Ken Burns reflects on storytelling, American history, and public broadcasting in candid interview

Filmmaker Ken Burns, whose career has shaped generations of public television viewers, spoke about his decades-long work, his philosophy on history, and the emotional connections his films inspire, during an April 4 interview with the BBC.

In a conversation that covered many topics, the famed documentarian emphasized the power of long-form storytelling and warned against the dangers of simplistic narratives in modern culture.

Burns, whose name is synonymous with historical documentaries in the United States, is currently working on a major film project for the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. He told the BBC that the success he experienced early in life was unexpected.

“I thought that becoming a documentary filmmaker in American history was like taking an immediate vow of anonymity and poverty,” Burns said. “I had grown up wanting to be a Hollywood director — John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks — those were my heroes.”

His path changed after a transformative experience during his college years at Hampshire College, where he studied under social documentary photographers. The shift toward non-fiction storytelling motivated him to leave New York City and settle in a small town in New Hampshire, where he would go on to base his entire career.

“Moving up here was the best decision,” Burns said. “There’s a humility that comes from a small town like this. You can’t be anything but humble.”

Burns credited the freedom of public broadcasting as foundational to his ability to take the time necessary to produce expansive works like “The Vietnam War,” which took over 10 years and cost $30 million.

“I could’ve walked into any premium cable station or streaming service and said I need $30 million, and they would’ve given it,” he said. “But they wouldn’t have given me the 10 years I needed to do it.”

His approach has always favored long development cycles and collaboration with a close-knit team, some of whom he said have worked with him for decades. He noted that such a production model allowed for creative integrity and for each project to be released in its “director’s cut” form, free from the compromises he believes are common in commercial media.

His expansive body of work includes films on the Civil War, jazz, baseball, the Roosevelts, country music, and the Holocaust. Each, he said, was driven not by what he already knew, but by what he hoped to discover.

“I don’t want to tell you stories about what I know. I’d rather share with you a process of discovery,” Burns said. “That’s why I dive into things I don’t know enough about.”

Burns said that while many potential topics swirl in his head, only certain stories make their way into his heart.

“A good story is a good story is a good story,” he said. “When one drops down to your heart, you realize that it’s firing on all cylinders.”

That process led him to seemingly unlikely connections between projects, such as how his documentary on baseball followed his Civil War series. The Civil War, he said, revealed deep truths about the country’s foundations. But it was in the story of Jackie Robinson, the grandson of a slave who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947, that he saw the first real post-war progress in civil rights.

“That was the beginning of what we would call the civil rights era,” Burns said. “There were people before who worked hard in all the intervening decades, but this was a major social moment.”

Burns said rock and roll, despite being a central part of his generation’s culture, did not speak to him the same way as jazz. He preferred to pursue material that opened new avenues of exploration.

“It’s created by a people who have the peculiar experience of being unfree in a supposedly free land,” he said. “And it becomes the one music that’s recognized around the world as ours.”

Burns also addressed the modern struggle with polarization and false binaries, saying that good storytelling depends on embracing contradiction.

“Sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing can be true at the same time,” he said. “The best stories are like a wheel — you are aware of all the spokes.”

He said that too much of modern discourse focuses on winning arguments, rather than understanding complexity.

“We’ve become so attached to facile and really non-existent binaries. Everything is always an argument,” Burns said. “But in great stories, the goal is to disarm argument.”

Burns also spoke about the importance of keeping history grounded in the full spectrum of human experience — including contradiction, failure, and moral complexity — without turning narratives into political tools or sanitized myths.

“We don’t go in saying, ‘And therefore we’ll be able to throw this zinger at Americans and make them wake up,’” he said. “That’s not what stories are for.”

Instead, he said, the process is about sharing discovery. “Let me tell you what I just learned” is a better starting point, he added, than issuing judgments or prescribing moral conclusions.

One of the most frequently cited lines in Burns’ films came from historian Annette Gordon-Reed in his series on Thomas Jefferson. When confronting the fact that Jefferson, who wrote “all men are created equal,” owned hundreds of enslaved people, she posed a difficult but honest question: “If you knew it was wrong and you could do it, why didn’t you stop?”

Burns called that “the question for all of us.”

“American history is a mirror that holds up to us an incredibly complicated story of us,” he said. “I make films about the U.S., but I make films about us, all the intimacy of that lowercase, two-letter plural pronoun.”

The emotional depth of Burns’ work, and its connection with audiences, has had personal and sometimes unexpected resonance. He recalled a story from New York’s Washington Square Park, where a man approached him during a college visit with his daughter. The stranger had recently lost a niece and was struggling with grief.

“He remembered the baseball film, so he got the gloves he and his brother used as kids, and went to his house and handed him the mitt. And they went out and played catch,” He said. “That’s the only reason you want to make a film. Somewhere, somebody has a moment where the emotional archaeology has power.”

Burns also addressed a common assumption that his work is rooted in nostalgia or a longing for an idealized American past. He rejected that notion, saying his focus is not on glorifying a bygone era but on understanding how the past mirrors the present.

“We look up after 10 years on a film about the Vietnam War or national parks or the Revolution and go, ‘Oh my God, it’s so much like today — the greed, the generosity, the venality, the virtue,’” he said. “We know these people. Because they are us.”

That belief also fuels his refusal to cancel or erase historical figures in favor of one-dimensional portrayals.

“We’ve done some bad things. And we’ve done some good things,” he said. “How do we reconcile all of that so we don’t have to throw anybody out? So we don’t have to cancel anyone? Or pretend a version of American history that’s unrecognizable?”

Throughout the conversation, originally broadcast by the BBC, Burns returned to a central idea: the best stories illuminate the full range of human behavior, not just what we admire or want to remember, but everything in between.

“When you understand that everyone has a different perspective — the shortstop, the right fielder, the people on the bench, the fans in the stands — you realize that the more voices we include, the closer we get to the truth,” he said.

That philosophy, he said, will continue to guide his work, including long-term projects now in development on Martin Luther King Jr., crime and punishment, and even a history of the CIA.

As he looks ahead, Burns emphasized that each project is never just about its subject, it’s about the process.

“When I put my head on the pillow, I just want to know I made the film better that day,” he said.

For Burns, who remains based in the same New Hampshire town he moved to decades ago, the formula hasn’t changed: take the time, trust the story, and keep searching.

Portions of this article are drawn from a BBC interview originally published in July 2025. Quotes used reflect content as aired and transcribed from the source broadcast.