Recent winter storms on the East Coast dealt a harsh blow to UNM’s 21st Century Speakers Series. Award winning historical documentary filmmaker Ken Burns was set to give a presentation titled “Telling American Stories” at Popejoy Hall, Thursday night, but flight cancellations kept him in the Northeast. Burns’ sold-out show would have been the latest installment in the highly successful speaker series. In a Monday phone interview, the Daily Lobo spoke with Burns about his approach to filmmaking, his disdain for Hollywood and his love for telling stories.
Ken Burns has made a career out of showing people his process of discovery, detailing how he manages to capture on film in a way that few, if any, ever have before.
“Most documentary filmmakers are doing nothing more than telling you what they already know,” Burns said. “We only take on projects that we know nothing about and, hopefully, the film comes out looking like an uncovering of sorts.”
Burns, who grew up in Newark, Del., and now lives in Walpole, N.H., has been serving as director, producer, writer and cinematographer on documentary projects for more than 20 years.
At the tender age of 22, he formed Florentine Films, an organization whose first film, “Brooklyn Bridge,” was nominated for an Academy Award in 1981.
“I looked like I was 12 years old and people thought I was trying to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge,” he said.
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Burns and Florentine have since been nominated for three more Academy Awards. Additionally, the duo has received two Grammy Awards, 13 Emmy Awards and five Peabody Awards. While flattered by the recognition, Burns rejects the idea of Hollywood and “big-business movies.”
“All of these Hollywood studios use palm trees on their stationary, when they should be using smokestacks,” Burns said. “We try to let our material sell itself. We’re not a factory.”
While many “Hollywood-made” documentaries rely heavily on live-action re-enactment footage and celebrity voice-overs, Burns tries to find an artistic balance when choosing the mediums that will comprise his films.
“We try to incorporate newsreel footage, photographs, paintings and really just whatever is appropriate to the story we’re trying to tell,” Burns said. “The script is not God. We want whatever serves the needs of the writing to be independent from what serves the needs of shooting. It’s a situation where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”
Burns’ 1990 film “The Civil War,” which became the highest-rated series in the history of Public Broadcasting Systems with an audience of more than 40 million, presented a unique set of challenges.
In all of human history, the “winners” have written the accounts, Burns said. But the Civil War was different; the responsibility fell to the South.
“Most of the notions perpetrated in ‘Gone With the Wind’ were dead wrong,” he said. “With photographs and historical documents concerning both leaders and common Joes, it was possible to look at it from both sides. Now that’s a good story.”
In terms of recounting history, film has a kind of evangelical quality to it that gets lost in written text, Burns said. He added that Florentine seeks to “spread the word” by using an organic, visual approach to telling stories.
He added that schools are good places to tell those stories.
“I’m interested in who we are as Americans, what makes our country tick,” he said. “I find that universities are places where there is incredible intellectualism. They are a very questioning environment.”
Through its association with the General Motors Corp., Florentine has developed an outreach program for schools including essay contests for students. The outreach program was a perfect fit for “The Civil War,” Burns said.
Burn’s films can be seen Mondays at 9 p.m., on KNME, as part of an agreement with the station.
