After creating some of the most iconic documentaries of the last 40 years, filmmaker Ken Burns decided, for the first time, to focus his latest project on an animal, the bison.
“We just thought for decades, ‘Wouldn't it be great to do a biography of an animal, knowing full well [that] it would help break up traditional and conventional approaches to this very complex history — particularly the 10,000-12,000 year old history that Native Americans have had with this animal, and more recently, that white Americans have had with this animal, and two different competing views of the natural world?’” Burns reflects.
The largest mammal of the United States, a.k.a buffalo, is Burns’ central character and “at the heart” of history in The American Buffalo.
“It was a way to recast and recenter perspective,” he says.
The two-part documentary series for PBS chronicles the bison’s millenia-spanning evolution and its close relationship with North America's Indigenous people. It also examines how white settlers almost drove the species to extinction, the devastating effect on native tribes, and the efforts to bring these animals back.
Burns discusses how his career led to this moment, making the film, and confronting controversies.
Burns’ successful five-decade career, techniques, financing
Over the years Burns has become synonymous with Americana. The American Buffalo marks his 44th cinematographic venture. In his almost five-decade-long career, he’s produced several critically acclaimed historical series including The National Parks, The Roosevelts, Baseball, Prohibition, Country Music, Hemingway, Muhammad Ali, and many more.
To create many of his mini-series and films, Burns has not been afraid to tell long stories. His series Jazz, totals almost 19 hours, and The War, about 14. He found that viewers crave long-format documentaries.
But the length and the use of photographs on his projects has not always been well received. While fundraising for his 9-episode film The Civil War, an institutional donor turned him down and told him, “‘We don't think that interest would be sustained longer than an hour, an hour-and-a-half looking at still photographs about the Civil War.’”
Burns convinced them to partially fund the project. But looking back, he believes it was not about the film’s length, but rather, “about what the film was made up,” he says.
The Civil War still is the highest rated program in PBS history, and won two Emmys. “So, it worked,” he quips.
Burns’ accolades include two Academy Awards nominations: One for his 1981 documentary Brooklyn Bridge, and a second for his 1985 The Statue of Liberty. And he has received 49 other awards throughout his career.
He has also developed a filmmaking style that has become highly recognizable, and has influenced other directors.
“My whole idea, which is of course superficially mimicked in the Ken Burns effect on iMovie is how to greet an old photograph, like a feature filmmaker does a master shot with a long a medium, a close a tilt, a pan, a reveal and isolation of details, whatever it might be,” he explains. “And using complex sound effects and music and first person as well as third person narration to help that photograph [come] alive.”
Official Trailer of “The American Buffalo,” a film by Ken Burns. Courtesy of PBS
In order to create his masterpieces, Buns has spent as much as about 25% of his time fundraising, something he actually enjoys doing.
“I like the satisfaction that I've argued with somebody in a good way and not in a pejorative way. I've made a good argument about why they should give me money… they've accepted it,” he says. “It hasn't just come from some deal where they're just backing a dump truck up. It has to do with the ideas and my ability to articulate what I think my vision is of the film, and then, knock on wood, be able to carry it out and deliver.”
A long-standing relationship with PBS
Burns has had a relationship with PBS that has spanned over 40 years. He has been broadcast on the network from his very first film, Brooklyn Bridge.
Then, in 2007, a deal was made: Burns would produce selected topics for documentaries for PBS well into the next decade. But according to a piece in The New Yorker, the agreement had been extended until 2030.
“Once I realized how foolishly time wasting it is to sort of raise the money for a project, work on it and then stop, [with the PBS deal] I've got several projects that I'm going to do,” Burns explains. “So first, it was a couple of five year plans, and then 10-year plans.”
Being with the public network has allowed him to take the time to develop several projects at the same time.
“I was approached by someone recently who said, ‘Why don't you just go to a premium cable or a streaming service?’ And I could. But they wouldn't give me the 10 and a half years I took to do the Vietnam project,” he asserts. “That's the thing. PBS has one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other out.”
And the relationship with PBS also meant that Burns had the freedom to develop his projects his way.
“[At PBS] I have been able to have essentially my director's cut for every film that I've made because there's not a suit telling me to make it longer, or shorter, or less sexy or more sexy or more violent or less violent. It just is the story that we can incubate in some cases over a decade. And it takes that long to master the complexity of the story of Vietnam, for example,” he says.
A successful career with some controversies
While Burns has enjoyed a successful career, he has also had to deal with some controversies.
In 2001, Burns says that in making his 10-episode series Jazz, he “was accused of reverse racism, privileging African American composers and musicians over white ones.” He has made several biographies featuring white subjects, such as Mark Twain, Hemingway, and Benjamin Franklin, to name a few.
By 2017, when his The Vietnam War 10-episode series aired on PBS, Burns was expecting pushback from all sides.
“We really were quite conscious of it, not frightened of it,” he states. “We presume the same sort of thing would happen here.”
Instead, Burns and his co-director Lynn Novick received a different response. Their 10-year in the making project paid off.
They shot the series both in the United States and Vietnam, assembled politicians, a group of 23 scholars who were doing “cutting edge work” about the war, innumerous consultants, as well as a vast-array of documentation (e.g. presidential tapes, declassified Vietnamese military documents) and recollections from survivors, including North and South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, American soldiers, etc. to tell this story.
“You realized you were right there, like surfing right on the edge of a curling wave and that we'd be able to sort of include in this just the very, very latest,” he says. “And I think even… now, six years later, it's still kind of one stop shopping, somebody's gonna come along with a book that will be more inclusive of it.”
He adds, “I really feel good about that, and a lot of that has to do with PBS.”
Then, in a 2021 article for HistoryNet, writer Gary W. Gallagher described that historians and scholars found that in Burns’ 1990 The Civil War, “[he] spent inordinate time on military campaigns and thereby obscured more important social, political, and cultural issues—especially those related to African Americans, slavery, and emancipation.”
The Civil War series had just turned 30 and the country was at the cusp of a national racial reckoning following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans by police, and that included discussions about diversity, equity and inclusion. The Washington Post writer Gillian Brockell argued that the series “hadn’t aged well.”
By April of that year, some 140 filmmakers called out PBS over diversity and opportunity for people of color, and the exclusive deal made with Burns, a white director telling stories of BIPOC subjects. In an interview with The New York Times Sway podcast, he responded:
“My beat is American history and what I found over the years is that every story, regardless of whether it’s obviously this — Muhammad Ali — is going to intersect with race,” he said. “We know when we were founded, and we know why we were founded, we know our catechism: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. I’m a third of the way through the sentence and you have got to stop because the guy who wrote it owned slaves and didn’t see the hypocrisy and didn’t see the contradiction. So you can’t deal with American history, which is what I’m interested in in my heart — I cannot do this without touching on these stories.”
And he added,
"Our crew, the people that we work with, are as diverse as you could have. The scholars that advise us are that, and so we feel comfortable about telling these complex stories.”
Burns has also recently been asked about a surfaced image of him with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the late billionaire industrialist David Koch attending a secretive all-men’s retreat in Northern California.
He says the encounter happened in the late 90s when he was fundraising for his Frank Lloyd Wright film. Before that, Burns had talked on the phone with Koch, who was a “big funder” of PBS. Following that call, Koch asked him to an event, where he met Thomas and Koch in person.
“I was invited to some history lecture and he came up and introduced himself and he said, ‘Hey, you want to meet Clarence Thomas?’ And I shook hands with this guy. We said some inanities, and that was it. I totally forgot about that. And that was like 10 or 12 years ago,” Burns explains. “I plead guilty, I guess!?”
What’s next?
Burns is always juggling several projects at one time. Right now, he has six in the pipeline, including a series on Leonardo da Vinci, his first non-American topic, The American Revolution, Emancipation to Exodus, LBJ, crime and punishment in the U.S., among others.
“I'm kind of greedy for that creative space. I love it. It's just so animating,” he says. “There's nothing better than just working on a film and trying to make it better with your colleagues and people who work really, really hard. And I've been so lucky to work with so many great people.”
In the meantime, he’s promoting The American Buffalo, which is now streaming on PBS.