Siege of Yorktown. General Rochambeau and general Washington give last orders before an attack, October 1781. Auguste Couder (1789–1873). Artist Auguste Couder, 1836 (Photo by Pierce Archive LLC/Buyenlarge via Getty Images)
Buyenlarge via Getty Images
During a recent press event, prolific producer Ken Burns points to his dog and jokingly says, “This is Chester, my executive producer. He always checks everything just to make sure I get it right.
At this point in his career, after making so many cultural important films, including The Vietnam War, Ben Franklin, The Dust Bowl, and Prohibition, among many, many other, Burns is entitled to work with anyone he wants.
Right now, Burns is very serious about discussing his latest project, The American Revolution, a 12 hour series, airing over six nights on PBS.
The series examines how America’s founding turned the world upside down.
As 13 British colonies rose in rebellion, winning their independence while establishing a new form of government, their actions reshaped the continent and inspired centuries of democratic movements around the globe.
This expansive look at the virtues and contradictions of the war and the birth of the United States of America, shows how the revolution began an effort of people around the world to imagine new and better futures for themselves, their nations and for humanity.
And, it asked questions that we are still trying to answer to this day.
Burns worked with fellow co-directors David Schmidt and Sarah Botstein on the project.
During the ten year duration of putting the series together, Burns admits that he was surprised to learn just how intense the upheaval really was.
“This is a bloody, bloody revolution, superimposed by a bloody civil war, superimposed by a bloody world war. I think that’s the thing for me — just the sheer sense of how long it took, how bloody it was, [and] the sense of contingency and the idea that it might not turn out the way we know that it did was the surprising aspect for us to try to [include] into our work”.
Schmidt adds, “What surprised me and really unlocks the key to this whole thing is that three things — republic, union, and independence — were actually not the goals at the outset of this war. The war at its start was about standing up to tyranny, liberating Boston, restoring things to the way they used to be under the British Empire, and it’s only the course of the war that makes independence, union, and republic necessary.”
Relating the relevance of The American Revolution to the world as it is today, Burns points out that, “We began this film in December of 2015 when Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency. And our job was to tell a complex story without sort of focusing on [current events].”
But, he recalls, “There’s a moment [in the film] when the wife of a German general is traveling across the Atlantic she’s making the perilous trip alone, and she’s worried because rumor has it that Americans eat cats. If our film had come out last fall, people would say, ‘oh, you put that in because of what’s going on in Springfield, Ohio, and what the campaign was distracted by for so long.’”
So, Burns confirms that there was never a conscious effort to release the series within a certain time frame, however, he says, “November, to me, is a perfect way to sort of tee up what I hope will not just be 10 more months of conversation about it, but 10 more years plus of conversation about the formation of the United States.”
In putting the narrative together, Botstein says that the creative team concentrated on having, ‘many different generations talking to one another.’
She says this is because, “We want history to be a conversation. We want history to poke a hole at things that we don’t typically learn about. We want to celebrate our achievements, look squarely at our failures, and make history both exciting and real. So we hope that the film will inspire conversations also of different generations who are watching.”
To make this happen, Burns calls out the scriptwriter Geoffrey Ward and narrator Peter Coyote, and then mentions that there are, “literally the dozens of voice [actors including] Domhnall Gleeson, Tobias Menzies, Tom Hanks, and Josh Brolin, as well as Claire Danes, Laura Linney, Paul Giamatti, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L.Jackson, Liev Schreiber and not only Ethan, but Maya Hawke. And I’ve named still only a quarter of the voices.”
Expressing even more passion about the project, Burns says, “This is our story. It’s our creation story. As I’ve said many times, I think this is one of the most important events in world history. It’s certainly the most consequential revolution, as we say, but I think it’s the most important event since the birth of Christ.”
He continues, [And I hope] that in this year of the semi-quincentennial, if you wanna find out what happened with a deep dive into a complicated story with villains and heroes, and people sometimes warring within themselves over that stuff, I don’t know a better story than the American Revolution, and I mean the event, not necessarily our film.”
Ever the champion of storytelling, Burns says, “Stories are what can help bring people together. We think this is as compelling a story as we’ve ever come across. And we hope a large number of Americans still have the capacity to understand that, and then self-select, self-curate, and binge this.”
‘The American Revolution’ premieres over six nights on PBS stations nationwide Sunday, November 16th through Saturday, November 21st, and streams on the PBS app and PBS.org.