>> Major funding for "Chat Box with David Cruz" is provided by the members of the New Jersey Education Association, making public schools great for every child.

Promotional support for "Chat Box with David Cruz" is provided by Insider NJ, a political intelligence network dedicated to New Jersey political news.

Insider NJ is committed to giving serious political players an interactive forum for ideas, discussion, and insight.

Online at insiderNJ.com.

>> Hey, everybody, welcome to "Chat Box."

I'm David Cruz.

America will celebrate its sestercentennial next year.

That's 250 years.

And the story of how we came to be is as important now as it's ever been.

So we're spending the entire show today with one of America's most celebrated documentary filmmakers who's brought to life in his singular style the story of the Civil War, the history of baseball, jazz, the Brooklyn Bridge, and so much more.

His latest work takes on the American Revolution in a way you've never seen before.

It's a pleasure to welcome Ken Burns to "Chat Box."

Ken, great to meet you.

Welcome.

Thank you, David.

It's great to be with you.

Thank you.

Also, first off, for jazz and baseball, my two favorite subjects and two documentaries that I refer back to all the time.

So I appreciate that.

How long does it take to complete a project like those or this project?

Well, let's let's take this project on the American Revolution.

I decided to do this project in December of 2015.

Barack Obama still had 13 months to go in his presidency.

And now here we are in 2015, I mean 2025, you know, beginning to release it.

Nobody was talking about the semi-quincentennial.

Nobody was thinking about 250 this.

We suddenly realized a few years in, "Hey, we're going to be out somewhere around the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the war in 1775 after Lexington and Concord."

But, you know, a lot of it.

And it's getting the facts right.

It's working with scholars, the most recent scholars, generations of scholars, finding the paintings, finding the reenactors, finding the maps, designing new maps, recording music in advance of the editing, making it come alive in the best possible way.

And I won't work, David, on a more important film than this one.

The American Revolution is the most important event since the birth of Christ in all of world history.

The world was turned upside down, and we've lost it.

It's become kind of sentimental.

And so we wanted to sort of tell you what the nitty gritty of this war was really like.

I imagine you probably knew a little bit about the American Revolution.

I don't know why I assume that.

But I assume.

What did you learn about the subject while you were making this thing and what are we going to learn.

Well, you know what, I did know what I thought was a lot, but I also know from previous experience of doing this for nearly 50 years that I knew nothing.

And that each day of the nearly 10 years it's taken us to do it, David, has been a process of discovery.

And rather than tell you what you should know, that's me starting off with what I do.

It's sharing with you our process of discovery.

And to me, it's a thousand things.

Some of them are intimate, about individuals that you've never heard of it.

Sometimes it's new information about somebody like George Washington that you think you know a lot about, but in fact, they become, as the historian Jane Kamensky says in our film, kind of marble statues.

And we don't really have any access to them.

So I think the revolution is just basically buried in sort of bloodless gallant myth.

It's the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia wrapped around it.

And so we know actually very little about what this was, which was a civil war, as much, if not more than our own civil war, because we've got communities, and in those communities are people making war on each other, loyalists against patriots, patriots against loyalists, the disaffected people trying to keep their head down, the armies moving backward and forward across these territories, and no place more so than in New Jersey.

New Jersey and South Carolina is where, you know, unfortunately the rubber hits the road.

It is incredibly violent story.

- Yeah, and there are stories that are untold about black people, native people, who are all part of this area where we are actually sitting right now.

- You know, we made an effort in our maps to tell that.

So you'll see big cities like Trenton and Philadelphia, not so big then, Philadelphia, but you also see what the native peoples were that were around there, because they were integrated into those 13 colonies.

And then on the Western border are all these very important nations.

And we treat them distinctly.

We just don't say them.

You know, there are nations like the Shawnee or the Delaware that are as important a player on the world stage as a Virginia or a New Jersey or a France might be.

Remember, our revolution is also a global war, probably the fourth global war over the prize of North America, and it's involving France and Spain and the Netherlands as well as the United States, patriots and loyalists, and of course Great Britain struggling to hang on to their most far-flung of all empires on earth.

It's just an incredibly dynamic story at the 30,000 foot level and incredibly dynamic at the intimate level of say a minister Nils Cullen in Swedesboro trying to hang on to his congregation and some of them are loyalists and some of them are patriots and he's because he's loyal to the king of Sweden he's you know trying to remain neutral and watching the havoc spread over his community as it is in in dozens if not hundreds of New Jersey communities as armies march back and forth but also a kind of guerrilla warfare takes place in its midst as well.

You talk about New Jersey let's take a little bit of a look here from the documentary where New Jersey plays an important role.

Washington had fewer than 3,000 Continentals in his camp.

But encouraged by Patriot victories at Trenton and Princeton and angered by the excesses of British occupation, New Jersey militiamen now rallied to him.

"They are actuated by resentment now, and resentment coinciding with principle is a very powerful motive."

John Adams.

Whenever British foraging parties ventured from their outposts, patriots attacked them.

At Maidenhead and Quibble Town, Bound Brook and Drake's Farm, Piscataway and English Neighborhood, and at least 50 other places.

That winter, more British and Hessian troops were killed fighting over forage than would fall in battle.

You know I don't know that New Jerseyans really know about how big a role the state played in the American Revolution.

We kind of downplay that.

It's huge.

David it's good.

I cannot you know overemphasize how central New Jersey is to this story.

You know there's a kind of a joke now.

George Washington slept here.

It really mattered in the revolution where he slept and often that place where he slept was in New Jersey.

And that's a really important part.

After the fall of New York, after Washington loses the biggest battle of the revolution, the Battle of Long Island, and has to abandon Manhattan, he moves up to White Plains, lose that battle, then comes down and is retreating across New Jersey.

And the British think they've got it all pacified.

They use the same terms as we use in the Vietnam War.

They pacified this province.

And people line up to sign a declaration of dependence afterwards, and there's offered amnesty.

And then, of course, as an occupying army, they begin to take liberties.

They forage, that women are raped, families are destroyed, and all of a sudden, the tide turns.

And there are more British and Hessian soldiers killed by guerrilla actions, by ambushes, than there are in the three major set-piece battles in New Jersey that we've, at least some of us, have heard about.

Trenton, of course, everybody's heard about.

But Princeton and Monmouth Courthouse, those are the big set-piece battles, but they're happening, skirmishes and ambushes are happening in hundreds of places.

And so it's nitty gritty.

It's really the story of the revolution writ in an intimate community by community way.

And we've tried to honor that.

And then when the war moves south, the same thing happens, particularly in South Carolina, that same kind of Americans killing Americans.

We just think it's us with our big ideas - all true - fighting the Brits with their bad ideas.

Well, they had the best system of government up to that point, the British constitutional monarchy, but we just came up with a better idea.

And the Conservatives, the Loyalists, which is...nothing wrong with that, they just saw all of their prosperity and health and the fact that they own land as issuing from Great Britain.

Why would I want to change that?

And so I think what happens is the revolution just awakens people, and not just the sort of moneyed, propertyed people, but everybody to the possibility of the cause.

And so you find Native peoples, you find free and enslaved African-Americans, you find the Spanish on the southern borders, you find all of these people trying to make decisions about which side to go on.

And it's not clear for just about anybody.

And the armies are constantly changing.

It's so, so interesting.

Yeah.

It's not too fine a point, I imagine, to talk about how this subject matter speaks to our current moment, no?

Well, you know, I think that we never... We have a discipline.

We've always had that.

Mark Twain is supposed to have said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."

You know, if he said it, it's a perfect thing.

No event has ever happened twice, ever.

But we do understand that human nature stays the same, and we see that.

And we're at a particularly divided moment in our history, and I think it's important to know, A, we've always been divided.

And there's no more so than in our revolution or civil war, at this moment, at that moment, there's not a period that you could find where we're not divided.

But I think we've lost touch with the revolution.

There are no photographs, there's no newsreels, so we keep it at a kind of sentimental arm's length.

And what we wanted to do was give the reality of the war.

It doesn't in any way diminish the big ideas that issue out of Philadelphia.

In fact, it makes those big ideas even more impressive.

And as I said, there is no more important event in the history of humankind after the birth of Christ than the American Revolution.

Everybody before that was a subject under authoritarian rule, and everybody after that, in the United States at least, had the possibility of being a citizen.

Now, it wasn't extended to everybody.

No women were included.

Obviously, black and enslaved blacks were not.

Even free blacks couldn't vote.

So there's Native peoples... There are lots of asterisks, but eventually those words are going to open the door for everybody, and we should be extraordinarily proud.

And rather than grab onto the mantle of a particular current political argument, I'd like to say there is something in this film that every single American, regardless of their persuasion, will find an ability to feel proud and inspirited by.

Because we're umpires calling balls and strikes.

We're not interested in putting our thumb on the scale and saying, "Oh, isn't this so much like today?"

We're just saying, "This is one of the great stories in all of human history, and guess what?

It's our story.

It's complicated, it's under-toe, it has a cast of characters like you can't believe, and we sort of reveal who those bold-faced names are in much more human dimension, and we introduce you to dozens of bottom-up characters that you never have heard of before.

And the very fact that you can be on the left or the right or in the middle somewhere, that you find something about this story that you relate to and are proud of.

So I mean, that's some common ground, at least, in and of itself, right?

That's what I think.

And because this is such an important event, that when we say we hold these truths to be self-evident, they weren't self-evident.

These were brand new ideas.

Thomas Paine, who's traveling across New Jersey with Washington's retreating army, prints a second thing after his incredibly inspirational "Common Sense" called "The American Crisis."

These are the times that try men's souls.

What tries men's souls is trying to outrun the British in New Jersey.

And then it galvanizes and allows on Christmas night and early in the morning of the 26th in 1776 for Washington to recross the Delaware, as we all know, and take the Hessian garrison at Trenton and give people at least a little bit of good news in a year of at least six months of pretty bad and disappointing news as battle after battle is lost.

- You're gonna have lots to talk about when you talk in front of a New Jersey audience.

Have you had that experience yet?

I have in different places.

I'm really looking forward to it.

On the 17th of September, we're going to be there at NJPAC.

And I'm very excited.

In the afternoon from 1.30 to 3, there are going to be some school kids.

There's going to be members of the public.

We're going to show clips from the film.

But to be able to work with the governor and various members of the delegation and be able to share the story of New Jersey and say, look, you know, it's it's a central part of this narrative.

And and we couldn't have told an accurate story of the revolution without it.

And I don't think there's a citizen in New Jersey that won't be proud to understand the dynamics.

You'll be right off the banks of the Passaic River, which I'm sure played a role in the Revolutionary War.

Indeed it did.

In every place, you know, there's, as I was saying, these skirmishes are taking play, you know, in English neighborhood and all of these different villages that we now know in different ways.

Just like the Battle of Long Island takes place in places of Brooklyn where my grandchildren live.

And you know there's you know the British run a flanking maneuver around Washington's army on a little footpath grandly called as we say the King's Highway.

And of course King's Highway.

Today.

So you're a PBS staple.

I have to talk to you about this.

The network has been devastated by federal cuts and other challenges of the marketplace.

I wonder what you've been thinking.

How has it impacted this work and plans for works going forward.

Well I'm happy to say David it hasn't influenced this work, it hasn't affected it in that way, but upcoming projects that we're working on have been severely budgets that we thought were there, money that had been committed have just been taken back and clawed back and so it's made our job a little bit more difficult.

It's such a short-sighted decision.

It's going to hurt mostly rural communities that depend on these signals and for not just our superb prime time and children's programming, but also for homeland security, continuing education, classrooms of the air, emergency alerts, stuff like that.

And so it just it seems petty and short-sighted.

We need to have a place where there's not, we can't have news deserts.

And what these rescissions and what these cuts are going to do is create news deserts all across the country where people no longer have somebody like an NJPBS going to a school board meeting or a city council meeting or a zoning board or understanding the local problems from the time up.

That all the media is going to be either speculative and subjective or it's going to be from some larger source that doesn't have an investment in the community, doesn't know the person who lives down the street, doesn't understand how this works, how we're different here in New Jersey than we are, say, where I am in New Hampshire, and how we're very much the same.

And I think that's a sad point.

But the only thing I'll say is that I'm keeping my day job.

What should the message be to viewers?

What do they need to hear if public media is important to them?

So I think that's a really good question.

You know, what we know, I don't know the statistics particularly for New Jersey, but what we know is a small fraction of the people who enjoy our programming are members.

And I think at this time, it's really important for people to step up, just as we always do in crises.

It might be World War II, where you're planting a victory garden, or you're getting your scrap rubber or your scrap metal and you're donating it.

I think now is the time, if you've just been sitting on the fence and equivocating about becoming a member, to become a member so that we can offset the very pernicious, as you said, devastating cuts that are happening all across the system.

Just a few days ago, PBS let go of many valued employees, people I've worked with for decades.

And it's just sad on a purely human level.

But we have a human level in which we can respond, and that's to become members, to support it, to argue for the support of public media.

I've spent my entire professional life, I could have made money, I've had many, many offers, but I've stayed here because while I could go to somebody and say, "Hey, look, I need $30 million to do a history of the Vietnam War," those premium cables or those streaming services would give me that, but they wouldn't give me the 10 and a half years it took me to make the Vietnam War.

And that's the important difference in public television, that I can stand by it and say, "This is a director's cut.

We worked with scholars for years and years and years with that film and with The Revolution."

And, you know, I assume mistakes will be made, but this reflects the most recent scholarship and is true.

It's fact, and you have to do that.

We're umpires calling balls and strikes.

You know, we live in a culture in which all you want to do is show the highlight film.

There's Aaron Judge hitting home run.

What you don't see is him striking out or taking a ball or taking a strike or all the other eight players that come up.

He can't come up every time at bat.

Sometimes it's that utility infielder who's gonna make or break that game.

And I think by calling balls and strikes, you get to know, you know, the minister in Swedesboro.

You get to know the ordinary soldier.

You get to know a woman named Mary Campbell who's attacked by British soldiers in her own home.

You get to know the intimacies of the battle as well as the top town characters like the Washingtons and the Hamiltons.

You talk about a decade and a painstaking process.

Every piece has to fit together.

Every piece.

And you know what?

We finish it, we lock it, as we call it, and then we unlock it a hundred times to add a word "perhaps" because a new scholar comes in and said, "You know, that word 'sixteen' could be 'sixteen' and could be 'eighteen' and might be 'fifteen'."

So we go, "Okay, we'll put 'perhaps' 'sixteen'."

Just to be accurate.

And people go, why do you fuss so much?

It really matters at some level that we have something-- and this is the whole story of public media-- is that we have some place where people are actually interested in the facts.

We live in a world in which people are trying to convince you that up is down and down is up.

And I can tell you the difference between that.

And music plays such an important part.

I mean, the jazz documentary, you know, that was easy lift as far as music, because it was all there.

But you've got to find not only period pieces, but stuff that is relatable, contemporary, and then that is evocative.

It's not easy.

So smart.

And jazz wasn't an easy lift, because you had the music background.

And then it was foreground, and then it was kind of hyperground.

You had to learn how to take it apart.

But you're absolutely right.

We have Baroque music from Europe and sort of the more formal parts of the colonies.

There's Native American music.

There's Afro-Caribbean stuff that's going on.

There's the music that enslaved Africans and free Africans are playing.

There's Yo-Yo Ma came in and played the cello.

We found beautiful Scotch-Irish music that helps do it.

And Rhiannon Giddens played for us a lot.

So it's been an amazing process.

And you know what?

Really important, we don't add it at the end.

We never score it.

Nobody's looking at a picture in the studio.

They're actually playing the music.

And then our editors will edit what we do to what they did.

And if we have to shorten a line of narration, so be it.

If we have to extend it, so be it.

We'll let the music, which is, as Wynton Marsalis said in "Jazz," "It's the art of the invisible."

It's what every other art form aspires to be.

Every other art form, whether it's painting or sculpture or documentary films or whatever, it relies on you seeing it.

Music is only hearing it.

- Yeah, and we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the cast, which is top grade.

- Yes, okay, right.

- I mean, you couldn't get this cast for a Hollywood movie.

- I keep saying this, and I'm waiting for somebody to challenge me, but I said there has never been a bigger and better cast for any film ever made, Hollywood, whatever.

Maybe "The Longest Day," the film about D-Day has almost as many, but if you think about-- and I'm going to get through about 1/10-- Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, Claire Danes, Hugh Dancy, Kenneth Branagh, Damian Lewis, Domnell Gleason, Jeff Daniels, Paul Giamatti, Laura Linney.

I mean, I'll stop there.

Literally dozens more people who bring to life, reading off camera, the journals, the diaries, the letters, the military dispatches.

Josh Brolin is George Washington.

Liev Schreiber is Nathaniel Green, the great general.

We have-- it's just amazing people who bring to life folks that are now just kind of two-dimensional figures or those marble statues.

And Paul Giamatti as Sam Adams.

Paul Giamatti as John Adams, yeah.

We didn't have Laura Linney reprise Abigail.

We had Claire Danes do it, and she's phenomenal.

And there's Kenneth Branagh, for example, is like a German officer, a French officer, a British lord, Irish soldier, and American soldier.

I mean, you just sort of feel you could give him all the mail ports, and that's all you need.

He's so talented.

And it's been very exciting to work with them.

And they've all done it at the minimum pay, and they've come in, and they love it, and help bring it alive to us.

It's interesting, you know, I brought in Tom Hanks, who I've worked with, and is one of the more extraordinary actors of all time.

And I said, I'm not gonna give you George Washington.

I'm gonna give you like 10 different quotes from 10 different people.

Every single one of those are in, every single one, because he inhabits them so perfectly.

You may say, oh, that's Tom Hanks, but you'll also have, don't miss for a second, what the content of it is, the anguish of someone realizing that Brtains are killing Britains and that this is a civil war to someone celebrating the surrender at Yorktown by seeing the white flag and the drummer boy up on the parapet making, as Ebenezer Denny says and Tom reads, "The most beautiful music I ever heard."

So what's next now?

I mean, what, do you rest for a decade and then start something else?

Or are you in perpetual motion?

No, no, no.

That's the problem.

Yeah, perpetual motion.

We usually have two or three films going on at once.

So there are ones that are sort of not on the back burner, but there are other colleagues that have been working them.

So the second this is broadcast, they're like saying, "Where have you been?

Come on, let's go back to LBJ and the Great Society or Emancipation to Exodus," which is a history of the most misunderstood period in our history, Reconstruction.

You know, it comes down to us from "Birth of a Nation" and "Gone with the Wind" as this sort of bad period, but it in fact is an attempt to extend civil rights to all Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War and its collapse is the great tragedy in American history.

And so it's an important and little touched and little discussed story that we've been working on for many, many years.

So lots of that and many other projects we're doing.

Tremendous.

All right.

His latest project is a six part documentary, "The American Revolution."

Ken Burns, a great pleasure meeting you.

Thanks for coming on with us.

- It's my pleasure, David.

Thank you for having me.

- And that's Chat Box for this week.

We are on Bluesky now.

You can follow us there @DavidCruzNJ and scan the QR code on your screen for more Chat Box.

I'm David Cruz for the entire crew here at Gateway Center in downtown Newark.

Thanks for watching.

We will see you next week.

>> Major funding for "Chat Box with David Cruz" is provided by the members of the New Jersey Education Association, making public schools great for every child.

Promotional support for "Chat Box with David Cruz" is provided by Insider NJ, a political intelligence network dedicated to New Jersey political news.

Insider NJ is committed to giving serious political players an interactive forum for ideas, discussion, and insight.

Online at InsiderNJ.com [music]