The following is a special presentation of WTI, Chattanooga, North Georgia, and the Tennessee Valley.

He's a man who spent more than 30 years of his life behind the lens of a camera, a historian, a documentary filmmaker.

Known for his keen ability to reach through the webs of time and bring the past to life.

My training.

I'm a filmmaker.

I just want to make a good film.

I just want to tell a good story.

I just want somebody to not feel like there was a lesson being sneaked in on them and at the same.

Will delve into the mind of award winning filmmaker Ken Burns.

Coming up on this edition of the A-list, Ken Burns.

He's a household name for history buffs and for documentary enthusiasts credited with at least 19 titles, including the War Jazz, The Civil War and Baseball.

Let us go forth a while and get better air in our lungs.

Let us leave our close rooms.

The game of ball is glorious.

Walt Whitman.

The careful crafting of sound, music and dialog burns encases facts, interviews and history into an ever unfolding story.

It's the unique talent he's mastered, and that makes him the most memorable documentary filmmaker in the 21st century.

I recently had the honor to sit down with him, and he shared with me a few tidbits of his latest film and a whole lot more.

Well, Ken, thank you for joining us on the A-list.

We're thrilled to have you.

Thank you for having me.

Our crew is in no way intimidated by your presence.

I will let you know if you want to if you want to check the shot composite.

You know, I have a an old cartoon in my refrigerator, and I've had it for 30 years.

It shows two men standing in hell, the flames licking up around them.

And one guy says to the other, apparently my over 200 screen credits didn't mean a damn thing.

Nobody should be intimidated.

Tell me about the documentary that's coming out now.

The National Parks America's Best Idea.

Well, we're we think it is.

You know, for the first time in human history, land was set aside not for kings or the rich, but for everybody for all time.

We invented that idea and we arrested this impulse that most human beings, particularly Americans, have, which is to develop it, to put a house on it, to build a shopping mall, to, you know, to do something.

And we were in danger in the mid-19th century of losing all of that.

And somebody said, let's set this aside, a huge battle.

So this isn't a travelog.

It isn't a nature film.

This is the story of ideas and individuals.

And we'll introduce you just like every other film I've made.

We'll introduce you to 50 people that you've never heard of, maybe Theodore Roosevelt and John de Rockefeller Jr, maybe John Muir.

But the rest are ordinary folks, Black and brown and red and yellow and female as well as white and male that basically fell in love with a piece of land and spent their lives trying to save it for people they would never meet.

Meaning you and me and everyone within the sound of our voice.

And that's an amazing thing.

And in these spectacular natural settings, we're able to see an America that once was.

It's the only place we can go back and see what things were like 200 years ago or 15,000 years ago.

It hasn't changed.

And you need to have these little oases where we can stop and be made to feel less important, less narcissistic in our lives that that in the paradoxical intervention that the national parks, do you feel your insignificance and that makes you bigger.

It connects you with everybody else and everything else in this creation, just as the person who is the egotist around us is diminished, as we would say by that self regard.

And I'm a passionate defender of this idea and the fact that we started it here.

It is as unique as our declaration of universal liberty or religious tolerance and freedom.

We should be out there celebrating it.

But we live in a virtual world now and it's now important to shake people out, you know, to leave those video games.

They are a treasure house of nature's superlatives, 84 million acres of the most stunning landscapes anyone has ever seen, including a mountain so massive it creates its own weather, whose peak rises more than 20,000 feet above sea level, the highest point on the continent.

This is just a sample of the majestic landscape you'll discover in its debut during the fall of 2009 on PBS, The National Parks America's Best Idea.

It's Ken Burns's latest work in this 12 hour, six part documentary series was six years in the making.

A labyrinth of caves longer than any other ever measured and the deepest lake in the nation with the clearest water in the world.

Mainly focuses on the great natural national parks, of which there are 58 out of a park service system that has 391 units.

But we do detail that moment in the Depression, actually, when a lot of the battlefields were added to the system and made it not just about our natural world, but about the history of us too.

So the national parks reflect not only this beauty of nature, but us in all our complexity, because a great nation like ours can also acknowledge mistakes we have.

Borne In 1953, in Brooklyn, New York, Burns says he wasn't always interested in becoming a documentary filmmaker.

However, by the time he turned 30 years old, his work had already reached critical acclaim.

The entry is by the soul of the uplifted foot, a fairly spacious doorway.

It is rather dark inside, but the gloom is pierced by thousands of little eyelets of light, marking the holes.

Left for the rivets.

Tell me when you first knew you were destined to be a filmmaker.

My mom died when I was 11 years old and my dad had a really strict curfew, but he relaxed it.

If there was a movie late on TV, I'd stay up till 2:00 with him on a school night, or he'd take me off to some cinema guild and I'd see some old American silent film or some European New Wave cinema.

And it was the first time I'd seen my dad cry, didn't cry at my mom's funeral, but he cried at a movie.

And I understood at 12 or 13 years old there was a power to this.

And somewhere along there I said, That's what I wanted to do.

And I. I first thought I wanted to make feature films.

That's what he was showing me.

But then I ran into a bunch of social documentary still photographers when I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and they showed me, I think quite correctly, how much drama there is in what's real, what is, and what was.

And and that turned me around to make documentary films.

I've read that you once said your work is trying to wake the dead.

You know, it was interesting, about 35 years after my mother died and she died when I was 11 years old, I realized that I was never present on the actual date of her death, April 28.

I was always aware of that day coming up, and then it was always receding.

And somebody said, well, that's, you know, a little kids magical thinking.

And here I was an adult, you know, over 40 little kids, magical thinking.

You know, I bet you blew out your birthday cake, candles when you were a kid wishing that you'd come back.

I said, Yes, I did.

She goes, Well, that's, you know, keeping her alive.

And I told this to a friend of mine who was a psychologist, and he said, I said, I seem to be keeping my mother alive.

And he said, What do you think you do for a living?

And I said, Excuse me.

He said, You wake the dead.

You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson and Louis Armstrong come alive.

Who do you think you're really trying to wake up?

And then you begin to realize that, you know, for all the dime store psychology that that must sound that there can be an intensely personal dimension to something as big as talking about American history, which we kind of, you know, go ug this is the required course, the homework, the castor oil.

But it doesn't have to be.

And I think you can have a relationship to the idea that the past, as William Faulkner said, the great Southern writer said, you know the past is is not was it is.

What would your mother think of your work?

You know, I always sort of feel that she's present that that she's guiding.

You know, I have three daughters and and I always feel that some of her must be in them.

And and I just think that in some ways it's not so much what approval there might be or comment.

There might be as much as one of my responsibilities as a human being on this planet is to try to honor her in some way.

So perhaps if you're liking something that I've done, maybe you could say by extension she'd done a good job.

What's the favorite of your documentaries that you've made?

The Civil War will forever be appended to my name, but I made a film on the celibate religious sect, the Shakers.

The second film that I did for public television.

And I love that film as much as I love the Civil War.

And I love this one.

Baby, let me just back up and tell you.

Duke Ellington's cop out on that question.

Someone asked him.

And Duke Ellington's our most prolific composer.

And many people believe, as I do, that he is our greatest composer.

And somebody asked him what his most important composition, and he said, The one I'm working on now.

And that's a nice way to dodge a question and sort of say that if you invest, you know what you're working on now with everything, then you can't ever be disappointed with the results or end up with favorites.

And witness firsthand baseball's finest moment when a black man wearing the number 42 trotted out to first base.

Topics and focus typical of a Ken Burns documentary are real people from previous generations, but sometimes he tackles a major historical event or even the measure of an inanimate object as it relates to American history.

Burns says you truly have to journey to the past to gain any true perception of what currently stands or is represent it because that person made a decision or because that object exists, or even because that event happened.

The war was now being felt by every citizen in every town in America, in fast growing Sacramento, California, and quiet Laverne, Minnesota.

Even children found themselves caught up in the effort to win victory that moment.

So how do you get to your subject matter?

What?

I mean, the first film, Brooklyn Bridge and then ever every one since then I would say was true, you know, iconic Americana.

Yeah.

Is that kind of the bar that you set for each film?

Well, you know, it's funny, I when I did the Brooklyn Bridge, it was just a particular thing that got me excited.

Something inside me said yes.

And so I did it.

And I never thought I was going to be sitting with somebody talking 35 years later.

And every single film has been in American history, just like the Brooklyn Bridge was.

I thought, maybe I do something contemporary or something political or something, you know, some other type of thing.

Cinema verité, I don't know.

But that's what I. I heard some inner voice, you know, That was the thing that I was supposed to be doing.

And so it's not so much that you consciously choose, oh, I need to do this to fill in this spot or this age or something, but you need to do this kind of film.

I'm an evangelist for American history, but that's not my training.

I'm a filmmaker.

I just want to make a good film.

I just want to tell a good story.

I just want somebody to not feel like there was a lesson being sneaked in on them.

And at the same time, I want to shout from the top of Lookout Mountain how incredible our country is.

It's made lots of mistakes.

It's had really horrific undertow.

But as Lincoln said when he said the last best hope of earth, he was implying that if we don't take it too seriously, this myth of exceptionalism, that we have a possibility and that possibility reveals itself, ironically, paradoxically in our history, to really lead the world.

And sometimes we've been able to do that and we celebrate that.

The obvious times in that that's happened in other times we haven't been so good at that.

But we can go back to that past to help us.

And so those twin things of just wanting to be a good artist and and also feeling like, I mean, let me just say it and I don't know anyone who loves their country more than I do.

Do you think that you put your personal bent into your documentaries, or is there a sense that you try to stay back and let the story unfold?

Well, yes and no.

You can't help but put yourself.

Everything is subjective.

How could you not put, you know, just by choosing to do this battle as opposed to that battle by.

And sometimes that may just be because they're photographs and they're not photographs.

So they're all these sorts of things that weigh on it.

But then again, you don't want to be I don't want to be.

One can be, but I don't want to be overtly political.

I don't want to advocate.

I want to talk to all my fellow citizens.

And the past is, interestingly enough, a place where you can do that.

You know, I said something to somebody the other day that, you know, with the exception of real extremists on the far left and the far right, everybody I know in America loves Abraham Lincoln.

You know, how.

Is that possible?

You know, But he's far enough gone that what we do is he's actually this good, but we always make him that good.

And the difference is our wish for ourselves.

And that means it has nothing to do with whatever Lincoln's politics were, whatever his policies were.

But that he seemed to embody something that makes us want to be better than ourselves.

That is a really, really good thing.

So I want to avoid the kind of overt, you know, politic politicking, you know, advocating of stuff in favor of telling a complicated story that that still nonetheless, you know, if you watch the Civil War series, I didn't think slavery was a good thing.

And I'm unapologetic about that bias.

I don't think particularly in a country that was advertising itself, you know, for you, fourscore and five years before that, we were all men are created equal, that slavery should still exist.

I was happy that the United States came together at the end of that, you know.

But other than that, we just told, I think, you know, a really good story.

Since slave marriages had no legal status.

Preachers changed the wedding vows to read until death or a distance do you part with my man?

You know what I'd rather do if I thought that I'd ever be a slave again?

I. I take one.

end it all.

Right away.

Because you're nothing but a dog.

And not as a no.

How important are firsthand accounts of the information you're you're trying to get across?

Well, I just thought at the beginning of my professional life, you know, documentaries were people telling you what they already knew?

They weren't process of discovery, as I've just described.

They also had a single third person narrator who was called The Voice of God.

That's what they call the narrator was usually some ponderous Charlton Heston or Orson Welles, Alexander Scoresby.

And they just told you what you should know.

And it was homework.

But I thought, What if you could just hear the voices of the people?

What if you could have that third person?

NARRATOR But accompanied by first person voices reading love letters and diaries and journals and newspaper accounts and military records, wouldn't that help you begin to understand that those people who lived before us lived as full of lives as we live now, that they could have conversations as complex as we're having?

And the arrogance of the present is that we don't think those folks in the past ever got it the way we get it.

Well, they got it 10,000 years ago.

They just weren't talking about the same things that we talk about now.

But the the degree of sophistication and you can do that by hearing that a love between a man and a woman was the same back in the Civil War and indeed back during the Peloponnesian Wars as it is right now, and that it could be expressed in a letter home.

Well, if the national parks were America's best idea, what's been America's worst idea?

Well, I think I would have to say is slavery.

You know, we proclaimed in 1776 the great second sentence of our declaration.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, self-evident.

Yet the guy who wrote those owned more than 100 human beings and never saw fit in his life to free them and set in motion a very complicated American narrative.

Americans slaughtered one another wholesale here in America in their own corn fields.

And Pete Orchards.

The Civil War, a nine part series exploring a war fought in some 10,000 different places.

And it's currently listed as one of the highest rated and most celebrated documentaries in public television history.

More than 3 million Americans fought in it, and over 600,000 men, 2% of the population died in it.

And with that is also the war focusing on World War two.

Burns takes a look at this time in history through the personal stories of men and women from four different U.S. towns.

Camera doesn't show America.

And yet here on the beach is America.

I understand that it took you longer to actually create the Civil War documentary than it took us to fight the Civil War.

Yeah, no.

And same with World War Two.

When we did our film The War, it was much longer to do.

And that just has to do, I think, with the care that we want to tell.

You can't tell every story.

And because you can't tell every story.

How could you?

You have to really be careful and honor what you're leaving out.

And, you know, people come up.

And I love it when they tell me what I left out of the civil War Baseball.

You know, because those films are 11 and a half and eight and a half hours, respectively.

They're not saying that was boring.

They're telling me that they wanted more because we left out their favorite player or their favorite general or their favorite battle or this important a subject.

And that's good.

And I know I left them out.

I had to make some conscious decision and it wasn't because I didn't think they were worthy.

I just knew that if you added one more straw to that camel's back, bad things might happen.

How did you sift through?

I understand there were at least a million photographs taken of the Civil War.

You sifted through 20,000?

Oh, no.

We actually probably handled over 100,000.

But yeah, we handled an awful lot and thought about it a lot and tried realizing there was no footage, of course, that it was going to be through the agency of these photographs, trusting the power of the individual image to convey complex information that we were going to make this war come alive, that we were going to wake the dead.

Waking the dead, breathing life into old photographs and making film documentation that brings history to a relatable format.

Burns's latest documentary features something preserved by generations past and sprawls across the United States accessible and welcoming to all the national parks, the preservation of land and our nation's natural history.

Celebrating living museums and the people experiencing them all continually growing, changing, but nonetheless never changing.

The simple fact that it's part of America's history.

From the very beginning, as they struggled over who should control their national parks, what should be allowed within their boundaries, and even why they should exist at all.

Americans have looked upon these wonders of nature and seen in them the reflection of their own dreams.

What was your favorite part of filming this documentary?

Well, I have always three favorite parts.

One is that moment, you know, in a Yosemite or a Denali or a Zion or someplace where you get up at dawn and you film something and you it just gorgeous light in a magic hour.

You know, people always say what filters to use?

And we say, oh, nothing.

God is our gaffer.

We just are patient enough to wait for the light to be a certain way.

That's like a bumper sticker.

By the way.

God is our gaffer.

Yeah.

And.

And then there's a moment when you're editing.

When, as I described before, something.

Sort of, you.

Know, not there.

And then you make a change and it's there, and you just love it, that it comes together and the story is born.

And it's that's really a moment of creation, because all the pretty pictures and all the great words don't mean anything unless you put them in together.

And then I think right now, just the ability to be an evangelist, to go out into the world, to schools, talk to you and just say, this is what I believe.

I think this is important.

I hope you share it.

There's so few things in American life that we do together now.

But he's got a separate channel.

We only have public television in a few other places where actually it's for everybody.

And there are a few things in our environment that are for everybody.

In this case, the national parks are, and that wouldn't be good.

You know, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr said that we suffer today from too much pluribus and not enough own them.

And I think that a better way to describe what I do is that it's about owning all the things that we share in common.

That's what I'm interested in.

The wealth of information you learn.

And to me, every time I see another frame of one of your documentaries, I say to myself or out loud, Wow, I never knew that.

Is that what you hope to elicit in every one of your.

Every single one.

You know, we have this phrase in television that I'm so embarrassed to admit, which is called the lowest common denominator.

We remember it from math class in the third or fourth grade, but it just means you've got to dumb it down because you're trying to speak to everybody.

And I thought, why won't you speak as high as you can?

And everybody, if they're not there, might rise up and be curious about that.

And so I think that when you can see these films over and over again and you know, there's not a day that goes by that someone doesn't tell me that they've now watched the Civil War every year with their dad, who's nine years old, and we cry and we do this, or baseball or jazz or some of the biographies or the films like Statue of Liberty.

And that to me is the greatest award, the greatest kind of feedback that you could possibly know, that somebody could go back to something and still find something there.

100 years from now.

What do you hope that Ken Burns of that generation makes the documentary of?

Well, you know, I think that that, you know, we try to stay away from the near past and the present.

That's the province of journalists.

And and, you know, you don't have the perspective necessary to make some, you know, judgments about it.

You can now say that Gettysburg was the greatest battle or the most important battle in the Civil War, You know, and you get some arguments.

So I think it's Vicksburg or I think it's this or the turning point was really here when we lost this person.

But, you know, it's it's the greatest battle in the Western Hemisphere.

But you can't say that, you know, a couple of years afterwards.

You have to wait.

And so I think the historians, 100 years from now, the filmmakers are making films where we're making stuff that maybe it's about now and maybe they'll call the actions in Afghanistan and Iraq and both wars and Iraq the petroleum wars.

You know, I mean, this is we we won't know how.

We will see.

I have a distant, distant ancestor.

I'm not sure exactly how I'm related to him.

The Scottish poet Robert Burns, who said, oh, with some power, the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us.

And history is in a way, that ability to look back.

And finally try to see something with a little bit more perspective, it will still be subjective.

It'll still be informed by what our concerns and what our hopes are.

Now that's what history is.

It's not just the past.

History is the set of questions we in the present ask of the past.

So it's very much informed by who we are now in this kind of world.

So it's complicated.

It's going to be about these important individuals that transform our lives and the eras that in fact transform them.

And the strange conversation between the times and the people who populate.

Well, I will say on behalf of all public everywhere, the highest common denominator.

Thank you for asking the questions, but also for giving us as many answers as you have, because.

Thank you.

That's.

You've inspired us.

Thank you.

That's very nice.

And thanks for being on the A-list.

Oh, it's my pleasure.

I've had a lot of fun.

National Parks debuts on W TCI, your local PBS station this fall.

I'm Allison Leibovitz, and I'll see you in the fall with even more amazing A-list interviews and conversations that you won't want to miss.