TV INTERVIEW: KEN BURNS
Director of 'The National Parks' Describes His Motivation & Love Of An American Ideal
Noted historian Wallace Stegner called our national parks “the best idea we ever had.” Well, Ken Burns — the best documentary filmmaker we ever had — has just created the best piece of television we’re bound to have this year.
The National Parks: America’s Best Idea will begin airing on PBS beginning September 27th as a 12-hour, six-part series. And Burns has pulled off another of his grand coups — not just recounting history, but by masterful use of the cinematic medium, he creates entertaining and compelling drama, both heart-warming as well as heart-rendering, while revealing a great, underlying theme — in this case, the fight for, and realization of, our democratic ideals…as expressed through Man’s relationship with Nature.
Sound lofty? Sit back and relax — in high-def and surround sound, if you have it. This stuff is fun to watch! On a purely “nature show” level, the cinematography is drop-jaw breathtaking. Spectacular. Exalting (and someone please stop me before I run out of adjectives). Burns’ spot-on musical choices take it another dimension yet. Scott Joplin. Duke Ellington. Haunting original pieces by Will Duncan and Bobby Horton. If anyone remembers the end of the first segment of Burns’ Civil War, as we heard a letter read, posthumously, from a son to his mother as the melody of “Ashokan Farewell” fades up…you know what I’m talking about. Like the great film music one can depend with the Coen Brothers, Martin Scorcese or Stanley Kubrik, you are in a master’s hands.
Now add in some high drama and a cast of colorful historical characters whose words are narrated by a cast of colorful living characters, like Tom Hanks, Eli Wallach, Andy Garcia, and John Lithgow, along with observations and comments by some incredibly eloquent actual park rangers and others… You see, our national parks didn’t just happen — they were battled and crusaded for by individuals. In America’s rush to settle coast to coast and industrialize, our scenic wonders and habitats faced damage and outright destruction. Who was going to save these? And for whom? The rich? Or all of us.
You think California’s state legislature is inept and beholden to special interests now? Watch them sell out and flood one of Yosemite’s most beautiful valleys, a century ago, and break the heart of America’s greatest naturalist, John Muir. Larger-than-life men like Teddy Roosevelt, an unlikely giant of conservation, fought to save the habitats of animals…so he and others could hunt and kill them. African-American war heros, the “Buffalo Soldiers,” were entrusted to maintain a semblence of order in rowdy parks during a virulently racist period of history. The National Parks is a very human story, which makes it such enthralling television.
Forget about the pressing problems of the Kardashian sisters. The National Parks is not only more fun and entertaining to watch, but one is imparted with an additional bonus — a deeper understanding of our history and culture, and a major uplifting of the soul. This is as good as television gets, and it’s brought to you by one of America’s greatest living filmmakers.
Buzzine editor-in-chief’s exclusive interview with Ken Burns:
Richard Elfman: When did you first get the idea of doing a documentary about the national parks?
Ken Burns: My co-producer and writer, Dayton Duncan, came to me about ten years ago and suggested what would be the logical sort of continuation of an interest both he and I have had in the American landscape as a way to get at the heart of the American story, the heart of the American character — to pursue the national parks, and I readily agreed. So what we have worked on, the last ten years, is not a travel log or a nature film, or anything like that, but in fact a story of the ideas and the individuals that made this amazing American idea possible for the first time in history. In all of human history, land was set aside for everyone and not just the very rich or royalty or monarchs — it’s a uniquely American story and an incredibly diverse one. Tell people over those ten years you’re working on the national parks and they say, “Oh Teddy Roosevelt.” And you go, “Yeah, he’s part of the second episode.” But there’s a much bigger story, and it’s not just about benevolent white men of power who have given us these great places, although that’s part of the story. It’s also the story of people who are black and brown and red and yellow and female and poor, as well as rich and white and male, who are at the heart of the story. And that was something we were stunned to learn, thrilled to investigate, and are very proud to share.
RE: This is one thing that impressed me about the doc — the comprehensiveness…the big picture that you give, and I find this in all of your work. We did a review of your Jack Johnson, and it wasn’t just “Jack Johnson,” but we learned so much about the entire American culture and sociology going on at the time.
KB: There’s a kind of parallel construction, I think, that is essential to good storytelling — one in which you are deeply invested in all of the 50 or so individuals that you get to know intimately and, of course, in this national parks film, but you are also armed with the perspective that allows you to see these lives in the context of the age in which they lived and the age that influenced them so much, as well as whatever influence they may have brought to their age.
RE: It’s not only a daunting task for a filmmaker, but this would be a daunting task for an academic as well. How do you approach something like that? Where do you start?
KB: That’s a really good question because I think it is a daunting task, and I think we begin sort of optimistically and enthusiastically. We are corrigible, I would say, would be the first thing. That is to say we don’t impose ourselves on the material. We gather as much as we can and spend years and years distilling the complexity of the story. Dayton and I both live in a tiny town raising our families in this little village in New Hampshire, and I’ve lived there for 30 years and Dayton for 20. We make maple syrup in our town. We fill 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup, and in some ways, that’s what we do too. Every story that we tell, we know — how shall we put it? — the negative space of creation that it took to make that — all that has had to be evaporated off or distilled in order to get the essence of the story that we think we can tell.
RE: How much time did the actual shooting take?
KB: We began shooting six years ago and, though I was working on other things, it was essentially, for Dayton, over the last six years, his number-one thing that he was involved in.
RE: How many of the parks did you personally go to?
KB: I didn’t count mine. Dayton went to all 58 of the natural national parks out of the system that has 391 units, but that would include national monuments, seashores, historic homes, sites, battlefields and the like. We do detail a little bit of those histories, but principally, the story that we tell is the one in which, for the first time in history, these great natural places were set aside and how consequential that has been for the American story.
RE: I imagine the production was presented with environmental challenges…
KB: The whole production is filled with it. You pinch yourself and you can’t believe you’re being paid, however modestly on a PBS budget, to do what you’re doing — to get up at 3:00 a.m…. It’s an effort to lug equipment out on a long promontory of a canyon or up a mountain — it’s difficult. But my goodness, the reward of seeing the sun hit halfstone at Yosemite or the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, or the Grand Canyon in Arizona is well worth it. There was a degree of arduousness. We filmed in well below zero temperatures and broiled in Death Valley, and had many other experiences, but all of them were exhilarating in the extreme. I remember that a lot of visitors to Denali National Park never see Denali — it’s a mountain that creates its own weather, and the very first shot I took was a time-lapse of Denali covered in clouds, where you couldn’t see it, and in the course of this two-hour and 40-minute time-lapse, it opened up for just a second and revealed itself, and it’s one of the most beautiful shots in the film, and it’s one of these great gifts that we were constantly receiving as we were struggling to tell this story.
RE: Do you generally keep the same crew and team?
KB: Definitely. I’ve been working with the same cinematographer… I do a lot of cinematography, but we have a principle cinematographer named Buddy Squires, and I have been working with Buddy since 1973, when we were in college together, so we don’t even talk to each other anymore. We just sort of grunt and gesture and look, and…it’s one of those things where you can come into a room, and he’s been there and we’re setting up for an interview or we’re shooting archives, or we’re outside shooting some live cinematography, and we just basically intuit it all.
RE: What I saw was absolutely stunning, by the way.
KB: And there’s no manipulation there. People always say, “Oh my goodness, what filters are you using?” Nothing. God is our gaffer.
RE: Another thing that has always impressed me about your work is it’s so cinematic, including the musical choices.
KB: That’s a great observation and I’m really glad you said that. We do it differently than other people, and it’s not a secret, but we record our music before we begin editing. It’s there helping to direct the pace of editing rather than the other way around, where people usually finish editing and add the music.
RE: I recall, it was the first episode of The Civil War — which I watched again last year with my wife, who hadn’t seen it the first time around — and a letter was being quoted at the end…
KB: I’m carrying a Xerox copy of that letter in my pocket, which I put in there in 1980. It has not left my wallet.
RE: But the music — I forget the name of the piece…
KB: It’s called “Ashokan Farewell.”
KB: Well, you’ll be very happy that it is. The Civil War series is the most-watched history film in our curriculum around the country.
RE: Well, I guess they’re doing some things right in education! Any other particular anecdotes regarding the sheer physical hurdles you encountered?
KB: Not really. We’ve done all that. We’ve been in snowstorms, we’ve seen the difficulties and extremes of heat and cold, and that doesn’t really compare — that’s part of the effort you make with this. It’s fun. A lot of people have a sense of filmmaking as a kind of glamorous thing that takes place instantaneously, but it actually takes a great deal of time and attention. When we are with folks who are advisors, they are sometimes surprised at the length of our day — how many hours we work — and this goes on for not just the couple of days they may be with us, but every single day. That physical demand is not unusual in our profession.
RE: What would you say your goal is with the national park project, in terms of the effect it is going to have on our culture?
KB: When The Civil War was out a couple of years, I happened to be revisiting Gettysburg, and I was walking across the lawn with the superintendent there towards the visitor’s center, and he scooped down and picked up a popsicle wrapper that was conspicuously lying there in the middle of this beautiful grassy lawn. He picked it up and wagged it at me and he said, “It’s all your fault.” I love that. I love the idea that his attendance had increased 300% since the series, and they were trying to manage all the people there. I want every superintendent at every one of the 391 units of the national park service to be a little bit angry at me because they don’t know what to do with all the people. That would be the greatest reward that we could ever have for this thing.
RE: Well that’s quite laudable. And finally, what is in the immediate future for Ken Burns?
KB: I’m sitting in an editing room right now, and we’re working on a history of two films. We’re updating our baseball series, which came out in 1994. The last action that described was 1992, and there’s been a lot of water under the baseball bridge, both good and bad, in the last 15 years or so. So we’re updating our baseball series, which had nine episodes, and our confit was to call each of them innings, and we’re now working on the 10th inning. We’re also working simultaneously on a three-part, six-hour history of prohibition.
RE: Oh, that sounds great!
KB: It is so exciting. And this is not just a Model T screeching around rain-slicked Chicago streets spraying machine gun fire — not the cliché of prohibition, but the nearly century-long incubation, from temperance to the actual prohibition, and then the disastrous, unintended consequences of this hypocritical law that, for the first-time, the liberty-loving people — the government — was trying to regulate human behavior and all of the unintended consequences, and it’s just a wonderful story. We’ve found new characters that are as complex as any we’ve gotten to know in any of our films that we look forward to sharing with you. The 10th Inning will be out next year, in the Fall of 2010. Our prohibition film will come out probably early in 2011.
RE: We wait them with bated breath.
KB: That’s very kind. Thank you.
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