The new Ken Burns documentary on the American Revolution is due to be released on November 16th, 2025. The 12-hour production will be broken up into six 2-hour episodes taking viewers through through the Revolutionary War. Ken Burns is, of course, well known for his earlier works covering things like the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and other topics such as Prohibition, baseball, and jazz. Sarah Botstein has worked on at least seven previous Ken Burns documentaries, including the ones on Vietnam, Prohibition, and Jazz. The two, along with co-producer David Schmidt, teamed up to produce this upcoming documentary covering the American Revolution. I had the opportunity to sit down with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein earlier this month to discuss the American Revolution with them. What follows is a transcript of our discussion on Zoom.
MT: Sarah, Ken, welcome to the American Revolution Podcast.
KB: Thank you.
SB: Thank you.
MT: So, both of you have produced a great many historical documentaries which we're all have enjoyed over the years. What drew you to the American Revolution as a subject?
MT: Yeah. In addition to the birth of our country, I think the American Revolution changed the world in a lot of ways. And in fact, you say in your documentary, you know, turns the world upside down. What did you mean when you said that or when it was said in your documentary?
SB: Ken usually has a great way to answer this question. I think before the American Revolution governments and societies were structured quite differently and so subjects became citizens and the world did actually turn upside down. It's a great line both in the play and in the world and I think really apt here. There are parts of our democracy and parts of the way that the history over the 250 years has unfolded that are wonderful unintended consequences of parts of the revolution. But the revolution did remake, in a local and then global context, how governments could be run and function and how people at the margins because we did a conversation last week with the wonderful scholar and thinker Yuval Levin and he said you know the America the Declaration of Independence uses the word all. So once you have the word all regardless of what's happening in that moment you're saying all And then Maggie Blackhawk, who I think is, you know, Ken and I talk about this a lot, is sort of at the heart of the show at the end of the second episode in the Declaration of Independence, says the Declaration was deeply significant to people at the margins who could see and feel that document and push the levers of power. And so over the 250 years, it might have taken us a long time for me to be able to go and vote, for example, but we got there. And that's an inspiring story of what is possible and I think really worth celebrating and it did in fact turn the world upside down.
MT: Yeah, I think that's right. I think a lot of people take for granted today that governments are democratic and even authoritarian governments at least pretend to be democratic. They at least have show elections and things like that. That wasn't even a thing before the American Revolution. Everything everybody had monarchies and that was that was about it. So the American Revolution kind of got the ball rolling on that and of course our country improved over time and other countries around the world were inspired by what we were doing. So, yeah. You touched on the issue of it being very hard to portray the American Revolution because there are no photographs. there's no obviously no video footage. Were there ways you felt maybe constrained in being able to show the brutality of this war and and some of the difficulties? I know paintings are a big part of of of what you do in the documentary, but of course that doesn't really capture the brutality of war. Was that a real struggle for you guys?
KB: I think it's always a struggle whether you've got tons of stuff that proves it. You know, there is such a thing as kind of "war pornography" where people glory in the gore and and it misses the point of what you want to do as you're narrating a complex story. I think the important thing is to first understand that our American Revolution is some not some bloodless gallant mythological story of people on Mount Olympus, i.e. Philadelphia, thinking great thoughts. but in fact a bloody civil war in some ways more bloody for civilians than our Civil War was which was more of a sectional war. We have the proof in the photographs of that. And so our our challenge was to not just animate the paintings but to animate maps and to animate documents to treat the main star of the film which is the extraordinary beauty and majesty and and size of the continent or at least the eastern seaboard of the continent, where the most of the battles take place - to give it a a kind of primacy as a character to take the opacity off the familiar bold-faced top-down names that we all know but don't know, the George Washingtons and the Thomas Jeffersons et al and then to introduce you to dozens and dozens of so-called ordinary people that didn't have their their portraits painted. So, there's there's a lot to do there. And then we've spent years and years and years filming reenactors is not to have them reenact a battle for us, but to give us the stuff, the the critical mass of imagery, mostly impressionistic. You don't see faces, shadows, dawn, dusk, washing blood, women washing blood off a clothes in a stream in a in a river, guns firing, just giving a sense of what it was like so you could remove the onus of not having those pictures. And we we spent nearly a decade trying to do that and and feel really excited. We spent most of the last year out on the road sharing this with audiences of all stripes in every part of the country and the response has been phenomenal. So I think that in some ways we were able to escape the limitations of the absence of of photographs and news reels and make this a real complicated visceral struggle that engages human lives that everybody can identify with. And so part of the scores of individuals we introduce you to are teenagers and and young girls and French and German civilians as well as soldiers and English civilians and soldiers and kings and ministers and the whole variety including loyalists and native people and freed and enslaved black people that are central to the story of this and and just it's impossible if you're going to tell a good story to sort of think that you can leave out any you know one port of of the complexity of it.
MT: You were kind enough to share a preview of the documentary with me and I did get a definitely a sense of that. I especially like the idea of using people who don't we don't aren't remembered by history as you said, people like Joseph Plum Martin or Betsy Ambler, or John Greenwood. They offer a very different perspective obviously than the the so-called great men of the war. Bringing in the loyalists as well I think was very interesting to get their perspective. One of the things I think Britain really counted on when the war got started was that they believed that a great many of the Americans were going to be loyalists and rally around the king and that did happen but not in the numbers that they ever counted on. How do you think that really impacted the course of the war? The fact that they never got the loyalists to join on and what was there a reason why they were unable to encourage loyalists to...
KB: I think there were they got lots of loyalists: thousands, tens of thousands of loyalists to help them. If you take two gigantic battles, the battle of Long Island, the battle of Brandywine, both of which suffer from the patriot point of view from really bad generaling on the part of Washington. He makes tactical errors in both places. In the first case, leaving his left flank and in Brandywine, his right flank exposed. But the British take advantage of that because loyalists take them through there. There are battles in which there's only Americans fighting with the except of a British officer leading the loyalist. The one of the loyalists that we follow in the film is sort of driven because of his loyalist sympathies from his his home and town in what is now Vermont and ends up in Canada and forms a loyalist regiment of which there's legions of them all around and plays a significant role in the battle of Bennington which is a loss for the British. There's lots of, I think, what the main impediment for the British is is I would say the size of the continent, the unpredictability of the weather, the distance from the home office, and the power of the ideas and the sense that you're here imposing your will on us. And those are really, really powerful things. All of those, you know, make it I mean, we have a British soldier. So, in some ways, it's funny. He says, you know, that you The word America takes up no more space on a map than Yorkshire, right? America is much bigger than that.
SB: You also have a soldier saying, "Have you forgot us? Where are you? Here we are." Right? I'm going to steal from Rick Atkinson. And you know, he says, "War never follows the script that you think it might follow." And that's true for both us and for them. And so, nobody knows how it's going to turn out. And they did not understand, as Ken was just saying, the landscape, the weather, and the cause. And those three things with them very far away. You know, it's an unlikely underdog story.
MT: Absolutely. And the geography thing is certainly a major factor, as you say, taking months to get messages or men across the ocean and then back again and the great distances. But the British - both of you have said us and them. I don't think the British saw it as us and them. these were British subjects over here. and we're all us. And they I don't think understood the change of mind, the the the understanding that people had here that they were feeling to themselves to be more Americans. Yes, they were British subjects under the titular authority of the king, but they didn't think of themselves really as British. They were they were beginning to think of themselves as something different even before the war began.
KB: Yeah. Very much so. You know that when the colonists in Boston dumped tea in the harbor, there crudely as Native Americans. This is not to deflect the blame. It's to say we're, as the scholar Phil Deloria says in her film, we're Aboriginal. We're no longer separated. And I think this is a two-way street. The Americans are forever thinking they can't possibly be doing this to us, our parents, our brothers. The British are saying the same thing. They're also very, very brutal, and the way they want to handle this is with extraordinary brutality, and so are the patriots. I think we have to take off the sentimental nostalgic blinders that the revolution always has. And when Benjamin Franklin's son, William, who was the deposed Royal Governor of New Jersey, is imprisoned and then released, expected to go back to England, he starts a terrorist organization killing patriots, just as there were many patriot organizations killing loyalists. And so, you have to get down to that nitty-gritty. It's really bad in New Jersey and South Carolina and the the raids and the um ambush is and the deaths of British and Hessian soldiers coming from brutal American tactics often in in response to the brutality of an occupying army. So it's not that the British are sort of reluctantly prosecuting this war against their own. There's a few instances when how kind of holds up. It could have just wrapped them up at Long Island and doesn't could have done the same thing at White Plains and doesn't. And and you do have a sense that it is your own countrymen. But let's Also remember what the British did to Scotland, what the British did to Ireland. These are a people not afraid to just be butchers of their own people in the most ghastly way. And history tells us this. It's such a complicated story. And what we wanted to communicate is that it doesn't fit nicely even into our more complex ideas about reluctance to fight and and whatever. There are fire eating patriots early on and there are lots of loyalists going, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa." You know, don't do this. And in Britain, there are people saying, "Let's not be so hard on them. They we understand where they're coming from." And others who are, you know, almost the parody of the Hamilton thing of of King George III, you know, we're going to send you know, kill your friends and family to remind you of our love. That's and that's basically what they said. And so, it's a very, very bloody civil war. And it's important then that we character it not just by giving dimension to the familiar people but as you say John Greenwood the name that you mentioned is 14 years old when he joins the patriot clause. Joseph Martin is 15. Betsy Ambler is 10. She comes from well to-do family but she'll be a refugee for most of the revolution she's from Yorktown and it's close to the to the Chesapeake and it means that they're subject to British raids and so she finds herself and her family for most of what is a very long revolution on the road trying to escape the British or trying to get to some place that feels safe that their mother has had a nervous breakdown, is having children. They're trying to figure out how to grow up in the middle of a revolution. And that's an incredibly important perspective to understand.
MT: Yeah, I think that's true. A lot of people were just really hoping to avoid the violence that was going on. And as you say, there were going a lot of more civilian deaths in the American Revolution than in other wars. Poor Betsy and reminds me a bit of um Wilmer McClean of the Civil War. They tried to escape the war by moving to Yorktown. Like Wilmer McClean moved to Appomattox Courthouse.
KB: They No, they were from Yorktown and they had to leave Yorktown.
MT: Oh, I thought they were living up north.
KB: Came back to it briefly and then the exigencies of the war and not not the sort of final great set piece, but earlier raids that Benedict Arnold with a loyalist group called the American Legion, you can't make this up. Um is is waging war on the Virginia countryside. And so because of her own father's involvement in the government, he they're they're in Williamsburg. They've moved farther into the west. They've come back, but then the capital moves away from there because the British are threatening. So they're they're on the move and they're nowhere near Yorktown when the climactic battle happens. So it's not a it doesn't have a Wilmer McClain stuff, but it does ... I mean we put her in because she's from the place where this whole thing is going to get at least in a military sense resolved. And let's remember it's 6 and 1/2 years after Lexington. And at Lexington, the chances of success are zero. And I think we forget about that. We just presume that George Washington knows he's George Washington. He has no idea that he's George Washington, that there's going to be a the District of Columbia is going to be named after him. There's going to be a tall obelisk in his honor, that he's going to be on the dollar bill in the quarter that there's going to be a state named after him that every practically every other state has a county called that or a town called that that is a consequence of the revolution these were guys that had just said that we pledge our lives our fortunes and our sacred honor and though that can tell us and they didn't know how it was going to turn out even when the French come in and Burgoyne and his loyalist and native and German allies fail at Saratoga and the French say yep we'll come in help you. And then Spain and the Netherlands, making this the fourth global war over the prize of North America. Nobody still knew how it would turn out. And when the British recaptured Savannah and Charleston, it looks really, really, really bleak. And no amount of French help seems to be helping. In the first couple instances, it doesn't help. And then something happens and it's a really, really good story. And you have to do good history is sort of paying attention because if you're telling a story right, meaning you're in the moment, it might not turn out the way you know it did and that keeps people we hope at the edge of their seats.
I see Shelby Foote on your on your on your bookcase. He told me God called me up and he said God is the greatest dramatist you know I mean here's a man who who works you know 20 hours a day for years to keep the war the president and he hears about the surrender and finally feels a few days later he's got enough time to go to the theater can't make that up
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MT: There are aspects even of the American Revolution which if you were reading a book of fiction would think was just silly like the fact that the British at after the Battle of Brooklyn were held back by a strange fog and wind that kept them from trapping the Americans and
KB: and Howe's reluctance to drive the knife in right for whatever reason. You know, Israel Putnam says he's you know a friend or no general at all. I meaning is he traitorous and and it's not - it's just a couple months later or less at what planes he does the same thing. He's got him totally wrapped up and doesn't pursue it.
MT: Yeah, I think the Americans were very lucky to have General Howe in command for the first year or two of the war. In addition to the the traditional civil war aspect of the war, we see a lot of African-Americans, both free and enslaved, and Native Americans taking up positions on either side, mostly with the British, but on both sides. I guess the Native Americans were were certainly interested in who was going to be less threatening to taking their land. The enslaved people I've always had trouble with because neither side really guaranteed them freedom. I'm not sure what - why they understood they were fighting for would improve their lives in any appreciable way.
SB: Well, I think it's hard to really answer why individual people make individual decisions. But I think what we tried to do in the film was show how both the British and the patriots were trying to get those communities on their side and promising all kinds of different versions of a better life. You can, I think, understand why they would side with whichever cause in that moment was promising them some better version of the lives that they had. And that is really really important part of the story that I think few people know for both the enslaved and free black populations and the Native American populations. It's a really important part of the American Revolution. So I hope that in telling those stories both how a community like the Haudenosaunee was split into and itself in a civil war to the incredible Stockbridge Indians who fought with us to the unbelievably complicated and devastating story what happens to the Cherokees, but what Lord Dunmore does, what happens in South Carolina. I mean, Ken, I'm going to toss the ball to you to just talk about James Forten for a second because it's there are different ways to get at how the governments or our beginning governments are trying to entice those populations onto their sides. And then you have heroes like James Forten.
KB: So, this is a story about big ideas, as we've been saying. And the biggest idea is liberty and freedom. And that is going to strike enslaved people more than it's going to probably inspire anybody else. And you're trying to make decisions about what's best for you and your family. So in Virginia, where Lord Dunmore cynically, an owner of of enslaved people, suggests that the British army will free those enslaved people who belong to rebels, not those enslaved people who belong to loyalists, and that many do flock to him. Complete disaster. Disease overtakes them. they're defeated in in various places. But it does suggest that the British might in the short run, even though their entire world economy depends on slavery. And there are 13 colonies which we think are the only colonies they have, ever. There are 13 colonies in the Caribbean that are completely dependent on slave labor. It's where they make their profits and that's what they're very anxious not to lose. Only Virginia and South Carolina are profitable in terms of relative speaking for the obvious reason is they have huge enslaved populations.
If you're going to in say Virginia as Dunmore does offshore deposed in a ship suggests that people going to flock flock to him whether they're you're their masters or rebels are loyalists and as one commentator in film says "how are you going to know?" you know if the if these people are coming to you and then you have people like James Forten who is born free who is 9 years old who he who is present in Philadelphia when the first public reading of the declaration happens and he not for a second he thinks all those self-evident truths are true for him as well and he spends an entire life fighting for the revolution not accepting a pension becoming well to-do funding the abolitionist movement. His granddaughter ends up during the Civil War going down to the sea islands to help the not emancipated yet but freed Africans sort of begin to make a a thing so so Forten, James Forten and his his granddaughter Charlotte are significant in American history.
And then I think the real thing is the native populations. The British had earned the respect of many native people by defeating the French. The native people are not living in some idyllic thing. Each nation is separate and distinct the way France is different from Belgium. They've got their own foreign policy. They've been on the world stage as traders and diplomats for, you know, 150 years. They know these people and they're trying to make good decisions. And what they're most fearful of are what they call in some instances the hated Bostononians. The people who the British have been keeping in check their colonists from flowing over the Appalachians in great numbers and just taking over Indian land. Not just on an individual basis but amidst the speculators like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. This is a very complex dynamics about real estate from people who have a land but don't have titles and sense of property in the same way English-speaking people do or Europeans do.
And so Native Americans are going to make, as Sarah's suggesting, choices that are intensely local. And also, you know, we came across a woman named Rebecca Tanner. she's a Mohegan woman. We presume therefore she is from Connecticut. She lost five sons fighting for the patriot cause. I know of no other patriot mother who lost that many. So it gives you a kind of extraordinary sense of both the large geopolitical sense of the war and your kinds of chess pieces that that nations have always done and played with lives in such an uncaring way. And then the the utter immediacy of a choice. I'm going with the British because I think we can be free. And it "we" means me, my family, my children, my children's children's, my children's children's children. And that as Annette Gordon-Reed, the historian says in our film, this is us. powerful motivator.
And if you're serving people and they're talking about freedom and slavery and and all this sort of stuff, you care about it as much about as what Jane Kamensky, the scholar, says in her film, The Liberty Talk, you care about it as much, if not more than anybody else. So you what you're obligated to do in good storytelling is give agency to all actors.
SB: And I think also, we've talked a lot about this, that you want to give the audience some context, as Ken was just saying, some understanding of why people did and didn't do certain things and some empathy. I think that's really important.
KB: Yeah.
SB: From every ... for every story we're telling and for every perspective.
KB: That's right. Even a loyalist. You get it. They're not the enemy. To be a loyalist is to be a conservative. The British constitutional monarchy is the best form of government on earth. They're right. Why would we throw it all away? My prosperity, my literacy, my my health, my land, all of this has come from that. Why would I invest in this idea that's completely unproven? It's completely understandable. So, if you just call balls and strikes and don't make the other wrong, you just say this is who they are. You can still root for the patriots to win, as we do, you know, as you can say the way the way we use the word "we" and "them."
It's it's still you're not going to make Sarah Fisher a Quaker and her husband from Philadelphia, wrong. They just are. They just happen to be who they happen to be. And you're not going to make a an enslaved American who rushes to Lord Dunmore thinking this is the free ticket. And in some cases, it is. There are enslaved people who end up being freed by the British. And the British insist over Washington's objectives that they leave with all the refugees leaving Charleston and Savannah and particularly New York for Nova Scotia and places in Caribbean after the war and black people do leave as a result of some of those deals. So they were more or less right in making that deal and everybody's got their own calculus and and I think you have to just respect I mean if we're going to love these ideas then you have to respect the agency that these ideas give to individuals to act in what they think is their own best interest whether you're Native American Shawnee or a Delaware that are as distinct from one another and yet ally or as Sarah was saying, the Haudenosaunee, the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy or the Cherokee in the south or other tribes in the Midwest that are involved intimately in this struggle in this global war and and are as important players as the European powers then everybody's get you got to extend to everyone what Thomas Jefferson was saying and what Yuval Levin was reminding us all you know and that "all" is he really just change rocked our boat, right? Because that's that's where the door got opened and you cannot close it when you say all.
MT: Yeah. Something that I guess really struck me when I first started reading about the American Revolution was how uncontroversial slavery was before in the pre-war era. There was a sense, I guess, in life that most people were born into the station that they would live. If you were born a slave, you were born a slave. If you're born an aristocrat, you were born an aristocrat. Whatever.
And the American Revolution changed that idea during the revolution change that? It actually started out, it seemed like in the early colonial protests, we're we're asserting our rights as Englishmen. In other words, we have certain privileges because of who we are and our status in society. And over a course of several years, it changed to all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights. That was kind of an idea that blossomed during the war. And yeah, of course, slaves had every incentive to be interested in that new idea. One of the things that struck me though too was there seems to be a tendency to be an effective authoritarian or a king or whatever you want to call them. You have to divide your subjects against one another so that you can come in and be the leader and peacemaker. And it seems like that's . . . the British tried to play that to some extent. They didn't have as much luck as they would have liked getting the colonists to be loyalists. But they did try to encourage black and native Americans to join the fight. against these colonists who they said quite correctly or probably want to take your land and keep you enslaved. Yeah, it was an interesting change that took place over that period of time.
KB: The idea, you know, gets out, right? And so, you're absolutely right. Bernard Bailyn, the late historian, is in our film and makes a really good point about this that before the the Revolution, people spoke about the evils of slavery, but it was generally not that discussed. But the second you start talking about liberty and freedom, the second you start as a rich planter start equating what the British are doing to you as a form of slavery, then the hypocrisy is there and the opening of the door is there. And if somebody like a Jefferson, an owner of hundreds of human beings, gives voice to these enlightenment principles where they're no longer just disagreements between Englishmen, but big, large, big ideas, the biggest ideas there are, stuff, then you have the unintended consequences. The democracy is not the object of the revolution, it's a consequence of it. And a lot of it comes from all of these free electrons happening and all of this stuff as as Sarah was saying, Rick Atkinson saying, everybody has said, anybody who studied war, that the second the first shots are fired, all the plans go out the window. And so what happens is you have a series of unintended consequences. One of which really important one is that the people who do the fighting and dying and winning the revolution are actually not the people meeting in Philadelphia. They are there, of course, the Washingtons and the Hamiltons, but it's so-called ordinary people, teenagers, you know, near well, second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance, Native Americans, freed blacks, and they win the war. Recent immigrants that, you know, and they win the war, and they've got to be given something. So, what they get is the foot in the door, and what we get, not intended at the beginning, is a democracy.
MT: Yeah. And it it began a process, as you say, that took generations to...
KB: that's right
MT: improve on but I think you really see the beginning of the abolitionist movement coming out of the ideals of revolution
SB: 100%
MT: certainly as you said, James Forten personifies that right
SB: Absolutely and and and as Ken was just saying Bernard Bailyn makes the point beautifully and there's a often said that you know our American Revolution was a civil war and our Civil War was our revolution and that is part of that story too
KB: there's a commentator 19th century commentator named John Chapman. He said, "There was never a moment in our history when slavery was not a sleeping serpent. It lay coiled under the table during the deliberations of the constitutional convention. Thereafter, slavery was on everyone's mind, if not always on his tongue, out of the bag." Right? Because once we've adopted the principles of the revolution, slavery is an obvious contradiction to all of that. It's not only it's over. It may take four score in nine years. It's over.
SB: Same with the ladies.
KB: Same with the ladies. And we have not brought that up. And that's just shameful. A majority of the population are women. They are hugely responsible to the success of the pre-revolutionary resistance movement, doing the sacrifices, running the the farms, being present at all of the battles with children, tending to the wounded, burying the dead, articulating with extraordinary force. Abigail Adams may be the best writer of them all as is Mercy Otis Warren, the first historian of the revolution and a a philosopher and a satirist and a poet. And it helps if you're a filmmaker if Meryl Streep reads her her her quotes in our film, but it's you know there it's a central story and always neglected. We see this wars as masculine exercises. So . . .
SB: women are always at the heart of a story of war. No question about it. You really see that here.
MT: Yeah. And I guess we tend to get that because we didn't see a lot of immediate changes for women that took even longer than freeing the slaves,
SB: right? And there aren't actually even archivally - Ken mentioned earlier, you know, the beautiful footage that we filmed of the women at the edge of the water in the sun doing laundry and, you know, washing clothes that had been stained and bandages that had been stained. And one of the reasons we ended up imagining a shoot like that is because there's virtually no paintings of that or renderings of so much of what women did. And we ended up shooting beautiful live cinematography with extraordinary women who spend their time at these reenactments and as part of that kind of living history and they're obviously central to all the living history museums that we were able to film at.
MT: Yeah. I've always been struck by the story of Jemima Warner, which I'm pretty sure did not, was not included in your in your documentary and mostly because there's not solid evidence and proof of of exactly what she did. But she was just an amazing woman. to be a 17-year-old girl who participated in Arnold's march across the wilderness of Maine, when half the army turned back because it was too difficult to make the walk and her active role in assisting the men on the front line at the siege of Quebec and and being shot in the head and killed by the British while doing that. You know, she's just this amazing heroic figure who shows bravery in battle and everything you could want and no one's ever heard of her,
SB: right? But also as as Tim O'Brien told us so beautifully when we started our Vietnam series. Anytime you talk about war, you need to think about every mother who lost a son, every wife who lost a husband, every sister who lost a brother. There are human consequences to those numbers and human beings behind those stories. So you need to show that.
KB: And for every person you can't absolutely positively prove you know that what they did there's a Margaret Corbin at Fort Washington and her her bravery is documented. that her husband is killed and she keeps fighting. It's an amazing amazing thing and she's become so effective that she becomes the center of all the Hessian attention. her her position is where they focus their guns and she's wounded in a couple of places and it's true.
MT: It is an incredible story. I have to admit I've made over 400 episodes on the American Revolution podcast so I'm clearly not good at this. But how did you find your ability to distill this topic into just six episodes there? had to have been interesting topics that you had to leave on the cutting room floor. Were there any difficult debates over what to put in and what to keep out?
KB: Always. That's our process. It's really wonderful. But you're telling a story and it's a coherent story. You're telling it to people who may be ignorant, but you want to draw them into a story because of the absence of photographs and news reels, you can't make it 18 hours the way our Vietnam was or even 15 hours the way our our World War II film called "The War" was so the twelve seemed to be sort of the limit of of being able to bend materials, but we always it's always a process of distillation, right? We we start out with 40 or 50 times the amount of information. We've heard all these stories and you leave without yelling. There are disagreements. You pull stuff out, you put it back in, you take it out again, you leave it out, you're - it then survives because you've mastered the narrative. You just you want to serve the larger story. and you and you're not an encyclopedia, you're a story. And stories involve editing and the sacrifice or let's reverse it and say it's taking one person and letting them be stand in and be signal for hundreds of other people. So you don't have to list every battle. You don't have to list every general. You don't have to list every woman who ever possibly maybe fought in this battle or you have to do this. You just begin to distill over time a process, just like the American process of a more perfect film.
SB: and you know it's additive and subtractive. Ken and I were talking on Saturday. It's it expands and contracts the whole time and Ken is a master storyteller and at the end of the day the films are as long as they sort of need to be given our process and you finally walk away. And that doesn't mean there aren't things later that are still, we're all still thinking about but that's the film that needed to be made and it's the length that it needed to be. It's a funny thing. They We never know exactly how long the films are going to be when we start. We sort of have an idea and sometimes they're longer and sometimes they're shorter. It's really interesting.
MT: Well, you know, as I said, I did get a preview. I think it did come out very well.
KB: Thank you.
MT: But the process, I guess that it just, you know, working on this thing for over 10 years and three co-directors who you had to have fights over various things over the course of or or at least disagreements over the course of. . .
SB: Here's what I here's what I people ask me this. all the time in terms of you know what that process is like to work with Ken and I think it's so you really you have Ken right and then you have Jeff Ward the masterful writer and just distiller of information before it even kind of comes into us into the editing room and David and me. Nut what we bring every day with our editors and just our extraordinary staff is everyone brings their best argument every single day so it's not a disagreement in terms of like I want ahh! No, it's like this feels really interesting to me and here are the reasons why or if we do this we should remember to think about that and if we think about that what does that mean about that and so it's I mean I don't know Ken it's sort of like it's almost sometimes it can be like a debate where you're where you have to literally bring your most convincing argument to each other and then you're also feeling a story and feeling a movie it's not a. . .
KB: I will sometimes say you know that's great but we can't handle it right now. Remind me in 6 months. Don't Don't forget that quote. Don't forget that stuff. I need I've got more important work to do. You're talking to me about a decoration in the attic and I'm trying to get the foundation right. Soon as I get the foundation right, then I can imagine that the house is going to be built and in the house there'll be an attic and that decoration on the attic will be there and then please tell me about that. But right now, I've got to be focused on this. So, it's not at all arguments ever. It's all. . .
SB: I might, you know, we might be like that wall in the wrong place.
KB: That's right.
SB: We got to move it. And how does that It takes a lot of brains and a lot of thinking and a lot of trying. I do think Christopher Brown was traveling with us in Atlanta and he, you know, he was just reminding us that to him it's not surprising that it takes this long to make a six-part 12-hour film because you need to live with it. You need to think about it. You need to consider it. You need to let the film itself live and breathe to get it right. And you can't do that quickly. You can't write a good memo quickly. You can't write a good book quickly. You can't have a good friendship that's quick. You can love somebody quickly, but time will will tell you a lot more. And that's true in making a big film.
KB: It also gives you a chance to listen to the weak voice inside you that. . .
SB: exactly
KB: has been saying for the last six screenings, this isn't quite right. And you've got you're distracted by more important and more immediate things. And all of a sudden, you just wake wake up one morning and go, I've been listening to this voice. It's so weak, but it's saying that this thing that we've just accepted and whatever. It's why in our editing room, our main editing room, we have a neon sign that says "it's complicated" because you want to be able to listen to all those weak voices inside you and to be able to articulate it. And sometimes you forget it. You let it go and and then at the last moment you go, "Wait a second. I can't let it go. We've already locked it, but we're we got to unlock it and fix it." But it also means you take complexity of a story that doesn't fit into traditional storytelling stuff and you have to, you know, destabilize it because reality doesn't fit nicely into the storytelling laws, you know, that Aristotle laid out, that we all still follow. And so, you have to always surrender to what actually happened. Even if it means making a scene that was working perfectly not work as perfectly as it did before, you have to serve the larger truth of it.
MT: You talk about the American Revolution has a story and it is a very interesting and compelling one. Is there something from the American Revolution that you think we still need to keep in mind today in terms of dealing with modern politics and and how the country is working today? Are there are there lessons from the American Revolution that particularly come to mind?
KB: Yeah, all the time, you know, that we you know we are told every day that we're in a a crisis and so I think going back and understanding the origins of of our beginning help us have a perspective on where we are right now and for everybody regardless of what your political persuasion might be and understanding and helps you maybe reinvest in the original ideals that propelled this country into existence.
SB: I would say I think the American Revolution is a really surprising story. It's extremely inspiring. I think it has the possibility to to really ignite patriotism in all of us in really exciting and fun and new ways at a time when I think we need that.
MT: Yeah, I think that's true. Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence something about people are predisposed to to to put up with. . .
KB: All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. It just means that everybody's been under the boot of an authoritarian and we're not doing that anymore. We're creating something that's going to require extraordinary diligence. and virtue and lifelong learning. That's the pursuit of happiness. And that's a citizen. And that requires just an unbelievable amount of energy to overcome the inertia of being a subject, putting up with it. And that is one of my most favorite phrases in the Declaration because in there is all that we have to do today. We have to go back and learn. We have to remember and we have to understand that tendency of human beings is to just go okay fine you made the train runs on time we're very very happy about that and then everything else is fine and that when you create - this is a very very complicated with a as Christopher Brown the scholar says in our film a wide variety of people when you start making a "them" of the people that are "us" then you violated the the original compact that Americans made when these 13 disunited colonies filled with wide variety of people in each one and figured out how to come together. That's our that's our job right now.
MT: I think that's right. For me it seems like there's it's always an ongoing struggle to be a free citizen. That's something that people are always going to push back against in the government and we have to push back against them to maintain our freedoms and that's an important thing to always remember that it's an ongoing fight I guess. Well, Ken, Sarah, I really appreciate your time. As I said, I'm looking forward to this documentary. becoming available to the public and everybody being able to enjoy it. I know
KB: November 16th.
MT: November 16th.
SB: Yes. Don't miss it.
KB: Broadcast streaming DVDs, if you know what that is, and Blu-rays and all sorts of stuff.
MT: I'm sure everyone's going to love it. Thanks again for your time today. I appreciate it.
Thanks again for joining my discussion with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein, co-producers of The American Revolution.
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The American Revolution documentary will air on PBS beginning on November 16, 2025. You can also watch the podcast on the PBS website: https://www.pbs.org/shows or steaming on the PBS App: https://www.pbs.org/pbs-app
It is also available on Blu Ray or DVD as well as a companion book.
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