Among his many credits are the acclaimed miniseries The Civil War, Baseball, The West, and the upcoming Jazz. At his Walpole, New Hampshire, headquarters, the Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and president of Florentine Films talked recently with Naval History Editor Fred L. Schultz about the possibility of a future naval project.
Naval History: What is your favorite period of history?
Burns: The period that tells me, in this moment, who I am. We tend to think of the past as some nostalgic, bygone period, when in fact history is the present-day engagement with something that has gone before. So history is itself a great mirror of who we are now. I can never pin down one particular era that is a favorite, because I'm always interested in the history that's waking me up today.
I think we make the mistake of thinking that somehow we can influence the past. We can't. We approach the past in a variety of ways that tell us more about who we are than they do about the past. The past becomes the method. Cezanne, I suppose, could talk about oranges, but he was not interested in oranges, he was interested in what lies beyond, the luminescence that he was able to capture from those oranges. So, too, it's less the specifics of the past that ought to matter than the way in which we engage it and that extra something that comes from that engagement. The way in which history becomes present, for a moment, becomes our best teacher, our best medicine.
Naval History: How did you become interested in history?
Burns: I think it's been in my blood all my life. I'm completely untrained. I'm a filmmaker who chose history the way a painter chooses watercolors or oils. But something both in personal history and in general has brought me to the sense of how positive and transforming a force history is.
Naval History: So you didn't major in history in college.
Burns: I majored in filmmaking. The last time I took a formal history course was in 11th grade. But I have spent my life in American history, and I can't imagine leaving it.
Naval History: American history, mostly?
Burns: Always and only. I am interested in the mechanics of my country. The operating guide is history.
Naval History: Most Naval History readers will know you for The Civil War. Many also will say that the series neglected the naval aspects of the war. Why were naval operations given such short shrift?
Burns: I agree that they were given short shrift, but certainly not through any intention on our part. A filmmaker is much like a sculptor who has a huge block of stone delivered to the studio and then works for many months, and in our case, many years, carving away. You make decisions in one day, and there's no way to change most of them.
So essentially, as we moved and listened to our own hearts, what came out necessarily made many things fall by the wayside. I would have liked to do more on women in the Civil War. I would have liked to do more on Congress—the Radical Republican Congress that was so politically important. I would have liked to do more on the social ramifications, more on emancipation. And I would have loved to cover dozens of other battles and, with great attention, naval affairs.
It was not a question of lack of interest. As this thing began to evolve and speak to us, it began to shape itself. We could do only just so much. It's not comprehensive; it was only 11-1/2 hours. You can't even get through one volume of Bruce Catton's great Civil War histories in that time.
Another reason that naval operations have been given short shrift is that the ghosts don't come up to you in the same way they do, say, on Little Round Top, or in the cornfield at Antietam, or at the Bloody Angle, or in other places that have etched themselves in our minds. Yet the naval operations are no less important.
One can imagine the drama of the Battle of New Orleans, or Mobile Bay with Farragut, or even some of the smaller gunboat battles on the Mississippi and other big rivers. And of course, there was the Blockade and all that it did, or didn't do, to contribute to the successful prosecution of the war for both sides.
Naval History: What impact would you say naval operations had on the outcome of the war?
Burns: I think the moment that draws me most of all is the heavy breathing that takes place after the Monitor and Virginia engagement in 1862, an event that not only gave pause to the United States and the Confederate States, but also to the world. At that moment, every other navy on Earth was obsolete. That, for me, is a central moment. All of a sudden, we knew that everything in naval history was about to change—completely and utterly.
Naval History: What is your take on the apparent resurgence of interest in war movies, with Saving Private Ryan and the more recent film about Guadalcanal,The Thin Red Line?
Burns: Most of these are a part of an unanticipated zeitgeist that we can't ever predict. We need something from our stories. They help us get through. As I said before, they help us understand who we are now. So there must be something in the medicine of World War II stories that is helpful to us now, a certain kind of unambiguous heroism that, I think, needs to be at least positive, as we struggle with all of the complexities and the ambiguities and undertones of our modern political life.
And so I think that we can find in this simplicity, and I say that not in military terms but in heroic terms—the simple and self-evident sacrifice at Omaha Beach—a kind of medicine that helps us get through our own very complicated times.
Naval History: How do you differ from Steven Spielberg in your approach?
Burns: I think that we are very similar in many ways and obviously very different in others. I do not wish to leave the facts. Shelby Foote once said to me that God is the greatest dramatist. I believe that it's important to stay with the facts. It does not mean that these are objective views. They're not. They're filled with subjective interpretation and emphasis and emotion. In fact, I call myself an emotional archaeologist. I'm uninterested in just the excavation of dry dates, events, and facts. I'm after something that adds a higher emotional resonance to our historical dialect.
Having said that, I think that Spielberg and I marshal forces in very similar ways. For too long, I think we have beaten to death this argument between what is made up and what is factual, because much is untrue in the merely factual, and much resonates with universal truths in the things that are made up. One need only compare reading the telephone book and a Shakespeare play to realize it.
So what we're doing is looking for a higher truth with regard to fact, because the mere assembly of facts is not enough, as Francis Parkman once said. It's imbuing the narrative with the life and spirit of the people, their motivations and their feelings. That's what I've tried to do.
Naval History: It seems that your work is better-known to some than your name. How do you feel about that?
Burns: Well, I think that may just be the choice of your audiences. Any documentary filmmaker takes a vow of anonymity and poverty, but neither has happened to me. In fact, I get stopped everywhere I go, and I don't know of that happening to any other documentary filmmaker. So, I think the "Q" quotient, or whatever they call it, is pretty high. But I don't kid myself that this is brain surgery, or even at the top of the pop charts. And I'm happy with that. I live in an anonymous place so that I can remind myself that any celebrity you have, plus 50 cents, gets you a cup of coffee.
Naval History: To many people, the word "documentary" equates with "dull." How do you overcome that?
Burns: Yes. Say "documentary" to people, and their eyes glaze over. It's like cauliflower or brussels sprouts. It's something that they know is good for them, but hardly good-tasting. I would suggest that the Hollywood model, the dramatic film model, is the one that's narrow and formulaic, that plays within very strict sets of rules. Documentary film has, particularly over the last 15 years, come to mean a whole variety of things, ranging from dramatic docudramas, to cinema verite, in which there's no narrator, and nothing but the actual moment is happening. I think that what we're used to as an audience is documentaries as expressions of already arrived-upon ends. They are very neat, tied packages. And they are, of course, boring.
We approach our films as a process of discovery. We want to find out about our subject, and we place all the enthusiasm and the expectation of discovery into our process. I think that's what we share along with the facts of our film, and that's why the films have been so popular. They are the antithesis of this vaccination that comes in the form of a documentary.
Naval History: If you could remake any of the films that you've done, would you, and what would it be?
Burns: I wouldn't remake them, because I think they are accurate snapshots of where I was when I made them. If you accept the idea of history as "not was, but is," as William Faulkner said, then the film is evidence of how I was when I made it. These are intensely personal films that are part of my own drama, as well as the larger drama of my fellow citizens. I look at the films and see their problems, and I see how I might have changed something, or added something, or taken something out. But that becomes meaningless. It's like looking at an old snapshot in an album and saying, I wish I was different from the way I was. There's nothing you can do about it. You can't take that paunch away. You can't shave the beard from the old photograph. You're stuck with it. That's who you were. So with these films, that's who I was.
Naval History: Which film did you like doing the most?
Burns: That's a difficult question. They are all completely different. Actually, I have been making the same film over and over again, I discovered recently. They are all asking the same question: Who are we? Like my two daughters, they all have special aspects to them that make them unique. Each has had its special moments—filming the Matthew Brady photographs at the Library of Congress for The Civil War or being out on the Lewis and Clark Trail, trying to bring back a moment free of telephone wires and modern influences. Lots of times you feel a special kinship to a project. But I can't say that one project is my favorite.
Naval History: Perhaps the biggest coup of your career was putting the voices and personalities of David McCullough, Shelby Foote, and Ed Bearss together in The Civil War. Was that a calculated decision?
Burns: Well, I've kidded David McCullough that I gave him his start in motion pictures. He had written a book on the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. My first major film, my first national PBS broadcast, in the early '80s—and one that I had been working on since the mid-'70s—was on the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, inspired in part by his book. It seemed logical to me that the person who knew most about the subject ought to narrate it. So I begged and twisted and cajoled until he finally came on. He narrated most of the next ten films I made, up to The Civil War. He was, in essence, my voice.
For The Civil War, I thought I would have dozens of voices. As it turned out very quickly, most of the academic historians we spoke with did not in any way help us understand the narrative story. They would always give you the punch line before you wanted to hear it.
Typically, we would ask, "What was the war like for the southern soldier?" And they would tell you in one sentence, through to the surrender. Any good narrative historian doesn't want Lee to surrender to Grant until it's time—until the last episode, right? But Shelby Foote would say things like, "Well, they ate something that they called 'sloosh.' That is, they'd fry up some bacon and when that was done, they would take the bacon grease, and they'd add some cornmeal to it, and they'd roll it into a dough, and they would roll that dough into a snake, and they'd wrap it around their bayonet or their ramrod, and then cook it over a fire. They called that sloosh. And they ate a lot of it."
So there was an expressive quality to Shelby. It turns out that very few other people we interviewed were able to put us in the historical moment with a certain urgency and sense—which all good narrative history should have—that things may not turn out the way you think they will. That maybe Lee will make it up and through the copse of trees at Gettysburg, and Pickett's Charge will turn out differently. That maybe this time Lee won't surrender to Grant. That maybe this time John Wilkes Booth won't get off the shot in Ford's Theater.
Good history makes you sit on the edge of your seat, hoping that it might not turn out the way you know it's going to turn out. That's good storytelling. And Shelby helped rivet our attention, as did Ed Bearss. Ed Bearss pulled us in with his rock-solid knowledge of every detail. I've heard Ed speak above backhoes. That guy could cut through fog.
Naval History: Who selects the photos that you use?
Burns: I try to do it. People say, "You must have so many researchers," because of the number of images that we so clearly deal with. In fact, we have very few. We don't really have researchers, because the researcher is traditionally the lowest rung on a production hierarchy. Why would you want that person making the critical decision of not so much yes, but no? We like to say no, or yes, to photographs. We have a nucleus of two or three or four of us on a big project. The people who make decisions in my absence are people whose aesthetic and historical judgments I trust. Even then, we have disagreements. They'll often make photocopies of 25 pictures and order 10, and then when I happen to see the other 15, many months later, I ask why we didn't order this or that one. Taste is so individual. In the case of The Civil War, I picked—and shot—every one.
Naval History: Have you ever had a desire to do the Hollywood blockbuster, as opposed to what you are doing?
Burns: When I was in high school, I was in love with the Hollywood movies, and I really wanted to be Alfred Hitchcock, or Howard Hawkes, or Orson Welles, or John Ford—especially John Ford. I loved his stories in American history. I loved the fact that he did history from the top down as well as from the bottom up. That is to say, there's always a dog barking in the corner of a John Ford scene. There's always a dance. You're always aware not only of what people wore, but you have a sense that this is really how they lived. There's mud on the streets, a sense of real lives being lived. And there's always beautiful music and a sense of a transcendent American message coming through it all.
That's what I wanted to be. I got my head turned around completely when I went to college—Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts—by social documentary still photographers who reminded me, quite correctly, that there's more drama in what is and what was than in anything the imagination could make up. And so suddenly you had this head of a documentary filmmaker on the body of a John Ford-lover.
In some ways, I've had my dream, and I'm constantly being drawn back to a Hollywood situation. But I enjoy, with Public Television and the kind of support I get from General Motors and other underwriters, an absolute creative freedom. So I will never come to you and say, the reason why you didn't like this film is because somebody made me do this, or I didn't get enough money for that, or somebody wanted the ending to change, or somebody released it on Thursday instead of Sunday.
I will never say that to you. I will say that the reason why you didn't like it is entirely my fault. I never want to make an excuse. So when I've had opportunities to do something in Hollywood, my conscience has always pulled back, because I realized that I would not have total artistic control, and therefore, I could not take full blame for my mistakes.
Naval History: Where does history begin for you? Can one do a responsible history of Operation Desert Storm, for instance?
Burns: Well, history is the great pageant of everything that has gone before this moment, but any realist understands that a certain amount of historical triangulation has to take place. That is to say, as in celestial navigation, or in any kind of mathematical equation, triangulation is fixing a specific spot by knowing the distances between a couple of other spots. And I think the key to that triangulation in history is time.
Let me give you a classic example of why you don't want to rush into something in the guise of history. For many years after Vietnam, that war seemed to be our albatross, a dark war that had taken on the same importance as the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II. And on top of this, it was a war we had lost. This was going to be the beginning of the decline of the United States. We labored under this popular sense for many years, and a lot of our fiction, our movies, and our popular culture issued from this belief, of this metaphor for the decline of America.
If you had done a history of Vietnam then, you would have been enthralled by that view. But, as Abraham Lincoln said, you need to disenthrall yourself and the one way you disenthrall yourself is through patience. You wait.
Look what happened. This relatively small military action called Desert Storm wiped out Vietnam as the albatross, that ball-and-chain we had been carrying. Vietnam still retains its significance and centrality in 20th-century American history, but it doesn't have the historical weight it once had. And what did that take? A mere 25 years away from the subject. So my philosophy is that you need at least 30 years before you can actually say, "I think I understand what this was about," in even just rudimentary historical fashion. Revisionism is going on all the time. In five years, we'll have a better perspective on Vietnam, or at least a different one.
In my films, particularly those subjects like baseball, and now jazz, that come up to more or less the present, we untether ourselves from our straightforward historical narrative within 30 or 40 years of the present day and become much more impressionistic. That is a quite conscious decision, so that we in no way make the mistake of a premature judgment or assumption. History is still being made.
Naval History: What would you say are the largest gaps in U.S. history?
Burns: As an amateur historian and a professional filmmaker, I've got to say that the prephotographic history of our country is much neglected. This is why I sort of dove, however naively or foolishly, into that prephotographic era in films on Thomas Jefferson and Lewis and Clark. I would have to say our colonial period is probably the least-known and least-reported, certainly in film. And I think also that is true in the scholarship, with some obvious notable exceptions. If I had my druthers, I would want to see more things about 17th- and 18th-century America.
Naval History: What do you think of cable television and the advent of The History Channel, and The Military Channel, and Discovery, and Arts and Entertainment?
Burns: I'm disappointed. The only thing that we have in our modern life that's really our own is our attention. I would wager that the things and relationships you are proudest of are those that occur in duration, those that have benefited—the people, the things, the work you've done—by your focused attention.
And yet, for more than three generations of television, we have convinced people that they don't need to have an attention span longer than eight to ten minutes, at which point we'll sell you six to eight things, then go back to telling the story. So it's no wonder that we have a lack of attention. On public television, my film can go out and not be interrupted for an hour and a half or two hours, if that's what it takes to tell the story.
The quality of the work on The History Channel and A&E is diminished. They're more superficial. They're hardly more than journalistic considerations, because they don't have the time, and they don't have the resources, because there are so many of them. How can you develop complexity, if every eight to ten minutes you're interrupted to sell six to eight different things? It may seem obvious, but it's not trivial in any way. It is the single most important reason for the dumbing-down of the country: our refusal to develop our own attention.
And that's why I've tried to stay, though often to my financial detriment, in a place that rewards me so much better with the freedom and the control necessary to develop attention.
Naval History: What projects are in the works for you currently?
Burns: Well, I'm working on two parallel tracks. After Baseball, I began with a series of biographies that started with Thomas Jefferson, then Lewis and Clark, then Frank Lloyd Wright. This fall, we're doing a dual biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, two very interesting women, and then in the year 2000, Mark Twain.
In the meantime, I will release the third panel on a triptych, the final leg of a trilogy that began with The Civil War, which defined us, as Shelby Foote said, to Baseball, which told us what we had become, to Jazz, which is a kind of redemptive promise of the country and a very interesting way of looking at 20th-Century American history. All three are great American creations, the great improvisational genius of America in jazz, in baseball, and in our Constitution, as manifested in its greatest crisis, the Civil War. Beyond that are more biographies, more series, and I'm just now beginning to pick and choose among dozens of potential projects.
Naval History: What would you suggest that we do to get people more interested in naval history?
Burns: Since The Civil War and Baseball, I'm confronted constantly with people telling me what I should do next. I'm basically a freelancer at heart, so I have what I'm going to do set for the next several years. But it's very interesting what people talk about.
The main suggestion is do something on railroads. The next main suggestion is immigration. And the third thing is do something about naval history, to do something about ships.
What I need to do is to find a story, not a series of disconnected events but a complicated story with all of the stuff of drama. Then we'll have people beating a path to our door. Certainly, the success of Titanic reinvigorates any consideration of the drama at sea. Titanic is a drama in which everyone knows what's going to happen, and they are even more riveted because they know. That's the essence of good history-telling.
I think one of the undertold stories in American history is our growth to a major sea power. It is central to our position as a world power. And I think if you polled most citizens, they would have no idea that our present world standing came essentially from our bursting out as a navy, able at first to rival Britain and then others.
Naval History: If ever you have a notion to do a naval history project, we hope you call the Naval Institute.
Burns: You would be the first people we talk to. One great thing about these projects is that we get to associate with historical agencies and groups that have the subjects closest to their hearts. They've spent their whole lives in it, and we come in for a few years and try to represent their enthusiasm as faithfully as we can.
The subjects choose me. So there will come a time, to be sure, when I'll be knocking on your door and begging you to lend me your beautiful photographs—and your expertise and kindness.