Ken Burns
Ken Burns
Kenneth Lauren "Ken" Burns is an American filmmaker, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs in documentary films. His most widely known documentaries are The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The War, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, Prohibition, The Central Park Five, and The Roosevelts. Also widely known is his role as executive producer of The West, and Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth29 July 1953
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.
I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.
I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that its extremely predictable, its a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and theres a certain musical virtuosity involved in it.
I have made all my films for my children with the exception of my first film because my oldest daughter wasn't born when I was making the film about the Brooklyn Bridge.
Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.
There are no ordinary lives.
You know, you meet some people, and do a lot of interviews, and you come across a Buck O'Neill and you know you are going to know him for the rest of your life. The same thing happened with Curt Flood.
I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique they have. But there's very little that I think satisfies you intellectually or emotionally.
You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.
No one was more important to the game of baseball in the last half of the 20th century than Henry Aaron and no one writes about that supremely talented man, that tumultuous time and this treasure of a game better than Howard Bryant. Together, they are an extraordinary combination, and the book Bryant has written gets to the heart of the complicated and dignified, patient and consistent genuine hero that is Henry Aaron.
When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things.
When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.
Wynton told us that Miles sold out, just wanted to make more money, just wanted to sell more records. I don't believe that Miles sold out but I'm not in a position to say.
You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.