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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 24 episode of the “Say More” podcast.
James Dao: Welcome to “Say More” from Boston Globe Opinion. I’m Jim Dao, editorial page editor. If it’s an important slice of American history, you can bet Ken Burns has made a documentary about it. The list is nearly endless. From baseball to jazz, Mark Twain to Ernest Hemingway, the Civil War to the Dust Bowl. Now he’s going back to the beginning with an exploration of the Revolutionary War, a war that is also celebrating its 250th anniversary this year.
When I learned about your project, I was almost surprised to learn that you hadn’t already made a Revolutionary series. You’ve covered so many chapters of American history, yet you hadn’t really covered the first chapter. Why did that not happen earlier?
Ken Burns: There’s lots of reasons. One is after “The Civil War” series came out, I said I’d never do another war again. But at the end of the 1990s, 10 years after “The Civil War” came out, I just realized that all these veterans of World War II were dying and a lot of school kids thought we fought with the Germans against the Russians.
So I sort of said, “Okay, no nevers,” and we spent nearly eight years working on a history of that. Before the ink was dry on World War II, I said, “We’re doing Vietnam.” Before the ink was dry on “The Vietnam War” film in 2015, I said, “We’re doing the Revolutionary War.”
It was just really gut instincts about where to follow the trail. We’ve done lots of other films and war is incredibly revealing, so I’m glad I waited. I’ve covered the war in earlier films such as “The Shakers” in the early 1980s, briefly in “Thomas Jefferson” in 1997, but it represents huge filmmaking challenges.
There’s not a single photograph, obviously, or a news reel, obviously. So how are you going to recalibrate all of our stuff? There’s no living witnesses, obviously. So how do you intermix, a technique I’ve used for years, first person voices and third person narrator commentary of scholars and writers and other people who know about it?
But what do you do about bringing it to life? Lots of maps. We filmed reenactors, not with an idea of directing them, but filming what they did in this very impressionistic way. You get a sense of haze through the out-of-focus shot of an arm, a hand, blood on a floor, a bayonet going through some smoke. We follow and collect it almost as documentary.
We feel as though our anxieties have been a little bit assuaged as we worked on a film for a decade and tried to get a super complex story. I think maybe it’s maturing as a filmmaker, willing to take on how complex the Revolutionary War is. And it’s complex because we’ve ignored a lot about it.
We’ve just assumed that it’s been bloodless and gallant and about big ideas and guys signing documents in Philadelphia. It’s much more interesting and complicated than that.
And that’s what our team, and it isn’t just me, it’s my co-director Sarah Botstein, David Schmidt, Geoffrey Ward, and a couple dozen people who really handmade this film over the last 10 years, learned in the process.
Related: The things you learn making a film about the Revolution
Dao: Of all the many things you learned in the process of making this film, what really stands out as surprising to you about this chapter of American history that we all learned about as kids?
Burns: I think coming to understand the undertow and the contradictions of it did not in any way diminish it the way revisionism sometimes seems to do, it seems to erode a faith in something. The right kind of, not revisionism, but revisiting of the complexity actually adds dimension to it. You know, Thomas Jefferson has this line in the Declaration of Independence that’s rarely quoted.
He said, “All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable.”
He said that there were some self-evident truths a few sentences before. They’re not self-evident at all. What he’s saying is that everybody has been under an authoritarian boot and we’ve accepted it. Mankind has shown, it’s easier to suffer the evils. He was creating something else. The founders were creating something else. This movement, this revolution was gonna create, not subjects, but citizens with all the requirements and responsibilities and all the anxieties.
John Adams was always worried. Is there enough virtue? Is there too much ambition and avarice? Are we gonna be able to pull this off? It requires this dedicated stuff.
So what happens is that when you tell a more complete story about it, one that sees it as it was, a very violent civil war in addition to a revolution, it’s actually more inspiriting. The ideas get bigger, if your knee-jerked patriotism isn’t checked by the complexities of it.
Dao: On that score, is there a particular complexity that really stands out to you when your mind is wandering and you think back to something that stands out in what you learned?
Burns: When you say the American Revolution, there’s a distance, right? Because it’s not a photograph. The people don’t seem real, the way a Civil War body or a president seems like a real person. They’re in wigs, they’re paintings, they’re subject to the talent, or lack of talent, of the painter. They’re in stockings and britches, and so there’s a kind of distance from them. But once you have found a way to communicate a humanist to them, then all of a sudden you get a huge rush of the complexity of it, and you begin to add all the different elements. This was a global war. It involved more than two dozen nations, European, but also Native Americans. A fifth of the population was enslaved. A good deal of the population was loyalist throughout. It’s so complex. Women were not silent partners in this area, they were active and vocal. They kept the resistance alive.
And so I think that we just kind of tell an idealized, sort of take-the-cream-off-the-top version and say, “It’s only about this, and if you mix it with the rest of the stuff, it’s gonna destroy it.”
And it doesn’t. It just makes it so much more interesting and so much more complicated.
Dao: You said that this history, your version of this history is not just about the document signers, it’s about the regular people who participated in the war, too. Tell us an example of that.
Burns: I’ll tell you lots of examples. It’s very, very important.
Even the idea that we could form a union is inspired by the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy of six tribes that formed together. They had a functioning democracy, giving autonomy to each tribe, but also banding together in mutual interests. Benjamin Franklin was incredibly impressed by this.
So there’s a Native American dimension, not just on the frontier, not just at the edges, not just with the raids and the counter-raids, but involved in every one of the colonies you would see.
We follow a 14-year-old fifer who joins the patriot cause in Cambridge, trying to get back to Boston to find his parents. He’s a very important character in our film, as is Joseph P. Martin, who’s sort of well-known among scholars as a 15-year-old kid from Connecticut who joins and fights throughout the war. We have a gal named Betsy Ambler who was 10-years-old when the war began and 16 or so when it ended. She narrates her own family struggles at this vulnerable place.
Dao: And is there one of those regular folks that stands out to you?
Burns: Well, I think Joseph Plum Martin, who I’ve mentioned, Betsy Ambler. There’s a loyalist named John Peters who was like the most respected citizen in his Vermont territory. It’s an area contested by both New England and New York. It’s not yet a state, of course. They send him to the First Continental Congress because he’s the most respected, and he gets there and goes, “What? You’re up to this? No.” And he goes home.
He’s arrested four times along the way. And then when he gets home, his father insists that he gets a severe bruising from his fellow townspeople. He’s eventually driven out of there, abandoning his wife, and small, including infant, children. She eventually is driven out and has to make her way somehow in the winter to Lake Champlain where she’s picked up by a British patrol boat and they reunite in Quebec. He starts a regiment. His 15-year-old son is the first person to sign up. He comes back and at the Battle of Bennington, kills his best friend growing up in New Haven.
He’s a loyalist to the end. He ends up having to leave America and he settles with his wife, Ann, in Nova Scotia. And that’s the fate of many loyalists who choose to leave rather than live under the victors.
You understand why someone would be a loyalist. They’ve seen the prosperity of the British form of government. They think, “So we’re gonna throw in our lots and follow these people who are suggesting something even more radical than that? I’m doing fine. Thank you very much. No.”
And these people feel strong enough about it to raise regiments and to fight and in many cases give up their lives.
Dao: So we’re in the heart of Revolutionary War history here in Boston. The Old State House is right across the street and that includes a memorial of five men who were killed by the British soldiers and what’s now known as the Boston Massacre, 255 years ago.
Talk a little bit about how Boston is situated in the story you tell, and why do you think it was so central to the revolutionary movement?
Burns: Well, there were protests going on everywhere. Certainly Virginia, the most populous and the most well-to-do, along with South Carolina.
We have to remember the 13 Colonies are the least profitable of the 26 colonies that Britain has in North America. The ones in the East Indies, where it’s so dependent on slave labor, those are the profit centers. But we manufacture things, we’re a good trading partner. We buy things.
So what’s happening is we’re upset that the British aren’t letting us take Native American land. We’re upset that certain taxes are being levied on us.
The average Englander pays 26 shillings a year, so the British naturally say, “Hey, we got the most far-flung empire on Earth, and our treasury is empty.” And New England is one of the most vociferous places.
One of the big reasons is that you have a guy who’s a propagandist, Samuel Adams. He’s a failure as a brewer. But he is really good at keeping people alive to their grievances. Even when we succeed in getting the Stamp Act revoked, he’s saying, “No, no, no, it’s still really bad.” Some of the laws that the British pass, like the Sugar Act, essentially is an attempt to curtail smuggling, which New England, maybe not wanting to admit it, is incredibly dependent upon, particularly in Boston. And particularly the wealthiest person in Boston, John Hancock.
So you’ve got lots of conflicting things, but it’s interesting that these disagreements between Englishmen are suddenly parsed out as natural rights, not just British rights. And so all of a sudden you’re talking about big ideas.
When it goes to that phase, then the rhetoric takes off. The more the British accuse us of being rebels and radical, the more radical and rebellious we become, the more tyrannical we accuse them, the more tyrannical they become until on April 19th, 1775 in Lexington Green it comes out to murder. And it’s a slaughter, it’s a massacre, just like the Boston Massacre in 1770.
Dao: We were talking about Sam Adams a second ago, and I’m curious about how he was viewed at his own time. Was he a boldfaced name or was he one of those people that just sort of emerged because he was such a brilliant propagandist?
Burns: Yes and yes. He was a brilliant propagandist and because of that, he is well known. And of course, because he was writing, and he was writing in pretty clear prose that everybody could understand.
Boston is central, obviously throughout our first episode, and through to the second end of our second episode where the Declaration of Independence is signed.
But before that, Henry Knox brought the guns from Fort Ticonderoga that Ethan Allen and one of our great generals Benedict Arnold had gotten. By the time they get put up in the heights of Dorchester, the British look up and go, “We’re outta here.”
At that point, the story moves to the beginning of the second movement of this three movement symphony of violence and great ideas moves to the Mid-Atlantic states, particularly New York and New Jersey, as well as Pennsylvania. And then again, moves to the far deep south of Georgia and works its way through the Carolinas, ending in the climax in Virginia with a surrender of General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown.
Dao: Can we talk a moment about music? It plays a big role in just about all the films you make. When I think about the Revolutionary War, I think of fifes and drums.
But it sounds like you’ve also sort of developed a soundtrack that goes well beyond that. Talk about that.
Burns: Well beyond that. Think about all the layers of humanity that’s present in this story. There’s lots of baroque music that’s inherited, not just from England, that’s played here. People have pianos, people are playing harps chords. There’s the Native American music. There is of course fife and drum. The banjo, an African instrument, is very important.
We wanted to represent all of that. We also wanted to find music that just fit and worked. Music is the only art that’s invisible and it’s the one that works the fastest. A couple notes, and you could be in tears sometimes. There’s a centrality to music.
In fact, all of the language we use in the editing room is using musical analogy. Can you hold that another beat? Another measure?
We’re dealing with notes. Sometimes I’m taking two frames off something and that’s a twelfth of a second. We really can actually perceive that.
So we’ve collected a lot of things. We’ve worked with country music player Rhiannon Giddens before. There’s a wonderful woman named Jennifer Kreisberg who does Native American music. Johnny Gandelsman is one of the organizers of the Silkroad Ensemble and an extraordinary musician in his own right. He has interpreted songs of the period for us. We have another composer named David Cieri, we’ve worked with him for 15 years.
More than 10 years ago, before I started working on this, I heard a stray song by Natalie MacMaster called “Hector the Hero.” It was written in the 19th century and was just beautiful. I said, “That’s gonna be the theme for the American Revolution.” And it is, and there are other variations on it that we use and that Johnny has developed and other people have played, including Yo-Yo Ma. Rhiannon has taken, fortunately, Amazing Grace which was written before the Revolutionary War.
So there’s versions of this that have percussive and polyphonic dimensions to it and chants and grunts. There’s lots of music that sort of feels like us. Both the two letters, lowercase, plural pronoun, but also the United States.
Dao: So you started this project a decade ago. So I’m sure you had no sense that you’d be releasing it in the first year of Donald Trump’s second term as president. This has been a year when many aspects of America’s culture, its history, its roots, its democracy itself, have been called into question. Has the tumult of this year changed the way you think about the nation’s origins at all?
Burns: Not at all. In fact, we would be bad filmmakers, or we would be different kinds of filmmakers. We would be advocating a certain political posture.
We’re calling balls and strikes. That’s our main desire to do.
We know whenever we finish any film, we lift it up and see the way it’s rhyming with the present. But we don’t adjust in any way for that. We’ve got a story to tell. We think that stories are the way to overcome the binary and there’s nothing binary in nature, right? And an argument is just binary. It’s on or off, it’s a one or a zero. It’s completely part of this separated age that we live in.
The novelist Richard Powers says the best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view. We began this at the end of the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency. I didn’t think about that when I chose it, and I didn’t think that there would be a 250 year celebration. It never even occurred to me. But we’ve got a really complex story to tell.
Dao: So what’s a rhyme that you hear between this era now and the Revolutionary?
Burns: There’s a failed invasion of Canada in our film. There’s a big debate about inoculations in our film. We’re obviously dealing with arguments about ways of government and what works and democracy, the very nature of democracy, the foundation of democracy.
So all of those things rhyme. Mark Twain is supposed to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” All of them rhyme, but they’re neither here nor there. They don’t affect what our story is and what we’re presenting, and so each individual will have to discover that. They’ll hear something and they’ll go, “Oh, that reminds me of something that happened.”
Everybody will find purchase in this film if they choose to do the extraordinary gesture of giving us their attention for 12 hours.
Dao: You said on a couple of occasions that this revolution may have been the most important event in human civilization since the birth of Christ. Tell us why.
Burns: Wars are really common. I think there’s always wars going on, but this is the first proclaiming the unalienable rights of all people. Everybody to that point had been a subject. Now we are inventing a new thing called a citizen, an extraordinary privilege, which the founders worried about.
It rippled out from the United States. It changed things. It’s for 250 years been an extraordinary story of the expansion of human rights and human history has not been about that. It’s been in fits and starts. We obviously were born tolerating chattel slavery in a country that was proclaiming to the world the universal rights of all human beings.
We take steps forward and we take steps backwards, but I don’t know what other event could qualify in the last 2000 years for the centrality and the importance.
Dao: You’ve covered so many parts of United States history: baseball, jazz, Vietnam, the Civil War, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson. What binds each of these topics together for you, the filmmaker?
Burns: The United States. I love my country. I love the stories of my country, and with the exception of a film that came out last fall on Leonardo da Vinci, all our subjects have been about American history in some way, shape, or form. Sometimes it’s recent history, like the Central Park Five, sometimes it’s distant history like the American Revolution. Sometimes it’s central history like the Civil War. Sometimes it’s about the Brooklyn Bridge or the Statue of Liberty. Sometimes it’s biographies about the Roosevelts, as you mentioned, or Mark Twain.
It’s funny, I collect quilts as my hobby. They’re interesting works of art all made by women and all with a very difficult story to discover. I spend all my professional life tracking down and finding the stories. And I love the unknowability of looking at a quilt. I’ve got more than a hundred of them. They’re spectacular works of American art. And so I see the films as you know, some are bigger squares, some are smaller squares, but they contribute to the dynamics of understanding who we are. That’s basically the main question that each film asks, “Who are we?”
Dao: Your love of the country and its institutions and culture is palpable almost. But you’ve also talked about how important it is to all your films to sort of show the warts and all.
Burns: Of course. That’s what the stories are about.
Dao: As a result of that and telling the full story that way, calling balls and strikes, as you say, have you ever been left shaken about the country or where it’s gone?
Burns: I’m always surprised that what I thought I knew about a subject is actually so much richer and so much more complicated. Part of what’s complicated about it is incredibly dark aspects of the human character that have been true of human beings since the beginning of time in every place, and not just the United States. It’s not going to find, from my lips, a kind of wholesale condemnation of things because this is what human beings do.
You will always find a good deal of shadows. The tapestry is not diminished in any way by lifting up that rug and sweeping out some of the dirt that often gets conveniently hidden for those same sanitized, superficial kinds of views of American history. It never was like that, never will be like that.
Dao: If you ever retire, after your 150th film.
Burns: Can’t retire.
Dao: What do you think you’ll want your legacy to be remembered as?
Burns: Oh, just the films. First of all, I’m the father of four daughters. That’s the most important thing to me. They’re everything. So first, father and then second, filmmaker.
If these films have meaning, 10 years or 50 years, or 100 years from now, that will be satisfying to know, but I won’t be around to know that. So they will just be satisfying to the people who may or may not be satisfied.
Dao: Ken Burns is a documentary filmmaker. His latest work is “The American Revolution,” and it comes out this fall. He’s written about his work in the Globe’s Ideas section. You can also find other articles about the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution in Boston Globe Opinion.
Listen to more “Say More” episodes at globe.com/saymore and wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, please follow us and leave us a review. You can email us at saymore@globe.com.
Kara Mihm of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
James Dao can be reached at jim.dao@globe.com.
