Night Sky With Exit Wounds

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's The Vietnam War released in 2017, after being in production for almost a decade. The result was one of the most comprehensive and exhausting pieces of war films ever made.

- Tatsam Mukherjee

Interviewing veterans from both sides of the war, and consciously staying away from historians and academics—the ten-part series (with a cumulative runtime of nearly 18 hours) mimics the long, arduous nature of the war fought by the Americans actively for nearly two decades. The series—made on a budget of around $30 million—played on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in America. Seven years after The Vietnam War came out and was hailed for its thoroughness, Lynn Novick reflects on the documentary. In an interview with Tatsam Mukherjee, she also touches upon the recognisable patterns that emerged from Vietnam, which were repeated in the USA's entanglements in Iraq, Afghanistan; the fraught nature of truth these days and the responsibility on documentary filmmakers and journalists; and the burden on war documentaries to be cautionary tales for us. The hour-long conversation has been edited for clarity. Excerpts:

Do you think it's possible for a documentary series to articulate an objective, multi-faceted truth? Or can we only hope for an approximation?

That's a deep question. The assumption of the question is, there is some truth that we can all agree exists. For certain things, I would say there is an objective truth that America did not win the Vietnam War. There are people who think that we were winning when we pulled out. That, to me, objectively, is not true. In other words, there is a realm in which there are facts, and those facts must be understood to help us get to the truth of what happened, as best as we can figure them out right now.