🔗 Share this article

The veteran filmmaker is now considered not just a historical storyteller; he is a brand, a prolific creative force. With each new project arriving on the PBS network, everyone seeks an interview.

He participated in “countless podcast appearances”, he notes, wrapping up of his marathon promotional journey featuring 40 cities, numerous film showings plus countless media sessions. “I think there are 340.1m podcasts, one for every American, and I’ve done half of them.”

Happily the filmmaker is incredibly dynamic, as expressive in conversation as he is prolific during post-production. The 72-year-old has appeared at locations ranging from prestigious venues to The Joe Rogan Experience to promote a career-defining series: this historical epic, an extensive six-episode, twelve-hour film project that occupied a substantial portion of his recent years and premiered currently through the public broadcasting service.

Defiantly Traditional Approach

Like slow cooking in an age of fast food, The American Revolution is defiantly traditional, reminiscent of historical documentary classics than the era of online content and podcast series.

But for Burns, who has built a career documenting American historical narratives covering diverse cultural topics, the revolutionary period represents more than another topic but essential. “I said this to my co-director Sarah Botstein during our discussions, and she shared this view: no future work will carry greater importance,” Burns states during a telephone interview.

Extensive Historical Investigation

Burns and his collaborators plus scripting partner Geoffrey Ward referenced numerous historical volumes and other historical materials. Numerous scholars, covering various ideological backgrounds, contributed scholarly insights together with prominent academics representing multiple disciplines including slavery, first nations scholarship plus colonial history.

Characteristic Narrative Method

The film’s approach will feel familiar to devotees of The Civil War. The unique approach incorporated gradual camera movements over historical images, extensive employment of contemporary scores featuring talent reading diaries, letters and speeches.

This period represented the filmmaker cemented his status; years later, now the doyen of documentaries, he can apparently summon numerous talented actors. Collaborating with the filmmaker at a recent event, acclaimed writer Lin-Manuel Miranda commented: “When Ken Burns calls, you say ‘Yes.’”

All-Star Cast

The lengthy creation process provided advantages concerning availability. Filming occurred at professional facilities, on location and remotely via Zoom, an approach adopted throughout the health crisis. Burns recounts the experience with performer Josh Brolin, who scheduled a brief window during his travels to voice his character portraying the founding father prior to departing to subsequent commitments.

Additional performers feature Kenneth Branagh, Hugh Dancy, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Morgan Freeman, Paul Giamatti, emerging and established stars, multiple generations of actors, accomplished dramatic artists, international acting community, Edward Norton, David Oyelowo, Mandy Patinkin, small and big screen veterans, Dan Stevens, Meryl Streep.

Burns emphasizes: “Honestly, this could represent the finest ensemble recruited for any project. They do an extraordinary service. Selection wasn’t based on fame. I became frustrated when someone asked, ‘So why the celebrities?’. I go, ‘These are actors.’ They are among the world’s best performers and they can bring this stuff alive.”

Nuanced Narrative

Still, the lack of surviving participants, visual documentation required the filmmakers to rely extensively on historical documents, combining individual perspectives of multiple revolutionary participants. This approach enabled to present viewers not just the famous founders of the founders along with multiple who are seminal to the story”, many of whom remain visually unknown.

Burns additionally pursued his personal passion for territorial understanding. “I have great affection for cartography,” he notes, “with greater cartographic content throughout this series versus earlier productions across my complete filmography.”

Global Significance

Filmmakers captured footage at numerous significant sites across North America and in London to document environmental context and partnered extensively with living history participants. Various aspects converge to depict events more bloody, multifaceted and world-changing than the one taught in schools.

The revolution, it contends, was no mere parochial quarrel over land, taxation and representation. Rather, the series depicts a violent confrontation that finally engaged more than two dozen nations and improbably came to embody described as “the noble aspirations of humankind”.

Brother Against Brother

What had begun as a jumble of grievances directed toward Britain by colonial residents in 13 fractious colonies quickly evolved into a bloody domestic struggle, setting brother against brother and neighbour against neighbour. In episode two, the historian Alan Taylor observes: “The greatest misconception about the American Revolution is that it was something that unified Americans. It leaves out the reality that colonists battled fellow colonists.”

Historical Complexity

According to his perspective, the revolutionary narrative that “typically suffers from excessive romance and wistful remembrance and lacks depth and doesn’t have the respect for what actually took place, and all the participants and the widespread bloodshed.”

It was, he contends, a revolution that proclaimed the transformative concept of the unalienable rights of people; a bloody domestic struggle, dividing revolutionaries and royalists; plus an international conflict, continuing previous patterns of conflicts between Britain, France and Spain for control of the continent.

Contingent Historical Events

Burns additionally aimed {to rediscover the