rank Lloyd Wright” follows “Thomas Jefferson” and “Lewis & Clark: The Corps of Discovery” as the third in a series of five biographies Ken Burns is producing and directing. “Frank Lloyd Wright” is made possible through the contributions of several underwriters. Having made a name for himself through epics like “The Civil War” and “Baseball,” Burns turned to biography because it represents a different entryway to history. “The beginning of my interest in history, the beginning of anyone’s interest in history is in some ways about other people I want to know,” Burns says. “That is called biography, and in fact, Thomas Carlyle, the great British historian, said that history is biography. The way we come to terms with our common past is through a doorway that is the lives of other people. There could be no more interesting person than Frank Lloyd Wright.”

Burns shares this film’s directing credit with longtime colleague Lynn Novick, who calls the film “a wonderful collaboration.” She reflects, “At every step along the way, Ken really knows what he wants and where he wants the film to go. It is quite inspiring to see that focus and direction able to marshall all these forces...working on ‘Baseball’, we could do a lot of back and forth really in the editing room...I won’t say we’re interchangeable because that is not really right....in the end we each have slightly different sensibilities and that is what made the film what it is.

Burns and Novick talked with PBS’s Eric Yeater in May 1998 about the making of “Frank Lloyd Wright”. Learn more about the film, their reaction to Wright, and their plans for the future through text and video excerpts from this interview.

This site includes RealVideo. Download RealPlayer now.