I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.
From Ken Burns
In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?
Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.
You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.
I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.
I think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can't work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can't really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance.
When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things.
I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.
In most films music is brought in at the end, after the picture is more or less locked, to amplify the emotions the filmmaker wants you to feel.
History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.
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