHAT HAS BEEN THE RESPONSE? we've shown it to veterans and they said I never thought I'd live long enough to see someone portray it the way it actually was. Their children who are coping, and wanted to know what their parents did and can extrapolate through us what it is their parents did to the grandchildren who ask there grandparents, what did you do, what was it like back there to even the millennial who are so far removed but begin to understand that in the middle of the 20th century this huge, biggest human event that ever happened, claimed 60 million lives is worth attention and something they need to know about. People approach it in different ways, you know some people think its cool, boys think its cool and that's ok because when you get in you see the human cost. Others come because they have relatives, others come because it's the human experience they need to connect with a sense of patriotism and love of country all of those things are in the film and they can find it all there, we call it the war, its what the veterans call it. 01:41:12 AND THE TRAVELING YOU'VE DONE WITH THIS, DIFFICULT WITH THE YOUNG ONE AT HOME? Its always hard, I was just talking to my little one who is 2 years old right now and I got on the phone and I was across the country and she said daddy home, now. And it took me back 20 years when my middle one was younger and I'd put my coat on and she'd go daddy going to new York and I thought oh my goodness its happening all over again, its very tough, but they participated in there own ways in these films, and they know in some way I have this fire burning to communicate the story of American history and I am grateful they let me go. All these films have been made in Walpole, NH. Yeah, no better place than Walpole NH to make a film. WHAT'S ON THE AGENDA WHAT'S COMING UP NEXT? We're editing currently a history of the national parks, not a travel log, wildlife film, bu the story of the ideas of the individuals who made this American idea happen. We're working on history of prohibition, we're going to update our baseball series, if I had a thousand years I wouldn't run out of projects. Lot's more to look for…lot's more Ken Burns…Thank you…Thank you. |
| key: war / veterans Return to index of stories... |
NEW HAMPSHIRE OUTLOOK Air Date/Time: 7/15/2007 HOST: Beth Carroll Length: 25:00 Now on New Hampshire Outlook: Walpole, New Hampshire -- home to film maker Ken Burns, is where some of America's best documentary's have come to life. Ken Burns has lived here for nearly thirty years, making Walpole somewhat of a hub for historical documentary film production. Hello, I'm Beth Carroll and Welcome to New Hampshire Outlook. We're coming to you from Florentine Films in Walpole, where film maker Ken Burns says he invented himself. Over the years he's earned critical and commercial success from documentary's on a wide range of topics -- from the Civil War, to Jazz, to Baseball. I sat down with Ken to discuss his new documentary -- "The War" -- a seven part documentary on World War Two. PRODUCER/REPORTER: Beth Carroll NAME OF PARTICIPANTS: Ken Burns\Filmmaker, "The War" |
| key: culture / arts Return to index of stories... |
NEW HAMPSHIRE OUTLOOK Air Date/Time: 7/15/2007 HOST: Beth Carroll Length: 25:00 Now on New Hampshire Outlook: Walpole, New Hampshire -- home to film maker Ken Burns, is where some of America's best documentary's have come to life. Ken Burns has lived here for nearly thirty years, making Walpole somewhat of a hub for historical documentary film production. Hello, I'm Beth Carroll and Welcome to New Hampshire Outlook. We're coming to you from Florentine Films in Walpole, where film maker Ken Burns says he invented himself. Over the years he's earned critical and commercial success from documentary's on a wide range of topics -- from the Civil War, to Jazz, to Baseball. I sat down with Ken to discuss his new documentary -- "The War" -- a seven part documentary on World War Two. PRODUCER/REPORTER: Beth Carroll NAME OF PARTICIPANTS: Ken Burns\Filmmaker, "The War" |
| key: history Return to index of stories... |
NEW HAMPSHIRE OUTLOOK Air Date/Time: 7/15/2007 HOST: Beth Carroll Length: 25:00 Now on New Hampshire Outlook: Walpole, New Hampshire -- home to film maker Ken Burns, is where some of America's best documentary's have come to life. Ken Burns has lived here for nearly thirty years, making Walpole somewhat of a hub for historical documentary film production. Hello, I'm Beth Carroll and Welcome to New Hampshire Outlook. We're coming to you from Florentine Films in Walpole, where film maker Ken Burns says he invented himself. Over the years he's earned critical and commercial success from documentary's on a wide range of topics -- from the Civil War, to Jazz, to Baseball. I sat down with Ken to discuss his new documentary -- "The War" -- a seven part documentary on World War Two. PRODUCER/REPORTER: Beth Carroll NAME OF PARTICIPANTS: Ken Burns\Filmmaker, "The War" |
| key: media Return to index of stories... |
NEW HAMPSHIRE OUTLOOK Air Date/Time: 7/15/2007 HOST: Beth Carroll Length: 25:00 Now on New Hampshire Outlook: Walpole, New Hampshire -- home to film maker Ken Burns, is where some of America's best documentary's have come to life. Ken Burns has lived here for nearly thirty years, making Walpole somewhat of a hub for historical documentary film production. Hello, I'm Beth Carroll and Welcome to New Hampshire Outlook. We're coming to you from Florentine Films in Walpole, where film maker Ken Burns says he invented himself. Over the years he's earned critical and commercial success from documentary's on a wide range of topics -- from the Civil War, to Jazz, to Baseball. I sat down with Ken to discuss his new documentary -- "The War" -- a seven part documentary on World War Two. PRODUCER/REPORTER: Beth Carroll NAME OF PARTICIPANTS: Ken Burns\Filmmaker, "The War" |