Ken Burns is now considered more than a historical storyteller; he is a brand, a prolific creative force. When he has documentary series heading for the television, all desire his attention.
He participated in “more fucking podcasts than I ever thought possible”, he says, approaching the conclusion of his extensive publicity circuit featuring 40 cities, numerous film showings and innumerable conversations. “With podcasts numbering in the hundreds of millions, I feel I’ve participated in a substantial portion.”
Fortunately Burns possesses boundless energy, as expressive in conversation as he is accomplished during post-production. The veteran director has appeared at locations ranging from Monticello to popular podcasts to promote his latest monumental work: his Revolutionary War documentary, a comprehensive multi-part historical examination that dominated ten years of his career and arrived recently on PBS.
Similar to traditional cooking in an age of fast food, The American Revolution is defiantly traditional, evoking memories of traditional war documentaries as opposed to modern online content audio documentaries.
But for Burns, whose entire filmography chronicling strands of US history covering diverse cultural topics, its origin story is not just another subject but fundamental. “I said this to my co-director Sarah Botstein the other day, and she agreed: we won’t work on a more important film Burns states from his New York base.
The filmmaking team and screenwriter Geoffrey Ward referenced thousands of books plus archival documents. Numerous scholars, covering various ideological backgrounds, contributed scholarly insights together with prominent academics representing multiple disciplines like African American history, Native American history and the British empire.
The style of the series will feel familiar to viewers of Burns’ earlier work. The unique approach included slow pans and zooms over historical images, extensive employment of contemporary scores and actors reading diaries, letters and speeches.
That was the moment Burns built his legacy; decades afterwards, now the doyen of documentaries, he seems able to recruit numerous talented actors. Appearing alongside Burns during a recent appearance, the Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda observed: “A call from Ken Burns commands immediate acceptance.”
The lengthy creation process also helped regarding scheduling. Filming occurred in recording spaces, at historical sites using online technology, an approach adopted amid COVID restrictions. Burns explains working with Josh Brolin, who found a few free hours during his travels to voice his character as the revolutionary leader then continuing to subsequent commitments.
Brolin is joined by numerous acclaimed actors, Jeff Daniels, Morgan Freeman, Paul Giamatti, Domhnall Gleeson, Amanda Gorman, Jonathan Groff, Tom Hanks, Ethan Hawke, Maya Hawke, accomplished dramatic artists, international acting community, skilled dramatic performers, Wendell Pierce, Matthew Rhys, Liev Schreiber, plus additional notable names.
Burns adds: “Truly, this might be the most exceptional group recruited for any project. Their contributions are remarkable. Their celebrity status wasn’t the criteria. It irritated me when questioned, regarding the famous participants. I responded, ‘These are performers.’ They’re the finest actors in the world and they animate historical material.”
However, no contemporary observers remain, visual documentation forced Burns and his team to rely extensively on the written word, combining individual perspectives of numerous historical characters. This allowed them to show spectators beyond the prominent leaders of the revolution along with multiple crucial to understanding, several participants lack visual representation.
Burns also indulged his personal passion for maps and spatial representation. “I love maps,” he observes, “featuring increased geographical representation in this film than in all the other films across my complete filmography.”
The production crew recorded at nearly a hundred historical locations throughout the continent and in London to document environmental context and worked extensively with re-enactors. All these elements combine to present a narrative more violent, complex and globally significant compared to standard education.
The film maintains, represented more than local dispute concerning territory, taxes and political voice. Instead the film portrays a blood-soaked struggle that finally engaged more than two dozen nations and improbably came to embody described as “mankind’s greatest hopes”.
Initial complaints and protests aimed at the crown by American colonists throughout multiple disputatious regions quickly evolved into a bloody domestic struggle, setting brother against brother and neighbour against neighbour. In one segment, the historian Alan Taylor observes: “The main misapprehension concerning independence struggle is that it was something that unified Americans. It leaves out the reality that Americans fought each other.”
For him, the independence account that “typically is drowning in sentimentality and nostalgia and lacks depth and fails to properly acknowledge for what actually took place, and all the participants and the widespread bloodshed.”
It was, he contends, a revolution that proclaimed the transformative concept of the unalienable rights of people; a bloody domestic struggle, dividing revolutionaries and royalists; and a worldwide engagement, another installment in a sequence of struggles among European powers for dominance in the New World.
The filmmaker also sought {to rediscover the
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