Ken Burns on Overcoming Filmmaking Obstacles

Well I think filmmaking is obstacles. In fact, every film is a set of millions, literally, no
exaggeration, millions of problems, but I use the word problems not so much pejoratively
as if it’s just resistances, friction that you have to overcome. I’m 56 right now. I’ve been
making films for over 30 years. I don’t look 56.

You can imagine what I looked like when I started off and the first film I wanted to do
was to tell the story of the Brooklyn Bridge, so people would slam the door and say,
“This child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge. No.” And for many years I kept two
thick binders, three-ring binders of literally hundreds of rejections, so I guess the biggest
sort of outer resistance was just finding the money to be able to produce these films that I
wanted to produce, convincing people that even making a film on a bridge was a worthy
subject, that it was going to be hard to keep it at an hour when they couldn’t understand
why a film on a bridge shouldn’t be a short that was five or six minutes in length.

Inwardly I think it was trying to find a form. I mean a style that adheres to someone has
to be an authentic process and style is the authentic application of technique and in my
world that meant trying to refine dozens and dozens of techniques to make the past come
alive and in my case I guess for the purposes of simplicity and brevity here I deal with
eight elements.

Four are oral and four are visual. The visuals are pretty obvious, the live cinematography,
the interviews that we do, the newsreel footage and the still photographs in which I was
most keenly interested in because of my training in still photography as well in which I
wanted to go into and old photograph, not just hold it at arm’s length as had been the
want of my colleagues, but to live in it, to listen to it, what sounds were making to take
that old desire to be a feature filmmaker and see each still photograph as a master shot
that had a wide, a medium, a close up, the possibility to tilt, to pan, to reveal and to make
the photograph come alive.

Orally we had a third person narrator, the voice of God, that’s sort of the traditional way
that you communicated in documentary, but also I added first person voices read off
camera by actors reading diaries, journals, letters, newspaper accounts of the period, and
then a complicated sound effects track, as complicated as a feature film, that would
hopefully help to will to life the still photographs and the archival footage we had, and a
complex music track that was recorded not after the editing, but before, so the music
became as organic as an element as anything else, and that’s what I needed inwardly,
creatively to figure out how to perfect or how to understand what the— how the various
elements would coexist before I could really call myself a filmmaker.

You know the advice that I give is — always sounds so platitudinous because it isn’t
specific to the medium of film. It’s totally specific to life. I’m in a medium in which
people are attracted to it because they think it’s glamorous and only a small fraction of it
is. It’s mostly a lot of hard work, so I think the most important thing that I would say
would be two things.

One, you have to be true to yourself. That is to say that you have to know who you are,
whether you have something to say or not and it is no shame to honestly say, “You know
what?” “I don’t think I have something to say.” “This isn’t for me.” “Maybe I will help in
this business in a subservient role, but I am not going to be that director or producer or
writer that I thought I was.” There is no shame in that, so knowing yourself is the first
critical thing, to be able to walk away. You should do —Emerson wrote a beautiful essay
called “On Self-Reliance” and in it he said, “You should do what only inly rejoices.” I-n-
l-y. I think he was making up a word. Inly rejoices.

And I’ve always thought that that was true and I would wish that for every one, so despite
how we are often, you know, attracted to fields that we think is going to be our discipline
or we’re forced into by parents or by other circumstance you have to do what inly
rejoices and you have to listen to that voice. And the second this is you have to persevere,
particularly in documentary film.

If you wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or a feature film I could tell you the steps to take
to do that, but every working documentary filmmaker I know has gotten there through
their own unique path. There is no career path. That’s the good news and the terrifying
bad news.

There is no career path and you’re alone and you just sort of have to bring something to it
and what I think it is among many other qualities is a kind of perseverance. It’s keeping
and collecting those hundreds of hundreds of rejections for your first film as a reminder
that you know you may not have… you may not be the most talented person.

You may not have the best ideas, but you’re going to see this through and I’m sure there
are lots of great filmmakers or people that would have been great filmmakers had they
been able to follow through that had ideas much more interesting than mine, but didn’t
and therefore aren’t filmmakers and we don’t know what they are because they didn’t
have that ability to persevere against the inevitable problems, the inevitable friction that
attends any effort to create something new.