Ken Burns on How the Film Shapes the Filmmaker

That’s a great question. Most documentaries, at least when we were growing up, we’re
sort of like caster oil. They were good for you but hardly good tasting. They were just
telling you what you should know. They were the expression of an already arrived end,
not a process of discovery. I don’t pick subjects because I know about them. I pick
subjects because I want to know about them. So, my films are not me telling you what
you should know but saying, “Hey, guess what I learned?” There’s a huge big difference.
There is a subtle ingredient of enthusiasm that is a part of that, an excitement of the new
story that which is not known. A hairy—once said the only thing that’s really new is the
history you don’t know.

And for me, each of the subjects is something I want to delve into. It’s like the
mysteriousness of diving into the deep end and not knowing precisely how deep it is and
then coming back to report that. That’s what we’ve tried to do with each film and rather
than be this sort of dull didactic expression of the set of facts and dates and events you
should know about, it is rather an unemotional archeology. That is the glue. I hope that
cements all of those dry dates and facts and events together into something higher in
which the hole is indeed good at some other parts. And it’s that again calculus that I am
so interested in. So, every project is a learning curve. Every project is about that
excitement of something new that the little town of Winchester, Virginia changed in 72
times during the civil war. We don’t think of America is a place where armies would
capture and recapture, that’s Europe but that happened in Winchester, Virginia. That the
state of Missouri sent I think it was 37 regimens to the battle of—21 for the north and 16
for the south to show you how the country was torn on the bias. That Jack Johnson who
many people think is just as big brute of a man that needed the liberal helpers to get him
through his life owned has three patents with the United States’ patent office, because of
the tools that he designed to adjust the fast cars who like to drive. That He was a great
rider. I mean everything comes with a blazer of flurry of new things that you learn and
that’s the great excitement, that’s why you do it, that’s why you get up in the morning.

People ask me that all the time. I don’t think my life is worth it, I am a medium that is to
say this is in the 19th century, I’d be the guy holding the zeons. That’s an essence of what
I’m doing. I’m going back into the past and I’m trying to interpret all of these random
stuff into something that may make sense for me and I hope other people because we
share some things in common, I trust and I hope. But my own life doesn’t seem that
important. There are people who always want to make it so, just as the life of painters
seem interesting to us or architects or other artists. I don’t feel so that way. I mean in fact,
the most important thing to me in my life is not my filmmaking anyway because I have
three daughters who range in age from 27 right now to four years old. And I’m much
more concerned with that co-production of being a father than I am with the films. And
that’s something entirely different and obviously private.