Ken Burns discusses his new documentary about the American Revolution

Last week, the iconic American documentary filmmaker Ken Burns released his latest series: a six-part, 12-hour film on the American revolution. The film follows dozens of figures from various backgrounds, allowing viewers to experience the war through the memories of the men and women who lived through it.

Earlier this year, Burns was in Portland for a special sneak preview of the film. We listen back to his conversation with Geoff Norcross in front of an audience at Revolution Hall.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Last week, the iconic American documentary filmmaker Ken Burns released his latest series, a six-part, 12-hour film on the American Revolution. The film follows dozens of figures from various backgrounds, allowing viewers to experience the war through the memories of the men and women who lived through it. Earlier this year, Burns was in Portland for a special sneak preview of the film. He sat down with OPB’s Geoff Norcross in front of an audience at Revolution Hall. They were joined by David Schmidt and Alan Taylor, who also worked on the film.

Geoff Norcross: You say the American Revolution was a civil war, even more so than the Civil War, the one in the 19th century.

Ken Burns: Yes.

Norcross: What do you mean by that?

Burns: Well, civil wars usually entail massive civilian loss of life, and our Civil War is more a sectional war, and we say North versus South. And while we focus on the trope of brother versus brother, it applies much more to the American Revolution than it does. There are very few civilian deaths in our Civil War outside of Missouri and and Eastern Kansas where there’s real, very similar to revolution-like combat that’s going on between civilians, particularly in our case in the revolution in New Jersey and in South Carolina, but there’s lots of lead up and a lot of intimidation, lots of terrorist organizations.

Benjamin Franklin’s own son, William, was the deposed royal governor of New Jersey that spent time in a prison. When he was finally released, it was presumed he would go back to England, his beloved England, and instead he formed a terrorist organization of loyalists going out killing patriots. There were plenty of patriot organizations killing loyalists and I think we have to understand that that’s quite different than what our sort of mythology that has grown up that is sort of calcified around our story of our revolution. So if we can understand it in a civil war where you have a loyalist population, disaffected population, patriot population.

And those numbers ‒ and Alan, correct me if I’m wrong ‒ they’re not constant. They’re ebbing and flowing as British occupation or as they call it pacification efforts. It sounds like the Vietnam War all over again. In one province, as they recall and as they referred to it in New Jersey or South Carolina falls apart. All of a sudden there’s a surge in patriot influence with the loyalists who are dominant in a particular area. They’re taking revenge and sort of personal and individual revenge on patriots. It’s really stunningly violent.

And so in our film, we’ve tried to represent the people, the kids, the soldiers that are fighting on both sides. A really prime example is we follow loyalists and we’re calling balls and strikes. We’re not saying that they’re necessarily bad, but we have one loyalist that we follow throughout most of the film named John Peters, who in our episode four is at the Battle of Bennington, which he is about to lose. He is accosted by someone climbing up the rampart, the redoubt that he’s defending, saying, “Peters, you damned Tory,” and sticks his bayonet in him. At the same time, he recognizes that this is his best friend growing up, Jeremiah Post, and as Peter says, “I was obliged to destroy him” and shoots him.

And that’s the American Revolution too, and that is stunning to sort of contemplate. And I think that you can go from that and there’s a real warning. The first voice you hear is Thomas Paine. The second voice you hear, Canassatego, says in the second time he speaks “never fall out with one another.” This is his advice to those seeking union, but the entire history of the United States is falling out with one another. And the divisions that we feel today, we were as divided then or much more so than now and certainly in our Civil War, it produced 750,000 deaths. This is a real civil war.

Norcross: Yeah. Alan, can you paint a picture for us of what the population of the continent was at the time? Who was here? And how were they diverse and how are they different?

Taylor: Well, Chris Brown makes a very important point that this is probably the most diverse society in the world in 1776. There were immigrants from Ireland, from what is now Germany, from England, of course, but also a surge of enslaved Africans had come in in an enormous wave during the late 1760s and early 1770s. And they were not speakers of a single language or coming from a single culture, but there was more ethnic and linguistic diversity among the Africans than among the Europeans who were settled here.

So then there are the Native peoples, dozens of Native Nations, and they’re not living completely separate from the settler population, but instead they’re all interpenetrated. So Thomas Paine said this is the country where there is greater diversity and the less likelihood of concord, meaning agreement, than any other on Earth, and that’s part of the enormous challenge faced in making the revolution, but also the tremendous accomplishment to pull together just enough of a coalition of diverse people to make a nation that’s not defined by one ethnicity or one language.

Norcross: Well, that’s us.

Taylor: That’s us.

Norcross: That has been from the start. When the colonists were getting organized around this idea of democracy, there was already a kind of democracy happening here. Can you talk about the Six Nations and, and how their ideas informed the new nation?

Taylor: Well, I would say that Native peoples were consensual societies in which there was an attempt to reach broad agreement. They were not on board with the kind of close divisions in elections and so forth. So I wouldn’t call it a democracy, but I would say they’re societies in which popular participation is absolutely essential and popular agreement ‒ and not just by men, but also by women, the matrons of these societies ‒ were key political elements. So these societies were, you could say, certainly more popularly oriented and had a broader political participation than the emergent United States, which, as William Hoagland says so nicely in the clips that you saw, the founders were not enthusiastic about democracy. What they wanted to do was create a republic which would have democratic elements, but in which this genteel elite would continue to govern the country.

Norcross: Ken, how did you find these historians? How did you decide who was going to be a part of this?

Burns: I’ll let David answer that because he was involved with Sarah Botstein in the wrangling of that. I mean, we, when we start…

Norcross: There were so many of them.

Burns: Well, and many are not represented on camera in the film, who’ve advised us, and I think the important thing that we do that I’d like to communicate is just that we do a lot of reading, we do a lot of studying and research. And we follow the scholarship and not just a particular perspective, but lots of different perspectives and then go out to see who we’re gonna talk to and have that and not sort of tell them what to say, but to be corrigible throughout our process and I think Alan can also testify to the fact that we were willing to not only listen to what various scholars were saying, but to incorporate their suggestions time and time again to strengthen the film. But David can talk about that process.

David Schmidt: Yeah, I mean, reading. You read, and you read, and you read, and thankfully we live in an age where you can often find a YouTube video to make sure that they’d be really good on camera. So we knew Alan, we got to meet Alan in person before we told him we wanted to interview him. We got to scout him out a little bit. So there’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of in the reading, finding the footnotes and seeing who Alan was reading. That helped. There’s talking to somebody like Alan and saying who should we talk to and he’ll tell you.

Kathleen DuVal, who you saw there was one of Alan’s students at Davis, is that right? And it’s actually interesting. There’s generations of scholars on there. Bernard Bailyn, who we saw here today. We interviewed him in 2018. One of the last interviews he gave. He’s now deceased. That same day we interviewed Gordon Wood, his student. His student was Friederike Baer, who you saw in the last scene. It sounds pretty incestuous, but there is a lot of people out there in Alan’s profession who are unearthing all sorts of history that maybe there wouldn’t have been available to us 50 years ago and that if we were making this film at the time of the bicentennial.

And then there’s a lot of people who tell this story in a slightly less academic way who are hugely important to the way we do this as well. So somebody like Rick Atkinson or William Hoagland, Nathaniel Philbrick, who you didn’t see here, Stacy Schiff, who you did, are… You saw their little lower third writer, so they’re not members of the academy, but they are pretty well versed in the story and they made it what it was. Without them and without Alan and his coterie, we wouldn’t have nearly the film we would, that we do have.

Norcross: David, you live here in Portland now, but you grew up on the Virginia Peninsula where so much of the Revolutionary War was fought. You’re like minutes away from Yorktown. What was it like to work on this project, given your personal history?

Schmidt: So I grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, and I worked in Colonial Williamsburg, so I like to say that I grew up in 1774. And so every Wednesday and Saturday, I was in the Colonial Williamsburg Fifes and Drum Corps, so I’d go from school in middle school ‒ pretty cool ‒ go from school to the Fife and Drum building, go into the locker room. There’s lockers all around here. It’s kind of reminding me of that. And I’d get dressed in my leather shoes with the brass buckles, the white stockings up to the knee, the knee breeches, the white cotton shirt, the weskit, the hunting frock fastened with a belt, stock, this leather awful thing that constricts you, tri-cornered hat. And then I’d go play the fife down to Gloucester Street, just like a normal kid, right?

So, there’s a gazillion things I am grateful to Ken for including me on this project. One of them is the opportunity to go back to this place I love so much and to begin to tell the story of not just Virginia, not just Williamsburg, Yorktown, but the East Coast, which I’ve left to live here with you guys. Another thing I’m hugely grateful to him for is that he let me move here and continue to keep my job. Thank you.

And then immediately just some immediate things that come to me here watching this film, some of this film in front of my home community, I’m incredibly grateful. I get to see the face of a voice that I’ve heard a lot, right? [Applause] I’ve gotten to become friends with my wife and my mother-in-law who are here, who I refer to as MPPW Alan Taylor, multiple Pulitzer Prize winner Alan Taylor. I get to go get drinks with him. And then seeing on the screen, Ken and I know – hopefully if we did our job right it doesn’t look like a lot of work, hopefully feels seamless – but there’s a lot of seams we’re burying in there about how much work went into each decision there.

Norcross: So Ken, this, the final cut is 12 hours long. How many hours did you have to cut out to achieve that number?

Burns: That’s a really good question. That’s so to the point because I think there’s a sort of sense that you build a film and to one extent you’re right, but it’s really you subtract stuff from it. So we probably have more than 500 hours worth of material to…

Norcross: God, that sounds excruciating to me.

Burns: It’s actually pretty standard. I live in New Hampshire and have for nearly half a century, and we make maple syrup in our little town and it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup, and it’s pretty much the process here. You can’t boil that sap. If you do, you have hard candy, rock candy, so you evaporate it. It’s a very slow and very cautious process in which you have to get the temperature up to, but not quite, to boiling and this stuff goes off.

And so our cutting room floor is not filled with anything that’s bad, which I think is one of the inferred aspects of your question, Geoff, which is it’s all good, it just didn’t sort of fit. And there’s so many different tangents as David and I and perhaps Alan watch where you see a scene and you realize, well, we used to also have this, this, and this, and it was just….

You saw the movie Amadeus, there were too many notes, or you went too far. You could watch even the scholars, but also other people that we’d bring in at various screenings. You could watch them fall out. That’s our terminology for just feeling like there was at one point the seamlessness that David’s referring to is this thing in which it looks like we just put it together yesterday and that it hasn’t been agonizing trial and error and really millions, literally millions of problems that we don’t see as pejorative but we see as inevitable friction in this effort to make a film about the American Revolution.

You’re going to a priori run into resistance and how you overcome it is important and a lot of that are very, very difficult choices. Even our introduction, which is the first thing we work on and are working on throughout and is often the last thing we’re working on and very true in this case, rearranging massive rearrangements of that introduction just a few months ago before and around and even after we locked it or supposedly locked the film, which is the technological term in editing when you promise you’re not going to change anything anymore. And then I think we’ve probably made hundreds of changes since we locked it. [Laughter]

Norcross: A boss of mine, a former boss of mine once said, the reason we have error dates is so editors will stop editing. Stop. It’s done. Well, and you are on a long schedule. You’ve made almost 40 films and they take years to make.

Burns: Yes, so this one, as I was saying, it was almost 10 years old and a lot of water under the bridge and 10 films probably released during that time.

Norcross: How does it feel after a decade of work to have it in the world?

Burns: First of all, it’s terrifically exciting in the way that David was saying. It’s bittersweet. There’s a sense of letting go of something as if a child is about to head off to college and they’re not coming back except to visit.

But there’s also three principal joys which occur in shooting when an interview with someone is great. And I’ve had the good fortune to do hundreds of interviews in my life, where you’re up at dawn and you’ve got a shot and I’ve had the privilege of taking that shot and seeing it in the film and you’ve seen some of my shots that I’ve done from my very professional film camera that supplement the main cinematography of this taken by a person who used to be my assistant cameraman 52 years ago when we first started working together. And so you might even see an archive someplace and you go, I know that’s going to be in it.

The second is in the editing room where the films are made and where there’s a kind of exhilaration, nothing compares to it. And then right now there’s a kind of evangelical period that mitigates the pain of having to let something go because you have the ability to try to convince other people of the importance of the centrality and I don’t have to make too much of an argument in referring to the American Revolution of how extraordinarily important it is, not just in the lives of all of us in very intimate ways, but in the life of the world.

Norcross: You don’t need to make an argument for the importance of it, but there are questions that you need to answer about how much people know and what you can build on. And maybe Alan, this is a question for you. What is your sense of the baseline knowledge that people have about the American Revolution that doesn’t need to be explained?

Taylor: Well, I was in the history department until last year and you have historians from many other parts of the world and often the person from Chinese history or from European history would say, well, you have such an advantage because your students show up and they know so much about your topic. And I said, I envy you that students would show up knowing nothing about your topic because there is this very hard-baked set of ideas about the American Revolution as a united American people rising up against British tyranny and it leaves out so much.

It leaves out the role of native peoples. It leaves out the enslaved people who are caught up in this war. It leaves out the division among the Americans. It leaves out people like John Peters, and David deserves immense credit for finding the story of John Peters because it really is a jaw-dropping moment in the film when it comes.

So this is an extraordinary, complex, fascinating story which has more drama when you bring in this broader cast of people who are not all united but are making very difficult decisions under enormous life and death duress.

Schmidt: You know, I noticed something today. I’ve seen this 45 billion times. I noticed something today that I had not noticed before, which is that the full title “Common Sense” is “Common Sense Addressed to the Inhabitants of America.” He didn’t say to the free white men of the property of America. He said to the inhabitants of America, and he also didn’t even say to the inhabitants of America of 1776. So you can read this, it is for you. It is for us, and I think he makes a lot of good points. Some stuff probably hasn’t aged super well, but most of it really has.

Burns: The S for a line.

Schmidt: That’s a great line. The only thing that’s aged is that he used an F instead of an S.

Burns: Green fleas, that great music of the period. Yeah.

Norcross: David, I want to ask about the eclipse. It was beautiful and it was moving, but you got to wonder, what does it have to do with the American Revolution? So talk about that inclusion.

Schmidt: So in the course of 12 hours, you need a minute and a half like that, I promise you. In the course of an hour maybe you don’t, but I will say that’s one of the stories that I had the great fortune to be able to contribute to this that hasn’t, I don’t think, been anywhere else and for good reason because what does it have to do with the American Revolution?

I was in Eastern Oregon in 2017 across the Cascades and got to see the total solar eclipse there. I don’t know if any of you guys got to see it, but it’s otherworldly is the right word for it, and I vowed then that if I ever get an opportunity to see another eclipse, I want to be there and I have a very stressful job that I don’t get away, and I don’t get to take too much vacation time. So what better way to ensure that I get to see the next eclipse than to write it into this story.

But it’s a little bit true. But we found in it, and it was also the story of the 2017 eclipse and the 2024 eclipse, that there are all sorts of people of every background who experienced that, and it is not just a story of that day. It is the same experience that you guys had in 2017 that I got to have twice. It is a kinship across time.

So we get to say that there’s a Spanish flag over New Orleans. Did you know that? I didn’t know that before working on this. And that there’s Spaniards in Mexico. But of course there’s also other people who were on this continent before in Mexico. There are people in the Great Dismal Swamp. That’s our chance to talk about the self-emancipated former slaves, so it came together just because I got to see something in Oregon, but it became a really nice way to cleanse the palate, as I think Ken said when he was introducing the clip before a really awful battle, at the Battle of Monmouth.

Burns: And that battle is lead by, is participated by Joseph Plum Martin, who you hear, which is typical of soldiers everywhere, that before this would have been some omen of great promise or evil, but in this case we’re soldiers, we just don’t pay it any mind. And the beauty of the eclipse just passes them by because they’re putting one foot in front of another. It’s really hot. And they’re about to fight one of the hottest and most difficult battles.

Schmidt: He refers to people in olden time, which I just love because he’s in olden time, right? I know.

Norcross: We’ve got time for one more question, and it turns out that one of our subscribers to OPB Insider put it beautifully. Could you please comment on your view of how this series on the American Revolution resonates with today’s political climate?

Burns: So it doesn’t, and of course it does. The Ecclesiastes, which is the Old Testament, said “what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again, there’s nothing new under the sun.” It is a very easy cop out for people from the academy to writers to ordinary folks like us in conversation to say that history repeats itself. It never has. No event has happened twice. Mark Twain is supposed to have said, perhaps echoing Ecclesiastes, that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes, and if he said that it’s a fantastic thing. It’s really true, and I don’t think there’s a film that I’ve worked on over the last 50 years that I haven’t been aware once we finished or even while you’re doing it that it was rhyming in some spectacular way in the present or many times. We worked on a film on the U.S. and the Holocaust that had just excruciatingly difficult rhymes in every sentence as we worked on it. And this one as well it’s. It’s clear.

Our job though is to not erect large neon signs or billboards saying, “isn’t this so like today.” Because over the course of the near decade that we spent working on it, those rhymes change all the time. And they of course will change as different people receive them and hear them with different ears. We made a joke yesterday about how one of our characters, the wife of a German officer coming to catch up with her husband with her three small children, is terrified of coming to this land where she understands people eat cats. So last fall, that was really resonating tremendously. This fall, maybe not so much, but there are many, many other things.

I think Johann Ewald says it again, as we sat down, Geoff. You know, he’s pretty impressed. He’s not impressed when he comes. He’s looking forward to whooping these rebels as a hired German mercenary, and he’s exulting in Colonel Musgrave’s excellent defense of the Chew House and other places along the way where he disdains the writing of Thomas Paine. But he has to admit, as he and his fellow Germans and the British army surrenders at Yorktown that this rabble… Who would have thought 100 years ago that this rabble could create something that could defy kings.

Norcross: Who would have thought 100 years ago that out of this multitude of rabble would arise a people who could defy kings? [Applause] That’s going to stay with me for a long time. Ken, Alan, David, what an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.

Burns: Thank you

Taylor: Thank you.

Schmidt: Thank you.

Miller: That was filmmaker Ken Burns, along with David Schmidt and Alan Taylor, talking with OPB’s Geoff Norcross in front of an audience at Revolution Hall in July.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.