Ken Burns is no longer a mere documentarian; he is a brand, a franchise, a one-man industrial complex. When he has a new project heading for the small screen, everybody wants a part of him.
Burns has done “more fucking podcasts than I ever thought possible”, he says, nearing the end of nine-month promotional tour that included 40 cities, 80 screenings and hundreds of interviews. “I think there are 340.1m podcasts, one for every American, and I’ve done half of them.”
Fortunately Burns is a force of nature, as loquacious behind the mic as he is prolific in the editing room. The 72-year-old has gone everywhere from Monticello to The Joe Rogan Experience to talk about one of his most ambitious projects: The American Revolution, a monumental six-part, 12-hour documentary series that dominated the past decade of his life and arrived this week on PBS.
Like slow cooking in an age of fast food, The American Revolution is defiantly traditional, more redolent of The World at War, narrated by Laurence Olivier for British television, or Burns’s own The Civil War, which launched a thousand sepia-tinted parodies to the plangent strains of a fiddle, than the era of streaming docs and podcast series.
But for Burns, who has built a career chronicling strands of US history including baseball, country music, jazz and national parks, its origin story is not just another subject but foundational. “I said this to my co-director Sarah Botstein the other day, and she agreed: we won’t work on a more important film,” Burns reflects by phone from New York. “Hopefully there are as important things coming up but this one has a singularity to it.”
Burns, co-directors Botstein and David Schmidt and screenwriter Geoffrey Ward drew upon thousands of books and other historical materials. Dozens of historians, spanning age and perspective, provided on-air commentary along with leading scholars from a range of other fields including slavery (Vincent Brown), Native American history (Ned Blackhawk) and the British empire (Maya Jasanoff).
The style of the series will feel familiar to devotees of The Civil War, one of the most influential and widely watched documentaries in US television history. Its distinctive style included slow pans and zooms across still photos, generous use of period music and actors such as Sam Waterston, Morgan Freeman and Jason Robards reading diaries, letters and speeches.
That was the moment Burns established his reputation; a generation later, now the doyen of documentaries, he can apparently summon any actor he chooses. Appearing alongside Burns at a recent event at Trinity Church in New York, the Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda observed: “When Ken Burns calls, you say ‘Yes.’”
The decade-long production schedule also helped in terms of flexibility. Recordings took place in studios, on location and remotely via Zoom, a tool embraced during the pandemic. Burns recounts working with Josh Brolin, who found a few free hours in Atlanta to record his lines as George Washington before flying off to his next engagement.
Brolin is joined by Kenneth Branagh, Hugh Dancy, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Morgan Freeman, Paul Giamatti, Domhnall Gleeson, Amanda Gorman, Jonathan Groff, Tom Hanks, Ethan Hawke, Maya Hawke, Samuel L Jackson, Michael Keaton, Tracy Letts, Damian Lewis, Laura Linney, Tobias Menzies, Edward Norton, David Oyelowo, Mandy Patinkin, Wendell Pierce, Matthew Rhys, Liev Schreiber, Dan Stevens, Meryl Streep and many others.
Burns adds: “Frankly, this may be the best single cast ever assembled for any movie or television show, period. They do an extraordinary service. They’re not picked because they’re celebrities. I got so angry when somebody said, ‘So why the celebrities?’ I go, ‘These are actors.’ They’re the finest actors in the world and they can bring this stuff alive. Tom Hanks can read a phonebook, as far as I’m concerned. Meryl Streep, the same thing.”
Still, the absence of living witnesses, photography and newsreels forced Burns and his team to lean heavily on the written word, weaving together the first-person voices of nearly 200 individual historic figures. This allowed them to introduce audiences not only to the “bold-faced names” of the founders but also to “dozens of others who are seminal to the story”, many of whom never even had a portrait painted.
A still from The American Revolution. Photograph: PBS
Burns also indulged his personal passion for geography and cartography. “I love maps,” he notes, “and there are more maps in this film than in all the other films I’ve done combined.” He reports that audiences at early screenings have remarked on the variety and effectiveness of their use in clarifying troop movements, territorial disputes and the sheer scale of the conflict.
The team filmed at nearly a hundred historical locations across North America and in London to capture the landscape’s character and worked extensively with re-enactors. All these elements combine to tell a story more violent, complex and globally significant than the one taught in schools or sanitised by powdered wigs, heroic tableaus and marble monuments.
The revolution, it contends, was no mere parochial quarrel over land, taxation and representation. Instead the film portrays a blood-soaked struggle that ultimately drew in more than two dozen nations and improbably came to embody what it calls “the noble aspirations of humankind”.
What had begun as a jumble of grievances levelled at London by far-flung British subjects in 13 fractious colonies soon descended into a brutal civil conflict, 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 it was a civil war among Americans.”
For him, the revolution is a story that “for most of us is drowning in sentimentality and nostalgia and is incredibly superficial and doesn’t have the respect for what actually took place, and all the participants and the incredible violence of it. One of the casualties of that superficiality is that we’ve seen it in bloodless, gallant terms.”
It was, he contends, a revolution that proclaimed the world-changing idea of the unalienable rights of people; a brutal civil war, pitting Patriots against Loyalists; and a global war, the fourth in a series of conflicts between Britain, France and Spain for the “prize of North America”.
Burns also wanted to rediscover the uncertainty out of the outcome. “There’s a lazy arrogance that the present always exerts on the past because there’s that confidence that we know exactly what happened. But good storytelling makes it contingent.
“George Washington, for example, didn’t know he was George Washington. He didn’t know he was going to be on the dollar bill and the quarter and have a big spiky monument in the national capital, which is named after him, and on the other side of the continent a state, and then in every other state a county or a town that’s named after him.
“I remember David McCullough, the late historian, told me that good history is thinking that it might not turn out the way you know it did. I’ve gotten lots of people who’ve called me up and said, oh, they were playing the Civil War series and I got to the last episode and I really wanted the gun to jam at Ford’s Theatre. I tell them right back: me too!”
Burns keeps a neon sign in his editing room that reads: “It’s complicated.” The American Revolution analyses the central role of Native Americans and African Americans in a way that a documentary on this subject made in the 20th century probably would not have done.
Behind the scenes of The American Revolution. Photograph: Mike Doyle
It refuses to treat Native Americans as a monolithic obstacle to colonial expansion. Burns stresses they cannot be relegated to a simple “them”. Nations such as the Shawnee and the Delaware were active players on the world stage, with deep economic and diplomatic ties to Europe. To lump them together, Burns argues, “does an incredible disservice to the enormous complexity” of a story in which they were central participants, not passive victims.
The film also confronts the central hypocrisy of the revolution head-on. Burns describes southern planters, including Washington himself, decrying their “enslavement” by British policies while holding hundreds of people in bondage. As the late historian Bernard Bailyn explains in the film, the revolution’s rhetoric forced the issue of slavery into the open.
Burns says: “You suddenly introduced a super-glaring contradiction into your universal truth.” Yet the language of the Declaration of Independence, particularly its assertion that “all men are created equal,” was an idea so potent it could not be contained. “The second you say all men are created equal, you have just blown down the walls of Jericho, right? Because all means all.”
Washington, an unabashed slaveholder, embodied the paradox. Burns presents a man who was “deeply flawed”. When he first took command, the Virginia planter was disturbed by the presence of Black troops and “wanted no more recruited”. He evolved on the issue and ultimately freed his slaves upon his death.
As a commander, he made “glaring tactical mistakes” at Long Island and Brandywine, and at Kip’s Bay was so “rash” that he risked his life and the entire cause. Yet it was Washington who convinced soldiers to fight on through the darkest of times and to unite people from disparate colonies into a single American identity. He was a master at selecting talented subordinates, showing no jealousy of those who might have been better generals.
In his most revolutionary act, he resigned his military commission when he could have been king. As Burns points out, it was Britain’s George III who, upon hearing of this, declared Washington “the greatest man in the world”.
The film also offers a more nuanced portrait of George III whom, Burns insists, is “not the raving lunatic that everyone in the United States thinks he is”. Instead, he is presented as an “interesting, dedicated constitutional monarchist” presiding over what was then seen as the world’s most advanced form of government.
Interviewers of Burns and reviewers of The American Revolution have been eager to draw parallels with Donald Trump and the current political moment. The film-maker’s views on the president are no secret. During a 2016 commencement speech at Stanford University, he called then-candidate Trump an “insult to our history”. Eight years later, addressing Brandeis University students, he called Trump “the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems” and urged attenders not to vote for him in November.
But Burns began work on The American Revolution during Barack Obama’s presidency and continued through the administrations of Trump and Joe Biden. He has no desire to turn his promotional tour into shrill political activism. With its intellectual generosity, plurality of voices and statement of faith in public broadcasting, the film speaks for itself as a bulwark against the id of Make America Great Again.
Behind the scenes of The American Revolution. Photograph: Mike Doyle
Burns offers one of his favourite quotations, attributed to Mark Twain, that “history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes”. To avoid dating the film by leaning too heavily into present-day parallels, he describes his film-making discipline as being like Odysseus “lashed to the mast”, deliberately ignoring the “sirens” of contemporary commentary. He even deliberately removed one element from the film because its rhyme with the present was so strong that “no one could possibly believe that we didn’t put it in” for that specific reason.
However, some rhymes were too historically essential to remove. In one episode, referring to the draft constitution’s balance of powers, narrator Peter Coyote says: “They feared that a demagogue might incite citizens into betraying the American experiment. Alexander Hamilton was concerned that an ‘unprincipled’ man would ‘mount the hobby horse of popularity’ and ‘throw things into confusion’.”
By accident rather than design, the documentary arrives less than eight months before the country’s 250th anniversary, a time of deep political and social division that extends to how the founding story should be told. Trump has called for a “grand celebration” in July 2026 and denounced “woke” history, criticising the Smithsonian Institution for being preoccupied with “how bad slavery was”.
Does Burns worry that Trump will hijack the semiquincentennial to tell a simplistic, white male version of America’s founding? “I’d be disappointed if that was the case but everybody left, right and centre loves a complicated story,” he says. “What have we had drummed into our heads for the last five years but that the darling show of the right is Yellowstone? It has Kevin Costner as its patriarch and he is wise and whatever; he’s also a murderer that dumps bodies down a ravine.
“His strong-willed daughter is the same way and he’s got two sons, one of whom is married to a Native American; the other is a traitor to the family. The daughter is in love with the foreman who oversees ranch hands that are gay and straight, young and old, male and female, Black and white. All surrounding is a Native American legacy that is still trying to assert itself superimposed over this overweening greed for land and development.
“And people love it. I don’t know how finding the revolution in its complexity could in any way undermine -” He pauses. Then he switches gears and sums up: “A good story is a good story is a good story.”
