(gentle music) - Hello and welcome to this "PBS Books" Filmmaker Talk.

I'm Lauren Smith, and I'm so glad you're here with us.

Tonight we'll discuss "The American Revolution," a film directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, and written by Geoffrey C. Ward.

This landmark six-part documentary examines how America's founding turned the world upside down as 13 British colonies on the Atlantic coast rose in rebellion, won their independence, and established a new form of government that radically reshaped the continent and inspired centuries of democratic movements around the world.

The film takes us far beyond the textbook version of history, an expansive look at the virtues and contradictions of the war, and the birth of the United States of America.

The film follows dozens of figures from a wide variety of backgrounds.

Let's take a look at "The American Revolution."

(gentle music) - [Narrator] To believe in America is to believe in possibility, possibility worth fighting for.

- The possibility of a different kind of world.

(bright music) - [Speaker] America is predicated on an idea.

- Everything that we believe in comes out of the Revolution, (bright music) our ideas of liberty, equality, (bright music) it's the defining event of our history.

- The American Revolutionary Movement served as a model around the world.

- These are not English liberties, these are transcendent liberties.

These are liberties that all individuals have by the nature of being human.

(bright music) - The American Revolution changed the world.

(bright music) - "The American Revolution," a film by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt is available to stream on the PBS app, and will appear again on PBS, starting on January 9th, with additional airings in the months to come.

I'm thrilled to welcome our guest this evening.

Ken Burns has been making landmark documentary films for nearly 50 years.

From the Civil War and baseball, to the war and country music, his films have helped shape our understanding of American history.

Sarah Botstein has been a producer with Florentine films for more than two decades, with acclaimed titles, such as "The Vietnam War" and "Hemingway."

Before "The American Revolution," she co-directed "The U.S.

and the Holocaust."

Jeffrey C. Ward is an Emmy award-winning writer who has collaborated with Ken Burns for over 40 years, writing over a dozen films and 10 companion books, including both "The American Revolution Documentary" and "The American Revolution: An Intimate History" companion book.

Rick Atkinson is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author.

His latest title, "The Fate of the Day," is book two of a trilogy that focuses on the American Revolution.

Rick served as one of the main advisors for this film as well as a featured interviewee.

Thank you all so much for joining us on "PBS Books."

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- With a subject as vast as the American Revolution, where do you begin, as filmmakers and writers, and how do you decide on what to focus on and which stories to highlight?

- You know, I got a call, I'll take this first, and then yield to the writers.

I got a call once from the novelist and historian, Shelby Foote, and he reminded me that God is the greatest dramatist.

You begin at the beginning.

You then go and then, and then, and then, and then, and is obvious, and perhaps, even kind of simplistic as it sounds, it's really so much better than any other convoluted pretzel narratives that people can tie themselves into.

And it's certainly the way we have, Jeff and I for more than 40, almost 45 years working together, and the way Sarah and I approach it, and love to hear how Rick handles that.

- Well, I think our ambitions are very similar, storytelling without being didactic, empowering the reader or the viewer's imagination.

I do it with words, sentences, paragraphs, Ken, Sarah, David, Jeff all do it with images and music, and then of course, words their own, and those that are words that are spoken by actors.

I think we share a common passion for this story, not only as our origin story, but perhaps the greatest, most improbable yarn in American history.

So I think that we have more in common with the way we approach this particular tale of the American Revolution than we have dissimilarities.

- Jeffrey, I was gonna ask you a follow-up question.

You wrote the film and the companion book, "The American Revolution: An Intimate History."

Talk to us about your approach to writing about such a complicated subject.

How do you engage viewers and readers and bring the history to life in a way that resonates?

- I just look for great individual stories that add up to a great big story.

That's a simple-minded answer, but that is what we do, and we weave them.

Things happen in absolute chronological order, just the way Ken said, or God said, (chuckles) and we try to keep to that as much as we can.

- Rick, the first two books in your revolutionary trilogy paint really an incredibly detailed portrait of the American Revolution, which balances the big picture, which we're talking about with those human stories that really bring it to life.

How do you go about, as a writer, compiling those stories and then weaving them together for your books?

- Well, I spend several years in 15 to 20 archives around the country and around the world.

I'm an archive rat, so the mystery of the next unopened archival box is what gets me up in the morning.

And then trying to master, trying to read as much as I can of the secondary material.

My books to get list for the most recent book had 2,500 titles.

I own about half of them, and that includes things like the papers of George Washington.

They're now on volume 34.

I think I've read volumes one through 26 at this point.

And so I'm amassing all this into various word files.

I put a mark on the calendar, I'm gonna stop here so I don't wander into the woods and never wander out.

And then I spend months outlining.

The book that I'm about to write takes me six or seven months.

It's usually six or 700,000 words long, and then I start writing.

I'm an old newspaper guy, so I write very fast, 1000 words a day, typically seven days a week, and the next thing you know, you've got a book.

- That's very impressive.

Another question for you, Jeffrey.

I'm really intrigued by the word "Intimate" in the title of the book, "The American Revolution: An Intimate History."

What makes this book intimate and why was it important for you to tell the story of the American Revolution in that way?

- I'm an old biographer (chuckles) and I want to get as close as I can to my subjects, but they're people just like us.

And I just wanna make that point over and over and over again.

So the closest you can get to 'em, the more fellow feeling there is and the more understanding of what they went through.

- Well, let's talk a little bit more about the art of storytelling.

The film follows dozens of figures from a wide variety of backgrounds.

How did you discover these stories and why did you decide to include these individual perspectives, and how did it change the way you understood the story of America's beginning?

Sarah, let's start with you on this one.

- We always look to, as Jeff was just saying, the great stories in any subject, and you wanna tell the stories of the famous people that we've heard of, George Washington, King George III, Thomas Jefferson.

But then, you know, Jeff, I think, discovered early on the amazing story of John Greenwood, and then Joseph Plum Martin, and Betsy Ambler.

David Schmidt went on a Betsy Ambler rabbit hole for many years, and I think to tie the famous people with the lesser known people, as Jeff was just saying so beautifully, who are just like us, even if they lived 250 years ago, brings the history much more dynamically to life, and hopefully interests new viewers to learn about history because they're learning about people who they may connect to in some way, and you can't tell a great story of history without widening the lens to hear, you know, a vast variety of perspectives, 'cause that's how human beings have lived together for many, many, many, many years.

- I'm interested in learning more about how you all work together as writers and filmmakers.

Can you talk to us about that a little bit?

- Sure.

It's pretty remarkable, and being in the presence of two extraordinary writers, it's a little bit daunting, as Sarah has also indicated, because these men work, particularly Rick, alone.

And while we have folks that are helping Jeff and feeding him stuff, and we have a process which is pretty spectacular, that means that the first draft is just that.

We have many, many drafts as we learn new stories, as we lose things that seem, for a moment, extraneous only to be put back in, in the next pass, to lose something else, to rewrite it, we find new facts, we qualify those things, we correct those errors.

But then Sarah and I are working on multiple other dimensions of what the imagery is that will go along with that text.

It's very often that we're doing the filming of the experts before there's a word that's written.

We start shooting a lot of the archival material, collecting it, and shooting the live cinematography before there's a word.

And so we're not sitting there with a script that comes down from Mount Sinai that is etched in stone, and then we are trying to film each particular line of that script.

It's in some ways the opposite, and in some ways, places that Jeff goes are informed by discoveries that we've made visually and we go hunting visually, informed by things that Jeff has discovered in the course of the research.

And in our case, we have four generations of scholars, beginning with Bernard Bailyn, who just passed away recently at over 100 years old, who we interviewed at the ripe young age of 98, to help us understand it, and his student, Gordon Wood, and other people, you get to piece together what is the sort of consensus of the last 50 years of scholarship, which is of course, built on the 200 years of scholarship before that.

And you begin to form through that kind of triangulation that takes place from a 14-year-old drummer, named John Greenwood, or a 15-year-old soldier, named Joseph Plum Martin, or Betsy Handler, or the French King, or the French Foreign Minister, or the British King, or his ministers, or his generals, or his foot soldiers, and the loyalists in America, and the variety of Patriots from New Hampshire to Georgia, you begin to find something that then also helps to flesh out those more familiar characters, like Adams, and Washington, and Jefferson, and there's a wonderful momentum that begins to happen through the course of the process of this work.

- Something that really struck me when I was watching the film was the way that I felt when I was rooting for the Americans.

Like I was very worried when they were losing a battle, or even knowing the outcome.

There was this tension.

Talk to me about the importance of creating that in a documentary, and how you go about doing that.

- Well, the thing is, David McCullough, an old friend of ours, the late historian, said that good history was tuning in because you think it might not turn out the way you know it did.

And Jeff and I made a film many years ago, 35 years ago, it came out, on the Civil War, and I still get mail or people who come up to me saying, "I go into the Ford's theater scene hoping somehow that the gun will jam."

This is great.

Lauren, you actually know how the American Revolution turns out.

There shouldn't be any tension about it, but I've seen this film 100 times and I know when the French come in, that's gonna be it, the fate of Britain is sealed, but then the first couple engagements don't go very well, and then they get Georgia and Savannah, and then Charleston Falls, and I go, "I'm not sure whether this is gonna work out."

At the same time, George Washington is saying, "I'm not sure this is gonna work out," and I have the same anxiety every single time, and I think you, in your question, have put your thumb on what the essence of good history is.

Nobody then knew how it was gonna turn out, and if you can place yourself in George Washington's tent, if you can place yourself in the foxhole of a grunt, if you can figure out what's going on in parliament, you understand that none of them knew, and if you can unite those disparate narratives into one coherent whole, you have a sense that's unfolding, and it may not turn out the way you pretty sure you heard it did back in third, or fifth, or eighth, or 11th grade when they taught you a little bit of American revolutionary history.

- I'm curious about Jeffrey and Rick, your thoughts on this too, because you wrote the script from the film.

You also write books.

Talk to us a little bit how those are similar and different, and the idea of creating that tension in both your books and in writing for film.

- The difference between the film, you know, I get asked that a lot, and it's a little hard to say.

The film is shorter.

(chuckles) The writing, and there are no topic sentences, largely, in writing for script.

The image is the topic sentence.

- Yeah, I'm reminded also that David McCullough said, "In good narrative, there's no such thing as a foreseeable future."

That's true in life, and it's true in good nonfiction, I think.

You know, you may feel admiration and you may be rooting for the Americans, but I also want you to see the other side of the hill.

So I spent a lot of time as a researcher and as a writer, for example, trying to understand what the British thought they were doing in waging war for eight years against their own people across 3000 miles of open ocean in the age of sail.

I spent a lot of time at Q where the British National Archive is.

I spent a week this summer at the British Library.

I was in Madrid for the better part of a week a couple months ago because I wanna understand the Spanish point of view, 'cause the Spanish are gonna come into the war as adversaries of the British.

I spent a lot of time, in fact, the latest book opens in Versailles because I think, as a reader, you need to understand who Louis the 16th is and his beautiful spend thrift wife, Marie Antoinette, in order to understand why the story turns out as it does, because the game is, for the Americans, to persuade the French, an absolute Roman Catholic monarch, to come into the war full force with an army and a navy, on behalf of Protestant wannabe Republicans intent on armed rebellion against their lawful monarch.

That's improbable.

(group laughs) It's a heavy lift diplomatically.

It's one of the reasons that the story is so extraordinary.

- Our "PBS Books" community is incredibly passionate about the value of books in telling a story that predates film and photography.

How strongly did you rely on books in the research process, and for sourcing visuals?

- Well, we are religious about sourcing anything we do, if we can keep using the religion thread here.

We have meticulously footnoted scripts and we do research really the old fashioned way.

That doesn't mean we don't use the internet for research.

We always go back to a paper source for everything we do, visual and textual.

So whether we're looking, sourcing a footnote, Jeff, for you, and then finding where that, you know, the original source of that, that's how we fact check our scripts.

That's how we fact check our images.

That's how we find collections where material live, whether we're doing a story in the 18th century or the Vietnam War.

That that part of what we do is the same.

We are all fierce readers.

We love the written word.

The film start with the word, and we fact check both what we're, you know, we have a lot of discussions about how to visualize the words, right?

The best part of our job is figuring out what we're gonna see, you know, to match the words and the stories, and we have an expression in the editing room, it shouldn't be, "Say dog, see dog," right?

So sometimes it's "Say dog, see dog," but most of the time we're gonna try to do something a little more clever.

- And I think that, you know, we have this neon sign in the editing room that says, "It's complicated," which has lots of different meanings and resonances for us at various stages in the process, which is a long, and in the case of this film, nearly 10 year process.

But essentially, it says that the facts are gonna rule, that even when you've got a good scene that's working, you're willing to destabilize it when you learn destabilizing and contradictory information.

And maybe that scene turns out not as cinematically perfect as it once was, but it's more accurate, and in that struggle between the fact and the art, the fact has to win, and we hope that the art can find a way to adapt to the fact.

- You've all spent years immersed in this project.

After so much research, and writing, and filmmaking, and, you know, touring communities, and being engaged with people around this film, what lessons do you personally take away after making "The American Revolution?"

- Human beings are super complicated.

Human nature doesn't change.

That's the foothold really, that we have, you know, the same amount of venality and virtue obtains today as you see back then, and that's kind of the portal human nature.

The problem with the present is that we're incredibly arrogant.

We think that somehow because we've survived, we're smarter, we know more.

We know how the story turns out.

So we've got some advantages to the people involved in it I suppose, but I think the humility that comes from submitting to the idea that these people could be as complicated, if not, in the case of our founding story, much more complicated than we are, this is a big see change in world history.

Stuff changes, and, you know, the Old Testament says, "There's nothing new under the sun."

Well, on July 4th, 1776, there was something new under the sun for a while.

The same human nature will attend to it and degraded it and improve it, but we wish to be servants of what happened, and that's the lesson we've taken away.

At least, I speak for myself.

- I think there are a number of things that the Revolution and the opportunity to celebrate and commemorate and remember the Revolution 250 years later shows us, first, the nation was born from violence.

It's part of our birthright.

There tends to be, I think, a public image of the American Revolution of being in soft sepia tones.

It's not that way.

It's very bloody.

It's very internecine.

It's the first civil war.

Also, I think, you know, whatever difficulties beset us in 2025, 2026, we've been through much worse before.

It should be a source of some comfort, I think, to know that we have survived these existential threats in the American Revolution, in the Civil War, in two world wars of the last century, in the Great Depression.

We are quite resilient and resourceful as a people, and it starts with a revolution where they are persistent for eight years against the greatest Navy the world has ever seen, and the first British empire, which is a really ferocious thing to be fighting.

So I think that, you know, we can look back with pride, we can look back with a sense of assurance that we have this extraordinary grounding, and we can also remember that we're the beneficiaries of this extraordinary political gift that's been given to us by that founding generation.

- What do you hope your viewers and readers will walk away with after seeing the film or reading your books?

- The United States was not invented by marble statue people.

It came out of blood, and it was fought by absolutely ordinary people, just like us.

And if you think they're marble statues, then we can't do anything, because we know we're flawed.

And to me, they were flawed too, and look what they did, and I hope that's what comes through.

- Yeah, the complexity of the origin story makes it, in my estimation, much more interesting than the notion that this nation was born perfect, and then began on a progress of improvement.

You know, George Washington, who is the indispensable man, proverbially and in truth, had 577 slaves during his lifetime at Mount Vernon.

You cannot square that circle morally.

You have to accommodate it within the larger story of the Republic of Washington, of the Revolution.

It makes the national narrative, I think, more human, it makes it more complicated, and it makes it just bottomless in its complexity.

- I'm surprised at how patriotic I feel at the end of the series, how inspired I am to try to make good on this history.

I think the American Revolution, as Rick was saying at the opening of this, is such an unlikely story.

It's such an underdog story.

As Jeff was just saying, they didn't know how it was gonna turn out.

It's very unlikely that it turned out the way that it did, and we're standing on the shoulders of 250 years of really interesting history, really complicated history, really interesting people, and we have a responsibility to do good by them.

- I don't know if it's wisdom.

I agree with what everybody said.

I think, you know, we have this responsibility to get it right.

We work really hard to do it, and in some ways, it's a little bit sort of specious to sort of expect people to have a reaction because everybody is different, and everybody will have a different reaction, and if you tell a good story, you ought to be able to provide everybody, wherever they come from, whatever their political persuasion, wherever they are in the country or the world, some access to this story.

And I think in the case of our film, written by Jeff, and ably complimented by not only Rick's advice, but his on-camera presence from the beginning, literally to the end, literally of the film, makes it a situation where you sort of present it and then people have an opportunity to make of it what they will.

But I do think the underlying thing, as Sarah's speaking to patriotism, is that we are supposed to be in incredibly divided times now, and as Rick said, you know, they're not as divided as the Revolution, and that maybe going back to the origin story helps rekindle in each person, regardless of where they come from, their background or their politics, the ability to find and take renewed inspiration from this remarkable, improbable, flabbergastingly amazing story.

- Okay, I have a couple of fun questions for you.

First, given the focus of "PBS Books," we always like to ask, did you have a favorite library, either now or as a child, or was there a memory of opening up a book and it sparking your interest and love of learning and history?

- Oh, I'll start here.

I love the Library of Congress.

I've spent so much time there, weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks, rephotographing, refilming, the still photographs of the Matthew Brady collection for the Civil War.

I've gone in there and seen fantastic stuff that'll never go into a film, but just lucky enough to have curators bringing stuff out that, you know, are from, you know, 1000 ago and beautiful in color, celestial cosmological maps and fanciful stuff to be able to hold at the American Philosophical Society, the original journals of Lewis and Clark, to see the handwritten in a handwriting not too different than my own, Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration with all the cross-outs and things like that.

This is where the nerds of libraries, and as a kid, you know, everybody else was reading novels and spy stories, and I was reading the encyclopedias, and sort of reveling in the story of us.

- When I spent my high school years in India where my father was stationed, and during the course of that time, I read the, I think, the entire American history room of the USIS, which used to have a big library in downtown Delhi.

It's the great background for everything I've ever done since, and I have nothing but gratitude for its existence.

- We call it a delicatessen.

(group chuckles) - Well, like Jeff, I had a peripatetic childhood.

My father was an army officer, and so there was a sequence of Army libraries, a sequence of Army posts, Presidio of San Francisco, Fort Shafter in Hawaii, the library at George S. Patton Jr.

Junior High School in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and when you don't have a hometown, which Army brats don't, a library, in some ways, becomes a kind of anchor, an important anchor, where you can feel at home in that library.

And like Ken, you know, the great libraries of today, like the Library of Congress, I spent a lot of time in the library, the Society of the Cincinnati, in Washington D.C.

near where I live, and it's fantastic and it's a pleasure and a privilege to be in a place like that.

- In the house I grew up in, there was nothing more important than the room where my father worked, which is an extensive library.

My father speaks many languages and collects rare books.

So we were told a few things as children.

We could always go to the bookstore and my father would always buy us a book.

That was not true about anything else, and that as I got older, I knew my great-grandparents who had come here in 1949 after the second World War, and my great-grandfather was a great book reader, and when the Nazis came to power, he buried his library, and after the war, went back and got it.

So books have been an enormously central part of my life, of my family's life.

And my children, who are eight and 15, know that on the weekends, if they wanna get me, they can get me to go to the bookstore and buy them any book they want, and that tradition continues.

- Ken, Sarah, Jeffrey, and Rick, thank you so much for sharing your time and your insights, and for giving us this remarkable window to "The American Revolution."

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Remember, "The American Revolution" is streaming now on the PBS app and will re-air on PBS, starting on January 9th, and again, in the months to come.

Don't miss the chance to experience this powerful series for yourself.

Sign up for our newsletter at pbsbooks.org/subscribe, and visit our website to discover more about this American Revolution Filmmaker Talk.

Check out our recommended reading list, and so much more.

Until next time, I'm Lauren Smith.

Thank you for joining us on "PBS Books."

(buoyant music)