Hey, it's Ken Burns with another UNUM conversation.

I'm so thrilled today to be joined by my longtime collaborators and partners, producers and writers, Julie Dunfey and Dayton Duncan.

We've just concluded a film on the history of the American buffalo.

That'll be out in October.

We're very thrilled about it.

But it's more of a bittersweet moment because both Julie and Dayton are retiring.

And, you know, we've been thinking about this film for a long time.

Where we sort of at the beginning thought we'd be telling the story, the positive story.

And it is of the de-extinction of a mammal, the largest land mammal in North America that was brought to the brink of extinction at the end of the 19th century.

And it is that but it's also a much more complicated story.

And we've been thinking about doing this for years and years and years, beginning before we worked on a film about the American West in the nineties and then Lewis & Clark in the late nineties and The National Parks all through the aughts.

And it's been sort of in the back of our mind and I think all of us sort of felt that we needed to grow up, get older, get more experienced, to have better chops, to be able to, deal with the complexities of this subject.

And so I wanted to first ask Dayton Duncan, who is the writer on this new film but has been a producer and writer on many films over the past three plus decades with me, to just talk a little bit about what the themes are in the American buffalo.

And I think you say you're on camera in most of the films that you write, that this touches on all corners of American history seems to us, when you say we're doing a film about the buffalo, it seems almost in a limiting way.

But in fact, this is an expansive story about all of us and all of our history.

what strikes me and why I was so enthusiastic and persistent of trying to have us do this film about the buffalo, which, as you say, we touched on, on four or five of our previous films in little aspects of its history, is that it's not only a majestic animal, our national mammal, the story of the American buffalo is a portal to a lot of our history the history of this continent and then eventually the history of our nation.

And what this one is about, at its heart is an ultimately tragic collision of two different ways of belief systems of how human beings should relate to the natural world.

One that was 10,000 years old or more before Columbus stumbled on to the Americas what we call the Americas.

Now, that is to say, the indigenous view of it that saw themselves as equals not masters of the natural world and the wildlife that was so, so abundant and so much a part of their life, that then newcomers arrived with a different view of that, that saw mankind as superior to everything else in some religious beliefs, almost commanded to control it and that collision that started in 1492 and worked its way across the continent, reached I think a dramatic crescendo and tragic climax with the near extinction of the bison, which was so important, particularly to the Plains Tribe.

It touches on race meaning white people's view of people who aren't like them in this case, Native Americans, and all the complications and tragedies that occurred through that.

And think it's bit of a morality tale as well.

are we capable as a nation and a people to utterly destroy this land and this natural world that we inherited from, our ancestors?

The answer given by what happened to the buffalo is a resounding, You bet we are.

the case of the buffalo and the indigenous people of the destruction is so dramatic and so catastrophic that it's that's to me exhibit A of our ability to, to do the wrong thing as we show in our second episode.

You know, certain people can get together and ultimately change course and ultimately get the federal government itself to change course.

And so that's the that's the hopeful message at the at the end of the story.

But first, you need to be honest and clear about about the destruction that happened.

Okay.

Well, thank you, Dayton.

you know, I feel that the time, Julie, that we spent waiting to do this was time well spent not just for our own maturity, but for us to learn how to see things from different perspectives, just not to acknowledge in a paternalistic way that those other perspectives exist, but to also yield, cede the viewpoint of the film at times to other things.

And you were the lead producer.

Can you talk first about the experiences of being out there and filming in all these majestic places, but also the way we incorporated that other voices and other visions and the kind of help we got from other consulting producers?

I agree with you, 100% that the extra time that we didn't expect to have researching from home, in my case my dining room table I think benefited the film.

It gave me time to have a lot of conversations and to dig a little deeper.

You know, my first consideration was the historical indigenous voices that Dayton was proposing in the script to think about those and who would best represent who could give voice and breath to those voices.

So the wheels started turning about, okay, let's reach out to Native actors.

Then we were figuring out who will our consultants be?

And, you know, there's some obvious choices in terms of academics, but there's also the whole, you know, a lot of native history is passed down in an oral tradition.

So can we seek out some of the descendants of historical characters in our story, Quanah Parker being one.

And in the course of doing that, I wound up talking to a filmmaker, Julianna Brannum, who is Comanche and has made many films on her own and with other people.

And my thought at first was she would be a terrific consultant.

we started thinking, Oh, she needs to be a part of this film.

She needs to be a part of our team on a day to day basis, not just, know, somebody who screens the film every few months and gives us comments.

And she claims that at the same time she was thinking, I need to ask them for a job.

So, so it was this wonderful combination of, you know, all of us realizing that we really needed to have Julianna with us.

And in fact, she became integral to finding and suggesting the native actors who could give voice to the historical voices and also just thinking as we're interviewing, you know, being sensitive to certain issues.

So I would say that, that was a huge benefit of the extra time we were afforded in 2020 and 2021.

Well, you know, our recent trip to Montana to visit the National Buffalo Preserve above Missoula and then to travel across the straight to Lewistown and back to Bozeman and thinking about all the other things, it sort of brought back the memories of our productions, particularly I've had with Dayton beginning in the West.

And then Lewis & Clark and all of the ways in which, you know, what we do together has been an important part of it.

And I think that we as filmmakers have understood that we could spend a lot of time in books and in research.

We could interview the scholars, we could interview the people that are involved.

But there was nothing that compared to getting out into the extraordinary landscape of this country and sort of experiencing its bigness, the intimacies of its moments, the far theatricals of day, as Emily Dickinson calls, sunrises and sunsets, and just being immersed in it.

And for me, this sort of tied up, particularly since both of you are retiring, this sort of sense of what we've done and what we have accomplished, the places that we've traveled, the experiences that we've had, the people that we've met, the education that we've gotten, the great gift of being able, as I think this film has done so remarkably, at least for me personally, of just seeing things from another perspective and having my molecules rearranged by George Horse Capture Jr. one of the Native Americans that we interview in the film who just sort of upends traditional thoughts about ownership or, you know, what we've done in the history of this animal and is really kind of a a conscience of spirit of the film.

And that's been a large part of of many of the films that we've done without preplan planning it, without sort of deciding in advance what people are going to say.

We've been able to receive stuff and help and changed ourselves and changed the direction of our film as we worked on them.

So I wanted to ask Dayton a little bit just about what it is about this wonderful collaborative medium that we're in, the teamwork that we've had over the years.

And also I think there's the centrality of New Hampshire, and in this case of the story, the new New Hampshire buffalo story, what it means to be in Walpole, what it means to be working together, particularly now as as you guys are beginning to contemplate a world in which that's a little bit in your rearview mirror?

all I can say is I'm the luckiest person that I know to have for the last 30 plus years worked with you and the team at Florentine Films on all these projects that were either topics that I was already passionate about or was very curious about.

And that includes, you know, going with you out on the Lewis and Clark trail.

I, you know, watching our films, it's like for me in a sense, watching home movies.

- Right.

I remember each moment.

Introducing you to the state of South Dakota and and North Dakota and Montana and seeing a buffalo herd and filming and filming that in South Dakota and out in Yellowstone on National Parks.

mostly what I think, I think of Walpole and the films we made is home grown tomatoes.

most of of the people who've worked with us on those films started as interns.

A number of them were local kids when they started and had talent and still do.

It's only talent that's now enhanced by experience.

And for me as the writer and in many instances also the producer, the writing part of it is more of a solitary effort.

But that moment when when it comes with you and Julie and the others, to see it the first time, actually to hear it for the first time on a screen is, you know, that's the that for in terms of what's going to happen to the script.

It becomes a collaborative effort.

And, you know, we make decisions as we have to, to meet time.

And it's always that first moment I realize things that look good on the page, which generally don't work on a screen.

And sometimes as we get farther in the, in the editing, things that worked well on page and on screen, just was too much information.

And those are the times where we necessarily have to make really hard decisions and things drop on the editing floor.

And you have always been so kind to me to pat me on the shoulder that happens and and say, "Don't worry, Dayton, it can be in the book."

Dayton: And so.

Ken: DVD Extras.

I get to go back after the, after we finish the film and take those early scripts that had way too much information, was way too long and build on that, to a book that has that extra information.

So for me, it's a double barreled joy to, to be writing something both a script and then a book.

But it's but particularly to see something that I put on a piece of paper come to life on the screen with the great cinematography that we've been able to amass, that the other photographs and the artwork and, and the music.

And when those things are all working together, it takes whatever it was that I thought it was on a piece of paper, and it transcends that to great heights.

I think all of us, all of us here feel that professionally there is nothing better than feeling at the end of the day that you've made a film better.

It's a long, long process.

It takes a lot of sausage making to do it and lots of things given up, lots of things learned.

But there's nothing more thrilling than feeling like you're just advancing something.

And I also think your idea about the home movie is right.

I can remember we weren't shooting.

The film was done, but we were in the winter in Yellowstone and we had left Old Faithful and where we were staying and headed east, and we came around a corner in a Snowcat and there huddled by the Yellowstone River, was a herd of two or three hundred bison.

And they were all dusted like confectioners, sugar with the snow that had fallen during the night.

And it sort of echoed what was already in our film that the Ranger, Shelton Johnson, had said to us about there's moments when you are brought back in time that he felt that he could be back in the Pleistocene era.

And I think there were experiences in working on this film in The Buffalo where you you sort of drop the baggage of today and all of a sudden you have this special privilege of feeling like you're seeing something from a different age, or at least you're inside the skin of somebody else.

I want to talk to both of you now or ask both of you to address a couple of questions.

I'll start with Julie, which is we've talked about The Buffalo.

We've talked about films that have dealt with the expansiveness of the American landscape, but what are the themes that run through all of the work, do you think?

And what do you hope specifically, that people get out of our film, our film, the collaborative film, on The American Buffalo?

I think all our films are explorations of what it means to be an American and what it means to inhabit this continent.

And they all provide different lenses onto that experience.

And when I think about The Buffalo, I think about how we've examined our relationship as Americans to the natural world.

And I think in both of those films there, as Dayton has said many times, and you have said they're morality tales about our relationship to the land.

And I hope people can understand that history.

And it, they then think about, well, you know, how are we doing that today?

What's our check in point?

all of your films address those questions in some way or another.

I think The Buffalo in particular, really it goes back 12,000 years on this continent.

And to me, that makes this film particularly special because we're trying to understand both the indigenous people, their relationship with this animal, which is giving us that lens into American history.

And then what happens when white people, when Europeans come to this continent.

So I really feel like we've gone back, you know, millennia now.

And that makes this film just a little bit special and spicy for me.

Yeah, yeah.

Dayton what's the river that runs through them all?

And what's the, what's the thing you hope, the takeaway from Buffalo.

I think the thing that runs through all the films that you and I have made, dates back to, the friendship that you and I started when I was writing books and you were making your early films.

And we both realized that we are both obsessed with the founding document of our nation, the Declaration of Independence, and the lofty goals, magnificent goals that it set forth, and equally obsessed with telling that story of this uncertain, jerky, and still incomplete journey of our nation, with luck, and hard work and persistence, get a little closer to achieving those goals, finally.

And in that exploration of that journey, there are lots of, lots of tributaries to that main river.

And, and we've explored so many of them.

And I've loved the fact that, you know, a number of so many of our films intersect at specific moments in time.

But you're traveling, you know, you're traveling with different companions, historical companions or themes that arrive at that moment, whether it's the 1930s so the Dust Bowl and the Depression, and how many times have we done that?

But it's always a little bit different, and yet there's still this bedrock And what I've enjoyed the most is our insistence that as we approach each of these topics, we don't begin thinking that we know the story, That we know what exactly it's going to be.

That the process itself, whether we're out filming, whether we're conducting an interview, whether I'm writing, whether, you know, throughout the whole process, it's one of, we want to start with our own blank slate and let the story help teach us what it, what it wants to have said.

Beautifully said.

That's exactly right.

You know, I think when you, when we got to Alaska, you introduced me to my fiftieth state when we were working on National Parks and we were in Denali and we saw the braided rivers.

And I really felt that that was a kind of metaphor for the intertwining of the various themes that we'd worked for and why I sort of initiated this water metaphor at the beginning of this conversation, because I think it's the interbraiding of this.

You know, we made a film together on Mark Twain, and the late novelist Russell Banks said that, you know, Twain alone was dealing with these twin themes of race and space, not outer space, but the physical space of the United States.

And the thing that other Europeans, the authors of the Iliad and The Odyssey hadn't tried to deal with was race.

And these differences between people, the othering of people.

And I've come to understand that, you know, I've been making films for 50 years now on the U.S., but also about us and that intimacy that's clear in your emotional response to the work we've been able to do, the friendship that undergirds that, and Julie as well speaks to this idea.

And I think we've all come away with the sense that our larger mission is not just the U.S. and the us, but also reminding people that there's no them.

The thing that we feel as we work on these films and you're absolutely right, we don't go in with the arrogance that we're going to tell you what we know, but rather share with our audience our process of discovery, is that we are, is that there is this profound kinship that links all of us together, and that if there is a way to tell a story that doesn't exclude history, it doesn't deny history, it expands it.

And the aspirational nature of the Declaration of Independence suggests that we are in pursuit of happiness.

This is nothing that we've achieved and this is part of who we are.

And so we get better.

That's the nature of this process.

And so it's been just spectacularly wonderful.

And I think with regard to The Buffalo, I think I would yield to say that I want an audience to have a particular response or a particular takeaway.

But I'd say think of our two parts of the film as Act one and two, and that there's, there's always a third act.

as Jefferson is asking us to consider, what's the next act, right?

All experience has shown, he said, That mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.

That means this new idea of a democracy just doesn't happen by itself.

The whole history of humanity is being under the boot of somebody that's telling you what to do.

So it's going to require extra energy to do this.

And so we're hoping that this film suggests that there's a third act that requires everyone's participation in how you might deal not just with the historical, not just with the biological and zoological nature of this, not just the ethnicity, but what it means to combine all those things and think about it in a larger ecological terms.

Could we actually create a space in the Great Plains that used to be the American Serengeti with a multitude of flora and fauna, and to figure out, can we recreate that, in a place that permits the kind of monocultures to disappear and us to invite back, as George Horse Capture Jr. and many of the Native Americans would say, in the film, our relatives, Gerard Baker, our brothers, our sisters in this grand epic human story, that for us happens to take place on this continent, for the United States, happens to engage all of these complicated dynamics.

you said, I hope that this film helps set the table for this, that third act.

There's very exciting things going on that are so important both to the ecologically but even more important to the Indigenous people.

The return of buffalo to their reservations, reuniting them after an absence of more than a hundred years when the buffalo were nearly exterminated.

And I hope that our film, as this is going on, deepens viewers understanding of why that is so important and why that is so exciting.

you know, all of our films, we're lucky and to see impact from the films we've made is one of the things I'm so grateful about that, people deciding let's, watch the national parks and say, well, let's load up the station wagon and head out there with our family.

You know, I think our films are detailed, but they're narrative and they're introduct- they're as you say, we're sharing our discovery and hoping that people get as excited about a topic as we became and that, that will lead them to other other writers other books other history, and particularly the places where that history occurred.

And nothing makes me feel better than when somebody says, Oh, I saw your film, and then I went to do this because I wanted to go see it for myself.

Because as good as our films might be, nothing takes the place of going there yourself.

Yeah.

No, it's absolutely true.

You know, on the, Julie we'll give you the last word on The National Parks film.

You know, at the time that we were finishing it, Dayton has the incredible you know, privilege of having to, been at all of the national parks then.

But what's great was when we'd sign the book together, he'd sign it, he'd address it to whoever wanted to do this as a companion book, that we made with the project.

And then he'd say, Visit them all.

You know?

And it was sort of like, That's the command.

And I sort of think that maybe the answer to all of these things is just a kind of in whatever way you interpret it, whether it's a physical going out or it's an intellectual pursuit or an emotional one, you know, just visit them all.

So, you know, and I've been you've been listening to us rant and and carry on.

What's your final thoughts?

Well, a couple that I always love.

When we first start sharing the film before it's shared widely, when we get to the end and the audience or whoever it is says, I learned so much.

I learned so much.

And in the case of The Buffalo, we've heard that a few times.

But then we've also heard.

But why didn't you keep going?

Why didn't you?

You know, what's happening today?

And of course, you know, we say this is two parts of a three act play.

But I did want to circle back to something earlier, talking about being out in these landscapes.

One of the reasons I love filmmaking is the different phases of production.

You know, whether you're you're sitting and researching and writing, raising money for several months and then boom, you're out with the camera crew and doing, you know, you're on the road, you're probably not eating all that well, but you're- and in the case of The Buffalo, that had a little extra, you know, when we were set loose in May / June of 2021, we were a year behind in production.

And so we had an aggressive schedule where we did 18 months of production in 6 months.

And I have to say, being out with the camera crew for three weeks in Montana was just glorious, I mean, not only to be in that landscape, but to be with, you know, longtime collaborators, cinematographer Buddy Squires, and you know, just the anticipation of what that was going to be like and understanding whether it was in an interview or you cap- we captured something really beautiful in Yellowstone or in the The Bison Range saying, I know, I know, we're going to use that.

And then you get through that phase and you're sitting with your colleagues in the editing room for whatever length of time.

In the case of The Buffalo, it was about a year.

And so it's the different phases that I've always loved so much.

And ultimately it's the collaboration that happens within each of those phases, whether it's talking with Dayton about the script and Just being with the camera crew and trusting their instincts about what we need to get or what we're able to get.

And then all of us being together in the editing room.

And that's been just a great joy of, you know these many, many films that we've made together.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

It's that moment when, you know, I know this shot, maybe even archive or this live shot is going to be in or this interview bite that we're doing.

It's going to be in the film.

I know this is.

Or the kind of incredible difficulty of editing, but but the joy of it.

And then I think even now, where we sort of transited into the evangelical dimension, where we're out on the road sort of talking about the film and hoping to invite people into our tent and sharing our enthusiasm with them to, to first look at it.

As we close, I wanted to thank you both for participating in this.

And it's sort of, very bittersweet because This will be the last road trip we'll be doing, the three of us together.

But I know that it will be impossible for you guys to stay away and we'll be impossible for us not to ask you to come in and, as Dayton suggested, kibitz on all the upcoming things that we have going and offer your advice, but just want, wanted me to say in the final moments here just how grateful it is to be together this time, but how wonderful it's been over the last 35 years to be able to work with you both on a number of different projects and and try to tell really complicated stories and in our complicated country's past.

Thank you all.

Julie: Thank you.

Dayton: Thank you.