Ken Burns

The filmmaker on his 12-hour documentary The American Revolution, the importance of undertow, and what's next

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Are there new ways of thinking about the American Revolution here? We are not applying a philosophy about the American Revolution to this. As we were finishing our Vietnam series, I said, “We're going to the Revolution next.” The fact that there are no photographs and no newsreels can’t inhibit us. We'll find new ways to tell the story. We followed re-enactors to collect a critical mass of footage so that we could give a sense of warfare, life in the 18th century, how newspapers were published, and how people spun cotton or wool. All of that is super important if you’re going to wake up the past and ask it to tell us its secrets.