In this episode of ‘Influencers’, Andy speaks with legendary filmmaker Ken Burns about his latest documentary on the life of Ernest Hemingway, how Burns’ filmmaking process has changed over the years, and why says we’re experiencing one of the most challenging times in American history.
Video Transcript
ANDY SERWER: For more than 30 years, Ken Burns has brought to life some of the most important aspects of America. From the Civil War to baseball, his documentaries have inspired an entire generation of filmmakers while introducing American history to a mainstream audience through his broadcasting partner, PBS. His work has earned awards and broken records, reaching many millions of viewers with his signature style, now called the Burns effect.
But despite all of his success, Burns shows no signs of slowing down. In this episode of Influencers, I’m joined by the legendary film maker, as we discuss his latest documentary on the life of Ernest Hemingway, his filmmaking process, and why he says we’re experiencing one of the most challenging times in American history.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to Influencers. I’m Andy Serwer. And welcome to our guest, Ken Burns, celebrated documentary filmmaker. His latest movie “Hemingway,” co-directed with Lynn Novick, premieres on PBS on April 5. Ken, welcome.
KEN BURNS: Thank you, Andy. Great to see you, and great to be with you.
ANDY SERWER: So, why Ernest Hemingway, Ken, and why now?
KEN BURNS: Well, the now is a complicated thing. So I found a scrap of paper from the early ’80s or mid ’80s that said, after baseball– meaning we were working on the Civil War, but baseball might be next– do Hemingway. And then Lynn, in the mid ’90s, had visited Key West, one of the places where he lived famously, and came away with a sense of his presence there and reinter– you know, sort of reinvigorated us. Jeff Ward, our writer of this and longtime collaborator, longest collaborator I’ve had, he and I have been talking about it for ages.
And so finally, we reached a place where there was a– the bandwidth, a break in, like, the unbelievable schedule. I’m working on nine films at once if you count the Hemingway promotion as a film. I mean, literally, they’re underway. I mean, this is not on the back burner, not in development or turnaround. So we did our first interview on this in ’14. And we had said yes to it probably in ’12, but ’14, it go. So it’s not now. It’s just you’re looking for enduring and evergreen subjects, not because they’ll live forever, but because I’m interested in the American beat.
But then you find out that, you know, history doesn’t repeat itself, but as Twain, Mark Twain, might have said– and he was the hero for Hemingway– history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. And so, you hear the rhyme. So whenever we finish a film, we pick up and it seems to be exactly speaking to the moment in a way. I mean, first of all, here’s this guy with this toxic masculinity. You know, certainly, you’ve got to throw him out, right?
But no, it turns out that’s sort of an edifice built to sort of mask deep insecurities and anxieties and gender fluidity and curiosity about the other sex. His wives, he’s always having them cut his hair. They cut their hair short like a boy. And he’s growing his hair long. And so, there’s unbelievable stuff that maybe only now we can begin to understand and speak about freely within a social dynamic. So, just, he’s a great writer. It’s a hell of a story. And that’s all that is really takes for us to do it.
ANDY SERWER: It certainly is. I just watched it, and it’s six hours. But it doesn’t seem like it at all. You fly right through it. And you think you knew about Ernest Hemingway. Trust me, you don’t.
KEN BURNS: You don’t. We don’t. I did– had no idea.
ANDY SERWER: So rich. I mean, three wars and all the writing and the wives and the relationships and the families. And I actually after I stopped watching it, I went into Wikipedia to find out more about his descendants. I mean, it’s a very rich story. And as you said, Ken, it touches on masculinity, mental health issues, alcoholism. How do you balance bringing a modern day look at these topics while honoring the history at the same time?
KEN BURNS: Yeah, well, it’s not bringing anything modern. It’s just telling the story. It’s the story is always it. So, we’re not thinking about stuff, other than the fact that we are human beings, Lynn and I and Jeff Ward and our senior producer, Sarah Botstein, and our remarkable team. They– we are thinking in this moment. But it is informed by trying to get a story right. And the laws of storytelling are as old as human beings. And so, you’re not sort of have an eye on it. Whenever we finish a film, we look up and see the way it resonates.
You know, in Vietnam, I used to go out with a stump speech and say, what if I told you I was working on a film about mass demonstrations taking place across the country against the current administration, the White House in disarray, obsessed with leaks, a president certain the press was lying about him, about big document drops of stolen classified material into the public sphere that destabilized the national political conversation and accusations that a political party reached out to a foreign power during a time of a national election to affect that election. You go, wait, it’s 2017. This is what’s just happened to us.
But that was true when we began work in 2006 about the Vietnam War. And it was true when we finished the editorial work in 2015, a month before the Iowa caucuses, out of which Donald Trump was not supposed to emerge. So, you know, this is human nature that doesn’t change. Mental illness has been around from the very beginning. Read Ajax and other works of the Greek stuff. The PTSD is there.
So here we have a story, a great writer, who’s a minimalist, with spare prose. It’s like an iceberg, right? Just his, he says, only an eighth is showing above the water. 7/8 is below the water. He’s pulled it out. Its spare, inviting meaning. And he’s focusing on observing nature. He’s focusing on the relationships between human beings, particularly men and women. He’s focusing on war. He’s focusing on death. And then you’ve got this edifice of this macho guy that has to be done. You’ve got letters that help betray that.
So what we do is we just go along and you begin to appreciate the demons that are going to catch up with him in his 61st year are many and come from childhood and come from experiences in life, abandonments by women, PTSD in war, alcoholism, chronic brain injuries. So you can, at the end, be a pathologist and say, this is what did it. But at the end, it’s a drama that’s a heart-racing drama of almost like a guy on bareback horse, you know, riding in a thunderstorm with these 20 horses behind him of the apocalypse that are just trying to overtake him. And at the end, they do. Which one got him? I don’t know– probably all.
ANDY SERWER: You talk about his genius and how difficult that spare prose is and stripping it down and getting to its essence. But how do you reconcile, Ken, that genius with his racism, with his sexism, with the misogyny and the violence? And then also, that question sort of writ large with all of your films in that people were geniuses, but flawed, and then when we look at them today, it’s a different perspective, right?
KEN BURNS: Well, you know, we’re all flawed. I’ve yet to meet– run into a perfect human being. And if someone thinks they are, they’ve just revealed their central flaw. So yeah, he used the n-word in his writing. And but he was writing the way people talked at that day. So was it racist? Yes, it was unnecessary. And we hold his feet to the fire for that. There’s no reconciliation that takes place. Is he misogynous? Yes, if you hit a woman or you’re mistreating them, yes. And are some of the female characters really disagreeable? Yes.
But on the other hand, there are a couple of short stories of where he, this toxic masculine figure, has put himself into a woman’s shoes and up in Michigan in a date rape situation. So he may have even be the one after he was abandoned by a nurse, you know, and it devastated him. He said, I rushed– I violently rushed two or three girls, who I cared nothing about, he wrote a friend. But it was cauterizing the wound. So you wonder whether, was he the guy who did the date rape that’s up in Michigan’s about? And this is in 1920s, when nobody talked about any of this stuff.
Or Hills Like White Elephants, in which a man and a woman are in a train station in Spain, having a conversation in which the word abortion isn’t mentioned, but that’s what he wants. And the man is saying, oh, it’s whatever you want, but clearly, it’s not. And it’s all about masculine prerogative and assertion, as one of our commentators says. And she finally just goes, will you please, please, please, please, please, please stop talking?
And so, yeah, does the behavior disqualify him in our on-off switch of a world right now? Yeah, but there is no on-off switch. He’s complicated. The writing endures. And you’ve got to– it’s not so much reconcile. You get to the point where you can find the good and the bad. And we don’t let him off any hook– any hook.
ANDY SERWER: Right. That please–
KEN BURNS: [INAUDIBLE] develop a compassion for him.
ANDY SERWER: Right. And that– sorry to interrupt, Ken– that please, please, please, please was so powerful in the film. I think that was Edna O’Brien.
KEN BURNS: No, it was actually a scholar– Hemingway scholar. And it was very interesting that most of the people, a majority of the people in our film are women scholars and writers, who have not thrown him out with the bathwater in our day, but have done it. And Miriam Mendel says that. And she’s blown away by that ability when we have it.
And it is Edna after that who says, he is able to get– it’s the androgyny in any writer that allows them to get into the place of the other person. So he gets under the skin of a woman character. And if people want to dismiss him, you’ve got to go through Edna O’Brien, you know, the great Irish writer who is totally influenced by Hemingway, but is right there, willing to say when she doesn’t like a Hemingway work, but, you know, ready to stand up there. And I’m not going to fight Edna.
ANDY SERWER: Yes, she was a force. And you’re right, so candid. So this is a business news platform. So I have to ask you about Hemingway, who fought alongside Communists in the Spanish Civil War, supported Castro to a degree. But he was also very commercially successful. So what was his attitude towards capitalism and making money, do you think?
KEN BURNS: Well, It’s kind of a whiplash. In our second episode, which is the ’30s, you know, he’s like a libertarian at one point. You know, he just– he thinks, you know, all the government does is tax him, and he just hates that. And he hates the Roosevelt administration for their makework New Deal stuff that has turned Key West into this kind of tourist destination. And then a hurricane that comes by that kills a lot of the veterans of the First World War that were drinking buddies of him is there– you know, done this.
So he’s then– he’s already been criticized by the commies and the left-wing American sort of establishment. And he suddenly then turns around and writes for “The New Masses,” a Communist magazine, and then goes off to fight against the fascists that are only being supported– the loyalists are only being supported by the Soviets. And they are doing atrocities [INAUDIBLE]. You know, Stalin wants to eliminate any bandwidth, except his own.
And Hemingway, the journalist, isn’t writing about that. He’s saving it. And it’s causing huge problems. Then he writes a novel about it, and he tells the truth. So is the nonfiction fiction and the fiction the truth of one of the great novels of all times, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” which we had, my friend, the late Senator John McCain, whose entire ethos, his entire self definition– not fair to say entire, but his self definition is Robert Jordan, the hero of “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” He read it as a kid and never stopped influencing who he was. He said a flawed man supporting a flawed cause, but trying to do his best, a kind of great existential statement.
ANDY SERWER: Another very powerful part of the film, John McCain and his pieces in there. I want to pull back and ask a little bit about the making of films and the business. And you’ve been doing this for so long and have such great–
KEN BURNS: For 40, 45 years, holy [INAUDIBLE].
ANDY SERWER: You were kind of the OG, the Original Gangster, of this modern documentary era, though. And now it’s sort of spread out, I think, to a really great degree because of your work. You have this arrangement with PBS, but HBO has, of course, gotten in the business, Netflix. What do you make of the world of documentary films right now, Ken?
KEN BURNS: Well, you know what? In ’85, we were talking about how what a great golden age it was. Because documentary’s a very weak word because it means, you know, what Michael Moore was doing, what, you know, some of these– there was a film called “Streetwise.” It was Errol Morris’s stylized thing. It’s the self-initiated– self-involved films like Ross McElwee’s “Sherman’s March.”
ANDY SERWER: “Sherman’s March,” wow, yep.
KEN BURNS: All of these things, my stuff, you know, it was just great. The whole thing’s right up to fiction, maybe crossing over the line to, you know, pure documentary like Fred Wiseman’s stuff. I mean, there was just an amazing spectrum. And it’s only gotten bigger and more effective. And maybe the success of the Civil War had something to do with people turning around and saying the cost per hour of whatever versus fiction.
But look, I’ve been with public television my entire thing. I’m staying with them. They have one foot in the marketplace and the other tentatively out. Look, I could have gone a few years ago or 10, 13 years ago to a streaming channel or a premium cable and say, I need, with my track record, I need $30 million to do Vietnam. And they would have given it me.
But what they wouldn’t have given me is 10 and 1/2 years. PBS gave me 10 and 1/2 years. And they gave me 6 and 1/2 on Ernest Hemingway and 10 on National Parks. I mean, we’ve got many projects going at once. I’ve got eight others happening now with four different teams. And I’m not missing stuff. I’m delegating in a way because I don’t have to do everything the way I did when I started off with, you know, in knee pants in this.
But the interesting model is that it’s not a financial model. It’s a grant model. We raise money from foundations and individuals of wealth, from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, from PBS itself. Bank of America has been our corporate sponsor since 2006. They’ve signed up to 2030. We’ve had a kind of stable of support from foundations like the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Park Foundation, stuff like that. We started a group we started called the Better Angels Society, which is a nonprofit that seeks money from individuals of wealth to help do these films.
And so we make them as zero sum games. Not allowed to put in contingency, not allowed to put in any profit margin. And it just happens. And then when they’re done, it’s all zeros, and we’ve already moved on to the other projects we’re working on. What that gives me is total creative control, which is I live in rural New Hampshire. This is my barn because I do not want to sit here having a conversation with you and saying, well, you know, they wouldn’t let me do this, and they wouldn’t let me do that. Or I really wanted to work with that writer, or I really wanted this person. And if you don’t like these films, it’s all my fault. I mean, in this case, it’s Lynn and my fault because she’s the co-director. But it’s our fault. And that’s the way you want it to be. No excuses.
ANDY SERWER: How do you pick the subjects for your films? And what’s on tap? What are some of those eight things, Ken?
KEN BURNS: Yeah, so they picked me as the glib answer, Andy. That’s not fair. It’s like the way you have lots of ideas. If I were given 1,000 years to live, I would not run out of topics in American history. I’m not going to be given 1,000 years. And so right now, in my late 60s, there’s an urgency to try to do as many as I can. And so we’re doing as many as I physically can. And it’s seven days a week, 24/7. It’s exciting and exhilarating. And I don’t even think of it as work, though it is work in a really good way. It’s hard. It’s disciplined. The people I work with are terrific.
So this fall, September– so it’s summer– we’ll have a four-part eight-hour biography of Muhammad Ali. We are in the– we just locked it. We’re now doing the mixing and sound cutting and mixing and finishing. We’ve got a biography of Benjamin Franklin, two-part, four hours. Difficult– no pictures, no footage, right? 18th century subject. That will be out in 2022. And in 2022 or probably 2023, another film that we’re in the editing is a three-part six hours on the history of the Holocaust in the United States. So what we knew and when we knew it, what we did and what we didn’t do, and what we should have done– very complicated.
We’re working on a biography of an animal, the buffalo, the American bison. It’s the story, obviously, of not just the animal, but the people who used it as sustainable to their lifestyle for hundreds of generations, and then the people who came in and, in less than a generation, brought it to the brink of extinction. And I’m happy to say those very same people then said oops and have brought it back from the brink of extinction.
I’m doing a big series, the next war after Civil War, the Second World War in Vietnam, on the history of the American Revolution, another hugely difficult thing. Because it ain’t 55 white guys with powdered wigs in Philadelphia and Lexington and Concord and Washington crossing the Delaware. And then eight years later, they surrender at Yorktown. It’s really complicated. It involves lots of people.
We’re doing a history of life after emancipation in America, Reconstruction, the collapse of Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era leading up to the great migration when African-Americans finally after the First World War– you know, the Tulsa riots are an example of why you might want to leave the South– began to leave and move up. We’re also doing LBJ and the Great Society. These are all underway. And the final one is the first non-American topic, which is a biography of Leonardo da Vinci, which takes us even farther back in time.
ANDY SERWER: It sounds like you might have some conversations with Walter Isaacson with at least–
KEN BURNS: Well, Walters, we’ve interviewed just spectacularly. He’s a dear friend and has been for years and years and years and did a spectacular– gave us a spectacular interview for Franklin. And that film is, you know, I’d say halfway done. And we’re looking forward to the conversation about Leonardo with him.
ANDY SERWER: Leo, right.
KEN BURNS: But people say da Vinci and that’s like saying of Manhattan or of Walpole.
ANDY SERWER: Right, we’ll have to ask DiCaprio if that’s OK. So, this is all such a far cry, Ken, from “Brooklyn Bridge,” which I believe was your first film in the 1980s. I mean, it was this huge enterprise that’s amazing unto itself. But I’m curious, how do you think your films are different now from the beginning? How have they evolved? How’s the actual filmmaking changed?
KEN BURNS: Well, you know, filmmaking’s changed a lot technologically. But we’re trying to do it the same way, handmade. I mean, I edited “Brooklyn Bridge,” like, in a little cabin right next to this barn here. I’ve been living in this house for 42 years. And this is where I live. This isn’t like the weekend or the vacation house or the place I escape to in COVID. This is where I live and work. And so the process is not different. I hope we’re better– I’m better as a filmmaker. I think I am. Stuff is more complicated. But we’ve tried to keep it handmade.
And so each of the groups are intimate. And it’s not a big deal. You know, the– we– they’re labor-intensive, which make the budget seem like, you know, indie feature film budgets. But they’re– because they take 10 years and we’ve got a lot of people working on them. But not that many– I mean, “Vietnam,” which is probably the most complex of all the films and one of the longest at 18 hours, is basically 15, 16 people are mostly responsible for it.
ANDY SERWER: Why do I feel like your films are better?
KEN BURNS: Well, I hope they are. I think I’m getting older. And, you know, it’s so funny because I used to, in the editing sessions, when we finished the screening, I made the editing team hold back– you know, family hold back. And then I’d walk down the seniority. I wouldn’t say anything, or maybe I would say something, depending on the vibe. If it was really terrible and it sucked, I’d try to inject some excitement in it. But I go down the seniority. Now I ask the interns first. Because when I was 21, I knew everything. Now I’m 67, and I know nothing.
So I really appreciate the confidence of someone who knows everything. And they do. They feel that they do. And they can give you new things. So now I go up the seniority scale and end with us poor, ignorant folks at the beginning. And yeah, no, I think they are getting better, Andy. And I feel excited about each one. I mean, somebody asked Duke Ellington what his most important contribution– composition was. And he said the one I’m working on now, the one I’m doing tonight. And that’s what it is. I just want to put my head on the pillow tonight and think that I made a film better.
ANDY SERWER: Let me ask you about filmmaking and filmmakers. It’s a craft that’s been dominated by men. You’ve worked with Lynn for years.
KEN BURNS: 30 years, yeah.
ANDY SERWER: What is the division of labor there? And what does Lynn bring to the table?
KEN BURNS: There’s no division of labor. I mean, Lynn brings her just– you know, you know what she’d probably say? Her worry. I mean, we’re both worriers. We just worry until it’s done. A film is a million– literally a million, maybe a series of 10 million problems. But if you see that in a pejorative sense, then you get overwhelmed. But if you see it as something to be overcome, it’s great.
And so, Lynn has– you know, she went to Yale. She has this incredible critical mind that allows her to not only be a great producer, but a great director in the moment. And I’m just trying to absorb. And I just want to feel this thing and make it better. And I used to do every single interview. She’s a great interviewer, so on her things. Now I’ve got three other strains, and sometimes the people are good interviews. And they do most of them, and I do some.
Another time, somebody will be uncomfortable. They’re young enough, and they want me to do all the interviews. And pretty soon, I want them– I say, no, no, you do this one. But I screw up. I say I’ve been screwing up on interviews since January of 1972 when I did my first on-camera interview with a sound– 60 millimeter sound film at Hampshire College. It was terrifying. And it’s still terrifying to do an interview. So it’s just great things have changed where I’ve delegated a lot, but I have not ceded the most important thing. When we have a script meeting, when you have an editing screening, when a decision is made, I am there in on the decision.
So, you know, it’s very, very satisfying. And the technology’s changed. And we’ve been late. You know, we were 10 years late to adopt computer editing. It wasn’t until, you know, 2001, I think, that we started computer editing. And we shot film through the odds when everybody else had left. And that’s because I didn’t want the technological tail to wag the dog. We still wanted to hand make them. I didn’t think that every single profession in the world was a keyboard and a mouse.
ANDY SERWER: Right. Many of your films give an authoritative account of a quintessentially American topic, like jazz, of course, the Civil War. Is that harder to do as America has become more politically polarized, Ken?
KEN BURNS: No, not at all. And we are politically polarized on the surface, and that surface may destroy us. I mean, this is one of the most challenging times, if not the most challenging time, in American history. I don’t want to undersell that. And certainly, the combination of the three viruses– COVID, that’s a year plus old, and the 402-year-old virus of racial injustice and white supremacy, which is having, we hope, a sustained reckoning right now, and then the age old human virus of lying, of misinformation, of conspiracy, of paranoia. These are always there. And they bubble up to the surface.
You know, the great writer Isabel Wilkerson in her book “Caste” talks about this, you know, anthrax that was frozen in the Siberian Tundra. And then when global warming heated it up, people started dying again. And so I think this is the metaphor for us, too. This hatred, this suspicion of the other. Look, one way to do this, Andy, is just to tell you, I have been, for 45 years, making films about the US. But I’ve also been making films about the lowercase plural pronoun of that– us.
And what I’ve discovered, you know, all of the majesty and the complexity, the contradiction, and the controversy of the United States, but all the intimacy of us is that there’s only us, and there’s no them. There are a lot of people out there making lots of money on them. And it’s being exploited, you know? And the big lie is part of the combination of that. But a story is a story. Richard Power, the novelist, said, the best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s mind. The only thing that could do that is a good story.
I am in the business of trying to tell stories. I hope they’re good, and I speak to everyone. I do not put my politics on display in my films. If you want to ask me about what I think about something, I’ll tell you. But, you know, I’ve got yard signs when the elections are coming. People in my little town know how I feel. However, in the films, we tell a complicated American story. I had an example of one guy who was thinking of underwriting the Roosevelts. And he said, yeah, but, you know, show me what you do for the New Deal, and then I’ll give you money. He was very conservative.
And I’m saying to myself, you know, no, I’m not going to do that. That’s not how it works. Nobody can have that kind of thumbs up, thumbs down with me. He turned out to be a wonderful friend. But when he came to me after the film came out, he said, Ken, that was perfect the way you did it. right? So here was a guy who wanted at least the anti-New Deal views to have some daylight. And we put them all in, just as we were talking about with Hemingway, about the writing that is of the period and reflecting the racism and the sexism of the time. And here is this toxic masculine guy, but also is interested in gender fluidity.
So what you have to do is remind people that when we tell stories, what makes us drawn to these stories are the complexities of people, not the perfection or the absolute evil that just don’t exist. Like, when we use the word hero, we’re always disappointed today that we have no heroes. But the hero is a Greek concept of someone who has great strengths and great weaknesses. And heroism is defined by the negotiation, sometimes the war within that person between those. Achilles had his, you know, his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths and great powers.
So it’s storytelling are human beings watching sometimes in figures like Hemingway or Achilles, writ large, to see themselves. All of us have this egotism and narcissism and gender bias and racism and all of that. And we need to negotiate it. And when we tell stories in a way that invites everybody in– Civil War or Vietnam or whatever– and says, you know, here’s what your enemy was thinking when you were firing through those hedgerows, we would interview the North Vietnamese people on the other side of that hedgerow, right? And then all of a sudden, that gives you a more dynamic view.
And I don’t know how many veterans have come up and said, thank you, I now understand where I was in that country, what I was doing, the foolhardiness of this, the bravery of them, the bravery of us, the foolishness of the lying of the politicians and the generals. That’s all you want. That’s all you want to hear, is just that this is a complex story.
ANDY SERWER: I think this notion, Ken, of an agreed upon shared set of facts for Americans is so important. And it is harder to characterize, to get us to agree upon them. But that makes your work, I think, that much more important.
KEN BURNS: We have to do that. I mean, you can’t say we’re in a post-fact place. There are people who want that to happen. It is in the financial interests of a lot of people to promote that. I mean, if you look at the big lie, you know, the president– ex-president’s team raised something like $250 million between the election and the inauguration to just support something that is just factually not true. And we know it isn’t because one of the lawyers arguing in his behalf about fraud that didn’t exist has just– her defense rests on the fact that no reasonable person would believe her.
ANDY SERWER: Right, the paradox.
KEN BURNS: So give back that money because that didn’t happen. And, you know, it’s just– you just can’t– you know, you can’t do it. You have to continue to tell the truth. And the people who don’t, their noses grow longer and longer and longer, which is another good story.
ANDY SERWER: One would hope, ah. So final question, Ken. You said you’re 67 years old. In Hemingway, the biographer started to come, flock around Hemingway. You know where I’m going here. I was just reading Remnick’s review of the Philip Roth biography. And that’s really about biographers coming to Philip Roth and the trouble he had. What about you, Ken? What would your legacy be? And would someone make a film about you? And would you let them do that?
KEN BURNS: Well, a couple of people have done that. And it’s sort of embarrassing. And people seem to enjoy it. Because I’ve been willing to talk about loss in my life, my mother, and how a lot of what’s animated my work is, as a therapist, my late father-in-law said to me was, you know, I wake the dead. And who do you think you’re really trying to wake up? You can make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive.
I don’t need that anymore. I mean, they gave me in ’08 the Lifetime Achievement from the Emmys. And I just said, you know, no, you know? Half Lifetime. Come on, we’re in a financial crisis. Let’s get it from a lifetime to a Half Lifetime Achievement. I got films I want to make. And we’re trying to do that.
Joe Biden, in his inaugural address, quoted a song that was in our World War II film. And it’s called “American Anthem” written by a friend of mine named Gene Scheer. And its chorus goes, “Let them say of me I was one who believed in sharing the blessings I’ve received. Let me know in my heart when my days are through. America, America, I did my best for you.” I could think of no better epitaph if that was to be mine than the chorus of “American Anthem.”
ANDY SERWER: Ken Burns, America’s documentary filmmaker, his latest movie, “Hemingway,” co-directed with Lynn Novick, premieres on PBS on April 5. Thanks so much, Ken.
KEN BURNS: Nice to see you. Thank you.
ANDY SERWER: You’ve been watching Influencers. I’m Andy Serwer. We’ll see you next time.
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