Ken Burns on ‘The American Revolution,’ Joe Rogan and No Kings

Ken Burns’ latest work takes us back to a moment of great dissension and division, a moment in which Americans raged against the monarch leading them and in which any outcome seemed possible. By sheer happenstance, it’s eerily resonant. 

Co-directed by Sarah Botstein and David P. Schmidt, “The American Revolution,” premiering Nov. 16 on PBS, is a six-part, 12-hour excavation of the war that led to the creation of the United States. In the form Burns has made famous in documentaries from “The Civil War” to “The Central Park Five” to “Jazz,” the series takes an expansive, prismatic view of its subject, exploring the motivations and decisions of early Americans including George Washington and rank-and-file soldiers. 

The production of “The American Revolution” unfolded over 10 years, during which time Burns, who continues to put out about a film a year, was working on other projects too. This effort, though, had special challenges, because of the lack of visual documentation of the period (there aren’t photos of Revolutionary battlefields to which the filmmakers can apply “the Ken Burns effect”) and the breadth of the subject matter. 

Covering the war — and integrating the testimony of academic experts — is a process of endless discovery. “We study it for so long, and then we get to work with all of these people who do this as their job every day,” says Schmidt. “I grew up in Colonial Williamsburg, and I don’t know this stuff.”

At 72, Burns, who’s been on an extensive press tour, is already looking ahead — he mentions a Lyndon Johnson project in the works. What draws his films together, and the tradition into which “The American Revolution” fits, is a curiosity about the national character and an inherent optimism. “I’ve worked with Ken for almost 30 years,” says Botstein, “and he is a great enthusiast. He’s excited about American history, about the human experiment and about bringing history to life.”

That’s not to say Burns thinks history provides a one-to-one template for the present moment: He rejects the idea that his new film might be seen as a comment on the Trump era. But in its clear-eyed, bighearted insistence that progress happens thanks to complex, flawed individuals, it may nonetheless be the project many watching at home need. Burns spoke to Variety via Zoom from his New Hampshire home in October.

I’m excited to speak with you specifically about this film — it’s pretty special.

This has been a really complex labor of love for almost 10 years, lacking some of the hallmarks — photography and newsreels — that would help make it complete. Perhaps the reason that the Revolution is so drenched in mythology and bloodless gallantness is that there are no photographs.

In “The Civil War,” for instance, you had photographic imagery to make the situations feel real. Here, you’re dealing with maps and paintings and that’s it, as far as primary visual sources go. Did you feel as if your hands were tied?

Not tied — it was a wonderful challenge to have. It’s just a recalibration. Sometimes, you’ve got no first-person voices, because you’re dealing with lots of living witnesses. Here, you’ve got hundreds of first-person voices, no living witnesses and many scholars.

We filmed reenactors for years and years and collected a critical mass of dozens of hours of impressionistic footage. We have lots of maps; some of them we extrude and make dimensional. All of that is a way of making what I hope is beautiful in lots of senses of the word. It’s also ghastly, horribly terrifying.

Early in the series, the historian Maya Jasanoff remarks that the fact that we know in retrospect that the events transpiring in the 1770s would become the American Revolution make it feel very unreal and detached. Your work makes it feel human-scale.

We’re looking at “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” right? Nobody stands up in a boat in the middle of a storm at night in an ice-filled river. When (she says) “unreal and detached,” we show that image, and we never show that image again.

It’s a revolution, yes, it’s a civil war — but it’s also a world war. It isn’t just about great men in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts. There’s this diverse group of people engaged in it, and we’re not picking any sides. We’re umpires calling balls and strikes. Nobody’s wrong. Everybody in this country will have the chance to identify with this in some form. I have never varied what I’ve said, whether I’m talking to Joe Rogan or schoolkids in Charleston, Detroit or Chicago: We’re umpires calling balls and strikes.

Your political views are no secret — you’re a Democrat and opposed to Donald Trump. To attempt to remove your own sensibility, does that take discipline?

Look, I’m a citizen — I have the right to free speech. And there are lots of filmmakers who very honorably make films about their political points of view. That’s totally fine too. We have a First Amendment still. But I’ve chosen the self-discipline of this, and I thrill to that. I thrill to the fact that we had David Koch as one of the underwriters of the “Vietnam” film, as well as a liberal bundler for Obama. I have conservative underwriters and left-wing ones, and they trust me.

Your press tour has included stops on Joe Rogan’s and Theo Von’s podcasts.

Ones and zeros exist in computers, but binaries don’t exist in nature. We’ve got a lot of divisions, but they may be a mile wide and only an inch thick. People were trying to give me briefing books about how to talk to Joe Rogan. I said, “No, I’m just going to talk to him and tell him how excited I am about this show.” He was curious — and Theo Von even more so! At one point, (Von) goes, “Liberty’s like a pilot light!” It was so great to have somebody coming to this understanding.

I don’t necessarily agree with them politically — some things I do. But I live in a tiny town in New Hampshire — it’s like going to a ball game. Nobody asked to see where you’re registered when you go in, right? Everybody’s singing the anthem. In my town, I walk every day, three miles or so. I wave at everybody. I don’t care what their bumper sticker says; I don’t care what their bumper sticker doesn’t say. I just go, “Hi, neighbor!”

I don’t think I’m the only person who, when thinking about the Revolutionary War, thinks first about the Founding Fathers, great men inventing our country in Philadelphia. This documentary complicates that story immensely — why was it important to you to expand the story beyond the familiar mythos?

Something your magazine has written about is the phenomenon of “Yellowstone.” What is “Yellowstone”? Apparently, it’s beloved by conservatives, right? It’s the big conservative series that everybody loves. It’s about a patriarch who is a great, honorable leader who also murders people. He’s got a very strong daughter; she has one brother who is married to a Native American and another brother who is Benedict Arnold. And at the heart of it is greed — American greed for land. How is this different from “The American Revolution”?

I could have made the same argument about “Succession.” This is our origin story. We live in a media world in which everything is red state or blue state, right or wrong. Nobody’s life proceeds that way. That’s why Kevin Costner is such an amazing character as John Dutton, because he’s flawed, and everyone is flawed.

As we speak, “No Kings” rallies just happened in every state in the country. Has bringing together viewers of all political allegiances gotten harder?

No, but what’s become harder is the discipline to just tune that out. This project began when Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency. Stuff rhymed then that doesn’t rhyme now; stuff rhymes, then doesn’t rhyme, then rhymes again. There’s a wife of a German general (in the documentary) who travels to catch up with her husband at Saratoga, and who’s worried that Americans eat cats. If our film came out last fall (when then-vice presidential nominee JD Vance spread an unfounded rumor that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating cats), people would go, Ken, you did this.

We have to just put all of that away. It’s not that you’re not mindful of all of this noise going on, but you can’t play to it. If you do, you limit the possibility of the art and the possibility of the story. Because it means that you’re trading on a momentary set of political exigencies which always change.

This particular project represents 10 years of work, give or take. But you weren’t single-mindedly focused on it, because you release a new project more or less annually. How do you keep up that pace?

We’d be really good generals. Maybe not me, but Sarah Botstein — put her in charge of anything. I’ve been working on the “Revolution” with a team that, at times, was finishing up “The Vietnam War,” working on “The U.S. and the Holocaust” and working on a project that has yet to come out, on LBJ and the Great Society.

I wear lots of hats: I do writing, I produce, I direct, I raise all the money. But the best job is to be in the editing room and be the audience’s representative — I can go, Wait. We’re still not connecting this. We’ve assumed everybody knows this, and they don’t necessarily.

Speaking of raising the money: I know the life of a documentarian is only getting harder. You’re in the happy position of having partnered with PBS on all of your films.

I couldn’t have made any of my films anywhere else but PBS. Take “Vietnam.” It cost 30 million bucks. Took 10 and a half years to make, and I spent 10 of those years with my cup out, trying to raise money. I could have gone to a streaming service or premium cable and gotten everything I wanted — they just wouldn’t have given me 10 and a half years to do it. What I wanted was the independence. I didn’t need suits giving notes; I needed the money to do it.

The underwriting model of PBS is more like a grant from the National Science Foundation to a college that is researching this rare blood disease — they’re not going to say, Have the cure next Thursday. Do what you can to advance the science. And so we hit our marks: We’re pretty much on budget, or if we expand, I raise the money. We’ve always hit our marks.

I imagine you’re concerned about the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its possible effects on PBS.

I lost $4 million for a future project on LBJ — and we’d been in discussions for $10 million more, which, I’m pretty sure, in normal times I would have received. So maybe the loss is four, maybe the loss is 14, but I’ll figure it out. But what about somebody who’s coming up? What about the rural stations that depend on CPB money for so much? They’re going to become news deserts, those areas. Maybe that’s the intention. But nobody’s going to be covering the school board or the city council meeting.

I’ve interviewed PBS CEO Paula Kerger in the past and find her a very formidable character, in the best way. What do you think of her leadership?

I’ve known every president of PBS back to Larry Grossman (who led PBS from 1976 to 1984). She is by far the best chief executive. She is from inside. She gets us. She is tireless. I always think I’ve had a long month and traveled a lot, and then I check in with Paula — oh my God.

I’m curious where your ideas come from. Why, for instance, did the American Revolution present itself to you at the moment it did?

It’s sort of like the ping-pong balls in the lottery, you know? There’s 30 ideas, but when one drops down to your heart, you do it. The “Buffalo” film that came out a couple of years ago — we’ve been talking about it for more than 30 years, and I’m so glad we waited, because we could benefit from not only new scholarship but Native American scholarship. Native Americans entering into the academic community are making their mark, and we could center a Native American narrative in a really organic way.

There was this moment when we were in the editing room finishing “Vietnam” where I saw that map of la Drang Valley in the central highlands, and I went, “Wow, that could be the British moving west in Long Island toward Brooklyn.” And I said, “Maybe we can do that.”

There are no focus groups. I love the question: Why did it take you so long to do the Revolution? I don’t know why — it’s just because we don’t have a set thing. We’re not going in chronological order. We’re not operating from a checklist.

I often wish that I could go back to college at the age I am now and truly appreciate it. Given that you’re not a subject-matter expert on most of the topics your films cover when you begin production, you’re kind of living my dream — existing as a perpetual student.

That’s exactly what I do: I’m the perpetual student. I’ve gone into two projects, “Baseball” and “Vietnam” with the sense of Finally. I’ve got a subject that I know something about. I played baseball for as long as I can remember, and I follow it to this day. It’s the greatest sport that’s ever been invented. And I protested the war and had a high draft number — otherwise, I would have tried to get conscientious-objector status. But every day of those productions was a daily humiliation of what I didn’t know. And that’s just so great.

As a student of history, do you think this country can emerge from how divided we are at this moment?

Yes, we can get better, yes. Or if not better, something else will happen — something different. We are in existentially difficult times; you’re right to bring it up.

History gives you a little bit of optimism. When somebody is in crisis, they go to a pastor or a professional, and that person will almost invariably ask, “Where’d you come from? Who are your parents? What was your childhood like?” And you begin to reassemble and put back together your fragile, fractured narrative of yourself by studying your own origin story. People and countries are the same: They’re living, breathing organisms.

I’m not a historian. I happen to work in history. But I’m a storyteller, and I’m interested in the story of us. This story is a way to help remind the people that there’s no them. This is the only thing I’ve learned: There’s only us. There’s no them. Despots and authoritarians need to make a “them” to have a straw man whom you are against. If you need to make an enemy of “them,” you’ve lost the spirit of us.