Ken Burns talks about story
It’s just 5 minutes with documentary meister Ken Burns, but it’s worth every second:
An interview in The Atlantic with the filmmakers Sarah Klein and Tom Mason:
The Atlantic: What inspired you to explore storytelling as a topic for this film?
Sarah Klein and Tom Mason: Everyone loves a great story. Stories teach us things, move us emotionally, and form the basis of the way we understand the world. As filmmakers, we’ve been telling stories for a while now — but at a certain point we realized that it’s actually really hard to explain what makes a good story. We know it when we see it, but the recipe always proves elusive. Ken Burns has been telling incredible stories for decades, and we thought that if anyone would have a thoughtful perspective on this, it’d be him. So this project started as our own exploration to figure out what that magic dust is that brings his stories to life.
It takes guts to make a documentary about one of documentary cinema’s most iconic filmmakers. How did you approach it?
We were definitely nervous about it. Ken Burns has defined documentary for our whole lives. We both remember sitting with our families watching The Civil War series in awe. We came to this project with a lot of questions and very little idea where they’d lead. He was incredibly patient, and brought his own curiosity and open mind to the conversation about how he tells stories and why. The first time we sent him a cut, we both poured a couple glasses of bourbon and crossed our fingers. Luckily, he liked it.
What was the postproduction process like?
The was definitely a moment where we sat down with his interview and no other visual material and wondered what the hell we had gotten ourselves into. These lofty concepts like 1+1=3 and story as an act of manipulation don’t present b-roll opportunities very readily. So we cut the interview together into a rough sequence and then wrestled with each visual black hole.
For more of the interview with Klein and Mason, go here.
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