Latest / NO FILTER / Joe Rogan Experience _2336 - Ken Burns

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Joe Rogan Experience _2336 - Ken Burns · NO FILTER

0:04
Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience.
0:06
Speaker 2: Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
0:12
Speaker 1: All right, we're up. Mr.
0:13
Speaker 2: Burns, pleasure to meet you.
0:15
Speaker 1: It's my pleasure. Thank you.
0:16
Speaker 2: I'm a huge fan, dude. I've been watching your work
0:19
Speaker 2: for so long, and I've always had so many questions
0:21
Speaker 2: about how a person like you becomes a person like you,
0:25
Speaker 2: how you become the preeminent documentarian. Of our time. I mean,
0:30
Speaker 2: you have so much work out there. It's really extraordinary.
0:33
Speaker 2: And all of it on PBS, right?
0:35
Speaker 1: Right. All of it. All of it.
0:36
Speaker 2: Which is also extraordinary.
0:38
Speaker 1: You know, it's the public broadcasting service. It's the Declaration
0:42
Speaker 1: of Independence applied to communications, just as the national parks,
0:46
Speaker 1: you could say, was the Declaration of Independence applied to
0:49
Speaker 1: the landscape. Like manifestations of really American things. It may
0:53
Speaker 1: not seem obvious to us, but it seemed obvious to
0:56
Speaker 1: me that that's where I should go. So I had
0:58
Speaker 1: lots of I headed for the hills out of New
1:01
Speaker 1: York 46 years ago because I thought I was taking
1:04
Speaker 1: a vow of anonymity and poverty to do this stuff.
1:07
Speaker 1: And I've lived in the same house that I've lived
1:09
Speaker 1: in since then, in the same bedroom for 46 years
1:12
Speaker 1: in this tiny little village in New Hampshire. And when
1:15
Speaker 1: the first film was nominated for an Academy Award, that
1:17
Speaker 1: was a film called Brooklyn Bridge, everybody said, oh, you're
1:21
Speaker 1: coming back to New York, you're going to L.A.? And
1:22
Speaker 1: I said, you know, I'm staying here. It's so labor-intensive.
1:26
Speaker 1: And I can sit here in front of you and
1:28
Speaker 1: tell you that every single one of my films is
1:31
Speaker 1: a director's cut. I'm not going to sit here and
1:33
Speaker 1: give you an excuse. Well, that one, they wouldn't let
1:36
Speaker 1: me do this or they didn't give me this amount
1:37
Speaker 1: of time. And so I could, with the reputation I have,
1:41
Speaker 1: go into a streaming service or a premium cable and say,
1:45
Speaker 1: I need $ 30 million to do a history of the
1:47
Speaker 1: Vietnam War. And they'd give it to me. But they
1:50
Speaker 1: wouldn't give me the ten and a half years it
1:51
Speaker 1: took me to take. You see what I mean?
1:53
Speaker 2: It's the time.
1:54
Speaker 1: It's the time and the ability to marinate the ideas,
1:57
Speaker 1: to do the deep dive into the scholarship, to triangulate
2:01
Speaker 1: the various scholarships. As you know better than anybody, there's
2:04
Speaker 1: lots of different viewpoints and perspectives, and you want to
2:06
Speaker 1: find a way in which you can kind of, if
2:09
Speaker 1: not average them out, you can find a way in
2:11
Speaker 1: which you can understand them and you can have a conversation,
2:14
Speaker 1: a sort of a campfire around which you can discuss things.
2:18
Speaker 1: the complexity and the undertow of any subject. You pick it,
2:22
Speaker 1: the Brooklyn Bridge, the American Revolution, most recently.
2:26
Speaker 2: How early on did you realize that the only way
2:29
Speaker 2: to get this full autonomy was to do with PBS?
2:36
Speaker 1: I'd like to attribute some consciousness to it, and I
2:38
Speaker 1: honestly can't do it. I realized that I was striking
2:41
Speaker 1: out trying to raise funds from folks, and the people
2:44
Speaker 1: who were interested in helping me, like the National Endowment
2:48
Speaker 1: for the Humanities or this, all required me to give
2:52
Speaker 1: it for free, as they still do, to PBS. And
2:55
Speaker 1: we had foundations and that. And so suddenly that dream
2:58
Speaker 1: of being a filmmaker, which I'd had since 12, I
3:00
Speaker 1: wanted to be a filmmaker at 12, of the communion
3:04
Speaker 1: of strangers in dark rooms, the cinematic experience, that suddenly
3:07
Speaker 1: I had to go, you know what, it's okay. I'm
3:10
Speaker 1: trading hundreds or maybe thousands of viewers for millions of
3:13
Speaker 1: viewers on a smaller screen. And they're not watching it together,
3:17
Speaker 1: but they're having an experience and I can do something
3:21
Speaker 1: over time. I can do a Civil War series and
3:23
Speaker 1: it can be 11 and a half, 12 hours and
3:26
Speaker 1: get deep, deep into that experience. Or Vietnam, which is
3:29
Speaker 1: 18 hours, 10 episodes. Or country music, the national parks, jazz, baseball.
3:34
Speaker 1: I mean, there are like 40 different things.
3:36
Speaker 2: American Buffalo.
3:37
Speaker 1: American Buffalo, most recently. And Leonardo da Vinci, the first
3:41
Speaker 1: non-American topic. We're just finishing the American Revolution.
3:44
Speaker 2: It's just.
3:45
Speaker 1: It was right for me. It was right for me.
3:48
Speaker 1: And I like the fact that they have, PBS, has
3:52
Speaker 1: one foot in the marketplace and the other out. That
3:56
Speaker 1: foot is tentatively there. And so it also reaches all
4:01
Speaker 1: parts of the country. It's the largest network in the country.
4:04
Speaker 1: It's 330 stations. And they really serve rural stations mostly.
4:08
Speaker 1: It's not this Upper West Side, Knob Hill, snobby kind
4:12
Speaker 1: of thing. It's Homeland Security and crop reports and weather
4:16
Speaker 1: and continuing education and classroom of the air as well
4:20
Speaker 1: as children's programming and what I think is a pretty
4:23
Speaker 1: damn good prime time schedule. You know, so it works
4:27
Speaker 1: in the context of all of America, not just some
4:31
Speaker 1: of America.
4:31
Speaker 2: So this is sort of a fortuitous sort of a
4:34
Speaker 2: thing that you came to.
4:35
Speaker 1: Be cooperative with them? The filmmaking thing was born in tragedy.
4:40
Speaker 1: My mom got cancer when I was two years old.
4:42
Speaker 1: There's never a moment when she wasn't dying that I
4:44
Speaker 1: was aware. She died when I was 11, a few
4:47
Speaker 1: months short of my 12th birthday. And my dad had
4:52
Speaker 1: a pretty tough curfew for my younger brother and me,
4:56
Speaker 1: but he forgave it if there was a movie on
4:58
Speaker 1: TV that might go till 1 a.m. on a school night,
5:00
Speaker 1: a school night. Or he'd take me out to, you know,
5:03
Speaker 1: the Cinnamon Sea, like Old Silence or French New Wave
5:07
Speaker 1: that was happening in the mid-60s. And I saw my
5:11
Speaker 1: dad cry for the first time. He didn't cry when
5:12
Speaker 1: she was dying, didn't cry when she died, didn't cry
5:15
Speaker 1: at this impossibly sad funeral. But we were watching this
5:19
Speaker 1: movie called Odd Man Out by Sir Carol Reed about
5:23
Speaker 1: the Irish troubles in the 1910s and 20s, James Mason,
5:27
Speaker 1: you know, very tragic. And I saw him cry and
5:30
Speaker 1: I got it immediately. I just, that provided him with
5:34
Speaker 1: this safe haven. to express himself in a way, nothing
5:38
Speaker 1: in his life, for whatever reasons, for his own psychology,
5:41
Speaker 1: his own history, his own traumas, his own whatever it is.
5:45
Speaker 1: And I said, that's what I want to do. And
5:47
Speaker 1: it wasn't about sentimentality or nostalgia. It was about authentic
5:54
Speaker 1: emotional stuff, higher emotional stuff. The way our founders would
5:57
Speaker 1: talk about, we'd be able to create a republic where
5:59
Speaker 1: you'd have higher emotions, nothing sentimental about it. It's it's
6:03
Speaker 1: that you would just get closer, be more virtuous. And
6:06
Speaker 1: so I said, and that meant, you know, I was
6:09
Speaker 1: going to be Albert Hitchcock or John Ford or Howard Hawks,
6:12
Speaker 1: you know, big Hollywood directors. And I went to Hampshire
6:16
Speaker 1: College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which was a brand new experimental school,
6:20
Speaker 1: came in its second year in 1971. And all of
6:22
Speaker 1: the teachers there were social documentaries, still photographers and filmmakers.
6:26
Speaker 1: And they reminded me correctly, that there is as much
6:30
Speaker 1: drama in what is and what was as anything the
6:34
Speaker 1: human imagination makes up, right? And so fiction's fine, but
6:38
Speaker 1: all of a sudden my molecules are rearranged again. I'm
6:40
Speaker 1: no longer just a filmmaker going to hopefully go to Hollywood.
6:43
Speaker 1: I'm now a documentary filmmaker. And all of that merged
6:46
Speaker 1: with this latent, Joe, I don't know how to describe it,
6:50
Speaker 1: love of my country and its history. I mean, where
6:53
Speaker 1: everybody else... growing up with reading novels and stuff like that.
6:57
Speaker 1: I was reading encyclopedias and reading histories and trying to
7:00
Speaker 1: get at some aspect of who we are. And I
7:04
Speaker 1: think every single film that I've made has asked the
7:08
Speaker 1: same question. Who are we? Who are those strange and
7:10
Speaker 1: complicated people who like to call themselves Americans? And what
7:13
Speaker 1: does an investigation of the past tell us about not
7:15
Speaker 1: only where we've been, but where we are and where
7:20
Speaker 1: we may be going, which is the great gift of history.
7:22
Speaker 1: It's the best teacher we have it as you.
7:25
Speaker 2: Know one of the more fascinating things about documentary work
7:30
Speaker 2: and particularly your work is it provides this entertainment pathway
7:36
Speaker 2: to education where it's engrossing and gripping and fascinating and
7:41
Speaker 2: it's really well edited and there's music and there's recreations
7:45
Speaker 2: of these scenes and it makes becoming educated fascinating yes
7:52
Speaker 2: it makes it exciting where instead of the stale, boring
7:56
Speaker 2: classrooms a lot of children face, if they could be
7:59
Speaker 2: exposed to something like your piece on Vietnam.
8:03
Speaker 1: Right.
8:03
Speaker 2: Was it 18 hours? 18 hours, 10 episodes. I mean,
8:07
Speaker 2: that piece on Vietnam is so fascinating. It's so incredible.
8:11
Speaker 2: And to see the people that survived it express, like
8:16
Speaker 2: there's this one moment where one of the guys is
8:19
Speaker 2: realizing that they're about, and it's just a very simple statement.
8:22
Speaker 2: He goes, okay, here we go. We're going to war.
8:26
Speaker 2: And you could see it in his face, him recalling that.
8:31
Speaker 2: And you're like, you don't get that from the written word,
8:33
Speaker 2: seeing that man's face, him recounting it.
8:37
Speaker 1: And you don't get it from churning it out either.
8:39
Speaker 1: So I spent five and a half years working on
8:41
Speaker 1: the civil war. And I really was like daunted by it.
8:44
Speaker 1: But the first All of the first five or six
8:47
Speaker 1: films that I've made, the Brooklyn Bridge wouldn't have been
8:49
Speaker 1: built without this new metal called steel, which the Civil
8:53
Speaker 1: War helped to promote the use of. The second film
8:56
Speaker 1: on the celibate religious sect, the Shakers, wouldn't have declined
9:00
Speaker 1: so precipitously, not because they were celibate. Celibacy exists in
9:04
Speaker 1: lots of religious traditions, but because a country that had
9:07
Speaker 1: just murdered 650,000 of its own people was not interested
9:11
Speaker 1: after the Civil War existed. in the questions of the
9:14
Speaker 1: sole survival in the intensity that it had before the
9:18
Speaker 1: Civil War. The next film I made was on the
9:20
Speaker 1: Statue of Liberty, and it was originally a gift from
9:23
Speaker 1: the French to Mrs. Lincoln to commemorate the survival of
9:26
Speaker 1: the Union despite her husband's ultimate sacrifice. The next film
9:29
Speaker 1: was on Huey Long, the turbulent Southern demagogue. He came
9:32
Speaker 1: from a North Louisiana parish that refused to secede from
9:36
Speaker 1: the Confederacy. I mean, refused to secede from the Union.
9:39
Speaker 1: They saw the Confederacy, the ownership of slaves... As a
9:43
Speaker 1: rich man's cause. And so they became a hotbed of
9:46
Speaker 1: kind of radicalism and populism and later would spawn this
9:49
Speaker 1: swamp thing called Huey Long. You know, we made a
9:52
Speaker 1: film on the history of the Congress. Obviously, the most
9:54
Speaker 1: important time in the Congress was when, there were two Congresses,
9:58
Speaker 1: one in Washington, obviously, one in Montgomery, and then later Richmond.
10:04
Speaker 1: And so I began to see the centrality. And after
10:06
Speaker 1: the Civil War was done, and it was really just
10:09
Speaker 1: brought to life by those voices of the people that
10:11
Speaker 1: what you're talking about, well, here we go. We didn't
10:15
Speaker 1: want to do another film on war. The guys, both
10:17
Speaker 1: North and South, who'd been in it, who said, here
10:21
Speaker 1: we go, were, they said they'd seen the elephant. That's
10:25
Speaker 1: how they described it. They said they'd seen the elephant.
10:28
Speaker 1: I assume it was the most exotic thing they could
10:31
Speaker 1: think of. That's what combat was, something that no one
10:33
Speaker 1: else experiences, seeing the elephant. And we just, even removed
10:37
Speaker 1: from it, we're just looking at still photographs, still got
10:40
Speaker 1: us to our core. And we just sort of said,
10:42
Speaker 1: we're not going to do any more war films. And
10:44
Speaker 1: then at the end of the 90s, the Civil War
10:46
Speaker 1: came out in 1990, the end of the 90s, We
10:48
Speaker 1: were working on lots of things, baseball and jazz and
10:51
Speaker 1: biographies on Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis and Clark and
10:54
Speaker 1: Mark Twain and all sorts of stuff, Jack Johnson later on.
10:58
Speaker 1: I heard that lots of graduating seniors, high school students
11:01
Speaker 1: walking off the podium with a diploma think we fought
11:04
Speaker 1: with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War.
11:07
Speaker 1: And that 1,000 veterans, American veterans of the Second World
11:13
Speaker 1: War were dying each day in America. And I was like, fuck.
11:16
Speaker 1: You know, the... We're losing them. And by the way,
11:20
Speaker 1: that figure today is so small. It's just actuarially true
11:25
Speaker 1: that it's not 1,000 anymore. It's maybe five or six today.
11:29
Speaker 1: And pretty soon it will be nobody. And there will
11:32
Speaker 1: be no memory. And so I wanted to make a
11:34
Speaker 1: film about that. Before the ink was dry on the
11:37
Speaker 1: World War II film, I said we're doing Vietnam. And
11:40
Speaker 1: before the ink was dry, meaning we're locking it and
11:44
Speaker 1: we're mixing it and doing all the stuff we have
11:46
Speaker 1: to do, 10 and a half years on Vietnam. It
11:50
Speaker 1: came out in September of 17. In December of 15,
11:55
Speaker 1: Barack Obama still has 13 months left in his presidency.
11:58
Speaker 1: I said, we're doing the revolution. And I am now
12:01
Speaker 1: speaking to you where we are almost done with it.
12:05
Speaker 1: We're still mixing. We're still mastering. We're still onlining some stuff.
12:09
Speaker 1: But what it allowed us to do in all of
12:11
Speaker 1: the cases of all the war is get exactly at
12:14
Speaker 1: that thing that you're talking about. What is What actually
12:18
Speaker 1: takes place in war? What is this thing? Life is
12:24
Speaker 1: vivified to an extent that we can't describe. Our imminent
12:29
Speaker 1: death right now as we speak is not a possibility.
12:32
Speaker 1: But if we're on the front lines, it is at
12:34
Speaker 1: any moment. And life is vivified. We understand why people
12:37
Speaker 1: come home and can't compartmentalize it. We understand why people
12:40
Speaker 1: have problems. We're amazed at the people who don't. It
12:45
Speaker 1: obviously brings out the worst. We're the most dangerous species
12:48
Speaker 1: on this planet, clearly. But it brings out the best, right?
12:53
Speaker 1: And it's worth pursuing. And I think particularly when you take,
12:58
Speaker 1: most recently we've spent so many years studying the American Revolution,
13:04
Speaker 1: we kind of accept the violence of the Civil War.
13:07
Speaker 1: We accept the violence of the 20th century wars. But
13:10
Speaker 1: the American Revolution, you know, they're in breaches and they're in,
13:14
Speaker 1: and stockings and they have wigs and the ideas are
13:17
Speaker 1: too important. We don't want to admit that this was
13:20
Speaker 1: as bloody per capita as our civil war, that it
13:23
Speaker 1: was in fact a civil war in ways that even
13:25
Speaker 1: our civil war wasn't. Our civil war was a sectional war,
13:29
Speaker 1: north and south, and that we were forged in violence.
13:34
Speaker 1: And it's okay. Those ideas, those big ideas that we
13:37
Speaker 1: seemingly want to protect by like putting in a bug
13:40
Speaker 1: in amber, you know, guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts,
13:44
Speaker 1: it doesn't in any way get diminished. In fact, it enlarges,
13:49
Speaker 1: it makes them more inspiring and more exhilarating, the understanding
13:52
Speaker 1: that what happened when our country was formed is one
13:56
Speaker 1: of the most important events in the entire history of humankind.
14:00
Speaker 1: I mean, you and I were talking about some of
14:01
Speaker 1: the punctuated equilibriums of comets or meteors or striking this,
14:06
Speaker 1: you know, ice ages. I mean, Ecclesiastes, the Old Testament
14:10
Speaker 1: says there's nothing new under the sun. And I agree
14:12
Speaker 1: with Human nature doesn't change. But for a few minutes,
14:16
Speaker 1: right here, we started something that was brand new. Thomas
14:20
Speaker 1: Paine said, not since the time of Noah do we
14:23
Speaker 1: have a chance to do this. And so we've just
14:25
Speaker 1: plowed ourselves into hearing not just those top-down voices, the
14:30
Speaker 1: bold-faced names that we all know, the Washingtons and the
14:32
Speaker 1: Thomas Paines and the Jeffersons and the John Adams, but
14:37
Speaker 1: also the people you've never heard of, right? 0.01% of
14:42
Speaker 1: people have a painting made of them or a drawing.
14:45
Speaker 1: Everybody else is visually anonymous. But somewhere they wrote their
14:48
Speaker 1: name down. Somewhere they're in a church record. Somewhere they're here.
14:51
Speaker 1: Somewhere they wrote a memoir and got handed down. And
14:55
Speaker 1: so we could bring to life a 14-year-old kid who
14:58
Speaker 1: joins the militia surrounding the British in Cambridge after Lexington
15:03
Speaker 1: and Concord. A 15-year-old who's from Connecticut who fights during
15:07
Speaker 1: the war. A 10-year-old girl who's, you know, from 10
15:10
Speaker 1: to 16 from Yorktown, who's a refugee for most of
15:13
Speaker 1: the time as her family's well-to-do circumstances are diminished and
15:17
Speaker 1: she has to be on the road because Yorktown is
15:19
Speaker 1: so vulnerable to attack from British in addition to all
15:22
Speaker 1: of this. And who are the native players? Who are
15:25
Speaker 1: the black players? Who are the Germans, the hired soldiers?
15:30
Speaker 1: You know, they're real people. Who are the Irish and
15:33
Speaker 1: Scottish and Welsh grunts of the British army? Who are
15:37
Speaker 1: the generals? Who are the diplomats? Who are the French?
15:42
Speaker 1: And then if you charge yourself with that, you can't
15:45
Speaker 1: turn that out in a year and a half. You
15:48
Speaker 1: have to spend a decade marinating that stuff, finding out
15:52
Speaker 1: what's too much. You don't want to make an encyclopedia.
15:56
Speaker 1: I mean, you started off by talking about entertainment, that
16:00
Speaker 1: you could make something that is, you know, technically educational, entertaining.
16:05
Speaker 1: This is a good story. I mean, the word history
16:07
Speaker 1: is mostly made up of the word story plus high,
16:11
Speaker 1: which is a really good way to begin a story, right? Yeah.
16:14
Speaker 2: High.
16:15
Speaker 1: And then we begin the thing. And so I've tried
16:17
Speaker 1: to treat it as that way. I understand, and PBS
16:20
Speaker 1: is really good, and one of the reasons to stay
16:22
Speaker 1: with them is that they can reach every classroom in
16:24
Speaker 1: the country. So today's a school day in America, and
16:27
Speaker 1: hundreds of classrooms are showing a little bit of the
16:29
Speaker 1: Civil War, a little bit of baseball, a little bit
16:31
Speaker 1: of jazz, Lewis and Clark, the Roosevelt's, country music, you
16:34
Speaker 1: name it. And I love that idea that it isn't
16:37
Speaker 1: like broadcast television or even just the release of anything
16:40
Speaker 1: like skywriting, the first breeze, and then all of a
16:42
Speaker 1: sudden you can't see the words anymore. I like the
16:44
Speaker 1: fact that a film I made 35 years ago in
16:47
Speaker 1: the Civil War is like as durable now as it
16:49
Speaker 1: was then. That's all PBS.
16:52
Speaker 2: That's amazing. It really is. And it is so cool
16:56
Speaker 2: that they do show these in classrooms because I think
16:59
Speaker 2: that Same moment where you had, where you saw your
17:02
Speaker 2: father cry, where it gave him some sort of a
17:05
Speaker 2: vehicle to express emotions that he couldn't show in real life.
17:09
Speaker 2: This will give children a way to be educated, but
17:12
Speaker 2: also entertained. And it will spark this sort of, it
17:16
Speaker 2: gives them a pathway to maybe children that are like
17:21
Speaker 2: very bored with school and just can't wait to get out.
17:25
Speaker 2: All of a sudden you have this spark of excitement.
17:28
Speaker 2: and a pathway to like maybe education is cool. Like
17:32
Speaker 2: maybe there's something about this that's actually fun.
17:34
Speaker 1: Exactly.
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18:57
Speaker 1: And we have let a lot of what is fun
18:59
Speaker 1: about it. We've sort of taken history out. We've taken
19:02
Speaker 1: civics out. We don't know about ethics. We don't know
19:05
Speaker 1: about values. We've placed everything over into one sort of
19:09
Speaker 1: set of educational prerogatives, forgetting that you want to build,
19:13
Speaker 1: as our founders said, these well-rounded citizens. Remember, we invented that.
19:18
Speaker 1: Everybody up until the point of our revolution were subjects, right?
19:24
Speaker 1: And Jefferson says a few phrases beyond the famous second sentence.
19:28
Speaker 1: He goes, all experience has shown that mankind are more
19:32
Speaker 1: disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. Meaning the whole
19:36
Speaker 1: history of human beings is like, okay, I'm going to
19:38
Speaker 1: be under the boot of an authoritarian. I just, you know,
19:41
Speaker 1: that's my lot. I'm just going to accept it. And
19:43
Speaker 1: he's going, no, central to the success of this new
19:47
Speaker 1: thing you were creating, citizens, was the responsibility to educate
19:52
Speaker 1: and to be educated and to do that your lifelong.
19:55
Speaker 1: In fact, he could have said, Jefferson could have said life,
19:59
Speaker 1: liberty and property. He didn't. He said the pursuit of happiness.
20:03
Speaker 1: That was not the chasing of objects, things in a
20:08
Speaker 1: marketplace of objects, but it was lifelong learning in a
20:11
Speaker 1: marketplace of ideas. It was making the story of how
20:15
Speaker 1: we acquire virtue, and they used that word all the time.
20:19
Speaker 1: They imported it from the classical. They went over the
20:22
Speaker 1: Dark Ages, over the Middle Ages, over the medieval period,
20:25
Speaker 1: and pulled back from classical times this idea of virtue,
20:28
Speaker 1: of temperance, of tolerance, and all of that. There's a
20:31
Speaker 1: wonderful moment when John Adams, who's the big worrier of
20:35
Speaker 1: the revolution, he's always worrying. He's saying, I just don't
20:37
Speaker 1: know if there's enough virtue to have a republic. Everybody
20:42
Speaker 1: is so ambitious and so greedy and so out to
20:46
Speaker 1: do this. And so for him, if you were going
20:50
Speaker 1: to create this new thing, something new under the sun,
20:53
Speaker 1: you know, the world started over again, as Thomas Bain
20:57
Speaker 1: is suggesting, an asylum for mankind, he called it, then
21:01
Speaker 1: maybe you had to figure out how to educate your stuff.
21:05
Speaker 1: And so when you go back and say, what have
21:08
Speaker 1: we lost? We're now just repeating, are we trying to
21:11
Speaker 1: get to the test? Are we trying to make a
21:13
Speaker 1: well-rounded human being? So if I tell you, in 1838,
21:17
Speaker 1: there is this lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, who is just
21:23
Speaker 1: a few days short of his 29th birthday, who is
21:27
Speaker 1: addressing the young man's Lyceum on an afternoon. And the
21:30
Speaker 1: topic is foreign policy. And he says, whence shall we
21:34
Speaker 1: expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step
21:38
Speaker 1: the earth and crush us with a blow? Then he
21:41
Speaker 1: answered his own question.
21:42
Speaker 2: Never.
21:43
Speaker 1: All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not
21:46
Speaker 1: by force take a drink from the Ohio River or
21:49
Speaker 1: make a track in the Blue Ridge in the trial
21:51
Speaker 1: of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we
21:55
Speaker 1: must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation
21:59
Speaker 1: of free men, we shall live through all time, or
22:02
Speaker 1: die by suicide. Whoa. You know who said that? That's
22:06
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln. He would come the closest to overseeing our
22:10
Speaker 1: near national suicide in the Civil War. But he understood,
22:14
Speaker 1: here you got these two magnificent oceans, big, relatively benign neighbors,
22:18
Speaker 1: north and south. And so what we've been able to
22:21
Speaker 1: do is incubate so many extraordinary things, but we've also
22:25
Speaker 1: been able to incubate lots of less than extraordinary things.
22:29
Speaker 1: And he was saying, it's thou's less than extraordinary things,
22:33
Speaker 1: are going to trip us up or we'll live forever.
22:36
Speaker 1: Because if you think about it, the greatest naval invasion
22:41
Speaker 1: in history, you know, June 6, 1944, D-Day, Normandy, nobody
22:46
Speaker 1: can do that for us. Nobody's going to land at Montauk.
22:49
Speaker 1: Nobody's going to land at, you know, St. Augustine. Nobody's
22:52
Speaker 1: going to land in Galveston and help us, right? We'll
22:57
Speaker 1: sink or swim forever. by the extent to which we
23:01
Speaker 1: are knowledgeable of and adhere to the blessings that we've
23:07
Speaker 1: received from that founding generation, the sacrifice made not by
23:11
Speaker 1: those boldface names, but by the people that you've never
23:14
Speaker 1: heard of, that we are trying to tell you about,
23:17
Speaker 1: John Greenwood, the 14-year-old Pfeiffer, Joseph Blum Martin, the 15-year-old
23:21
Speaker 1: kid from Connecticut, Betsy Ambler, you know, loyalists, too. I mean,
23:25
Speaker 1: we're umpires, Joe. We call balls and strikes, you know
23:28
Speaker 1: what I mean? Being a loyalist in the revolution is
23:31
Speaker 1: what it would be like saying, well, you're conservative, right? Well,
23:34
Speaker 1: you think I live under the greatest political system, the
23:37
Speaker 1: British constitutional monarchy. Why would I want to change this
23:40
Speaker 1: great life, this great prosperity I have for this idea
23:43
Speaker 1: that A, sounds foolhardy and radical, but also B, has
23:49
Speaker 1: zero chance of working out. Zero chance of working out, right?
23:53
Speaker 1: At Lexington, 250 years ago on April 19th, The chances
23:58
Speaker 1: of the Patriots prevailing are zero. And to tell the
24:04
Speaker 1: story of how it went from zero to 100% is scary, violent, complicated,
24:14
Speaker 1: lots of undertow, and as exhilarating as you could possibly imagine.
24:19
Speaker 2: There's a great line in the trailer for this movie
24:24
Speaker 2: piece on the Revolutionary War. We say it's the first
24:27
Speaker 2: war that was fought in history for the unalienable rights.
24:31
Speaker 1: Proclaiming the unalienable rights of all people. Now, let's be honest.
24:35
Speaker 1: Thomas Jefferson meant all white men of property free of debt.
24:39
Speaker 1: But the words are beautiful. The words are vague. And
24:41
Speaker 1: the door got open to crack. And everybody else put
24:44
Speaker 1: their foot in it. Women put their foot in it.
24:47
Speaker 1: The poor. The not landed people. The folks, the craftsmen
24:51
Speaker 1: who just had a regular job. Black people. Native. So
24:54
Speaker 1: And it has sponsored revolutions all around the world, democratic revolutions,
24:59
Speaker 1: that the greatest thing that we invented was the idea
25:03
Speaker 1: that we could govern ourselves, that we would no longer
25:06
Speaker 1: be under the boot of an authoritarian master who had
25:10
Speaker 1: just set himself up, like King George, because of hereditary privilege.
25:16
Speaker 1: His grandfather and his grandfather and his father and his
25:20
Speaker 1: uncle and going back and forth. On what basis? Is
25:25
Speaker 1: it talent? Is it showing the things? And so all
25:30
Speaker 1: of these people that we consider the bold-faced names of
25:34
Speaker 1: our revolution, the Washingtons and the Jeffersons and the Patrick
25:38
Speaker 1: Henrys and the John Adams, they didn't know they were
25:41
Speaker 1: those people, right? They didn't know they were a planter
25:45
Speaker 1: and they were a businessman and they were a lawyer
25:47
Speaker 1: and they were this guy and a planter or a scientist.
25:49
Speaker 1: And they were just risking their lives, their fortunes, and
25:54
Speaker 1: their sacred honor for something much bigger than anything else.
25:58
Speaker 2: It's also the incredibly complex system of checks and balances
26:03
Speaker 2: that they divide to prevent tyranny.
26:05
Speaker 1: Oh, it's so unbelievably beautiful. I can't believe you brought
26:07
Speaker 1: that up. So we have a technical problem, which I'll
26:11
Speaker 1: share with you, or I thought it was a technical problem,
26:14
Speaker 1: which is the climax, if you're making a film called
26:16
Speaker 1: The American Revolution, the climax is the Battle of Yorktown.
26:20
Speaker 1: happens in October of 1781. The British don't leave New
26:23
Speaker 1: York for two more years until 1783. They're occupying New York,
26:29
Speaker 1: which they took over in the summer of 76. And
26:32
Speaker 1: our Articles of Convention are doing nothing. Our Articles of
26:37
Speaker 1: Confederation are doing nothing. They're toothless. They can't be a government.
26:40
Speaker 1: And so in 1787, we have this constitutional convention that
26:44
Speaker 1: happens in Philadelphia, four months. They hammer together the shortest
26:48
Speaker 1: constitution in the world And it is exactly that. Jefferson's
26:52
Speaker 1: writing in from Paris, who representing our interests, going, but
26:56
Speaker 1: what about this? What about they're trying to check the
26:58
Speaker 1: possibility of somebody being somebody who would try to take
27:05
Speaker 1: advantage of the system and rig it to their own benefit.
27:08
Speaker 1: And so all of those elaborately beautiful checks and balances.
27:12
Speaker 1: Article one is the legislative. Article 2 is the executive.
27:17
Speaker 1: It delineates Article 3, the judicial. It delineates what the
27:20
Speaker 1: responsibilities are and the way in which the system has
27:23
Speaker 1: worked and fits and starts with lots of problems. And,
27:27
Speaker 1: you know, there's something encouraging about seeing how divided Americans
27:31
Speaker 1: were back then because we're always wringing our hands, oh,
27:34
Speaker 1: we're so divided. Okay, human beings are divided. And my
27:39
Speaker 1: feeling is that if you succumb to argument, right? Which
27:44
Speaker 1: is what we do. The novelist Richard Powers said, the
27:47
Speaker 1: best arguments in the world, and that's all we do
27:50
Speaker 1: is argue, the best arguments in the world won't change
27:53
Speaker 1: a single person's point of view. The only thing that
27:55
Speaker 1: can do that, that is to say, change somebody's point
27:58
Speaker 1: of view, is a good story. Because a good story
28:02
Speaker 1: allows contradiction and undertow. You can have a George Washington
28:07
Speaker 1: who is complex, flawed, rash, makes terrible tactical decisions on
28:12
Speaker 1: the battlefield, and yet without him, historian after historian after
28:17
Speaker 1: historian says, without him, we don't have a country. And
28:20
Speaker 1: you can take that and put that in the bank.
28:22
Speaker 1: And at the same time, understand the dimensions of, we
28:25
Speaker 1: all have feet of clay. We're all flawed in some way.
28:28
Speaker 1: And to try to design a narrative that isn't, you know,
28:32
Speaker 1: filled with that kind of morning and again, sanitized Madison
28:36
Speaker 1: Avenue kind of view of American history, nor is it
28:40
Speaker 1: that unforgiving revisionism that wants to... throw out anybody who
28:44
Speaker 1: did something bad back then, you then permit a world
28:49
Speaker 1: to exist in which they suddenly seem familiar to you. Like,
28:53
Speaker 1: you can argue with other people and see that you
28:55
Speaker 1: get nowhere, but you also know if you're married or
28:58
Speaker 1: you have kids or you have friends or you're in
29:00
Speaker 1: business that you actually are more engaged in story and
29:05
Speaker 1: tolerance and understanding and listening. And so part of our
29:09
Speaker 1: job As filmmakers, strangely enough, it's not to impose ourselves
29:16
Speaker 1: on the material. As I said before, we're umpires calling
29:19
Speaker 1: balls and strikes. It's to listen to the material. What
29:23
Speaker 1: is it telling us? What is it saying about this
29:27
Speaker 1: circumstances of, say, the resistance in Boston in the early
29:30
Speaker 1: days leading up to the revolution? To try to understand nuance.
29:34
Speaker 1: Every school kid knows that when the 60 or 70 people,
29:37
Speaker 1: all white males, both rich and poor in Boston, dumped
29:42
Speaker 1: 40 tons of tea, 40 tons of tea in the harbor,
29:47
Speaker 1: they were dressed crudely as Native Americans. And if you
29:51
Speaker 1: ask a kid, why were they dressed that way? Well,
29:53
Speaker 1: you know, just to disguise, to put the blame on
29:55
Speaker 1: somebody else. It was to say, we're not part of
29:59
Speaker 1: the mother country anymore.
30:01
Speaker 2: Really?
30:02
Speaker 1: We're here. We're aboriginal. We are Americans. We are distinct.
30:07
Speaker 1: We've been having complaints about British citizenship. We're arguing British law.
30:11
Speaker 1: But all of a sudden, those laws have been broken
30:13
Speaker 1: out into natural laws. And we're telling you that we're
30:17
Speaker 1: not trying to blame it on anyone else. Nobody would,
30:19
Speaker 1: for a second, have thought that the Native Americans would
30:22
Speaker 1: have dumped the tea. They weren't burdened by the tea taxes.
30:26
Speaker 1: What they were doing was saying we are– and it's
30:28
Speaker 1: so ironic given the history of our relationship to the
30:32
Speaker 1: dispossession of native lands. They are saying we are aboriginal.
30:37
Speaker 1: This is what the scholar Phil Deloria says.
30:39
Speaker 2: So, yeah, wow. And then you get– Newly adopted aboriginal.
30:43
Speaker 1: Right. We're saying we're not of the mother country. We're
30:46
Speaker 1: in essence kind of filing divorce papers by dressing as
30:50
Speaker 1: the people who originally inhabited this country dressed– Nobody's fooled.
30:56
Speaker 2: How did you figure that out?
30:58
Speaker 1: It's listening to scholarship. It's thinking, of course, that you're
31:02
Speaker 1: not going to have— no one in their right mind is
31:06
Speaker 1: going to say, oh, the Native Americans did it because
31:08
Speaker 1: they're protesting the T-tax. They're not paying the T-tax, right?
31:13
Speaker 2: Right.
31:13
Speaker 1: So it's like you then go and then you talk
31:17
Speaker 1: to a scholar, in this case Phil Deloria, who's been
31:18
Speaker 1: studying Native stuff, and he goes, just think about it.
31:22
Speaker 1: You're dressed crudely as this. You're making a statement. to Britain,
31:26
Speaker 1: that we are no longer, we're severing ties. Now, this
31:29
Speaker 1: is well before, this is December of 1773. The guns
31:35
Speaker 1: are going to fire in about 18 months at Lexington,
31:38
Speaker 1: a little bit less than 18 months at Lexington and
31:41
Speaker 1: Concord on April 19th. But it is all of these
31:45
Speaker 1: little moments that lead up to boycott of British goods.
31:49
Speaker 1: Women take a huge part of the role of the resistance.
31:52
Speaker 1: You've got people like Samuel Adams, who is a failure
31:56
Speaker 1: as a brewer and a tax collector. It's sort of interesting,
31:59
Speaker 1: you can't make this shit up. Who is, his whole
32:02
Speaker 1: job is to keep his fellow colonists alive to their grievances.
32:06
Speaker 1: When things calm down, the Brits sort of retreat, he goes,
32:09
Speaker 1: oh no, no, no, it's just gonna get worse. It's
32:11
Speaker 1: gonna get worse. And so you meet these characters that
32:14
Speaker 1: sound an awful lot like characters that occupy our large
32:19
Speaker 1: media space. And it was occupying the large media space
32:22
Speaker 1: of the colonists from New Hampshire I live in a
32:25
Speaker 1: tiny village. The Walpole Gazette was read all the way
32:28
Speaker 1: in Georgia. People exchanged ideas and thought about things and
32:32
Speaker 1: were trying to figure out, even as late as the,
32:35
Speaker 1: even after, even after Lexington conquered, even after the Battle
32:38
Speaker 1: of Bunker Hill, which is June of 75, even after
32:41
Speaker 1: the other things that were happening, by early 76, nobody's absolutely,
32:48
Speaker 1: not nobody, but there's not a majority will for independence, independency,
32:52
Speaker 1: as they called it. And then Thomas Paine comes in
32:55
Speaker 1: and writes this pamphlet, Common Sense. And all of a sudden,
32:59
Speaker 1: people are going, oh, yeah. And by June, there's a
33:02
Speaker 1: committee of the Second Continental Congress, and Franklin's in charge
33:06
Speaker 1: of it, and there's John Adams is on the committee,
33:08
Speaker 1: and there's a 32-year-old lawyer from Virginia named Thomas Jefferson
33:12
Speaker 1: who's given the first crack at doing this thing. And
33:15
Speaker 1: what does he write? He writes, we hold these truths
33:19
Speaker 1: to be sacred and undeniable.
33:21
Speaker 2: And Franklin.
33:22
Speaker 1: who's the old man, the chairman, if you will, of
33:25
Speaker 1: this little committee, goes, uh-uh, we hold these truths to
33:28
Speaker 1: be self-evident. Joe, there is nothing in the world less
33:32
Speaker 1: self-evident than the idea that all men are created equal,
33:35
Speaker 1: that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,
33:39
Speaker 1: that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
33:43
Speaker 1: But as someone pointed out, it's the old lawyer's dodge.
33:45
Speaker 1: You know, you just tell them that it's self-evident, not
33:49
Speaker 1: just sacred and undeniable, lovely phrasing on Jefferson's park, but
33:53
Speaker 1: if you say self-evident, then we're not arguing about this thing.
33:57
Speaker 1: We're saying that everything that you're about to hear is
34:00
Speaker 1: without argument, which is a like really in your face,
34:04
Speaker 1: bold move in the intimacy, the human intimacy that gets
34:07
Speaker 1: communicated when you spend even a little amount of time
34:11
Speaker 1: trying to parse this, trying to get at the heart
34:14
Speaker 1: of the dynamics of dumping tea and dressed as Indians
34:17
Speaker 1: or writing these words. Um, you know, that mankind are
34:22
Speaker 1: disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, meaning, yeah, we've
34:27
Speaker 1: taken it, all this through human history, and guess what?
34:30
Speaker 1: We're not going to take it anymore.
34:31
Speaker 2: When they first devised this system of government, what were
34:37
Speaker 2: they basing it on? I know part of it was
34:39
Speaker 2: on the Greeks, but like, what was the, how did
34:42
Speaker 2: they make it To the point where even today we
34:46
Speaker 2: marvel at it.
34:46
Speaker 1: Yeah.
34:48
Speaker 2: 250 years later, people go back and like, look what
34:49
Speaker 2: they did.
34:50
Speaker 1: This is extraordinary. It's extraordinary. So lots of factors. First
34:54
Speaker 1: of all, it was true what I said. They have
34:57
Speaker 1: experienced at a reserve and at sort of, as somebody said,
35:02
Speaker 1: salutary neglect. People didn't pay attention to the colonists. And
35:06
Speaker 1: they had learned suddenly they were more literate than their
35:10
Speaker 1: British compatriots. They paid less taxes and they paid it
35:14
Speaker 1: to local stuff and they had land. And most folks
35:19
Speaker 1: in England and Wales and Scotland and Ireland were living
35:22
Speaker 1: dependent lives. They'd worked the land of somebody else for
35:24
Speaker 1: a thousand years. So they've got this British constitutional monarchy,
35:28
Speaker 1: which is a really strong thing. And King George is
35:30
Speaker 1: not a bad guy. He really does believe that Parliament
35:33
Speaker 1: has this role to play and the House of Lords
35:34
Speaker 1: and the House of Carmens. They're kind of the checks
35:37
Speaker 1: and balances that we'd think of. But They're also in
35:41
Speaker 1: the middle of the Enlightenment, where they're beginning to say
35:44
Speaker 1: that there are certain rights that are natural. That's the
35:50
Speaker 1: word that I think Jefferson would use. That is to say,
35:53
Speaker 1: they are not bestowed by a monarch. They're natural, that
35:56
Speaker 1: all men are created equal. This is big stuff. And
35:59
Speaker 1: this is distilling, in Jefferson's words in the Declaration, a
36:04
Speaker 1: century of Enlightenment thinking. And the Enlightenment has been a
36:07
Speaker 1: kind of philosophical and human and kind of governmental dynamic
36:12
Speaker 1: that's coming out of the Renaissance, right? We know what
36:15
Speaker 1: the Renaissance is in art, Leonardo da Vinci, Bernini, you know,
36:19
Speaker 1: all of this stuff, some music. But what it's doing
36:22
Speaker 1: on a social scene and a philosophical scene is it's
36:25
Speaker 1: doing that. And they're reaching back to antiquity, as you say,
36:28
Speaker 1: and they're pulling back some of the best ideas of self-discipline,
36:32
Speaker 1: of temperance, of virtue, all of these sorts of things.
36:35
Speaker 1: But then because they've experienced all these years of this
36:41
Speaker 1: misuse and distrust from the mother country, 3,000 miles away, takes,
36:45
Speaker 1: you know, at least a month for information to get there.
36:48
Speaker 1: The Britain wins with our help, what we call the
36:52
Speaker 1: French and Indian War, which was a global war called
36:54
Speaker 1: the Seven Years War. And they've got now the biggest,
36:59
Speaker 1: most far-flung empire on earth, but they can't protect its
37:02
Speaker 1: own colonists who are trying to pour over the Appalachians
37:05
Speaker 1: to take Native American land and it's causing.
37:09
Speaker 2: Uprisings.
37:10
Speaker 1: And so they say, you can't go over 1763. You
37:13
Speaker 1: can't go over that. And oh, by the way, we're broke.
37:15
Speaker 1: So we need you to help us to pay for
37:17
Speaker 1: this stuff. But we don't have any representation there. So
37:21
Speaker 1: Native lands, taxation, representation become this thing. And it goes
37:25
Speaker 1: on for so long. They've watched the ineffectiveness of their
37:30
Speaker 1: government while they're prosecuting the revolution and the ineffectiveness of
37:33
Speaker 1: the Articles of Confederation emerges from fighting the war and
37:38
Speaker 1: is trying to figure out how to make it work,
37:41
Speaker 1: that they go into that constitutional convention and they are
37:43
Speaker 1: determined to figure out every possible angle to forestall authoritarianism,
37:49
Speaker 1: to balance the relationships between the states, to have the
37:53
Speaker 1: checks and balances between the three forms of government, the judicial,
37:57
Speaker 1: the legislative, and the executive. It is a beautiful thing.
38:02
Speaker 1: And what was so incredible is that it fostered one
38:05
Speaker 1: of the greatest public debates ever in human history, because
38:09
Speaker 1: they had emerged from this bloody, bloody, costly civil war.
38:14
Speaker 1: Civil war means lots of deaths of civilians. That didn't
38:17
Speaker 1: happen in our civil war, except in Missouri and a
38:20
Speaker 1: little bit of Kansas. You know, six people died at
38:23
Speaker 1: the Siege of Vicksburg, less than 20 at Atlanta, two
38:26
Speaker 1: in Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in North America.
38:30
Speaker 1: But the American Revolution, lots of their battles in the
38:33
Speaker 1: South in which you might have one British officer leading
38:36
Speaker 1: loyalist troops. Every person on each side is an American
38:40
Speaker 1: and they're killing each other. And they're doing it not
38:42
Speaker 1: just in set battles, but in little guerrilla actions, almost
38:45
Speaker 1: like the Viet Cong attacking patrols in South Vietnam. And
38:50
Speaker 1: it is really bad stuff. And so they say, we're
38:54
Speaker 1: going to ratify this, but we want a Bill of
38:56
Speaker 1: Rights too. We want to enshrine... these things that we
39:00
Speaker 1: fought for. And so you have no establishment of religion,
39:05
Speaker 1: freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom to assemble and
39:09
Speaker 1: redress grievances, right to bear arms, free and fair trial,
39:15
Speaker 1: end of cruel and unusual punishment. All these things become
39:18
Speaker 1: the set pieces of I made a film a couple
39:22
Speaker 1: years ago on the US and the Holocaust, what we knew,
39:26
Speaker 1: when we knew it, what we did, what we didn't do,
39:28
Speaker 1: perhaps what we should have done. And I was at
39:32
Speaker 1: some event and somebody raised their hand and said, is
39:35
Speaker 1: the Holocaust the most important event since the birth of
39:38
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ in world history? And I just immediately said, no,
39:41
Speaker 1: it's the American Revolution. It's the American Revolution. I mean,
39:45
Speaker 1: this is a sea change in the course of human events.
39:49
Speaker 1: And man, We don't know enough about it. We don't
39:52
Speaker 1: know enough of the interiors of it that are complicated.
39:55
Speaker 1: I have in my editing room a neon sign. I've
39:58
Speaker 1: had it for a decade and a half in cursive,
40:01
Speaker 1: lowercase cursive. It says, it's complicated. You know, because there's
40:05
Speaker 1: not a filmmaker on earth that if, you know, if
40:09
Speaker 1: the scene's working, you don't touch it. But we have
40:12
Speaker 1: spent the last 50 years touching those scenes, right? You
40:15
Speaker 1: know what I mean? Going in, maybe it's lesser, but
40:18
Speaker 1: it's truer and it's got more depth It's got more contours.
40:22
Speaker 1: It feels like it's accurate to what actually happened, which
40:27
Speaker 1: is more complicated than our sort of simple binary discussions
40:32
Speaker 1: of what history is.
40:35
Speaker 2: It's so hard for people to recognize that that was
40:39
Speaker 2: a civil war. I think most people think it was
40:41
Speaker 2: the United States colonists against the British. But the separatists
40:46
Speaker 2: and the loyalists battling it out together... I think most
40:50
Speaker 2: people are completely unaware of that.
40:51
Speaker 1: Completely unaware. We wrote a, for lack of a better word,
40:55
Speaker 1: a topic sentence early in the film is that, and
40:58
Speaker 1: I might get this slightly wrong, but the American Revolution
41:02
Speaker 1: was not just a dispute between Englishmen over Indian land
41:08
Speaker 1: taxation and representation, but a bloody struggle that involved more
41:12
Speaker 1: than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American,
41:16
Speaker 1: that somehow came still to represent some of the highest
41:20
Speaker 1: aspirations of humankind. So ours is like the fourth global
41:25
Speaker 1: war over the prize of North America. And we're treating
41:29
Speaker 1: native nations not as them, but as distinct entities. The Shawnee,
41:35
Speaker 1: for example, in the middle of the 18th century, 1750,
41:40
Speaker 1: are as important an entity on the world trading stage
41:44
Speaker 1: with French or British or others as, say, the state
41:47
Speaker 1: of Virginia or the colony of Virginia is at that time. Really?
41:50
Speaker 1: And that they're different from the Delawares, their allies. And
41:54
Speaker 1: they're different from the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, the six, five,
42:00
Speaker 1: and then it was six tribes, the Seneca, the Cayuga,
42:03
Speaker 1: the Onondaga, the Tuscarora, the Oneida, and the Mohawk. And
42:07
Speaker 1: I've just walked from western New York State all the
42:11
Speaker 1: way into New England, right, and up into Canada. And
42:14
Speaker 1: they had formed a union of their own that had operated,
42:19
Speaker 1: a democracy that had operated for centuries, that had allowed
42:22
Speaker 1: the independence of each of these separate nations, states, and
42:28
Speaker 1: yet yielded to the larger thing when their interests were threatened.
42:32
Speaker 1: So essentially with regard to foreign policy. And Franklin looks
42:37
Speaker 1: at this and goes, 1754, he goes, wow, this is
42:41
Speaker 1: a great idea. We should be doing this. He's been
42:42
Speaker 1: the postmaster. He's the only person who's been to New
42:45
Speaker 1: Hampshire And he's been to Georgia and all the places
42:49
Speaker 1: in between. He said, we should do this. And he
42:51
Speaker 1: calls a conference in Albany. And he's got a picture
42:54
Speaker 1: of a cut-up snake above the dire warning, join or die.
42:58
Speaker 1: And they pass. Seven of the 13 colonies attend. And
43:01
Speaker 1: they pass this thing called the Albany Plan of Union
43:05
Speaker 1: in 1754. And then they go home to try to
43:07
Speaker 1: sell it. And none of the states take it because
43:10
Speaker 1: no one wants to. None of the colonies take it
43:12
Speaker 1: because no one wants to give up their autonomy. So
43:14
Speaker 1: the plan dies. But 20 years later, join or die
43:17
Speaker 1: is the war cry in the most consequential revolution in history.
43:22
Speaker 2: Wow.
43:22
Speaker 1: Isn't that great? So you're taking the Native American, riffing
43:26
Speaker 1: on that, and then as you're forming this, you're bringing
43:30
Speaker 1: in what you've had and inherited for centuries of British
43:34
Speaker 1: constitutional monarchy, and you're borrowing from the New Enlightenment things,
43:38
Speaker 1: and you've got biblical references and classical references having to
43:42
Speaker 1: do with the conduct of individuals and personal responsibility, all
43:45
Speaker 1: of these just utterly American, but also been out there forever.
43:51
Speaker 1: And we end up with what we have, which is this,
43:54
Speaker 1: you know, glorious, wonderful, but also dysfunctional republic.
43:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's terrible, but it's the best one out there.
44:01
Speaker 1: It's the best one out there. Yeah, that's exactly right.
44:04
Speaker 2: When you started this project, so you have this idea
44:08
Speaker 2: to start this project, what was your understanding of the
44:12
Speaker 2: Revolutionary War? versus what is it like when you really
44:17
Speaker 2: delve into the material and you start to formulate a
44:20
Speaker 2: plan for this documentary series? Like how much did you
44:23
Speaker 2: know about it when you first started?
44:25
Speaker 1: I'm pretty well versed in American history, but nothing. I mean,
44:28
Speaker 1: like I've worked on two films where I made the
44:31
Speaker 1: mistake of thinking, ah, I know about this subject, baseball
44:34
Speaker 1: and Vietnam. Because I grew up in the 60s and
44:38
Speaker 1: I went through it. I lived on a college campus.
44:40
Speaker 1: I knew all the stuff, I thought. I was at
44:43
Speaker 1: college as the war was winding down, and I loved baseball.
44:47
Speaker 1: Every day of both those productions were daily humiliations of
44:51
Speaker 1: what I didn't know. And so what happens is you
44:54
Speaker 1: come in with a humility that I wish to know.
44:58
Speaker 1: And rather than tell you what I know, the last
45:00
Speaker 1: time I checked, that's called homework. we would rather share
45:04
Speaker 1: with you our process of discovery. Joe, you cannot believe
45:08
Speaker 1: what we just found out. Can I use these mugs
45:12
Speaker 1: to tell you how Daniel Morgan won the Battle of
45:15
Speaker 1: Cowpens against Bannister Tarleton in South Carolina, just below the
45:20
Speaker 1: North Carolina border, and he trusts to his militia who
45:23
Speaker 1: are unreliable, please just fire twice the first line of militia,
45:27
Speaker 1: and then you can retreat, then you can run, but
45:29
Speaker 1: please promise me you'll fire twice. And the second line
45:31
Speaker 1: of militia, more inexperienced, please just fire twice and then
45:36
Speaker 1: run behind the third line, which are these scraggly kids, teenagers, felons, ne'er-do-wells,
45:42
Speaker 1: second and third sons without the chance of an inheritance,
45:49
Speaker 1: recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany. And they stop the British.
45:53
Speaker 1: So Tarleton goes, oh, they're doing what all the militias do.
45:57
Speaker 1: They're retreating, they're retreating, they're retreating. And then the third
45:59
Speaker 1: line comes up and and they go after them, and
46:03
Speaker 1: the Americans actually attack, which is very rare, an attacking
46:09
Speaker 1: thing to drive into the British line. Tarleton gets away,
46:11
Speaker 1: but a huge part of Cornwallis' army has been diminished,
46:14
Speaker 1: and they're uttering this war cry that they have adapted
46:19
Speaker 1: from the Cherokee, from Native American tribes, which is a
46:22
Speaker 1: yell that will reverberate in southern battlefields for decades. Wow.
46:27
Speaker 1: Wow is right. And like, I can take, I mean, look,
46:33
Speaker 1: there's Lexington and Concord, and then maybe somebody says Bunker Hill,
46:37
Speaker 1: which is really Breeds Hill, Bunker Hill too, and then
46:39
Speaker 1: maybe Trenton, he takes over, he surprises them on Christmas night,
46:43
Speaker 1: and then maybe some people know that Saratoga is the
46:46
Speaker 1: surrender of an entire British army that gives the French
46:50
Speaker 1: the confidence to come in on our side and give
46:52
Speaker 1: us the equivalent of $ 30 billion plus Navy and soldiers.
46:57
Speaker 1: And then it's Yorktown. But there are Dozens of battles
47:01
Speaker 1: that we'll tell you about. Like Germantown is a wonderful thing.
47:04
Speaker 1: The Battle of Brandywine. What's the largest battle in the entire...
47:08
Speaker 1: The largest battle is the Battle of Long Island. George
47:12
Speaker 1: Washington makes a terrible blunder, a tactical blunder. He leaves
47:15
Speaker 1: his left flank exposed, and the British see it, and
47:18
Speaker 1: they completely surround him. And then a year later at Brandywine,
47:22
Speaker 1: he leaves his right flank exposed, and they go around.
47:26
Speaker 1: He's not the greatest tactician, but he is... the man
47:30
Speaker 1: of the time, this leadership, this ability to understand subordinate talent,
47:34
Speaker 1: this reserve, this kind of confidence. I mean, you cannot
47:38
Speaker 1: come away from this without extraordinary admiration for this person
47:43
Speaker 1: without whom we don't have a country. We just literally
47:46
Speaker 1: don't have a country.
47:47
Speaker 2: Which is so crazy when you think of like pivotal
47:49
Speaker 2: figures in human history, this one person, were they not born,
47:53
Speaker 2: were they not in that position at that time, extraordinary circumstances,
47:57
Speaker 2: unusual character.
47:59
Speaker 1: We have a historian. The only time really in the
48:02
Speaker 1: film that any of our talking heads break the fourth wall,
48:05
Speaker 1: you know, we don't have, we don't have first person voices.
48:07
Speaker 1: I mean, we don't have witnesses. We have hundreds of
48:11
Speaker 1: first person voices, but we have some scholars and writers
48:13
Speaker 1: who are on the thing. And there's one Christopher Brown
48:16
Speaker 1: who just shakes his head and he goes like, I'm
48:20
Speaker 1: not a, you know, big fan of the great man
48:22
Speaker 1: theory of history or interpretation of history, but let's put
48:26
Speaker 1: it this way. I don't see how the United States
48:28
Speaker 1: survives without Washington's leadership. And it's this wonderful moment in
48:32
Speaker 1: which you go, right, we don't have to throw out
48:35
Speaker 1: the heroes in order to do that. More often than not,
48:38
Speaker 1: we sort of elevated these people to a supernatural position
48:41
Speaker 1: that they don't really necessarily deserve. He deserves it. And
48:46
Speaker 1: yet he's also deeply flawed, feats of clay, as I said.
48:50
Speaker 1: And that's, to me, what makes a good story. Like,
48:53
Speaker 1: How is it that he can be tactically so wrong
48:56
Speaker 1: in two extraordinary places? He's also very rash, Joe. He
49:00
Speaker 1: runs out at Kipps Bay, which is halfway up Manhattan.
49:03
Speaker 1: After he's lost the Battle of Long Island, he's now
49:05
Speaker 1: abandoning New York, or he's taking a good number of
49:09
Speaker 1: his men up to Harlem. And at Kipps Bay, which
49:12
Speaker 1: is sort of midtown on the East River, there's a battle,
49:15
Speaker 1: and we're just being rolled up. And he comes charging
49:18
Speaker 1: onto the battlefield, and his aides are going crazy and
49:20
Speaker 1: they're grabbing the reins of his horse. He's going to
49:22
Speaker 1: be killed. If he's killed, that's it, right? And then
49:25
Speaker 1: later on at the Battle of Princeton, he does the
49:28
Speaker 1: same thing. And one aide puts his hands over his
49:30
Speaker 1: face thinking, I cannot watch my commander in chief be killed.
49:35
Speaker 1: And in the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse in New Jersey,
49:37
Speaker 1: he rides out and just is very present, turns what
49:40
Speaker 1: is a retreat of continental soldiers and militiamen into steadying
49:46
Speaker 1: their lines and basically holding their own against the prime,
49:50
Speaker 1: the elite of the British army. And it's, where does
49:53
Speaker 1: that come from? Who does that? How did we do?
49:57
Speaker 1: And from the very beginning, everybody knew you needed a Virginian,
50:01
Speaker 1: the New Englanders, where the war starts. The war is
50:03
Speaker 1: a symphony in three movements, right? The New England is
50:08
Speaker 1: the first movement, central states, and then the southern states.
50:12
Speaker 1: And there is a sense early on when after Lexington
50:17
Speaker 1: and Concord, where we've driven the British back into Boston,
50:19
Speaker 1: and they've got ways to get in, but they can't
50:21
Speaker 1: get out besides by ship, that we need a real army.
50:27
Speaker 1: And the army is formed, and it is very obvious
50:30
Speaker 1: from the very start that there can be no other
50:32
Speaker 1: person than George Washington. The New Englanders want a Virginian.
50:36
Speaker 1: It's the most populous. It's the richest state. And they
50:40
Speaker 1: know this person has been around since he's a 22-year-old
50:45
Speaker 1: militia officer who probably fires the first shot in the
50:48
Speaker 1: French and Indian War. That starts the global conflict that
50:52
Speaker 1: everyone else on Earth calls the Seven Years' War that
50:55
Speaker 1: will set the stage for the American Revolution. And then
50:59
Speaker 1: he acts bravely in many other situations. And he is
51:02
Speaker 1: denied a commission in the British army. And he's like,
51:05
Speaker 1: F you, you know? And then he go, and then if,
51:09
Speaker 1: and he's a speculator in native American land that he
51:11
Speaker 1: doesn't own, he wants to sell to new colonists. And
51:15
Speaker 1: when the British put the line of demarcation, 1763, that
51:18
Speaker 1: separates says you can't go over because we can't afford
51:21
Speaker 1: to protect you. He's now pissed again. And then he's
51:24
Speaker 1: still this voice of reason that arrives in Philadelphia and
51:28
Speaker 1: just poised and people look to him for leadership. He's
51:31
Speaker 1: very good at picking out, you know, that guy has
51:35
Speaker 1: got great, he's got great executive function and great ability
51:39
Speaker 1: to pick subordinates without fear of being overshadowed. One of
51:43
Speaker 1: his great generals, Nathaniel Green, another great general, Benedict Arnold.
51:47
Speaker 1: And we introduced Benedict Arnold in the opening seconds of
51:49
Speaker 1: our first, our second episode. And it isn't until you're
51:53
Speaker 1: a third of the way through the sixth and last
51:55
Speaker 1: episode that you go, Uh-oh. But he's a hero at
51:59
Speaker 1: Quebec City. He's a hero at the Battle of Saratoga.
52:03
Speaker 1: He's been painted out. Of most of the paintings because
52:06
Speaker 1: he became Benedict Arnold. Isn't it nice to know that
52:09
Speaker 1: he's that great a general before he becomes Benedict Arnold?
52:12
Speaker 2: That term when I was a child, when I was
52:15
Speaker 2: in school, a Benedict Arnold was a traitor. A traitor.
52:18
Speaker 2: I think that's gone now. I think if I brought
52:20
Speaker 2: that up to my children, I said, do you know
52:22
Speaker 2: what a Benedict Arnold is?
52:23
Speaker 1: Oh, God. They say it was a mixture of.
52:25
Speaker 2: It's like an Arnold Palmer.
52:27
Speaker 1: It's like an Arnold Palmer. It's a mixture of iced
52:29
Speaker 1: tea and lemonade. Yeah.
52:30
Speaker 2: You know what?
52:30
Speaker 1: That's so terrifying to me.
52:32
Speaker 2: Weird, right?
52:33
Speaker 1: No, it's what happens when you atrophy this interest in
52:36
Speaker 1: American history or you think that it can be so
52:39
Speaker 1: simplified that you don't have to do anything. That's my job.
52:43
Speaker 1: I mean, I love it. And I love the fact
52:45
Speaker 1: that we can bring back these things for people and
52:48
Speaker 1: they can experience. And there isn't a person in the
52:51
Speaker 1: country that's listening to me now or that we're going,
52:54
Speaker 1: you know, 35 different cities all around the country talking
52:58
Speaker 1: about this. We made it for everybody. This is not
53:01
Speaker 1: made for the eighth grader taking American history, the 11th
53:04
Speaker 1: grader making it. It's for you. It's for anybody who
53:08
Speaker 1: cares about where their country came from and is willing
53:11
Speaker 1: to say, I probably don't know the full dimensions of this.
53:17
Speaker 2: It's probably impossible to teach it in the way that
53:20
Speaker 2: you can in a documentary. I think it's the most
53:22
Speaker 2: effective form of expressing these things. I mean, obviously, there's
53:26
Speaker 2: some things that can be documented in books that numbers, dates, history,
53:30
Speaker 2: that would be kind of cumbersome to certain documentaries because
53:34
Speaker 2: it would interfere with the flow of the entertainment aspect
53:38
Speaker 2: of it. But in terms of absorption, in terms of
53:42
Speaker 2: stimulation and absorption, human beings are much more inclined to
53:47
Speaker 2: take it through one of your long pieces like the
53:50
Speaker 2: Vietnam one, the 18-hour piece.
53:52
Speaker 1: That's exactly right. I think what happens is that It's
53:56
Speaker 1: so interesting because we understand, as you're referencing the power
54:00
Speaker 1: of a book, still the greatest mechanical invention there is,
54:05
Speaker 1: that it can go into some depths, a documentary do.
54:07
Speaker 1: But a documentary can hold lots of different opposing points
54:11
Speaker 1: of view, not make them arguments, but allow people to
54:13
Speaker 1: have different points of view and sort of collect, almost
54:16
Speaker 1: like spokes in the wheel. You want to get to
54:17
Speaker 1: the hub. That's whatever it is that you're after. But
54:21
Speaker 1: the wheel is much stronger by all those spokes. And unfortunately,
54:25
Speaker 1: too often... In history or in teaching, we subscribe to
54:29
Speaker 1: one particular theory of history, right? That it's got to
54:32
Speaker 1: be this or it's got to be that. And what
54:36
Speaker 1: we've done is we've found the documentary and the storytelling
54:39
Speaker 1: aspects of it hugely, hugely valuable in communicating the complexity
54:45
Speaker 1: of the subject without... putting your thumb on the scale
54:48
Speaker 1: and making a political point. We're just, you know, look,
54:51
Speaker 1: I will be totally honest. History doesn't repeat itself. No
54:55
Speaker 1: event has ever happened twice. But Mark Twain is supposed
54:59
Speaker 1: to have said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
55:02
Speaker 1: If he did say that, he's exactly right, because human
55:05
Speaker 1: nature doesn't change. And so you watch these events. And
55:09
Speaker 1: when we finish working on it, I told you, we
55:11
Speaker 1: began this when Barack Obama had a year and a
55:14
Speaker 1: half to go in his presidency or a year and
55:16
Speaker 1: a month to go in his presidency. It's a totally
55:19
Speaker 1: different world, and we know that it rhymes, but we
55:22
Speaker 1: never once have concentrated in saying, oh, we're going to
55:25
Speaker 1: put our thumb on the scale here. We want everybody
55:28
Speaker 1: to watch. We have no axe to grind. We're just,
55:31
Speaker 1: as I'm saying, calling balls and strikes. And when I
55:33
Speaker 1: mean that, it would be like saying, let me tell
55:36
Speaker 1: you about Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson. They struck out
55:39
Speaker 1: a lot. Thanks so much. I mean, and I'm true.
55:44
Speaker 1: I have not told you anything that is not true.
55:46
Speaker 2: Correct? Right. Sure.
55:47
Speaker 1: They also hit a hell of a lot of home runs.
55:50
Speaker 1: And so calling balls and strikes is saying that what
55:53
Speaker 1: happens is the way we teach history is the way
55:56
Speaker 1: ESPN does sports highlights. It's always the home run. It's
56:02
Speaker 1: never the guy turned the double play or he doubled
56:05
Speaker 1: some guy off or there was some other thing. It's
56:08
Speaker 1: always the home run. And so nobody takes a strike
56:12
Speaker 1: in these highlights. And what we're trying to say is,
56:16
Speaker 1: isn't it better to watch the game and see that
56:19
Speaker 1: even Babe Ruth can only come up to bat every
56:23
Speaker 1: nine times. And even Babe Ruth fails seven times out
56:28
Speaker 1: of ten. He's a 300 hitter. A little bit more
56:31
Speaker 1: than 300 hitter. That's the great beauty of it. And
56:34
Speaker 1: so I think that we don't ever now think that
56:37
Speaker 1: he is a failure. We understand that the dynamics of life,
56:41
Speaker 1: the dynamics of this particular game, mean that the people
56:46
Speaker 1: who fail seven times out of ten and do it
56:48
Speaker 1: significantly are in the Hall of Fame. I mean, and
56:53
Speaker 1: that's the beauty of these storytellings. I'm not taking anything
56:56
Speaker 1: away from George Washington by making it complex. We're making
57:00
Speaker 1: him human. He's not a statue out in the park
57:03
Speaker 1: collecting bird shit. He's a real breathing human being. He's
57:07
Speaker 1: one of the richest people in America. He marries one
57:09
Speaker 1: of the richest people in America, a widow. And he's away.
57:15
Speaker 1: He makes one visit home, I think, to Monticello during
57:18
Speaker 1: the whole, I mean, to Mount Vernon during the whole war.
57:22
Speaker 1: He's dedicated to this thing. I mean, he doesn't have
57:24
Speaker 1: to do this, right? He's committed to this project of us.
57:30
Speaker 1: And that's the ultimate point I want to make about
57:34
Speaker 1: not just this film or Vietnam or all the things
57:36
Speaker 1: we've been talking about is that I've had the great
57:40
Speaker 1: privilege of making films about the U.S. for nearly 50 years, Joe.
57:44
Speaker 1: But I've also made films about us. That is to say,
57:48
Speaker 1: the lowercase, two-letter, plural pronoun, all of the intimacy of
57:53
Speaker 1: us and we and our, and all of the majesty
57:57
Speaker 1: and the complexity and the contradiction and even the controversy
58:01
Speaker 1: of the U.S., and that is a privileged space to
58:04
Speaker 1: be operating in, to be having been given the permission
58:07
Speaker 1: to do this for nearly 50 years, is just great.
58:11
Speaker 1: I think I have the best job in the country.
58:13
Speaker 1: And I'm always happy to meet somebody who's willing to
58:15
Speaker 1: contradict me. But it's only because you have a chance
58:19
Speaker 1: to work hard at telling the story. I mean, we
58:22
Speaker 1: lock the picture back in January. That means you're not
58:25
Speaker 1: going to do any more work on it. We've unlocked
58:27
Speaker 1: it hundreds of times just to make it better. Some
58:30
Speaker 1: historian said, I'm not sure if you can be that categorical.
58:34
Speaker 1: And then we put in a perhaps, right? Or you
58:37
Speaker 1: find out that image isn't, as stunning as we thought
58:40
Speaker 1: it could be. Could we swap that out? Oh yeah,
58:42
Speaker 1: that works better than before. Even after we were done, done.
58:46
Speaker 1: And I like the ability that by the time we're
58:48
Speaker 1: letting it go, it's like your kid, you're still, you know,
58:51
Speaker 1: licking the smudge off their face and, you know, making
58:54
Speaker 1: sure that their, their hair is, is tied up in
58:56
Speaker 1: a nice bow and, you know, have a good day, sweetie. Yeah. Yeah.
59:00
Speaker 2: Well, I think that gratitude that you have towards your
59:02
Speaker 2: work and this dedication to truth, because there's one of
59:08
Speaker 2: the problems with problematic historical figures is we tend to
59:15
Speaker 2: use modern ideological perspectives when we describe these people. And
59:22
Speaker 2: we try to show that we have a disdain for
59:27
Speaker 2: the way they live their lives and the choices they
59:29
Speaker 2: made in perspective with how we do today. And the
59:34
Speaker 2: problem with that is it comes off political or ideological.
59:38
Speaker 2: And you lose the real understanding of the complexities of
59:42
Speaker 2: history and of these human beings that lived in a
59:45
Speaker 2: very different time. 1776, even though it's only three people ago,
59:50
Speaker 2: it was a very, you know, people lived to be 100,
59:52
Speaker 2: three people ago. So it's a very different time.
59:55
Speaker 1: It's a very different time. And you make a really,
59:57
Speaker 1: really good point. When you take the judgments of what
1:00:00
Speaker 1: we know now, you can apply them, and then you
1:00:03
Speaker 1: end up with what I call that unforgiving revisionism, where
1:00:07
Speaker 1: you throw out some significant people with the bathwater revisionism.
1:00:12
Speaker 1: But let me just tell you, they all knew slavery
1:00:15
Speaker 1: was wrong. They all knew it was wrong, and they
1:00:18
Speaker 1: still did it. And there's a historian in it, Annette Gordon-Reed,
1:00:20
Speaker 1: who just says, you know, slavery is foundational to Thomas Jefferson,
1:00:24
Speaker 1: and he knew all his life it was wrong. and
1:00:26
Speaker 1: said it and wrote about it and tried to put
1:00:28
Speaker 1: in something to end the slave trade and end the
1:00:30
Speaker 1: Declaration of Independence, which no one would have. And she goes, well,
1:00:35
Speaker 1: how could somebody do something they knew was wrong? She goes, well,
1:00:39
Speaker 1: that's a question for all of us. And so Jefferson's
1:00:44
Speaker 1: neighbor freed all his slaves and urged him to do it,
1:00:47
Speaker 1: and he didn't, and his cousin freed all his slaves.
1:00:49
Speaker 1: So there's already that. The question is, If you are
1:00:54
Speaker 1: just taking the judgments of today to cancel somebody, you've
1:00:58
Speaker 1: just missed the possibility of getting to know George Washington
1:01:00
Speaker 1: or getting to know Thomas Jefferson. And if you only
1:01:04
Speaker 1: do people who are perfect, you're either lying about them
1:01:12
Speaker 1: or you've got very few characters. Because I don't know
1:01:16
Speaker 1: about you. I'm not. I presume you're not. I don't
1:01:20
Speaker 1: think you know anybody who's perfect. I don't know anybody
1:01:24
Speaker 1: who's perfect. And so then it's like history becomes, honey,
1:01:29
Speaker 1: how was your day? It doesn't begin. I back slowly
1:01:33
Speaker 1: down the driveway, avoiding the garbage can at the curb,
1:01:37
Speaker 1: you know, unless you get T-boned. In case that's exactly
1:01:40
Speaker 1: the way to do it. You edit human experience and
1:01:42
Speaker 1: you tolerate the vast experiences that human beings are, are,
1:01:49
Speaker 1: are so complex. And it's the, It's the interest. It
1:01:52
Speaker 1: was very interesting. We did an update of our baseball
1:01:54
Speaker 1: series called The Tenth Inning. And being from New England
1:01:58
Speaker 1: and being a Red Sox fan, the whole thing was
1:02:00
Speaker 1: just a disguise to be able to do the Red
1:02:02
Speaker 1: Sox comeback in 2004. But we were dealing with the
1:02:05
Speaker 1: great Atlanta team in the 90s and the great Joe
1:02:07
Speaker 1: Torre led Yankees and then Sosa and McGuire and then
1:02:12
Speaker 1: Bonds and then steroids and whatever. At the end of it,
1:02:16
Speaker 1: we're really trying to come to something about steroids and
1:02:19
Speaker 1: try to figure out how to deal with it. And
1:02:22
Speaker 1: Thomas Boswell, now retired as a great sports writer for
1:02:25
Speaker 1: The Washington Post, said, I think it's Keats, writing about
1:02:30
Speaker 1: William Shakespeare, who's a pretty good playwright, said that Shakespeare
1:02:35
Speaker 1: had negative capability. That means he could hold in tension
1:02:39
Speaker 1: the positive and negative aspects of a character for as
1:02:42
Speaker 1: long as you possibly could. without making that quick and
1:02:46
Speaker 1: facile and easy judgment that we make all the time
1:02:49
Speaker 1: in our lives. When the guy cuts us off, we
1:02:51
Speaker 1: give him the finger, you know, we yell, F you,
1:02:53
Speaker 1: whatever that is, we make judgments about it. And Shakespeare
1:02:56
Speaker 1: had that ability, even with the darkest characters, you know,
1:03:00
Speaker 1: the Iagos and the Richard III, you know, people who
1:03:04
Speaker 1: are deep and dark, he had negative capability. He said,
1:03:08
Speaker 1: that's what we need to grow in order to understand
1:03:12
Speaker 1: The steroid era, in order to understand how to deal
1:03:16
Speaker 1: with all of that. And I think that in a way,
1:03:19
Speaker 1: all of us have to kind of grow that negative capability,
1:03:22
Speaker 1: that ability to distinguish that nobody's perfect. And that if
1:03:27
Speaker 1: you superimpose this kind of abstract sets of judgment, nobody
1:03:31
Speaker 1: passes the test.
1:03:32
Speaker 2: Right.
1:03:32
Speaker 1: No one passes the test.
1:03:34
Speaker 2: That sort of performative purity test, too, I think it's
1:03:38
Speaker 2: a real problem with... Our current culture, where I think
1:03:44
Speaker 2: this is sort of a natural progression of an improvement
1:03:47
Speaker 2: of society, because we could all agree that society is
1:03:50
Speaker 2: far more just today than it was in 1776. And
1:03:55
Speaker 2: we know we're on this path, but it's a very bumbling, stumbling, fail,
1:04:01
Speaker 2: figure out why you failed, kind of succeed, but then
1:04:04
Speaker 2: also take a few steps back. Yeah, it's consistent. And
1:04:08
Speaker 2: I think in this process of this, unfortunately, you have
1:04:14
Speaker 2: performative virtue.
1:04:16
Speaker 1: That's correct.
1:04:17
Speaker 2: And this is a lot of people that want to
1:04:18
Speaker 2: tear down statues and throw paint on, you know, paintings
1:04:22
Speaker 2: and do things where they're trying to show that I
1:04:25
Speaker 2: am better than the people who came before me. And
1:04:28
Speaker 2: the problem with doing that in regards to history is
1:04:31
Speaker 2: we don't learn anything if you're not truthful. If we
1:04:33
Speaker 2: don't give this sort of like a really— objective analysis
1:04:37
Speaker 2: of all the factors that were taking place with these
1:04:39
Speaker 2: extraordinary human beings who were experiencing this thing that was
1:04:43
Speaker 2: wholly unique on this new continent and with this new
1:04:47
Speaker 2: idea of forming this experiment in self-government that hadn't existed before.
1:04:53
Speaker 2: And that you're going to, you have to say, you
1:04:56
Speaker 2: have to do it the way you do it. It's
1:04:58
Speaker 2: really the only way.
1:04:59
Speaker 1: I think it's the only way and it takes time.
1:05:01
Speaker 1: And I am very I have to acknowledge that there's
1:05:06
Speaker 1: no other place on the dial that dates me, you know,
1:05:09
Speaker 1: than PBS, right? Where I have the time to do it.
1:05:12
Speaker 1: It's sort of like an NIH grant. Like here, we'd
1:05:15
Speaker 1: like you to explore the possible cure to this disease.
1:05:17
Speaker 1: Can you have it next Thursday? Well, no, you can't
1:05:20
Speaker 1: have it next Thursday. That's what Hollywood says. I need
1:05:23
Speaker 1: it out because the other Marvel thing is coming out
1:05:25
Speaker 1: at the same time. What you need is we want
1:05:28
Speaker 1: to set you up with a certain set of circumstances
1:05:30
Speaker 1: that are going to permit you to have the best
1:05:33
Speaker 1: possibility of, of, of doing this. And so we've always
1:05:36
Speaker 1: hit our marks. We've always come. If, if we haven't
1:05:39
Speaker 1: been in budget, it's because we've expanded the film and
1:05:43
Speaker 1: then I've gone out and raised the money. So no
1:05:45
Speaker 1: one else was responsible for the fact that we decided
1:05:48
Speaker 1: Vietnam is not going to be seven episodes. It's going
1:05:50
Speaker 1: to be eight. And Oh, you know what? It's going
1:05:51
Speaker 1: to be 10 and that's 18 hours. And that's, you know,
1:05:55
Speaker 1: the way the Vietnam and it had to do with
1:05:57
Speaker 1: listening to the material, understanding how it spoke to us,
1:06:00
Speaker 1: you know, committing ourselves to recording Vietnamese voices, not just
1:06:05
Speaker 1: South Vietnamese soldiers and South Vietnamese civilians, but Viet Cong guerrillas,
1:06:08
Speaker 1: North Vietnamese soldiers, North Vietnamese civilians, as well as the
1:06:12
Speaker 1: range of Americans. And so one of my favorite scenes
1:06:15
Speaker 1: is a North Vietnamese soldier and a Viet Cong soldier
1:06:17
Speaker 1: and an American all saying exactly the same thing about
1:06:21
Speaker 1: the same moment in a battle, early battle, before there
1:06:24
Speaker 1: were technically boots on the ground. This was an advisor,
1:06:27
Speaker 1: an American advisor saying, But they're all talking about a
1:06:30
Speaker 1: helicopter flying over this one hedge. And the Viet Cong
1:06:34
Speaker 1: guy is behind the hedge. The South Vietnamese officer is,
1:06:37
Speaker 1: you know, next to the American guy. And they all
1:06:41
Speaker 1: have an experience of war that is exactly the same.
1:06:45
Speaker 1: And I love that. I love that.
1:06:50
Speaker 2: What was your first piece?
1:06:52
Speaker 1: Brooklyn Bridge. What year was this?
1:06:56
Speaker 2: So it came out, it.
1:06:57
Speaker 1: Was first broadcast in 81 or 82. I had been
1:07:01
Speaker 1: working on it since 77. I looked 12 years old
1:07:04
Speaker 1: and I was trying to sell people the Brooklyn Bridge.
1:07:06
Speaker 1: And people were, you know, telling me, oh, this child
1:07:10
Speaker 1: is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge.
1:07:11
Speaker 2: No.
1:07:12
Speaker 1: And I used to keep these two big, thick three-wing
1:07:15
Speaker 1: binders on my desk, all filled with rejections for that
1:07:18
Speaker 1: one film. I mean, literally hundreds of rejections. But I
1:07:21
Speaker 1: had read David McCullough's The Great Bridge, the epic story
1:07:25
Speaker 1: of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. And I went
1:07:26
Speaker 1: out to my partners. We just founded our company called
1:07:29
Speaker 1: Florentine Films. We were starving. We'd like maybe get a
1:07:33
Speaker 1: day's work or two days work a month as cinematographers
1:07:36
Speaker 1: and sound men and grips. And we were paying the rent.
1:07:39
Speaker 1: And that was that. I said, we're going to do
1:07:40
Speaker 1: this and I'll raise all the money. And I did.
1:07:43
Speaker 1: And it got I moved up to New Hampshire so
1:07:45
Speaker 1: I could. live on nothing in 79 and 80. And
1:07:50
Speaker 1: both those years, I made less than $ 2, 500. And chopped
1:07:54
Speaker 1: all the wood for my stove, split it, carried it,
1:07:58
Speaker 1: kept the stoves going. You wake up in the middle
1:08:00
Speaker 1: of the night and 4 a.m. in February and you go,
1:08:05
Speaker 1: I just heard the heater kick on. I got to
1:08:07
Speaker 1: go down and feed the stove. But it came out,
1:08:09
Speaker 1: I got nominated for an Academy Award. And that That
1:08:13
Speaker 1: was the sign to me that like I needed to,
1:08:18
Speaker 1: I'd hit a fork in the road. And like Yogi
1:08:20
Speaker 1: Berra said, you take it. It was to not go
1:08:23
Speaker 1: back to New York, to not go back to L.A.,
1:08:25
Speaker 1: but to say I'm going to be staying here because
1:08:28
Speaker 1: this is labor intensive. We're going to have to raise
1:08:30
Speaker 1: grants to do this stuff. I'm not looking for investors.
1:08:33
Speaker 1: We're looking for underwriting so that we are liberated from
1:08:37
Speaker 1: the suits that would come in and give the notes
1:08:39
Speaker 1: and say, oh, you need to be less sexy. Or
1:08:41
Speaker 1: more sexy or longer or shorter or more violent or
1:08:44
Speaker 1: less violent. I can sit here and tell you with
1:08:48
Speaker 1: a great deal of pride and not just for me
1:08:50
Speaker 1: but on behalf of the extraordinary people that work with
1:08:53
Speaker 1: me and some of them have been for 50 years
1:08:55
Speaker 1: and some of them for 30 years and some of
1:08:57
Speaker 1: them for 40 and, you know, a lot of people.
1:09:00
Speaker 1: of people that these are director's cuts that we haven't
1:09:04
Speaker 1: let it go. And they're the way the country has
1:09:07
Speaker 1: responded to them. Like the Civil War series, still 35
1:09:10
Speaker 1: years old. It's still the highest rated program in the
1:09:12
Speaker 1: history of public television.
1:09:14
Speaker 2: That's incredible. How did you have that clarity of vision
1:09:18
Speaker 2: as a young man to recognize that working in isolation
1:09:22
Speaker 2: in a small town? Was the best option because I
1:09:25
Speaker 2: would imagine if you had aspirations to being a filmmaker
1:09:28
Speaker 2: when you were younger the the call of Hollywood just
1:09:32
Speaker 2: the the call of being a part of an enormous
1:09:35
Speaker 2: organization Like being respected by your peers in this enormous
1:09:40
Speaker 2: or like that had to be at least somewhat attractive
1:09:45
Speaker 2: But how did you have the clarity to realize that
1:09:47
Speaker 2: that was not the correct path for you?
1:09:48
Speaker 1: I can't take credit for it. You know, I went
1:09:50
Speaker 1: to Hampshire College. My teachers were social documentary still photographers.
1:09:54
Speaker 1: I had a mentor named Jerome Liebling. And he was
1:10:01
Speaker 1: so firmly rooted in a kind of, you know, another word.
1:10:04
Speaker 1: We've been talking about virtue. Another word is honor or
1:10:08
Speaker 1: honorable that is not engaged and people don't really use
1:10:11
Speaker 1: it in ordinary conversations. He just instilled in all of us,
1:10:15
Speaker 1: I believe, all of his students, a sense of honor.
1:10:18
Speaker 1: So there was this responsibility to follow it through, to
1:10:21
Speaker 1: work really hard. I mean, I don't know anybody that
1:10:23
Speaker 1: works harder than us. You know, we really work seven
1:10:27
Speaker 1: days a week. We love it. I put my head
1:10:28
Speaker 1: on the pillow. I want to know that my girls
1:10:30
Speaker 1: are okay, my daughters, and I want to know that
1:10:33
Speaker 1: I've made a film better. You know, in some way, shape,
1:10:35
Speaker 1: or form. Seven days a week. Seven days a week.
1:10:37
Speaker 1: And it's not that you can't take a day off
1:10:39
Speaker 1: and you can't do something, but you're always thinking about
1:10:41
Speaker 1: this stuff and you want to make them better. And
1:10:43
Speaker 1: it's very funny. We're out on the road and we're
1:10:45
Speaker 1: showing the clips. And, you know, we've seen these clips
1:10:47
Speaker 1: a gazillion times. And I'm talking to Sarah Bostein, the co-director.
1:10:51
Speaker 1: And we just look at each other simultaneously and say,
1:10:54
Speaker 1: got to get rid of that. We have to change
1:10:56
Speaker 1: that shot. And so suddenly we're working with an editor
1:10:59
Speaker 1: who happens to be in Paris this semester and the
1:11:02
Speaker 1: editor that's.
1:11:03
Speaker 2: In New York.
1:11:03
Speaker 1: And we're changing things. And I love the fact that
1:11:06
Speaker 1: we did that. You know, I'm actually embarrassed that I'm
1:11:09
Speaker 1: telling you about it because I feel like in some
1:11:11
Speaker 1: ways I'm advertising. The fact that that's what we do,
1:11:14
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to say that somewhere along the line,
1:11:17
Speaker 1: I've made the opposite of decision of what was sort
1:11:22
Speaker 1: of career-wise supposed to be what I was supposed to do.
1:11:26
Speaker 1: In fact, Robert Penn Warren, the poet and novelist, told
1:11:31
Speaker 1: me that– he looked at me once and he just said,
1:11:33
Speaker 1: careerism is death. And I've never used the word career.
1:11:36
Speaker 1: I've always said my professional life because careerism suggests that
1:11:40
Speaker 1: you're– that you're following some sort of rut, and that's
1:11:44
Speaker 1: not what I wanted to do. What do you mean
1:11:47
Speaker 1: by rut? By just, you know, a carved path that's
1:11:51
Speaker 1: already well-worn. I mean, look, if you want to be
1:11:54
Speaker 1: a doctor or a lawyer, you've got to follow some
1:11:57
Speaker 1: well-worn paths just by virtue of that. Everybody that I
1:12:02
Speaker 1: know that's working in documentary that has been working at
1:12:05
Speaker 1: it for a long time and makes their living from it,
1:12:08
Speaker 1: have come from completely unique paths. It's been their own way.
1:12:12
Speaker 1: And I like the fact that I made this, no,
1:12:14
Speaker 1: I'm not going to go back to New York. No.
1:12:16
Speaker 1: Why would I move to LA? I'm going to be
1:12:18
Speaker 1: here in this little town in New Hampshire where any
1:12:22
Speaker 1: number of Oscar nominations and Grammys and Emmys means zero
1:12:29
Speaker 1: to the people that I live with. It's like, did
1:12:30
Speaker 1: you shovel the lawn, the walk of the of the
1:12:35
Speaker 1: lady next door who's not doing so well. Did you
1:12:37
Speaker 1: do this? Are you a good neighbor? That's the stuff
1:12:40
Speaker 1: that matters, and it's a good place to raise kids
1:12:42
Speaker 1: as well. And then the splendid isolation. There's a great tradition,
1:12:49
Speaker 1: as you know, in American history of the way in
1:12:51
Speaker 1: which wildness, nature, becomes part of the American catechism, that
1:12:57
Speaker 1: it's possible, Walt Whitman is saying, that you can worship
1:13:00
Speaker 1: God more closely in nature than in cathedrals made by man.
1:13:04
Speaker 1: This is the American catechism of being out in nature,
1:13:07
Speaker 1: and it manifests itself in different people who are aware
1:13:10
Speaker 1: of the power of nature. Nature reminds you of your insignificance,
1:13:17
Speaker 1: and that is inspiriting. This is paradoxical, right? That's inspiriting.
1:13:21
Speaker 1: Even though you're feeling insignificant, it's inspiriting, just as the
1:13:26
Speaker 1: egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self-regard, right? Right.
1:13:33
Speaker 1: So anybody who says, I'm this, it's actually diminished. The
1:13:36
Speaker 1: person who is humble is humiliated by their atomic insignificance,
1:13:42
Speaker 1: as one person said about Mount Denali in Alaska in
1:13:45
Speaker 1: the 19-teens, a reporter, is actually inspirited by that. And
1:13:50
Speaker 1: I wish to be inspirited because I think that's the
1:13:53
Speaker 1: only condition in which we're then able to to make
1:13:57
Speaker 1: the kinds of decisions, the creative decisions, the personnel decisions,
1:14:01
Speaker 1: the thoughtfulness or to have that regard for not necessarily
1:14:07
Speaker 1: following the well-worn path.
1:14:10
Speaker 2: It's just amazing.
1:14:10
Speaker 1: Does that make sense?
1:14:11
Speaker 2: It does. It does make sense. It resonates. It resonates completely.
1:14:15
Speaker 2: The natural art of nature, the true majesty of experiencing
1:14:22
Speaker 2: nature the vastness of the mountains and of the woods
1:14:27
Speaker 2: and of the, it, it, it humbles you in a
1:14:31
Speaker 2: way that nothing else does. And it grounds you in
1:14:34
Speaker 2: a way of recognizing. I don't want to say your insignificance,
1:14:39
Speaker 2: your relative insignificance, but it puts like, it's not just you.
1:14:45
Speaker 2: This whole thing is massive.
1:14:47
Speaker 1: My best friend.
1:14:48
Speaker 2: You're so fortunate to experience.
1:14:49
Speaker 1: Oh, you know, I feel so grateful, Joe. You know, my,
1:14:53
Speaker 1: Best friend once said to me when we were much,
1:14:55
Speaker 1: much younger, we'd been friends for more than 50 years.
1:14:58
Speaker 1: He said, there's only one center of the universe and
1:15:03
Speaker 1: you're not it. It was a great gift. It was
1:15:08
Speaker 1: a really great gift. And I don't know what I
1:15:10
Speaker 1: was doing or whether I was even doing anything that
1:15:13
Speaker 1: was inviting it. But he just wanted me to remember
1:15:16
Speaker 1: that there's no center of the universe.
1:15:19
Speaker 2: Well, you also get to see the stars, too.
1:15:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, out there. And that's another thing I was thinking,
1:15:23
Speaker 1: you know, there is that the beauty Emily Dickinson called
1:15:27
Speaker 1: sunsets and sunrises, the far theatricals of day. It's like
1:15:32
Speaker 1: a perfect description of it. But when you go out
1:15:35
Speaker 1: and it's 10 below zero in my town and I'm
1:15:37
Speaker 1: up a mile and a half out of town, which
1:15:40
Speaker 1: has five or six streetlights. So there's no glare and
1:15:45
Speaker 1: you see the Milky Way and you just you are
1:15:49
Speaker 1: just what what can you do but just be. humbled
1:15:53
Speaker 1: by the vastness of the universe and how relatively insignificant
1:15:59
Speaker 1: our lives are. But that in itself compels you, drives
1:16:05
Speaker 1: you to try to do something that would have not significance,
1:16:10
Speaker 1: but just would add something. So I live in a state,
1:16:14
Speaker 1: politics comes through all the time. Everybody's got a lawn sign, right?
1:16:18
Speaker 2: Left, right, center.
1:16:19
Speaker 1: My lawn sign. says love multiplies. It's the only functioning
1:16:28
Speaker 1: theory of the entire universe. It is what it's all about, right?
1:16:31
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter what religion, what philosophy you might subscribe
1:16:34
Speaker 1: to or not. Thomas Jefferson says in our film, if
1:16:38
Speaker 1: my neighbor believes in 20 gods or no god at all,
1:16:41
Speaker 1: it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
1:16:44
Speaker 2: Right?
1:16:44
Speaker 1: Like, we are so religiously intolerant today. Oh, well, I
1:16:48
Speaker 1: know that if I had been born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,
1:16:51
Speaker 1: I'd still be a born-again Christian.
1:16:53
Speaker 2: No, you wouldn't.
1:16:53
Speaker 1: You'd be a Shiite.
1:16:55
Speaker 2: You know? I mean, a Sunni.
1:16:57
Speaker 1: And you'd be at war with the Shiites across the
1:17:00
Speaker 1: border in Iran. You know, I'm sorry to break the
1:17:03
Speaker 1: news to you. And that all of them All the
1:17:06
Speaker 1: great religions have the same thing in mind.
1:17:09
Speaker 2: There's also that problem that people have with this rigid
1:17:12
Speaker 2: perspective that they would be so arrogant as to believe
1:17:15
Speaker 2: that they would be unique in that environment.
1:17:17
Speaker 1: Right.
1:17:18
Speaker 2: No, I would get it. I would understand it.
1:17:20
Speaker 1: No, you wouldn't.
1:17:21
Speaker 2: That's crazy.
1:17:22
Speaker 1: And who's to say? I mean, what was essential about
1:17:26
Speaker 1: the founders, particularly Jefferson, is that they were deists. And
1:17:30
Speaker 1: while they all had their own particular, mostly Protestant beliefs,
1:17:34
Speaker 1: denominations that they had come out of, and I think
1:17:38
Speaker 1: still to some extent in some cases practice, less so Jefferson,
1:17:42
Speaker 1: is that they believed that there was a supreme being
1:17:48
Speaker 1: who was disinterested in the affairs of man and did
1:17:51
Speaker 1: not distinguish between faiths. So that, you know, you see
1:17:54
Speaker 1: the baseball player who hits the home run and crosses
1:17:57
Speaker 1: home base and looks up and thanks. They never do
1:17:59
Speaker 1: that when they hit into a game-ending double play in
1:18:04
Speaker 1: the ninth inning, right? They don't say, oh, thank you, God,
1:18:08
Speaker 1: for giving me that. I've only seen that once. Pedro
1:18:09
Speaker 1: Marcina had given up a fairly significant lead, not the
1:18:13
Speaker 1: entire lead, to the Yankees in one of those great playoffs.
1:18:16
Speaker 1: And as he walked off and was pulled by the manager,
1:18:19
Speaker 1: he walked off and looked up and I spoke to
1:18:21
Speaker 1: him about it. I said, I've never seen anything like that.
1:18:24
Speaker 1: But this idea that all of our affairs are governed
1:18:27
Speaker 1: in that way, It's not what many of the founders
1:18:30
Speaker 1: believed in, that it is our obligation to lead that
1:18:33
Speaker 1: virtuous life. Don't mean to keep bringing you back there. Yes.
1:18:37
Speaker 1: Moves you closer up the stairway to heaven, up the
1:18:40
Speaker 1: ray of creation to God. And that it's your movement,
1:18:46
Speaker 1: not that supreme being's movement towards you. Oh, let's make
1:18:50
Speaker 1: sure that's a ground root double. Oh, let's, you know,
1:18:53
Speaker 1: that's not happening.
1:18:54
Speaker 2: Right.
1:18:55
Speaker 1: It is the ongoing chaos of the sequence of events
1:19:00
Speaker 1: and human nature. And we've got to A, be aware
1:19:03
Speaker 1: of the sort of incredible current, the force of the
1:19:07
Speaker 1: current of that human nature. But also the way in
1:19:10
Speaker 1: which my individuality, my will, the discipline, the virtue that
1:19:15
Speaker 1: I might be able to have could in some ways
1:19:20
Speaker 1: be singular and do something significant. Not because of that,
1:19:24
Speaker 1: but in order to be closer to that higher thing.
1:19:27
Speaker 1: And that's where they're all talking about it, that they
1:19:31
Speaker 1: want the founders higher emotions. As I said, not sentimentality,
1:19:35
Speaker 1: not nostalgia. Those are the enemies of anything. But the
1:19:38
Speaker 1: higher emotion, sometimes we say that the whole is greater
1:19:42
Speaker 1: than the sum of the parts. What is the difference
1:19:45
Speaker 1: between that? If you've added up all the sum of
1:19:47
Speaker 1: the parts and it comes here, what's that? And what
1:19:51
Speaker 1: it means is that as much as to build a table,
1:19:55
Speaker 1: to build a bridge or a highway, one and one
1:19:58
Speaker 1: always has to equal two. The things that matter in
1:20:01
Speaker 1: our lives are where one and one equals three. where
1:20:05
Speaker 1: we are able to see something that's bigger, that something
1:20:10
Speaker 1: is produced by the collision of two musical notes, by
1:20:14
Speaker 1: two images in a documentary, by the conversation between two
1:20:17
Speaker 1: human beings, whatever in which something is possible. I'm interested
1:20:23
Speaker 1: in whatever energy that creates and with whom. I mean,
1:20:27
Speaker 1: you just don't know that that person at the convenience
1:20:32
Speaker 1: store that you just kind of like, don't even look
1:20:34
Speaker 1: and don't even think about has a life as important
1:20:37
Speaker 1: as yours. You're driving on the highway. We're coming down
1:20:39
Speaker 1: from Dallas this morning on 35, you know, thousands, thousands
1:20:43
Speaker 1: of cars going out of the direction. The person in
1:20:45
Speaker 1: that car is looking and their life is as full
1:20:48
Speaker 1: as what I'm seeing out of my eyes. And I
1:20:50
Speaker 1: know sitting here that you're seeing something totally different than
1:20:54
Speaker 1: what I'm seeing. And that, that life is as full.
1:20:57
Speaker 1: And I think good history, good friendship, good storytelling, good conversation,
1:21:04
Speaker 1: all have at its base the respect for the other
1:21:09
Speaker 1: point of view, the ability to listen, and that kind
1:21:11
Speaker 1: of desire to be better. And in our country, we've
1:21:16
Speaker 1: actually got lots of blueprints for it. We've got lots
1:21:18
Speaker 1: of plans. They're out there. It's in the Declaration. It's
1:21:21
Speaker 1: in the Constitution. It's in the Bill of Rights. It's here.
1:21:24
Speaker 1: It's in that speech. It's in the Lincoln speech, you know?
1:21:27
Speaker 1: We're going to live forever or die by suicide, all right?
1:21:30
Speaker 1: Or then he's got two speeches, Lincoln does. One's a
1:21:35
Speaker 1: message to Congress in 62, what we'd call the State
1:21:38
Speaker 1: of the Union Address. And he says, fellow citizens, we
1:21:41
Speaker 1: cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass
1:21:45
Speaker 1: will light us down in honor or dishonor. to the
1:21:48
Speaker 1: latest generation. And then a few seconds later, he goes,
1:21:51
Speaker 1: the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the
1:21:54
Speaker 1: stormy present. As our case is new, let us think anew.
1:21:57
Speaker 1: He's both those things, right? We cannot escape history, and
1:22:01
Speaker 1: guess what? The dogmas of the past. He's in his
1:22:03
Speaker 1: second inaugural, one of the most famous addresses of all time.
1:22:06
Speaker 1: He's got Old Testament righteousness. You know, if we have
1:22:10
Speaker 1: to spend another 500 years drawing with the sword the
1:22:15
Speaker 1: blood that is drawn with the lash, meaning fighting to
1:22:19
Speaker 1: end slavery. We'll do it. And then he stops, very
1:22:22
Speaker 1: Old Testament. He stops on a dime and turns to
1:22:25
Speaker 1: this New Testament ending, the peroration, which says, with malice
1:22:29
Speaker 1: towards none, with charity for all, you know. And then
1:22:32
Speaker 1: it has that kind of unbelievable generosity in it and
1:22:36
Speaker 1: this ability to say, a second ago, I'm willing to
1:22:40
Speaker 1: keep this going for however long it takes. to end
1:22:43
Speaker 1: this scourge of slavery. Whatever drawn by the lash, drawn
1:22:49
Speaker 1: by the sword, we will do. It's just an amazing
1:22:52
Speaker 1: ability to understand us. And he took, he's the one
1:22:55
Speaker 1: who reached back over the Constitution and plucked Jefferson back
1:22:58
Speaker 1: into significance. And so when he gives the Gettysburg Address,
1:23:02
Speaker 1: four score and 87 years after the signing of the Declaration,
1:23:06
Speaker 1: he's creating the 2.0 operating system that we have now.
1:23:14
Speaker 1: We really do mean it, that all men are created equal.
1:23:18
Speaker 1: And that now, because of the sacrifice, there's not a
1:23:21
Speaker 1: proper word in that entire address. You know, the guy
1:23:24
Speaker 1: before him, Edward Everett, noted order, spoke for more than
1:23:26
Speaker 1: two hours. And he spoke for two minutes. And Everett
1:23:30
Speaker 1: wrote him and he said, Mr. President, I should flatter
1:23:32
Speaker 1: myself if I thought I came to the heart of
1:23:34
Speaker 1: the matter in two hours as you did in two minutes. Wow.
1:23:38
Speaker 2: It is.
1:23:39
Speaker 1: There's so many wows in the work that we have.
1:23:42
Speaker 1: And people say, well, what'd you learn differently? And you go,
1:23:45
Speaker 1: oh my God, are you kidding? Every day is this revelation,
1:23:49
Speaker 1: this sort of tsunami that breaks over you of new information.
1:23:53
Speaker 1: And then it's just, what is it that I can save?
1:23:55
Speaker 1: You'd assume, you'd presume completely understandably that making a documentary
1:24:00
Speaker 1: film on the American Revolution is additive, right? You're building
1:24:05
Speaker 1: this thing. It's not. I live in New Hampshire. We
1:24:08
Speaker 1: make maple syrup. It takes 40 gallons of sap to
1:24:12
Speaker 1: make one gallon of maple syrup. And so it's all reductive.
1:24:18
Speaker 1: We have 12 hours in this six-part series, and we've
1:24:22
Speaker 1: got more than 500 hours of material. Filming reenactors for years,
1:24:28
Speaker 1: some of them dressed in French uniforms, some of them
1:24:30
Speaker 1: dressed in militia, some of them in British, some of
1:24:34
Speaker 1: them in... you know, continental, some of them German, Hessian,
1:24:38
Speaker 1: some of them native, all of that stuff. And then
1:24:41
Speaker 1: we're using it to help the building blocks of doing it.
1:24:44
Speaker 1: At the same time, we've collected more than 12,000 paintings
1:24:48
Speaker 1: and drawings. We've taken maps. We've got more maps in
1:24:51
Speaker 1: this than in all the other films we've made combined.
1:24:54
Speaker 1: Sometimes we're just taking an old archival map and leaving
1:24:57
Speaker 1: it alone. Sometimes we're taking an old archival map and
1:25:00
Speaker 1: just putting red and blue lines showing the movement of
1:25:03
Speaker 1: British and continental soldiers. Sometimes we're taking maps and sort
1:25:06
Speaker 1: of making our own hybrid map that gives us a
1:25:09
Speaker 1: little bit more control. But all of these things, we're
1:25:12
Speaker 1: just practicing. I mean, I looked at something earlier today,
1:25:17
Speaker 1: which was just a minute change on a map that
1:25:22
Speaker 1: we highlight where a British admiral wanted to attack all
1:25:25
Speaker 1: these seaport towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and Maine.
1:25:29
Speaker 1: And the last one is Machias, which is up near
1:25:31
Speaker 1: the Canadian border. And we weren't seeing it. So we
1:25:34
Speaker 1: are trying to figure out how to light up Marblehead
1:25:37
Speaker 1: and Cape Ann and Gloucester and Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Saco, Maine,
1:25:42
Speaker 1: which was then the Maine Department of Massachusetts, and then Falmouth,
1:25:46
Speaker 1: which is now Portland, Maine, and Machias. And so we'll
1:25:49
Speaker 1: spend months trying to just get that one thing right.
1:25:53
Speaker 1: No one, if we hadn't done it, no one would
1:25:56
Speaker 1: care except for us.
1:25:58
Speaker 2: Right.
1:25:58
Speaker 1: Except for us, right? Yeah. It's that little thing. You know,
1:26:01
Speaker 1: I have friends who are woodworkers. And they'd never hide
1:26:06
Speaker 1: a mistake, right? Right. They'd never hide a mistake. There's
1:26:12
Speaker 1: a kind of craftsmanship to all of that, you know,
1:26:15
Speaker 1: out in the woods by yourself, just how you relate
1:26:17
Speaker 1: to nature, a kind of purity, a kind of intention
1:26:21
Speaker 1: that you have in relationship to it. I know you
1:26:24
Speaker 1: know all of that.
1:26:25
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think one of the things that's fascinating is
1:26:31
Speaker 2: that The isolation in which you work and the environment
1:26:35
Speaker 2: in which you live, which does highlight the majesty of
1:26:40
Speaker 2: nature and the humility of it all. In the expression
1:26:48
Speaker 2: of your work, you're giving this vision to people that
1:26:52
Speaker 2: a lot of them are living in this world that
1:26:55
Speaker 2: creates uniquely anxious and disconnected people. Because we're living in
1:26:59
Speaker 2: these urban environments without nature, because we're of light pollution,
1:27:03
Speaker 2: we see no stars. I think it's one of the
1:27:06
Speaker 2: reasons why we're one of the most confused societies ever.
1:27:10
Speaker 2: And art, and I think documentary film work is clearly art,
1:27:16
Speaker 2: especially art in providing an understanding of the true events
1:27:24
Speaker 2: of history.
1:27:25
Speaker 1: Yes.
1:27:26
Speaker 2: It gives people a sense of what it really means
1:27:28
Speaker 2: to be a human being in a different way. It
1:27:31
Speaker 2: illuminates these aspects of humanity in a different way that
1:27:35
Speaker 2: allows people just this kind of glimpse into like, what
1:27:37
Speaker 2: are we made out of? Like, what is it about
1:27:40
Speaker 2: us that makes us who we are and why do
1:27:43
Speaker 2: we do what we do?
1:27:44
Speaker 1: I can't imagine any human being could say it better
1:27:48
Speaker 1: than that, Joe. I think that's exactly right. This disconnection
1:27:51
Speaker 1: that we feel has come from the fact that we
1:27:54
Speaker 1: have become transactional beings. Nothing is transformational. And that we
1:28:02
Speaker 1: yearn nonetheless for that kind of transformation that takes place
1:28:06
Speaker 1: in our lives. And as Americans, those of us fortunate
1:28:09
Speaker 1: enough to be Americans with all the problems that are
1:28:12
Speaker 1: attendant to that statement, we have this glorious past that
1:28:18
Speaker 1: has the ability to take us out of that stupor,
1:28:21
Speaker 1: that take us out of that rut to be able
1:28:24
Speaker 1: to say, And with the exception of the film on Leonardo,
1:28:28
Speaker 1: the 40 or so films that I've done, some of
1:28:30
Speaker 1: them are hour long, some of them are 20 hours long,
1:28:34
Speaker 1: are all about us, right? All about us. And the
1:28:38
Speaker 1: thing that I was describing about the US and us
1:28:40
Speaker 1: is that I realize there's only us. There's no them.
1:28:45
Speaker 1: All of our world is about them, of creating a them,
1:28:49
Speaker 1: the artificiality that despots or autocrats always have to make
1:28:55
Speaker 1: of them. There's got to be an enemy out there
1:28:58
Speaker 1: in order to do that. There's only us. And the
1:29:01
Speaker 1: important obligation that we have is to tell our stories
1:29:09
Speaker 1: to everybody. That is to say, I do not wish
1:29:12
Speaker 1: to preach to the congregation, whatever my congregation is. I
1:29:17
Speaker 1: do not wish to preach to the choir. I wish
1:29:20
Speaker 1: to say we have an extraordinary country. I mean, I'm
1:29:26
Speaker 1: interested in its voices, I realize. I'm interested in its
1:29:31
Speaker 1: complicated voices, the true, honest, complicated voices of American history
1:29:35
Speaker 1: that's unafraid of controversy and tragedy, but equally drawn to
1:29:39
Speaker 1: those stories and moments that suggest an abiding faith in
1:29:43
Speaker 1: the human spirit, and particularly the remarkable role this republic
1:29:48
Speaker 1: plays in the positive progress of mankind. That's my play.
1:29:54
Speaker 1: That's my sandbox.
1:29:55
Speaker 2: Wow. It's a great sandbox.
1:29:57
Speaker 1: It's a great It's great, and, you know, there's implied
1:30:03
Speaker 1: discipline in that. You know, work with people, I mean,
1:30:06
Speaker 1: for decades and decades, and we work really hard, and
1:30:09
Speaker 1: we want to do a good job, and it's sincere
1:30:11
Speaker 1: in that regard. And because, as I said, it's PBS
1:30:14
Speaker 1: with one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other
1:30:17
Speaker 1: proudly out, you can make decisions that don't have to
1:30:19
Speaker 1: do with, you know, whether it's going to enrich your
1:30:22
Speaker 1: bank account. I mean, there are so many ways to
1:30:26
Speaker 1: measure richness that don't have to do with the bottom line.
1:30:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
1:30:29
Speaker 1: You know, one of the things that Americans have done,
1:30:31
Speaker 1: we've incubated lots of great ideas because of those two
1:30:34
Speaker 1: oceans and those two relatively benign names. One of the things,
1:30:38
Speaker 1: and de Tocqueville noticed this when he came through in
1:30:40
Speaker 1: the 1830s, was so into money and the almighty dollar,
1:30:44
Speaker 1: he called it, that was the religion of America. And
1:30:48
Speaker 1: that has its cost. It obviously has some nice attributes.
1:30:53
Speaker 1: It has a spiritual cost. It has a spiritual cost
1:30:56
Speaker 1: that is... profound. You know, the Old Testament again said,
1:31:02
Speaker 1: it is easier for a camel to pass through the
1:31:05
Speaker 1: eye of a needle than a rich man to reach
1:31:07
Speaker 1: the kingdom of heaven. And that's tough for Americans to hear.
1:31:14
Speaker 1: It is so tough for Americans to hear, particularly since
1:31:18
Speaker 1: we have so many preachers who are certain that it's
1:31:21
Speaker 1: okay to be both, you know? And at some point
1:31:24
Speaker 1: you have to realize, you know, something is lost and
1:31:28
Speaker 1: there is richness in relationships. There's richness in children. There's
1:31:34
Speaker 1: richness in art, in associations, in knowledge. I mean, your
1:31:39
Speaker 1: curiosity is so palpable. You know, I was listening to
1:31:44
Speaker 1: you speaking to my friend Elliot West, who's written about
1:31:48
Speaker 1: the Buffalo and Native peoples and the sort of prehistory
1:31:52
Speaker 1: of the American West. And you can just hear there
1:31:55
Speaker 1: is this preternatural sort of interest in curiosity and like,
1:32:00
Speaker 1: how does it work? We're all given a really short
1:32:05
Speaker 1: period of time and the bad news is, maybe it's
1:32:08
Speaker 1: the bad news, maybe it's also the good news, is
1:32:10
Speaker 1: none of us are getting out of here alive. None
1:32:13
Speaker 1: of us. And then it comes back to us. What
1:32:18
Speaker 1: are we going to do?
1:32:18
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:32:19
Speaker 1: What are we going to do? And it doesn't matter.
1:32:21
Speaker 1: You don't have to make documentary films. You don't have
1:32:23
Speaker 1: to have radio shows. You just You can raise a child.
1:32:27
Speaker 1: You can tend a garden. You can build a bridge.
1:32:30
Speaker 1: All of these things are legitimate. It just requires your
1:32:33
Speaker 1: full attention and willingness to engage in that, whatever it
1:32:39
Speaker 1: might be.
1:32:40
Speaker 2: Whatever it is.
1:32:41
Speaker 1: I've got a friend in my little town. I've known
1:32:42
Speaker 1: him for 40 years. I think we probably have opposite
1:32:47
Speaker 1: political views.
1:32:48
Speaker 2: I don't know.
1:32:49
Speaker 1: But I adore this man. He builds stone walls. He's like,
1:32:54
Speaker 1: if you come to my house, and you see the
1:32:55
Speaker 1: walls that he's built, it's like, you know, you don't
1:33:00
Speaker 1: need to go to Chartres or Notre Dame and just say, whoa,
1:33:04
Speaker 1: Dougie did this really great job here.
1:33:06
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:33:06
Speaker 1: You know, and, and, and you just love him for
1:33:09
Speaker 1: that dedication to saying, I could just do this in
1:33:14
Speaker 1: this moment to the best of my ability. People always say,
1:33:17
Speaker 1: do you ever go back to your earlier films and
1:33:18
Speaker 1: want to change it?
1:33:19
Speaker 2: And I go, no. Right.
1:33:21
Speaker 1: It's like, it's like a photo album where you go
1:33:23
Speaker 1: back and You're wearing a Paisley shirt with a big
1:33:25
Speaker 1: collar and you go, who the hell thought that was
1:33:29
Speaker 1: a good look? But you don't tear that picture out
1:33:31
Speaker 1: of the album. You say, that's who I was.
1:33:34
Speaker 2: That's the time.
1:33:35
Speaker 1: That's the time. That's who I was.
1:33:37
Speaker 2: What an extraordinary hypocrisy to have a rich preacher. I
1:33:41
Speaker 2: was thinking that while you were saying that, you know,
1:33:44
Speaker 2: based upon that biblical quote, what a bizarre, like blatant
1:33:51
Speaker 2: in your face hypocrisy. Have a rich preacher.
1:33:55
Speaker 1: Um, Jesus Christ did not intend to start a religion.
1:34:01
Speaker 1: Other people who liked what he said started a religion
1:34:05
Speaker 1: long after he was crucified. So religions themselves is so
1:34:11
Speaker 1: interesting that all of them that have at the root
1:34:13
Speaker 1: of their, um, their philosophy, the exact same thing, exact
1:34:18
Speaker 1: same thing, all of them, you know, about doing to others. It's,
1:34:21
Speaker 1: it's essentially about love. And, um, And yet religions seem
1:34:26
Speaker 1: to be sometimes the cause of most of the pain
1:34:29
Speaker 1: in there. It means that somewhere along the line from
1:34:33
Speaker 1: the original message to the expression, stuff gets corrupted. And
1:34:37
Speaker 1: you can convince yourself that having as a guru in Oregon,
1:34:41
Speaker 1: 52 Rolls Royces.
1:34:44
Speaker 2: Or a giant arena that you have your congregation meet
1:34:49
Speaker 2: you at every Sunday. It's just such a uniquely American thing,
1:34:52
Speaker 2: the megachurch pastor. And uniquely... sort of adapted to this
1:34:59
Speaker 2: bizarre society where the bottom line is numbers. It's ones
1:35:05
Speaker 2: and zeros on a ledger.
1:35:06
Speaker 1: It's important. You know, let's not downplay it. Oh, yeah.
1:35:08
Speaker 2: It's better than not having any money.
1:35:10
Speaker 1: It's better than not having any money.
1:35:12
Speaker 2: But it shouldn't be.
1:35:12
Speaker 1: Shelby Foote, who was our talking head in the Civil War,
1:35:15
Speaker 1: said that money, the only thing it could buy you
1:35:17
Speaker 1: is privacy and service. Meaning, you know, you can get
1:35:20
Speaker 1: somebody to mow your lawn if you need that to happen.
1:35:23
Speaker 1: And you can be a little bit private, but If
1:35:25
Speaker 1: you think it's going to be doing a lot, lot
1:35:27
Speaker 1: more than that, you've already begun to atrophy that awareness
1:35:34
Speaker 1: of being alive, that I think everybody wants to feel
1:35:37
Speaker 1: that sense of vivifying oneness.
1:35:41
Speaker 2: It's also a foolish pursuit to try to be better
1:35:44
Speaker 2: than people by just having more numbers. It's a really
1:35:49
Speaker 2: crazy thing people do.
1:35:49
Speaker 1: Do you know the poor in the United States— The
1:35:53
Speaker 1: studies have shown give away well more of their disposable income.
1:35:57
Speaker 1: You know, if you've got $ 100 and your friend comes
1:36:00
Speaker 1: up and says, hey, man, I need $ 100, you give $ 100.
1:36:04
Speaker 1: If you've got $ 1, 000 and somebody goes up and says, hey,
1:36:06
Speaker 1: I want $ 100, you go, well, then I will not
1:36:09
Speaker 1: have $ 1, 000. I will have only $ 900. And this works
1:36:12
Speaker 1: all the way up to $ 100 billion. You're right. I
1:36:16
Speaker 1: know that is. It's so interesting that somehow... This is
1:36:23
Speaker 1: what we think is... Or even the folks who are
1:36:27
Speaker 1: dedicated to spending, prolonging their lives with these other things. Yeah.
1:36:32
Speaker 1: It really is the quality of life is the much
1:36:35
Speaker 1: more important thing. Right. You know, how generous you are.
1:36:39
Speaker 1: You know, I always tell my girls when they're in trouble,
1:36:42
Speaker 1: I say the three things. And one is, this won't last.
1:36:47
Speaker 1: Get help from others and be kind to yourself. You know, just...
1:36:52
Speaker 1: There's no yes buts to those. I mean, which is
1:36:55
Speaker 1: where when you're a teenager, anxious, there's always, or an adult,
1:37:00
Speaker 1: there's always a kind of a yes but. But, you know,
1:37:03
Speaker 1: just things will change. It always does. There's always change.
1:37:06
Speaker 1: Maybe it gets worse. Maybe it gets better. Probably gets better.
1:37:10
Speaker 1: And it's no harm in reaching out to other people.
1:37:13
Speaker 1: And the hardest thing of all is to be kind
1:37:14
Speaker 1: to yourself.
1:37:15
Speaker 2: Yes. I say the same things and I also say,
1:37:18
Speaker 2: Find something that you love, not that people love you for.
1:37:22
Speaker 2: That's right. Find the thing that you, whatever it is,
1:37:25
Speaker 2: like that you're uniquely drawn to and let that change
1:37:28
Speaker 2: over time. If you don't want, if you don't love
1:37:30
Speaker 2: that anymore and there's a new thing that you love,
1:37:32
Speaker 2: pursue that. But find the thing that really calls to you.
1:37:37
Speaker 1: This is what Robert Penn Warren meant when he said
1:37:39
Speaker 1: to me, careerism is death. He just was saying, you
1:37:43
Speaker 1: got to find that thing. And people, when I talk
1:37:45
Speaker 1: to students, they want to know, what the secret is.
1:37:49
Speaker 1: And I go, there's only two secrets. One is to
1:37:51
Speaker 1: know yourself. And that may be understanding that I thought
1:37:55
Speaker 1: I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I don't have
1:37:56
Speaker 1: anything to say. And it's perfectly legitimate to do something else,
1:38:00
Speaker 1: to change that thing if you do it. And the
1:38:02
Speaker 1: other is to persevere because there's, in every single situation,
1:38:07
Speaker 1: many more people wanting to be in front of a
1:38:11
Speaker 1: mic every day than there are the possibility of being
1:38:16
Speaker 1: in front of the mic every day. And so you
1:38:19
Speaker 1: have to work at it really hard. You can't make
1:38:21
Speaker 1: assumptions about it. Sometimes you have to do, you know,
1:38:24
Speaker 1: I sort of felt like moving to New Hampshire was
1:38:26
Speaker 1: in the Godfather going to the mattresses, you know, it
1:38:28
Speaker 1: was like, okay, I got handed a job. I needed
1:38:31
Speaker 1: a job. And I was just so worried that I
1:38:33
Speaker 1: was going to put the film that I had shot
1:38:35
Speaker 1: for this first film on the Brooklyn bridge on top
1:38:37
Speaker 1: of my refrigerator. And I would just wake up and
1:38:39
Speaker 1: I'd be 45 years old and I would have, you know, not,
1:38:44
Speaker 1: not finished it. And so I got offered a job,
1:38:46
Speaker 1: which was like, you know, being offered $ 800, 000 a year today.
1:38:50
Speaker 1: And I said, no. And I moved to New Hampshire
1:38:53
Speaker 1: where I could live for nothing and finish the film.
1:38:55
Speaker 2: How did you choose New Hampshire?
1:38:57
Speaker 1: I had a lot of friends. I had gone to
1:38:58
Speaker 1: school in Western Massachusetts and had a lot of friends,
1:39:00
Speaker 1: sort of hippies and others that sort of after, sort
1:39:03
Speaker 1: of alternative stuff, that after they had not, some had
1:39:07
Speaker 1: gone to New York and pursued sort of traditional, professional lives,
1:39:11
Speaker 1: but others had become book salesmen or opened a natural
1:39:14
Speaker 1: food store or were a weaver or whatever it might be.
1:39:17
Speaker 1: And so a lot of them gravitated, uh, in Southern
1:39:20
Speaker 1: Vermont and Southern New Hampshire, a little kind of nice
1:39:24
Speaker 1: little nook. And so I ended up going to this town, um,
1:39:27
Speaker 1: and have literally, I mean, I walked in, I rented
1:39:30
Speaker 1: the house for the first two years, uh, first few
1:39:32
Speaker 1: years and, um, bought it after my daughters were born. Um,
1:39:37
Speaker 1: and I've lived, I've been in the same bedroom for
1:39:39
Speaker 1: 46 years. Wow. And it's, and I don't feel cut
1:39:42
Speaker 1: off or starved. I know every part of the country,
1:39:45
Speaker 1: my film's have covered every part of the country and
1:39:48
Speaker 1: part of the shoe leather that we have to do
1:39:50
Speaker 1: with PBS, you know, because they don't have the big
1:39:52
Speaker 1: budgets to smother the American Revolution coming November 16th over
1:39:58
Speaker 1: every bus and subway and billboard, is you go out
1:40:01
Speaker 1: and you talk to people. And that puts you in touch.
1:40:05
Speaker 1: And at the same time, you have this place to
1:40:07
Speaker 1: retreat and restore. And every morning, I take a three-mile
1:40:12
Speaker 1: walk with my dog into the, you know, what looks
1:40:16
Speaker 1: like 18th century America.
1:40:18
Speaker 2: Wow.
1:40:19
Speaker 1: You know, I mean, talk about rich. That's pretty rich, right?
1:40:23
Speaker 2: Right. You can't buy that.
1:40:24
Speaker 1: You cannot.
1:40:25
Speaker 2: Yeah. That's really so important. Really, because it's like, it's
1:40:29
Speaker 2: the greatest perspective enhancer ever.
1:40:32
Speaker 1: It is.
1:40:32
Speaker 2: I always say that about going to the mountains. There's
1:40:35
Speaker 2: nothing different. There's nothing about it that you can recreate. Artificially.
1:40:46
Speaker 2: You have to go to the actual source of nature,
1:40:50
Speaker 2: the true source of nature, to really appreciate that. I
1:40:53
Speaker 2: think it's like a vitamin. I think just like you
1:40:57
Speaker 2: get vitamin D from the sun, I think you get
1:40:59
Speaker 2: something from actual pure nature.
1:41:03
Speaker 1: I agree. Capital N.
1:41:04
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:41:04
Speaker 1: I agree completely.
1:41:05
Speaker 2: Real nature.
1:41:06
Speaker 1: I think, you know, Americans, you know, manifest destiny basically says,
1:41:11
Speaker 1: see that, you know, that river? Let's dam it. See
1:41:14
Speaker 1: that forest? Let's calculate the board feet. See that canyon?
1:41:19
Speaker 1: What minerals can be extracted?
1:41:20
Speaker 2: That's okay.
1:41:20
Speaker 1: And we've done that with 98% of the continental United States.
1:41:25
Speaker 1: But we also, in the midst of all of that,
1:41:27
Speaker 1: set aside these places that were so spectacularly beautiful, like
1:41:32
Speaker 1: Yosemite or Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon or Zion or
1:41:35
Speaker 1: Bryce or Canyons or the Everglades or Acadia or Smokies,
1:41:39
Speaker 1: and just said, I want my children and my children's
1:41:43
Speaker 1: children's children to be able to see these.
1:41:46
Speaker 2: That's one of the most extraordinary things about this country
1:41:48
Speaker 2: is what Teddy Roosevelt did with national lands.
1:41:51
Speaker 1: That's why I said it's the declaration applied to the land.
1:41:55
Speaker 1: No other countries. We invented national parks. Every other country has.
1:41:59
Speaker 1: Every other country has followed suit because we were saying
1:42:03
Speaker 1: land does not belong to a monarch. or to the noblemen,
1:42:06
Speaker 1: or to the very rich. And just reverse engineer that
1:42:10
Speaker 1: for a second and say, okay, we don't have national parks.
1:42:13
Speaker 1: So Yosemite and Zion are gated communities. You can't, you
1:42:18
Speaker 1: maybe have one little observational place along the Grand Canyon
1:42:22
Speaker 1: to look. The Everglades was long ago drained in his
1:42:26
Speaker 1: golf courses and strip malls and apartments. It's one of
1:42:29
Speaker 1: the most diverse ecological environments on earth, as flat as
1:42:32
Speaker 1: it is. It's just spectacularly diverse.
1:42:35
Speaker 2: Kind of a mess now.
1:42:37
Speaker 1: And Yellowstone would be a down-on-its-luck heyday in the 1950s
1:42:43
Speaker 1: amusement place called Geyser World. But it's not that. You
1:42:50
Speaker 1: and I and everyone within the sound of my voice
1:42:54
Speaker 1: own the most beautiful spots on the continent and I
1:42:59
Speaker 1: would argue in many cases the most beautiful spots.
1:43:01
Speaker 2: On the earth. Yeah.
1:43:03
Speaker 1: It's pretty great. And it gives us That unfettered ability
1:43:06
Speaker 1: to go into nature, to get off the trail, which
1:43:09
Speaker 1: 90% we can admit it. There's nothing wrong with that.
1:43:12
Speaker 1: 90% of the people stay within 100 yards of any trail.
1:43:14
Speaker 1: But to get off the trail and go out and
1:43:18
Speaker 1: see the magnificence of this planet. You know, the Colorado River. Yeah,
1:43:23
Speaker 1: you stand. And you know, the thing I like about
1:43:25
Speaker 1: the parks is that it isn't just what you see.
1:43:29
Speaker 1: It's who you see it with. Like you stand on
1:43:31
Speaker 1: the rim of the Grand Canyon. And the Colorado River
1:43:34
Speaker 1: exposes pre-Cambrian Vishnu Schist that is 1.7 billion years old.
1:43:40
Speaker 1: That's almost half the age of the planet itself. But
1:43:45
Speaker 1: the Grand Canyon works if you also are holding somebody's hand, right?
1:43:51
Speaker 1: It's like who you see it with becomes central information.
1:43:57
Speaker 1: to the experience of it. Miracle to the Grand Geological Library,
1:44:01
Speaker 1: all of the strata. It was like a library of
1:44:05
Speaker 1: telling stories of what was going on. It's why I
1:44:08
Speaker 1: love American sports. I really love them. But I focus
1:44:11
Speaker 1: on baseball because in football, the description is, oh, you know,
1:44:16
Speaker 1: Joe Montana threw to Jerry Rice with a few seconds
1:44:18
Speaker 1: left and we scored a touchdown and we won. Or
1:44:21
Speaker 1: Michael Jordan hit the three-pointer at the buzzer, tongue wagging,
1:44:24
Speaker 1: and we won. But the baseball story always begins, my
1:44:27
Speaker 1: mom or my dad took me to this game. And
1:44:30
Speaker 1: I remember walking out and seeing the green of the thing.
1:44:33
Speaker 1: And then Babe Ruth hit a home run or Hank
1:44:36
Speaker 1: Aaron hit a home run or somebody pitched the perfect game.
1:44:40
Speaker 1: It's all gauged with who you see it with as
1:44:44
Speaker 1: well as what the thing is. Wow.
1:44:47
Speaker 2: Yeah. Baseball is a unique American pastime. Because it's boring.
1:44:55
Speaker 2: You know, it's exciting.
1:44:57
Speaker 1: It's not for those of us who love it. And
1:45:00
Speaker 1: it was always the national pastime. It's had competition. I
1:45:03
Speaker 1: think one of the reasons why we sort of relegate
1:45:06
Speaker 1: it to this thing is that most of the other
1:45:09
Speaker 1: forms of entertainment, particularly in sports, are a little bit
1:45:12
Speaker 1: more fast-moving. George Will said to me, though, who's a
1:45:14
Speaker 1: big football fan, he says, football has two of the
1:45:17
Speaker 1: worst features of American life. Violence... Punctuated by frequent committee meetings. Right?
1:45:27
Speaker 2: Right? What a great quote. Isn't that fantastic?
1:45:29
Speaker 1: What a great quote. Yeah. No, but baseball has this thing.
1:45:33
Speaker 1: It's the only sport in which the defense has the ball.
1:45:36
Speaker 2: Right?
1:45:37
Speaker 1: The person scores, not the ball. Right. And where do
1:45:39
Speaker 1: you go? Home.
1:45:41
Speaker 2: Home.
1:45:42
Speaker 1: Yeah. And statistics matter. Like, maybe you know how many
1:45:46
Speaker 1: yards Tom Brady has, the greatest of all time.
1:45:49
Speaker 2: Probably you don't.
1:45:50
Speaker 1: But you know how many home runs Babe Ruth hit
1:45:52
Speaker 1: and how many home runs Hank Aaron hit. And you
1:45:54
Speaker 1: know these are things that matter. And if you look
1:45:57
Speaker 1: up the 1919 World Series, it says that the Cincinnati
1:46:02
Speaker 1: Red Stockings won the 1919 World Series. There's no asterisk.
1:46:07
Speaker 1: But then those numbers require you to tell a story
1:46:10
Speaker 1: about the Chicago White Sox, known to us forever as
1:46:15
Speaker 1: the Black Sox, who took money from Arnold Rothstein and
1:46:18
Speaker 1: other gamblers. to throw the 1919 World Series and give
1:46:22
Speaker 1: it to the much lesser team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings.
1:46:26
Speaker 1: It is great that the statistics matter. A 300-hitter means
1:46:30
Speaker 1: the same thing to my dad as it does to
1:46:33
Speaker 1: my grandfather and my great-great-grandfather and my great-great-great-great-grandfather. But you
1:46:38
Speaker 1: still have to tell stories.
1:46:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's... I mean, it.
1:46:45
Speaker 2: The stories are so important to people, too. I mean,
1:46:48
Speaker 2: it does... It's something that is a part of their
1:46:52
Speaker 2: life that they tune into to give their life more meaning.
1:46:57
Speaker 2: And that's something that I never understood about team sports
1:47:00
Speaker 2: when I was younger because I never liked them. Because
1:47:02
Speaker 2: I was always in... I always felt like I don't
1:47:05
Speaker 2: like team sports because I don't want to lose because
1:47:08
Speaker 2: Billy drops the ball in the back in the outfield. Like,
1:47:10
Speaker 2: I don't want to be a loser because somebody else
1:47:12
Speaker 2: fucked up. I want it to be entirely dependent upon me.
1:47:15
Speaker 2: Then after a while, I started realizing, like, no, this...
1:47:18
Speaker 2: There's a richness to being a fan. There's a quality
1:47:24
Speaker 2: of life that comes. There's an experience that comes from
1:47:28
Speaker 2: everyone being united in this thing, like wanting the team
1:47:31
Speaker 2: to win. That doesn't exist in individual sports.
1:47:35
Speaker 1: It doesn't. I agree with you completely. There's something wonderful.
1:47:38
Speaker 1: I was just talking to my best friend about this
1:47:40
Speaker 1: the other day, that my daughter... was at school and
1:47:45
Speaker 1: she was the co-captain, my oldest daughter of the, of
1:47:48
Speaker 1: her softball game. And 25, 30 years ago, we went
1:47:52
Speaker 1: to some misty Saturday morning game and it was like,
1:47:55
Speaker 1: they were winning three to two in the bottom of
1:47:58
Speaker 1: whatever the last inning was. And the other team had
1:48:00
Speaker 1: the bases loaded and no outs. And we got three
1:48:03
Speaker 1: force outs and it was like, the girls just immediately
1:48:07
Speaker 1: burst into tears, but it was just an amazing thing.
1:48:10
Speaker 1: Or just you're driving in a, in a you know,
1:48:13
Speaker 1: a suburban or a city area and there's a ball
1:48:17
Speaker 1: game going on and you're kind of slow. You lift
1:48:19
Speaker 1: your foot off the accelerator as the pitch goes. As
1:48:23
Speaker 1: it goes, there's something suspended as the pitch is heading
1:48:26
Speaker 1: from the pitcher to the bat or something. Everything stops
1:48:29
Speaker 1: and possibility is suddenly there in front of you. So
1:48:32
Speaker 1: I love the game so much.
1:48:34
Speaker 2: It's just a game that if you try to introduce
1:48:35
Speaker 2: it today, it would be very difficult to sell.
1:48:38
Speaker 1: You know, it's so funny. I get to more often
1:48:42
Speaker 1: than not and haven't been in a while because I'm
1:48:44
Speaker 1: such a dull boy and working so much to Fenway Park.
1:48:47
Speaker 1: And it's always just filled with people and it's always
1:48:49
Speaker 1: got lots of kids and they're always there because they
1:48:52
Speaker 1: want to be my screen saver of my phone. are
1:48:56
Speaker 1: my two daughters, my two youngest daughters at a Red
1:48:59
Speaker 1: Sox game, you know, 10 or 15 years ago. I
1:49:02
Speaker 1: haven't been taking it off the thing. You know, this
1:49:04
Speaker 1: one's now a sophomore at Georgetown University, and this one
1:49:07
Speaker 1: is going into ninth grade. But they were like eight
1:49:13
Speaker 1: and 13 then.
1:49:15
Speaker 2: Wow.
1:49:16
Speaker 1: And look at the expressions on their face. Yeah. It's
1:49:19
Speaker 1: just pure joy. Yeah.
1:49:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's, I mean, it really is uniquely American.
1:49:26
Speaker 1: And it's accompanied nearly every decade of our national narrative.
1:49:31
Speaker 1: Even into the 17th century, there are bits and pieces
1:49:34
Speaker 1: in which there seems to be some stick and ball game.
1:49:37
Speaker 1: And then after, before the Civil War, in the decades
1:49:40
Speaker 1: before the Civil War, they begin to combine rounders, sort
1:49:43
Speaker 1: of a British schoolyard game with cricket, and do something
1:49:48
Speaker 1: that's a lot better than both called baseball.
1:49:52
Speaker 2: And you know what?
1:49:53
Speaker 1: There was a guy in 1858 named Pete O'Brien. He said,
1:49:57
Speaker 1: you know, they don't play baseball the way they used
1:50:00
Speaker 1: to when I was a kid. This is 1858. I
1:50:02
Speaker 1: don't mean they don't play it with the same, with
1:50:05
Speaker 1: the same rules or the same, they just lost the
1:50:07
Speaker 1: spirit of it. So we've always been saying something's wrong.
1:50:11
Speaker 1: Something's gone out of the game. It's not, it's not
1:50:13
Speaker 1: quite right. And there's always not true. And just, it
1:50:18
Speaker 1: continues on.
1:50:20
Speaker 2: The steroid era to me was really fascinating because one
1:50:25
Speaker 2: of the things about baseball being so uniquely American is
1:50:29
Speaker 2: that the idea of someone cheating at this uniquely American
1:50:34
Speaker 2: thing was particularly offensive. Whereas at the same time, people
1:50:39
Speaker 2: were 100% taking steroids for football. Oh, yeah.
1:50:42
Speaker 1: Bill Romanowski was, you know, there was bottom of the
1:50:45
Speaker 1: fold of the New York Times. But as soon as
1:50:47
Speaker 1: the baseball player was implicated, it was the top of
1:50:49
Speaker 1: the fold. And that told you, even though the NFL
1:50:52
Speaker 1: had long overtaken baseball as kind.
1:50:54
Speaker 2: Of the national.
1:50:56
Speaker 1: pastime or football had done that. And I think it
1:50:59
Speaker 1: has to do with the sense that it... I mean,
1:51:02
Speaker 1: it does allow stealing of bases, but you're absolutely right.
1:51:05
Speaker 1: There is.
1:51:06
Speaker 2: Well, that's a strategy.
1:51:08
Speaker 1: There is that wonderful thing about baseball that it seems
1:51:12
Speaker 1: kind of pure.
1:51:13
Speaker 2: Yes.
1:51:13
Speaker 1: It seems American.
1:51:15
Speaker 2: And to cheat at that is offensive.
1:51:16
Speaker 1: And to cheat at that. And that's why, you know,
1:51:18
Speaker 1: I used to say out of some... I'm embarrassed by
1:51:22
Speaker 1: the kind of arrogance of it. I used to say, well,
1:51:24
Speaker 1: they should not... they should let Pete Rose in after
1:51:27
Speaker 1: to the hall of fame after he dies. Now he's died.
1:51:30
Speaker 1: And I'm, I'm still, I sort of feel like, who
1:51:34
Speaker 1: am I to say that? Certainly the hall of fame
1:51:37
Speaker 1: isn't like a list of angels. But I also still
1:51:43
Speaker 1: am not sure he should go in or shoeless Joe Jackson,
1:51:46
Speaker 1: as much as you want to resurrect the great story
1:51:48
Speaker 1: of the, of the most promising of, of the Chicago
1:51:52
Speaker 1: White Sox Kings in 1919, that through the, The World Series,
1:51:55
Speaker 1: the black stockings. I don't know. I mean, it's very complicated.
1:51:59
Speaker 1: Will Roger Clemens, will some of these other people that
1:52:03
Speaker 1: we know were juicing, Barry Bonds. Barry Bonds, doing interviews,
1:52:10
Speaker 1: is clearly or arguably the greatest player that's ever played baseball.
1:52:15
Speaker 1: And you could even say to the moment he looks
1:52:18
Speaker 1: at McGuire and says that he knows he's got tons
1:52:22
Speaker 1: more talent than them. And they're getting all the attention,
1:52:24
Speaker 1: and he says, I can do this. He's still got...
1:52:29
Speaker 1: He's right then, he's a first ballot Hall of Famer,
1:52:31
Speaker 1: and would arguably, if he just stopped right then and
1:52:34
Speaker 1: just quit and said whatever. But decisions are made, and
1:52:38
Speaker 1: then it becomes back to Shakespeare, negative capability. And can
1:52:43
Speaker 1: you hold in tension the great prodigious gifts and the.
1:52:51
Speaker 1: In this case, the sort of shortcut of the way
1:52:53
Speaker 1: in which these gifts were corrupted.
1:52:55
Speaker 2: Well, it was so uniquely American that there was congressional
1:52:58
Speaker 2: hearings on steroid use in a sport.
1:53:00
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:53:01
Speaker 2: Which was very strange. And again, while simultaneously it's ubiquitously
1:53:06
Speaker 2: used in football.
1:53:08
Speaker 1: And you also live in a society in which you
1:53:11
Speaker 1: take a pill to deal with erections. You take a
1:53:15
Speaker 1: pill for this.
1:53:15
Speaker 2: You go to sleep.
1:53:16
Speaker 1: You take a pill to sleep, to wake up. We're
1:53:19
Speaker 1: all drugged. And one person made in our 10th inning
1:53:23
Speaker 1: the update to the series on baseball that came out
1:53:26
Speaker 1: in 94, 10th inning came out in 2010. They said, look,
1:53:30
Speaker 1: you know, what if you're scraping, you know, middle infield
1:53:34
Speaker 1: or second baseman, shortstop, and everybody's taking steroids in the clubhouse.
1:53:39
Speaker 1: Everybody knows about it. Baseball has no rules against it
1:53:41
Speaker 1: right now until– It's the difference between you getting that
1:53:45
Speaker 1: four-year $ 28 million contract in which your family is set
1:53:49
Speaker 1: for life. You're from the Dominican Republic. You're from, you know,
1:53:52
Speaker 1: wherever you're from. And maybe ending up in AAA and
1:53:56
Speaker 1: that's it. And then you realize and you're being told
1:54:01
Speaker 1: by every signal of society, take something to be better.
1:54:06
Speaker 1: This then complicates the entire dynamic of our Of our judgments,
1:54:11
Speaker 1: of the facility of saying, oh, I'm really absolutist. I
1:54:14
Speaker 1: know this, you know. And I realize the more I go,
1:54:20
Speaker 1: the more disappointed I am in the arrogance of my
1:54:23
Speaker 1: certainty before. You know, I think one of the big
1:54:26
Speaker 1: things is, you know, we think that the opposite of
1:54:29
Speaker 1: faith is doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite
1:54:34
Speaker 1: of faith is certainty, which destroys the mystery of the unknown.
1:54:40
Speaker 1: And so I'm always taken aback, sometimes more often in
1:54:45
Speaker 1: retrospect than in the moment, when I could possibly do
1:54:47
Speaker 1: something about it, that I have been more certain about
1:54:51
Speaker 1: something and less trying to see it from another person's
1:54:56
Speaker 1: point of view or from the other side of the
1:54:59
Speaker 1: coin or whatever it might be. Or maybe there's many
1:55:01
Speaker 1: different facets to these things. As we were talking about
1:55:05
Speaker 1: with regard to the revolution and slavery and... what responsibility
1:55:10
Speaker 1: of imposing the morality of this moment on the previous moment,
1:55:13
Speaker 1: how much did that previous moment already understand the morality
1:55:16
Speaker 1: of it, which they did, what's the right answer? And
1:55:21
Speaker 1: I think staying open to the questions I know in
1:55:24
Speaker 1: filmmaking has made us better filmmakers. And it's not a
1:55:27
Speaker 1: royal we. I don't do this alone. There are a
1:55:30
Speaker 1: lot of people that I work with. They're handmaids. It's
1:55:32
Speaker 1: a small little nucleus of people, but they... They deserve credits,
1:55:36
Speaker 1: writers and co-directors and co-producers and people who are digging
1:55:41
Speaker 1: in the archives. Cinematographer I've worked with for 52 years.
1:55:45
Speaker 2: I think this is so important for people to hear
1:55:47
Speaker 2: because I think this very unique and noble perspective that
1:55:52
Speaker 2: you have is why your work resonates so much with people.
1:55:56
Speaker 2: I agree.
1:55:56
Speaker 1: I think what it is, is that whatever... I don't
1:56:02
Speaker 1: want to say sacrifices... But whatever discipline has been imposed
1:56:06
Speaker 1: on the process of whatever it is we do, people
1:56:10
Speaker 1: recognize that. And they know that they can see something.
1:56:16
Speaker 1: They may not like all the aspects of it because
1:56:19
Speaker 1: it is complicated. And you do see not just the
1:56:23
Speaker 1: intimacy of the us, but you also see the complexity
1:56:27
Speaker 1: and the contradiction and the controversy along with the majesty
1:56:30
Speaker 1: of the U.S. It's all there. But I do think
1:56:34
Speaker 1: that they know that we have earned their attention. That's
1:56:40
Speaker 1: the biggest thing we have. Like, you know this. You're
1:56:44
Speaker 1: asking an extraordinary amount of people right this second. You're
1:56:47
Speaker 1: asking them to devote their attention. I mean, the longest
1:56:51
Speaker 1: episode I've ever done is like two hours and 20 minutes,
1:56:55
Speaker 1: two hours and 30 minutes. That required every skill I
1:56:58
Speaker 1: had to be able to make that over 10 years
1:57:01
Speaker 1: of an episode, the fourth episode of World War II,
1:57:05
Speaker 1: a film called The War. But mostly it's two hours,
1:57:08
Speaker 1: and it is a supreme compliment if somebody will give
1:57:12
Speaker 1: me their attention for that amount of time, and then
1:57:15
Speaker 1: maybe for 10 episodes or nine episodes, or in the
1:57:17
Speaker 1: case of the American Revolution, just six for a total
1:57:20
Speaker 1: of 12 hours. That is a huge, huge responsibility of
1:57:23
Speaker 1: trying to earn someone's attention. And that's our job is
1:57:30
Speaker 1: really just making sure that that person who does not know,
1:57:33
Speaker 1: who's ignorant but curious, which is, of course, perfectly fine.
1:57:37
Speaker 1: If you're willfully ignorant, I really can't help you. But
1:57:41
Speaker 1: if you're curious and ignorant, then we want to make
1:57:45
Speaker 1: sure that if you've given us your attention for this
1:57:49
Speaker 1: two hours of the first episode of The Revolution and
1:57:51
Speaker 1: then stay for all 12 hours that, you know, we
1:57:55
Speaker 1: want to make sure that we've earned it. in the
1:57:58
Speaker 1: simplest way, that the equation is not at all above.
1:58:02
Speaker 1: There's no communication in this world, you already know this,
1:58:05
Speaker 1: except among equals. Like if I look up or down,
1:58:09
Speaker 1: already I've dislocated the possibility and the only communication is
1:58:15
Speaker 1: among equals and that's you treat your audience like they
1:58:19
Speaker 1: know something not that they're familiar with the subject but
1:58:22
Speaker 1: they're not stupid and they don't have to be added
1:58:27
Speaker 1: some sort of pablum. You don't have to simplify it.
1:58:30
Speaker 1: It can be complex because if it is, they'll recognize
1:58:34
Speaker 1: either themselves or they'll recognize somebody that they know that's
1:58:37
Speaker 1: very close to them. And that's the essence of good
1:58:40
Speaker 1: story is it's human beings telling stories about other human
1:58:43
Speaker 1: beings and what they do that has a resonance that
1:58:48
Speaker 1: accrues like the layers of a pearl imperceptibly. You can't identify,
1:58:52
Speaker 1: but you know, and of course a pearl is based
1:58:54
Speaker 1: on an irritant, a grain of sand that's bothering the
1:58:57
Speaker 1: hell out of that, you know, oyster, right? You've created
1:59:02
Speaker 1: this gem out of the friction and irritation and resistance
1:59:08
Speaker 1: and perseverance of having to do something.
1:59:10
Speaker 2: I think one of the most uniquely American stories that
1:59:13
Speaker 2: you've told is the story of Jack Johnson. Yeah.
1:59:19
Speaker 1: You know, it's interesting because One of the great themes
1:59:22
Speaker 1: in American history is race. I mean, it's obvious because
1:59:25
Speaker 1: we were founded on the ideal that all men are
1:59:28
Speaker 1: created equal, and the guy who wrote that sentence owned
1:59:30
Speaker 1: hundreds of human beings and didn't see fit in his
1:59:32
Speaker 1: lifetime to free them. But you also have individuality. And
1:59:36
Speaker 1: what is, with Jack Johnson, like a good boxing match,
1:59:41
Speaker 1: you have a black man who also just wants to
1:59:43
Speaker 1: be a man, wants to be fully himself. Now, the
1:59:47
Speaker 1: society doesn't really want him to do that, and they're
1:59:49
Speaker 1: going to put lots of constraints And he's going to
1:59:51
Speaker 1: overcome those constraints. And then when he does, they're going
1:59:54
Speaker 1: to find another way to box him in. But James
1:59:57
Speaker 1: Earl Jones was really great on this. He was almost saying,
2:00:00
Speaker 1: do not just be constantly distracted by the question of race.
2:00:04
Speaker 1: This is somebody who wanted to be a man, his
2:00:07
Speaker 1: own person. And that a great deal of Jack Johnson
2:00:11
Speaker 1: and all the travails and all the things that he
2:00:13
Speaker 1: went through and all the great, great, great, great skill.
2:00:18
Speaker 1: I mean, Muhammad Ali... We made a film on Ali, too,
2:00:21
Speaker 1: which I'm really, really proud of. But he's clearly studied
2:00:26
Speaker 1: Jack Johnson. He knew they would watch those films. Robodopa
2:00:30
Speaker 1: is Jack Johnson. A lot of that making, wearing your
2:00:33
Speaker 1: opponent out is Jack Johnson from, you know, an earlier century.
2:00:37
Speaker 1: And this is a time, I mean, his heyday is
2:00:40
Speaker 1: between 1905 and 1915 when more African-Americans were lynched for
2:00:45
Speaker 1: looking sideways at somebody. And he's openly defeating every great
2:00:51
Speaker 1: white hope that came at him.
2:00:52
Speaker 2: And dating white women.
2:00:53
Speaker 1: Dating white women and marrying white women. And so, you know,
2:00:57
Speaker 1: we call the film, you know, mostly we like to
2:01:00
Speaker 1: have kind of boring things like the American Revolution, Brooklyn Bridge,
2:01:06
Speaker 1: the Vietnam War. But we call that film Unforgivable Blackness,
2:01:11
Speaker 1: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. And I did
2:01:13
Speaker 1: that because the great black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois at
2:01:16
Speaker 1: the turn of the 20th century said, boxing is in
2:01:21
Speaker 1: great disfavor. Jack Johnson seems to be the cause. But
2:01:25
Speaker 1: Jack Dunstan did nothing that no other boxer or sportsman
2:01:30
Speaker 1: or even senator has done. Why then has it come
2:01:35
Speaker 1: to him? It all comes down then to his unforgivable blackness.
2:01:39
Speaker 1: That by taking the crown, by defeating all comers, it
2:01:43
Speaker 1: was an unacceptable situation. When in those days, being the
2:01:47
Speaker 1: heavyweight champion was there was a sense of this was
2:01:50
Speaker 1: the supreme masculinity of the world and that everyone went
2:01:54
Speaker 1: out of their way from John Sullivan to others to
2:01:57
Speaker 1: avoid fighting a black man. And finally, somebody paid Tommy
2:02:02
Speaker 1: Burns guaranteed $ 30, 000 to fight Jack Johnson on Boxing Day.
2:02:06
Speaker 2: The day after. What was that worth today?
2:02:09
Speaker 1: Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Millions and millions of dollars.
2:02:12
Speaker 1: Jack only got $ 5, 000, but he's happy to do it.
2:02:14
Speaker 1: He's been Going after Tommy Burns, no relation. And Tommy
2:02:18
Speaker 1: Burns was a pseudonym. I can't remember his name. A Canadian. Anyway,
2:02:23
Speaker 1: in Australia, they fight on the day after Christmas, 1908.
2:02:26
Speaker 1: And Jack Johnson just told you he probably could have
2:02:29
Speaker 1: taken care of him in the first inning. And he
2:02:31
Speaker 1: just keeps it going. They finally cut the newsreels off.
2:02:34
Speaker 1: They actually stop the fight because they do not want
2:02:37
Speaker 1: the public to see this. And when, after having digested,
2:02:42
Speaker 1: I think is a good word, all of the white
2:02:45
Speaker 1: hopes that were thrown at him in the intervening year
2:02:48
Speaker 1: and a half. They finally convinced Jim Jeffries, the guy
2:02:51
Speaker 1: who'd retired undefeated, the previous champion before Tommy Burns, to
2:02:57
Speaker 1: come out. And in Reno on July 4th, 1910, the
2:03:02
Speaker 1: fight of the century, Jack Johnson defeated, you know, no
2:03:07
Speaker 1: one thought it would happen, Jim Jeffries. And there were
2:03:09
Speaker 1: riots all across the country, all across the country, white
2:03:13
Speaker 1: on black riots. The Los Angeles Times wrote their lead
2:03:19
Speaker 1: editorial was a word to the black man. Do not
2:03:22
Speaker 1: lift your chest up too high. Do not put your
2:03:25
Speaker 1: face up to the sun. Do not. You are still
2:03:28
Speaker 1: the same lowly person you were yesterday just because Jack Johnson.
2:03:32
Speaker 1: And I mean, the idea that that, you know, it
2:03:38
Speaker 1: goes back to this issue. Washington knew it was wrong.
2:03:42
Speaker 1: Jefferson knew it was wrong. They made so much money.
2:03:46
Speaker 1: It was really hard to do this. I mean, Jefferson
2:03:49
Speaker 1: himself said slavery is like holding a wolf by the ears.
2:03:55
Speaker 1: You don't like it, but you don't dare let it go.
2:03:59
Speaker 1: And so what happens is that somebody like an Abraham
2:04:03
Speaker 1: Lincoln is born anti-slavery, right? But they're also a developing
2:04:08
Speaker 1: abolitionist movement. So now they want to abolish slavery. They're
2:04:12
Speaker 1: not just against it and understand that it's immoral. Nowhere
2:04:16
Speaker 1: does God say that black people are inferior to white people.
2:04:22
Speaker 1: But what happens is, even though most of the slavers
2:04:26
Speaker 1: know that it's wrong, but there's so many good profits
2:04:28
Speaker 1: to make, what happens when the abolitionists come along, that
2:04:33
Speaker 1: they begin to make arguments that slavery is actually good
2:04:36
Speaker 1: and that black people are, in fact, inferior. And so
2:04:39
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why the Civil War happens is
2:04:41
Speaker 1: this sense of threat to their economic power, which are
2:04:45
Speaker 1: the 4 million people in the 9 million populated South
2:04:50
Speaker 1: that are owned by other human beings. And it's an
2:04:53
Speaker 1: extraordinary dynamic. We face it today, the reverberations. And Jack Johnson,
2:04:58
Speaker 1: I think, is one of those magnificent cases where he
2:05:03
Speaker 1: defies your ability to put it in a neat, It
2:05:06
Speaker 1: defies your ability to make it binary. Like we live
2:05:09
Speaker 1: in this media culture, right? We live in a computer world.
2:05:11
Speaker 1: Everything's a one or a zero. Everything's a red state
2:05:13
Speaker 1: or a blue state. Everything's young or old, gay or straight.
2:05:16
Speaker 1: It's not that way. And so to tell a complex
2:05:19
Speaker 1: story of history, particularly like of Jack Johnson, is just
2:05:24
Speaker 1: to have your molecules rearranged. You know, it really is exhilarating.
2:05:30
Speaker 1: I probably said that word too many times. It's exhilarating.
2:05:34
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think he's also one of the rare cultural
2:05:37
Speaker 2: figures that where a sports figure defines a time, much
2:05:42
Speaker 2: like Muhammad Ali defined the Vietnam era. Like Muhammad Ali,
2:05:48
Speaker 2: when I was a child, my parents were hippies and
2:05:51
Speaker 2: they never cared about sports at all, except when Muhammad
2:05:55
Speaker 2: Ali lost to Leon Spinks and then had the rematch.
2:05:58
Speaker 2: We all watched. I remember this being a child thinking
2:06:02
Speaker 2: how strange it was. that my parents were so invested
2:06:07
Speaker 2: in Muhammad Ali. But what they were invested in is
2:06:10
Speaker 2: this man that risked his entire career and livelihood. They
2:06:14
Speaker 2: took his livelihood for three years for protesting the Vietnam
2:06:17
Speaker 2: War and refusing to go fight. And it was a
2:06:20
Speaker 2: big thing because he was a cultural hero. It wasn't
2:06:24
Speaker 2: just that he was the best boxer ever. He was
2:06:27
Speaker 2: also this guy that said, I'm not doing this. The
2:06:30
Speaker 2: Vietnamese people didn't do anything to me. I'm not participating
2:06:33
Speaker 2: in this. I'm not going to go kill anybody. I'm
2:06:35
Speaker 2: not doing this. And we were all like, yes. And
2:06:38
Speaker 2: then they took his livelihood away and he became a martyr.
2:06:41
Speaker 2: He became a hero and, you know, spoke out against
2:06:44
Speaker 2: the war. And then it was three solid years in
2:06:47
Speaker 2: his prime before he came back.
2:06:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an amazing story. And we told it just
2:06:53
Speaker 1: a few years ago in a four-part, eight-hour series. I
2:06:57
Speaker 1: agree with you 100%. I'm a little bit older. I
2:07:00
Speaker 1: remember when Sonny Liston And then Cassius Clay fought in Miami.
2:07:08
Speaker 1: And he was such a new commodity. He was rocking
2:07:12
Speaker 1: the boat with this verbal onslaught that we were for
2:07:17
Speaker 1: a nanosecond sorry that Sonny Liston lost because he was
2:07:23
Speaker 1: the person that we were familiar with. We knew this
2:07:26
Speaker 1: kind of black man. And we did not know this
2:07:29
Speaker 1: other scarier verbal person. and almost instantly, and my dad
2:07:34
Speaker 1: was an anthropologist. I mean, this was boxing. He was
2:07:36
Speaker 1: not doing this thing. But from then on, we became
2:07:40
Speaker 1: just loyal. We watched all the stuff through the 60s
2:07:42
Speaker 1: and then saw his opposition into the war. And then
2:07:45
Speaker 1: he said, you know, you could come and mow me
2:07:48
Speaker 1: down with a machine gun. I'm not going to go.
2:07:50
Speaker 1: And the ABC did some interviews with black soldiers in Vietnam,
2:07:55
Speaker 1: and they all to a person said, this is why
2:07:57
Speaker 1: I'm fighting. This is why I'm here. I'm fighting for
2:08:00
Speaker 1: him to say, I don't want to be here.
2:08:02
Speaker 2: Wow.
2:08:02
Speaker 1: And I just, I just thought it was great. And
2:08:04
Speaker 1: I also wanted to do this because nobody, people had
2:08:08
Speaker 1: done certain fights. People had done his fight with the government.
2:08:12
Speaker 1: I wanted to do soup to the nuts. We wanted
2:08:14
Speaker 1: to do soup to the nuts. My daughter, oldest daughter, Sarah,
2:08:16
Speaker 1: and my son-in-law, David McMahon, we made the film From
2:08:20
Speaker 1: birth to the death. This guy is, in the late 60s,
2:08:23
Speaker 1: the most hated man in America for that stance that
2:08:26
Speaker 1: you were describing about the drug. And he dies the
2:08:29
Speaker 1: most beloved person on the planet. And I really love
2:08:32
Speaker 1: the idea. I love the opportunity of being able to
2:08:35
Speaker 1: show how that happened in the midst of, you know,
2:08:39
Speaker 1: they call it the sweet science, but there are some fights.
2:08:43
Speaker 1: The three fights with Frazier are like as brutal as ever.
2:08:47
Speaker 1: Anything you could ever possibly imagine. And what they went
2:08:51
Speaker 1: through and what he ultimately, clearly, in retrospect, lost as
2:08:56
Speaker 1: a result of winning two of the three of the
2:08:58
Speaker 1: fights is one of those miraculous stories. And I agree.
2:09:03
Speaker 1: Like Jack Johnson is defining an age and so interesting
2:09:08
Speaker 1: that it's in a marginalized activity. Even back then, like
2:09:14
Speaker 1: heavyweight boxing.
2:09:15
Speaker 2: Well, marginalized but still elevated. The heavyweight champion of the
2:09:20
Speaker 2: world was still the baddest man on the planet, and
2:09:23
Speaker 2: people still wanted to watch it. But it was thought
2:09:25
Speaker 2: to be a backroom, sort of darkly lit, dingy pursuit.
2:09:32
Speaker 2: You learned it in the dangerous gyms. It's not something
2:09:37
Speaker 2: that you learn on a college campus with educated professors
2:09:40
Speaker 2: and analysts that have reviewed proper technique. Which is how
2:09:45
Speaker 2: they teach in Russia. Russia has a very technical version
2:09:51
Speaker 2: of it. Well, they do in America as well, too, now.
2:09:54
Speaker 2: But not back then. Back then it was dark, dingy gyms,
2:09:58
Speaker 2: mob-run businesses.
2:09:59
Speaker 1: The sporting world. And you were there. There were gamblers.
2:10:02
Speaker 1: There were women of the night. Money was being exchanged.
2:10:06
Speaker 1: A lot of mob stuff. Lots of throne fights. And
2:10:11
Speaker 1: it was in the interest. It was so interesting that
2:10:13
Speaker 1: that emerged this person who was so resolutely himself, just
2:10:18
Speaker 1: as Muhammad Ali would be decades later. It's why I'm
2:10:21
Speaker 1: drawn to it. I'm not a big fan of boxing,
2:10:23
Speaker 1: but it's irresistible. You can't take your eyes away from
2:10:26
Speaker 1: these two men when they're fighting. They're, first of all,
2:10:28
Speaker 1: spectacular specimens, and they are amazing fighters. They change the
2:10:34
Speaker 1: whole dynamic. And as you said, there's no greater boxer
2:10:37
Speaker 1: than Muhammad Ali.
2:10:38
Speaker 2: Well, the really terrible thing is Muhammad Ali's best years
2:10:42
Speaker 2: were taken from him.
2:10:43
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:10:44
Speaker 2: Because if you go to 1967, I've talked about this
2:10:47
Speaker 2: numerous times on the podcast, when he fought Cleveland Big
2:10:49
Speaker 2: Cat Williams.
2:10:50
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:10:51
Speaker 2: That fight was one of the most extraordinary performances of
2:10:54
Speaker 2: any heavyweight ever. It was, Cleveland was a dangerous guy,
2:10:58
Speaker 2: like vicious knockout puncher. He was a real specimen himself.
2:11:02
Speaker 1: Yes, he was.
2:11:03
Speaker 2: And Ali toyed with him. I mean, toyed with him.
2:11:07
Speaker 2: just boxed his face off, knocked him out moving backwards,
2:11:11
Speaker 2: just picked him apart, popped him, and showed movement and
2:11:15
Speaker 2: speed and agility and technique that we had never seen
2:11:18
Speaker 2: from a heavyweight ever.
2:11:19
Speaker 1: He was the greatest.
2:11:21
Speaker 2: The greatest.
2:11:21
Speaker 1: The greatest.
2:11:22
Speaker 2: And then three solid years of inactivity.
2:11:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this is what makes him so great.
2:11:29
Speaker 1: This is like Ted Williams, only much bigger, because Ted
2:11:32
Speaker 1: Williams loses a lot of time to World War II
2:11:35
Speaker 1: and to Korea. And comes back and, you know, still hits,
2:11:39
Speaker 1: you know, 350 or whatever it is he hits for
2:11:42
Speaker 1: the Red Sox, having lost what you'd consider the prime
2:11:45
Speaker 1: of his career in his early days in World War II.
2:11:48
Speaker 1: And as a fighter, this is not like the goodwill ambassador.
2:11:51
Speaker 1: He's flying fighter bombing runs. You know what I mean?
2:11:54
Speaker 1: He's like, really, it's every time he can not come back.
2:11:57
Speaker 1: And he's a magnificent stuff. But it's not denying it
2:12:02
Speaker 1: as they did in both Jack Johnson. They took away
2:12:04
Speaker 1: his titles. And he was fallow from 1912 to 1915.
2:12:09
Speaker 1: And then finally they put him in the ring in
2:12:11
Speaker 1: Havana with Jess Willard, who's a younger guy. He's 105 degrees,
2:12:16
Speaker 1: 110 degrees on the canvas. They're going to go 40
2:12:18
Speaker 1: rounds after the 26. This guy who's got 10 years
2:12:22
Speaker 1: on Jess Willard, he's 37. Willard's 27. You know, Willard
2:12:26
Speaker 1: finally gets in a thing and it's like, oh, thank God.
2:12:29
Speaker 1: And They would not let another black man fight for
2:12:32
Speaker 1: heavyweight champion until he was not Jack Johnson. That is
2:12:36
Speaker 1: to say, until he was Joe Louis, light-skinned, couldn't be
2:12:40
Speaker 1: seen with a white woman, couldn't smile at his victories.
2:12:44
Speaker 1: And Louis agreed to all of this. It was the unspoken,
2:12:47
Speaker 1: unwritten rule that you couldn't be an in-your-face black man.
2:12:51
Speaker 1: And that sort of obtained for a couple of decades.
2:12:54
Speaker 1: And then Ali came and he said... Broke the mold.
2:12:56
Speaker 1: Broke the mold and essentially... Basically, they used to say
2:13:00
Speaker 1: when he was training, Ali was training, there'd be ghost
2:13:05
Speaker 1: in the house, ghost in the house. And that meant
2:13:08
Speaker 1: that Jack Johnson was there. Oh, wow. And that Ali
2:13:10
Speaker 1: had to be that much better.
2:13:12
Speaker 2: Wow.
2:13:13
Speaker 1: Ghost in the house.
2:13:14
Speaker 2: Wow. The Ali of three years later was a completely
2:13:17
Speaker 2: different fighter, unfortunately. Physically, he didn't look the same because
2:13:21
Speaker 2: he didn't train for three years. He didn't do anything,
2:13:24
Speaker 2: and he lost everything. I mean, he still was one
2:13:26
Speaker 2: of the greatest. I mean, still was able to beat
2:13:28
Speaker 2: Joe Lewis, still was able to beat George Foreman, but
2:13:32
Speaker 2: he is a different fighter. He didn't move the same way.
2:13:34
Speaker 2: He didn't have the same physical build. He didn't look
2:13:37
Speaker 2: as good. He lost three solid years in his prime
2:13:41
Speaker 2: of training.
2:13:42
Speaker 1: And it makes those post-Vietnam years even more spectacular, the
2:13:48
Speaker 1: fact that he could prevail over Frazier and over, I
2:13:52
Speaker 1: mean— The rumble in the jungle is just.
2:13:56
Speaker 2: Crazy.
2:13:57
Speaker 1: Crazy. Crazy. What he did.
2:13:59
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:13:59
Speaker 1: What he did.
2:14:00
Speaker 2: Well, nobody thought he was going to win.
2:14:01
Speaker 1: No one thought he was going to win.
2:14:03
Speaker 2: Including Hunter S. Thompson, who famously sabotaged his career by
2:14:06
Speaker 2: not covering the fight. He was sent over there to
2:14:08
Speaker 2: cover the fight and instead decided to just swim in
2:14:10
Speaker 2: the pool and drink.
2:14:11
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:14:12
Speaker 2: Because he didn't want to watch Ali get destroyed.
2:14:14
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:14:15
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, he missed.
2:14:16
Speaker 1: One of the greatest fights of all. I remember I
2:14:19
Speaker 1: was in college still and we got... soundless black and
2:14:25
Speaker 1: white footage of the fight, some of it in slow motion.
2:14:29
Speaker 1: And my film teacher showed it to us and none
2:14:33
Speaker 1: of us were interested. I was like, whoa, this is
2:14:35
Speaker 1: stuff I did with my dad 10 years before. And
2:14:38
Speaker 1: it was him delivering a blow to Foreman and seeing
2:14:45
Speaker 1: in slow motion this halo of sweat coming off the
2:14:51
Speaker 1: afro Of George Foreman. I mean, I will never forget
2:14:55
Speaker 1: just the spectacular, almost the beauty of this incredibly brutal sport.
2:15:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, incredibly brutal. But in those moments, it elevated everybody
2:15:09
Speaker 2: who watched it. That's the crazy irony of it all.
2:15:12
Speaker 2: It's like in this brutality, this beat down of another man,
2:15:15
Speaker 2: everybody who watched it was elevated. Because someone did something
2:15:19
Speaker 2: that we thought was impossible.
2:15:20
Speaker 1: Exactly. Exactly.
2:15:21
Speaker 2: And it was that person who did it, this guy
2:15:24
Speaker 2: who stood up against the Vietnam War. And at the time,
2:15:28
Speaker 2: we didn't realize how bad the Vietnam War would look retrospectively.
2:15:33
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, he did not enjoy any benefit of the doubt.
2:15:37
Speaker 2: No.
2:15:38
Speaker 1: It was really another time of division and people exploiting
2:15:43
Speaker 1: division and making them. He was the worst them that
2:15:47
Speaker 1: there possibly could be. And I think The fact that
2:15:50
Speaker 1: he was able to stick to his guns. I mean,
2:15:53
Speaker 1: he could have said, OK, I will go and do
2:15:56
Speaker 1: goodwill stuff. And it would have been all over.
2:15:58
Speaker 2: Right.
2:15:59
Speaker 1: No, I'm not going to.
2:16:00
Speaker 2: Right.
2:16:01
Speaker 1: Famously, no Vietnamese ever called me the N-word.
2:16:03
Speaker 2: Yeah. And just the fact that at the time we
2:16:07
Speaker 2: didn't understand, we were still locked into this perception of
2:16:11
Speaker 2: military conflict being like World War II.
2:16:14
Speaker 1: That's right.
2:16:14
Speaker 2: Where it was imperative to save the world from communism.
2:16:18
Speaker 2: and that there was a real problem, there was a
2:16:20
Speaker 2: real threat to the American way of life and America
2:16:23
Speaker 2: as a whole that was going on in Vietnam, which
2:16:26
Speaker 2: now seems absurd.
2:16:28
Speaker 1: It seems absurd. There's a wonderful parallel. I mean, when
2:16:30
Speaker 1: I said that, Twain said that history doesn't repeat itself,
2:16:33
Speaker 1: but it rhymes. Like, we have a failed invasion of
2:16:36
Speaker 1: Canada in the American Revolution. There's a big debate over inoculation.
2:16:41
Speaker 1: There's an eclipse that takes place. You know, all of
2:16:44
Speaker 1: this sort of stuff. And there's always an interesting thing
2:16:47
Speaker 1: is that particularly in New Jersey and South Carolina, the
2:16:50
Speaker 1: British are always talking about, we have now pacified New Jersey,
2:16:54
Speaker 1: the province of New Jersey. We have now pacified the
2:16:57
Speaker 1: province of South Carolina, and then all of a sudden
2:16:58
Speaker 1: they have to admit that it's un-pacified because the patriots
2:17:01
Speaker 1: have taken over and done all this guerrilla warfare that
2:17:04
Speaker 1: has made it un-pacified. And at one point, George III
2:17:08
Speaker 1: and many others within the British government are worried about
2:17:11
Speaker 1: what we would call the domino theory. If we lose them,
2:17:14
Speaker 1: then we're going to lose Ireland. If we lose Ireland,
2:17:15
Speaker 1: we're going to lose Gibraltar and we're going to lose
2:17:17
Speaker 1: the subcontinent of India and we're going to lose. And
2:17:20
Speaker 1: so you go, there's nothing new under the sun. There's
2:17:24
Speaker 1: nothing new under the sun.
2:17:27
Speaker 2: The Vietnam War and your 18-hour piece on the Vietnam
2:17:31
Speaker 2: War is one of the more confusing aspects of the
2:17:37
Speaker 2: United States history because looking at it today, it doesn't
2:17:41
Speaker 2: make any sense how we sold this.
2:17:43
Speaker 1: No, and every president from Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon,
2:17:49
Speaker 1: even Ford. never told us the complete truth about it
2:17:53
Speaker 1: and did stuff that got Americans killed and lots of
2:17:57
Speaker 1: other people killed over what would have been, whether it
2:18:01
Speaker 1: was the Geneva Convention in 54 that basically said we
2:18:05
Speaker 1: could separate into two places and in two years we
2:18:07
Speaker 1: had an election which everyone knew Ho Chi Minh would win.
2:18:11
Speaker 1: If he left it at that, we'd be talking about
2:18:13
Speaker 1: three million people still walking the earth at least.
2:18:16
Speaker 2: Crazy.
2:18:17
Speaker 1: Crazy. And the communists, Chinese and the Soviets, were very
2:18:23
Speaker 1: suspicious of Ho Chi Minh. They thought he's not a communist,
2:18:25
Speaker 1: he's just a nationalist. And he knew, I'll tell you,
2:18:29
Speaker 1: the day that the, The Japanese surrendered in Tokyo Bay, officially,
2:18:37
Speaker 1: was September 2nd, 1945. That same day, in Badin Square,
2:18:42
Speaker 1: in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence, and he
2:18:50
Speaker 1: quoted Thomas Jefferson.
2:18:52
Speaker 2: Whoa.
2:18:53
Speaker 1: And standing next to him were OSS guys. By the
2:18:56
Speaker 1: end of September, the State Department, having realized, oh, this...
2:19:02
Speaker 1: this World War II is over, but we're going to
2:19:04
Speaker 1: be in a new, they didn't call it Cold War yet,
2:19:06
Speaker 1: but we're going to be in an epic struggle all
2:19:08
Speaker 1: around the world with communism. And this guy has been
2:19:12
Speaker 1: to Moscow and whatever, so he must be a communist.
2:19:15
Speaker 1: And so all of a sudden, the State Department, the OSS,
2:19:18
Speaker 1: had saved his life and parachuted into northern Vietnam looking
2:19:21
Speaker 1: for people that could mobilize in their help against the
2:19:26
Speaker 1: Japanese and found a sick and dying Ho Chi Minh
2:19:29
Speaker 1: we don't know what is malaria, whatever, treated him and
2:19:32
Speaker 1: brought him back. And he was, he didn't see us
2:19:35
Speaker 1: as the enemy. And yet we, in those two years,
2:19:39
Speaker 1: in 56, when they should have held an election, we
2:19:41
Speaker 1: had already decided to place our bets with Ngo Dinh Diem,
2:19:47
Speaker 1: who was a corrupt South Vietnamese politician who would eventually
2:19:50
Speaker 1: be assassinated by, you know, a general who would be
2:19:53
Speaker 1: a one in a series of generals until we got
2:19:55
Speaker 1: Chu and Ky, and those were the people who took
2:19:58
Speaker 1: us out of it or, or were on their watch when,
2:20:02
Speaker 1: when the North Vietnamese, you know, finally, uh, united their country. It's,
2:20:07
Speaker 1: it's just, and the lying, you know, that we have
2:20:10
Speaker 1: the tapes of Johnson and of Nixon and, and it,
2:20:13
Speaker 1: it just, you know, there's an arrogance to record yourself
2:20:20
Speaker 1: for posterity, you know, and you be careful what you say. The,
2:20:23
Speaker 1: some of the things that not all of them have
2:20:25
Speaker 1: been listened to, they haven't all been transcribed and, We
2:20:28
Speaker 1: were fortunate to spend a lot of time just listening
2:20:29
Speaker 1: and listening and finding just some stuff that, you know,
2:20:33
Speaker 1: if Nixon and Kissinger had walked into the peace talks
2:20:35
Speaker 1: that were already started in January of 69 and taken
2:20:39
Speaker 1: the terms that the North Vietnamese were offering, they would
2:20:43
Speaker 1: have had better terms than what they had in 73,
2:20:45
Speaker 1: and there would be fewer Americans, a lot more Americans alive, 25,000
2:20:49
Speaker 1: more Americans alive, something like that, and hundreds of thousands
2:20:52
Speaker 1: of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians. But they didn't want to
2:20:55
Speaker 1: be the first president to lose a war. In fact,
2:20:59
Speaker 1: they'd already soured the South Vietnamese, they said, as Humphrey
2:21:03
Speaker 1: was coming up in the polls. He only lost by 0.7
2:21:06
Speaker 1: points of a percentage in the election. He'd been way behind.
2:21:13
Speaker 1: It was making a lot of speed. A lot of
2:21:14
Speaker 1: it had to do with what people perceived as progress
2:21:16
Speaker 1: in Paris. And the Nixon administration, or not the administration,
2:21:20
Speaker 1: the Republican Party, the Nixon's election came, reached out through
2:21:25
Speaker 1: an intermediary to the South Vietnamese government and said, boycott
2:21:29
Speaker 1: the talks in Paris. And if you'd had another week
2:21:33
Speaker 1: or two to the election, you would have had Hubert
2:21:36
Speaker 1: Humphrey as president, or if they hadn't reached out to
2:21:40
Speaker 1: the South Vietnamese. And Johnson got it on tape. They
2:21:43
Speaker 1: were taping the the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington and
2:21:47
Speaker 1: the palace in Saigon. And he knew it. And he
2:21:50
Speaker 1: called up Nixon. There's a tape. And he goes, oh,
2:21:53
Speaker 1: I would never do anything like that. And Johnson either
2:21:56
Speaker 1: pissed off at Humphrey because he's not as much as
2:21:59
Speaker 1: a hawk as Johnson had become or more than likely
2:22:03
Speaker 1: unwilling to admit to your allies that you had been
2:22:06
Speaker 1: taping them in their own embassy in Washington and their
2:22:10
Speaker 1: own palace in Saigon. did not tell the truth of
2:22:13
Speaker 1: what he knew, that Richard Nixon had essentially reached out
2:22:17
Speaker 1: to a foreign power at the time of a national
2:22:19
Speaker 1: election to try to influence that election. Wow. Yeah, I mean,
2:22:23
Speaker 1: it's just endless.
2:22:24
Speaker 2: And the reverberations, like the one thing that it did
2:22:28
Speaker 2: that I think is like so pivotal is it destroyed
2:22:31
Speaker 2: the faith that the United States citizens had.
2:22:34
Speaker 1: In its government, telling them the truth.
2:22:37
Speaker 2: And in engaging in military activities. Because we had always
2:22:40
Speaker 2: thought we were a just government. We were a just society.
2:22:44
Speaker 2: And that if we got into World War II, it
2:22:46
Speaker 2: was to save the world. If we got into Vietnam,
2:22:48
Speaker 2: it was to save the world. Oh, no, it wasn't.
2:22:50
Speaker 2: Not only that, we got in on a lie. We
2:22:52
Speaker 2: literally got into the war on a false flag. That's
2:22:55
Speaker 2: exactly right. So it was entirely engineered. And then there
2:22:58
Speaker 2: was also the heroin production, which was a big part
2:23:00
Speaker 2: of the whole thing. The heroin trade, there was money
2:23:04
Speaker 2: that was being allocated to various individuals through the heroin trade.
2:23:09
Speaker 2: that was facilitating a lot of it. It's very confusing
2:23:12
Speaker 2: stuff when you look at it over time and you
2:23:14
Speaker 2: look back at it, you're like, what would the United
2:23:19
Speaker 2: States look like had clear heads prevailed? What would we
2:23:23
Speaker 2: look like today?
2:23:24
Speaker 1: The counterfact? Well, I think we'd be less divided. I
2:23:27
Speaker 1: think a good deal of the divisions now were sort
2:23:29
Speaker 1: of born in there, the entrenched positions that people take now.
2:23:33
Speaker 1: I think there's also a sense, you know, the Pentagon
2:23:35
Speaker 1: Papers were McNamara going to a gentleman that we interviewed,
2:23:41
Speaker 1: Robert Gard, and saying, I need to find out all
2:23:44
Speaker 1: the decisions. And he learned, not only was he lying
2:23:49
Speaker 1: at times, you know, going and getting battlefield reports and
2:23:52
Speaker 1: then coming back and saying it's all rosy, but everybody
2:23:54
Speaker 1: had been lying back to the Truman administration about what
2:23:58
Speaker 1: was going on. And it was just a series of lies.
2:24:01
Speaker 1: And that's what, when they asked the Rand Corporation to
2:24:04
Speaker 1: sort of analyze some of the data, that's when Daniel Ellsberg,
2:24:08
Speaker 1: who worked for the Rand Corporation, surreptitiously, illegally copied them
2:24:12
Speaker 1: and then released them to various newspapers. And they became
2:24:18
Speaker 1: what we call the Pentagon Papers, but they were always
2:24:21
Speaker 1: the Pentagon Papers. And they detail exactly what you just described,
2:24:26
Speaker 1: just a complete presence of both parties, a military industrial complex.
2:24:34
Speaker 1: When Eisenhower leaves, just before he leaves, he warns of
2:24:37
Speaker 1: the military industrial complex. He's not saying this is something
2:24:40
Speaker 1: that happened last Thursday. He's saying this happened the second
2:24:44
Speaker 1: World War II was over.
2:24:46
Speaker 2: Well, even before that. Smedley Butler talked about it in 1933.
2:24:49
Speaker 1: People, there was so much money to be made that
2:24:53
Speaker 1: nobody wanted to ramp down the armaments. And so you
2:24:58
Speaker 1: end up having these proxy wars. You end up having
2:25:01
Speaker 1: you know, these places where you're going to not have, uh,
2:25:05
Speaker 1: a hot war because that means the end of the
2:25:07
Speaker 1: world and in a world of nuclear weapons, but you're
2:25:11
Speaker 1: going to fight these proxy wars in different places. And
2:25:13
Speaker 1: in Kennedy, it's a doctrine that Eisenhower and Kennedy and
2:25:16
Speaker 1: they all sort of embrace and figure out that they,
2:25:20
Speaker 1: that they can do it. And then of course, Johnson who,
2:25:22
Speaker 1: you know, Kennedy inherits 700 advisors from Eisenhower. Johnson inherits 17,000
2:25:28
Speaker 1: advisors now in quotes. Um, when he comes in and
2:25:32
Speaker 1: he still has to wait until he wins reelection overwhelmingly
2:25:36
Speaker 1: a year later and it's only into the following march
2:25:40
Speaker 1: of 65 that he commits ground forces first army and
2:25:44
Speaker 1: first marines and then then army uh to vietnam and
2:25:47
Speaker 1: then we have the boots on the ground even though
2:25:50
Speaker 1: we'd had boots on the ground for a long time
2:25:52
Speaker 1: and engaged in combat these advisors were very much engaged
2:25:56
Speaker 1: That sort of stuff and then it just get escalates,
2:25:58
Speaker 1: you know, that's a peak. It's well over 550,000 soldiers
2:26:03
Speaker 1: in American soldiers.
2:26:04
Speaker 2: In country Insane it's also, you know the coming to
2:26:08
Speaker 2: fruition of Eisenhower's warnings and then this inspires this counterculture
2:26:16
Speaker 2: of the 1960s that sure reshapes art reshapes culture reshapes
2:26:21
Speaker 2: rock and roll politics politics everything everything changes and And then,
2:26:25
Speaker 2: you know, Nixon comes along and to stop the anti-war movement,
2:26:31
Speaker 2: to stop the civil rights movement, puts these sweeping Schedule
2:26:35
Speaker 2: I drug acts on all these different, you know, psilocybin,
2:26:40
Speaker 2: all these LSD, all these different things that they believe
2:26:43
Speaker 2: these people were involved in so that they could start
2:26:45
Speaker 2: arresting people and sort of throw water on the entire movement.
2:26:49
Speaker 2: And it's effective.
2:26:51
Speaker 1: It is so interesting to look, and I've got in
2:26:54
Speaker 1: my office this wonderful two-framed maps, if you will, and
2:26:57
Speaker 1: they're the intertwining of the various two parties, the Democrats
2:27:03
Speaker 1: and the Republicans, over time. So the Republicans are the
2:27:06
Speaker 1: party of Abraham Lincoln, the party of emancipation, of whatever,
2:27:09
Speaker 1: and the party that invented progressivism in the first part
2:27:13
Speaker 1: of the 20th century. Democrats had been not that place,
2:27:17
Speaker 1: but in the 60s it began to change thanks to
2:27:20
Speaker 1: Lyndon Johnson's of Austin, Texas, who understood that it was
2:27:26
Speaker 1: the right thing to do to put in those civil
2:27:28
Speaker 1: rights and voting rights acts and other things that we
2:27:30
Speaker 1: call part of his great society. A film, by the way,
2:27:33
Speaker 1: that we're working on now We'll be out in a
2:27:36
Speaker 1: few years. But he knew that the bargain would be
2:27:40
Speaker 1: to give up the solid South. I mean, you woke
2:27:44
Speaker 1: up on Election Day, if you're a Democrat, and you
2:27:46
Speaker 1: had every one of the states of the former Confederacy,
2:27:49
Speaker 1: all of them, all of them in your tally, and
2:27:52
Speaker 1: that's flipped. And now you wake up on Election Day,
2:27:56
Speaker 1: and you more or less have all the states of
2:27:58
Speaker 1: the former Confederacy on the Republican side who abandoned what
2:28:03
Speaker 1: they were about. And it's interesting to see in which,
2:28:06
Speaker 1: for self-interest, for whatever, I mean, Nixon begins it. Jackie
2:28:11
Speaker 1: Robinson is a Lincoln Republican, didn't go over as many
2:28:14
Speaker 1: black people did to FDR during the New Deal. He
2:28:17
Speaker 1: was supporting Nixon for president, but Nixon wouldn't come to, to, um,
2:28:21
Speaker 1: Carlin campaign.
2:28:23
Speaker 2: Wow.
2:28:23
Speaker 1: So he ended up voting for Kennedy and, and he,
2:28:26
Speaker 1: and Goldwater fully understood that, we're just going to now
2:28:32
Speaker 1: switch the Republican Party and go after just white voters
2:28:35
Speaker 1: who are disaffected with changes in civil rights. And so
2:28:39
Speaker 1: it's an interesting story of the way in which parties
2:28:43
Speaker 1: can change places and be the very opposite of the
2:28:47
Speaker 1: thing they were just a few years before.
2:28:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, because they're all gross.
2:28:54
Speaker 1: Well, I just find the thing is, you know, the
2:28:56
Speaker 1: bad word is, is progressive today. And this is, you know,
2:29:00
Speaker 1: the Republican Party invented progressivism. And they joined forces with
2:29:05
Speaker 1: some more liberal Democrats in the big cities, right? But
2:29:09
Speaker 1: their opposition to the civil rights bill is coming from
2:29:14
Speaker 1: Southern Democrats. And it's Lyndon Johnson knowing that he will
2:29:20
Speaker 1: have to use every bit of his powers of persuasion
2:29:22
Speaker 1: to to get it over, and he will require lots
2:29:24
Speaker 1: of Republican votes, and he does. So you do have
2:29:27
Speaker 1: something positive happening in American history where the two parties
2:29:31
Speaker 1: are coming together and not just lockstep where every single
2:29:35
Speaker 1: Republican votes for something and every single Democrat votes against it,
2:29:38
Speaker 1: and you just feel like they're from two different planets.
2:29:43
Speaker 2: Yeah. Another thing about the Vietnam War that's so crazy
2:29:46
Speaker 2: is we've kind of accepted the fact that the United
2:29:50
Speaker 2: States military does things overseas that we don't want them
2:29:53
Speaker 2: to do because after that war, it sort of set
2:29:57
Speaker 2: the stage for Afghanistan, Iraq, all those, especially Afghanistan, like
2:30:02
Speaker 2: this prolonged 20 year, completely complete failure, especially in how
2:30:10
Speaker 2: we withdrew from it. It's like, we've, we've lost a
2:30:14
Speaker 2: lot of faith in the decisions that are made.
2:30:17
Speaker 1: I actually think you have young, officers like Colin Powell
2:30:22
Speaker 1: who are learning the lessons of Vietnam. And so what
2:30:24
Speaker 1: you find is extraordinary reticence in the late 70s and
2:30:29
Speaker 1: the 80s and the early 90s. So the first Gulf
2:30:31
Speaker 1: War is very much a reflection of Vietnam chastened by
2:30:38
Speaker 1: the excesses of Vietnam. We're going to do it with
2:30:40
Speaker 1: a coalition. You know, we're going to do it with
2:30:43
Speaker 1: one arm tied behind our back. We're going to stop
2:30:45
Speaker 1: a little bit sooner. We're not going to have the
2:30:47
Speaker 1: full destruction of this. All these sorts of things are
2:30:50
Speaker 1: Vietnam inherited. But then real politique comes in. And then
2:30:55
Speaker 1: all of a sudden you realize we're in Afghanistan because
2:30:58
Speaker 1: of 9-11. We're pursuing this person. It's not we had
2:31:03
Speaker 1: a chance to get him. We missed him. It was
2:31:06
Speaker 1: not our fault. And we then switched the focus to
2:31:09
Speaker 1: Iraq and then ended up in both places in a
2:31:12
Speaker 1: kind of, you know, terrific stalemate that, as you say,
2:31:15
Speaker 1: just was, I think, back to being Vietnam. I mean,
2:31:19
Speaker 1: I always say this, that if we, you know, we
2:31:23
Speaker 1: made our film on Vietnam, it came out in 2017.
2:31:25
Speaker 1: If I had done the film 10 years, and this
2:31:29
Speaker 1: is why history requires perspective. If I had done it
2:31:32
Speaker 1: 10 years after the fall of Saigon in, in, um, 1985,
2:31:38
Speaker 1: there's a recession going on in the United States. Not big,
2:31:41
Speaker 1: but we talk about the Pacific rim. Japan is ascendant.
2:31:44
Speaker 1: We Vietnam would be this ball and chain that we
2:31:50
Speaker 1: would be dragging around us forever. If I'd waited 20
2:31:53
Speaker 1: years to 1995, we're the sole superpower. We're in the
2:31:56
Speaker 1: middle of the largest, to that point, largest peacetime economic
2:32:01
Speaker 1: expansion in the history of our country. And Vietnam would
2:32:05
Speaker 1: always be important, but it wouldn't be this symbol of
2:32:09
Speaker 1: our decline, right? If I'd waited 30 years to 2005,
2:32:12
Speaker 1: when we are bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and
2:32:19
Speaker 1: people are beginning to use the language of the Vietnam
2:32:22
Speaker 1: and getting stuck in these unwanted, perpetual, never-ending wars, you
2:32:27
Speaker 1: have another view. And so the do-good history is to
2:32:30
Speaker 1: actually get some distance and perspective. So you can look
2:32:33
Speaker 1: at the Vietnam War from the mountaintop of 85 and
2:32:37
Speaker 1: 95 and 2005 and then realize I've still got other experiences.
2:32:41
Speaker 1: New scholarship has come. Classified material has been released. More
2:32:45
Speaker 1: of those tapes have been listened to. There's been a
2:32:49
Speaker 1: mellowing among the veterans and a willingness to speak. Gold
2:32:52
Speaker 1: Star mothers realize they can't hide their grief. We have
2:32:57
Speaker 1: one in the film. She knows that by telling her story,
2:33:01
Speaker 1: she will help thousands of other people who have lost
2:33:04
Speaker 1: their children. We can interview soldiers from other sides of
2:33:08
Speaker 1: the conflict. that seemed to speak exactly like our soldiers
2:33:12
Speaker 1: and that you begin to develop a way to see
2:33:15
Speaker 1: it more holistically than in just a kind of journalistic
2:33:18
Speaker 1: and almost political response. So that was bad. We did
2:33:22
Speaker 1: that badly. We did this poorly. You can see it
2:33:24
Speaker 1: for this hugely, hugely complex machine that it was that
2:33:29
Speaker 1: just ate up human beings and ate up credibility, as
2:33:33
Speaker 1: you're saying, that the United States had built up as
2:33:36
Speaker 1: the greatest power on earth and certainly the good guy
2:33:41
Speaker 1: in what we euphemistically call the good war, that good
2:33:44
Speaker 1: war is the worst war ever. More than 60 million
2:33:47
Speaker 1: people's lives were extinguished in World War II. But as
2:33:50
Speaker 1: we said it in our film about World War II
2:33:52
Speaker 1: called The War, one of our pilots said it was
2:33:56
Speaker 1: a necessary war. And that's what we should be thinking
2:34:00
Speaker 1: about fighting, necessary ones, not the ones that are going to,
2:34:04
Speaker 1: you know... have all these ulterior things that you described.
2:34:07
Speaker 2: And it's also like unwinding all that bad and sort
2:34:11
Speaker 2: of reshaping America's perspective and the way the world perceives
2:34:16
Speaker 2: us takes so much time. And I think we lost
2:34:19
Speaker 2: so much of that post 9-11. I think 9-11 had
2:34:22
Speaker 2: the entire world in our sympathies. I agree. We had
2:34:28
Speaker 2: been attacked. The whole world thought of us as being
2:34:31
Speaker 2: like this shining light, like, wow, we have to stand
2:34:33
Speaker 2: against this. Then we go and invade Iraq and everyone's like,
2:34:36
Speaker 2: what are you doing? What is this? There's really no
2:34:39
Speaker 2: weapons of mass destruction. It's all a lie.
2:34:41
Speaker 1: The thing that the Depression did is it got used
2:34:47
Speaker 1: to Americans doing without. And it made it very easy
2:34:51
Speaker 1: for Americans to segue into the Second World War. because
2:34:57
Speaker 1: it was about shared sacrifice, something they'd learned on a
2:35:00
Speaker 1: domestic level, they could now learn it on an international level.
2:35:04
Speaker 1: And they did that. We had an opportunity at 9-11,
2:35:08
Speaker 1: it seems to me, and I haven't made a film
2:35:10
Speaker 1: about it, and I imagine once we get enough years out,
2:35:14
Speaker 1: it might be interesting to sort of look at that.
2:35:16
Speaker 1: We had an opportunity to collectively turn the energy that
2:35:21
Speaker 1: we had, the grief and the sense of purpose, even
2:35:26
Speaker 1: anger of that moment, as well as the world's unabashed
2:35:32
Speaker 1: sympathy for what we've done and turn it into something productive.
2:35:37
Speaker 1: And yet we didn't. We then, as you were saying,
2:35:39
Speaker 1: we moved into sort of rationales and justifications for Iraq
2:35:44
Speaker 1: that were, as we know in retrospect, completely fraudulent.
2:35:49
Speaker 2: Yeah. From the outside, like me looking at your work,
2:35:53
Speaker 2: I get anxiety just thinking about the daunting task of
2:35:58
Speaker 2: taking on these subjects. And I know you have 10
2:36:01
Speaker 2: years for some of them to like really ruminate and
2:36:04
Speaker 2: really figure it out. But what is your process like?
2:36:07
Speaker 2: How do you begin? Like you said, you're going to
2:36:08
Speaker 2: do something on Lyndon Johnson or if you're going to
2:36:11
Speaker 2: do something in Vietnam, like. How do you, what does
2:36:13
Speaker 2: day one look like?
2:36:15
Speaker 1: Day one is making sure that you're looking yourself in
2:36:17
Speaker 1: the mirror and you're going to commit to that because
2:36:19
Speaker 1: I'm now off like a congressman trying to raise money
2:36:22
Speaker 1: from foundations and corporations and individuals of wealth and the
2:36:26
Speaker 1: Corporation for Public Broadcasting and things like that. But you're
2:36:30
Speaker 1: immediately reading, you're immediately talking to scholars who spent their
2:36:34
Speaker 1: life maybe on this aspect or that aspect of Vietnam.
2:36:37
Speaker 1: We had, I think it was 23 scholars, all who
2:36:40
Speaker 1: knew one aspect. And I knew we were onto something
2:36:42
Speaker 1: when we'd have these screenings and a scholar would comment
2:36:47
Speaker 1: and all the other 22 would like whip over like
2:36:49
Speaker 1: they hadn't heard that. And so the film would do that.
2:36:53
Speaker 1: It's daunting. I asked Shelby Foote about U.S. Grant and
2:36:55
Speaker 1: he said, Grant had what they call four o'clock in
2:36:58
Speaker 1: the morning courage. That meant you could wake him at
2:37:01
Speaker 1: four o'clock in the morning and tell him the enemy
2:37:02
Speaker 1: had turned his left flank and he'd be as cool
2:37:05
Speaker 1: as a cucumber. And so what you develop is Four
2:37:09
Speaker 1: o'clock in the morning, courage. You wake up and go,
2:37:11
Speaker 1: and we're still doing it. I'm still waking up. I
2:37:13
Speaker 1: didn't like the way that sounded. Why didn't we trail that?
2:37:15
Speaker 1: So you just put one foot in the other. You
2:37:17
Speaker 1: trust a process. Process is a really important thing. We're
2:37:22
Speaker 1: all impatient and impatience kills process. Just like comparison is
2:37:27
Speaker 1: the thief of joy, process you're impatient, then process is squandered.
2:37:33
Speaker 1: And process teaches you really important things of how to
2:37:37
Speaker 1: relate to a subject, how to collect the material, and
2:37:39
Speaker 1: then how to figure out how to digest that material
2:37:42
Speaker 1: into something that's a cohesive story that I can give
2:37:45
Speaker 1: to you, who may be ignorant of that story, but
2:37:47
Speaker 1: it's daunting, it's terrifying, And I wouldn't have it any
2:37:51
Speaker 1: other way. And I think I'm speaking for the people
2:37:56
Speaker 1: who work with me because there's something everybody responds at
2:38:01
Speaker 1: three in the morning. You know, everybody says, yeah, what
2:38:03
Speaker 1: do we do that? We can we can fix this.
2:38:05
Speaker 1: We'll find an alternative to that to make it better.
2:38:08
Speaker 1: And sometimes it's the niggling tiny things or sometimes it's
2:38:11
Speaker 1: really big to have the courage to take out an
2:38:13
Speaker 1: entire scene that really is working really well, but destabilizes
2:38:17
Speaker 1: the film a half an hour later. And I did
2:38:20
Speaker 1: that in our Mark Twain film. I took out this
2:38:21
Speaker 1: beautiful prose thing from Life on the Mississippi called Whitetown
2:38:25
Speaker 1: Drowsing about Hannibal, this disguised Hannibal sort of waking up
2:38:30
Speaker 1: from its slumbers as it sees the puff of smoke
2:38:33
Speaker 1: north as the steamboat's coming down. And the whole town
2:38:36
Speaker 1: is industry and activity and loading and unloading and whatever.
2:38:39
Speaker 1: And then by the time the puff of smoke is
2:38:41
Speaker 1: around the bend south, Everybody's Back Asleep Again. It was
2:38:46
Speaker 1: just fantastic and written so beautifully. Mark Twain never wrote
2:38:51
Speaker 1: a bad word. And I just realized we weren't getting
2:38:55
Speaker 1: out of the early biographical stuff soon enough. And I
2:38:59
Speaker 1: said to my partner on the film, the co-producer and
2:39:02
Speaker 1: the writer who'd found that quote from Life on the Mississippi,
2:39:06
Speaker 1: I said, We're taking it out. And he looked so
2:39:09
Speaker 1: hurt and so pained. I said, look, I'll put it
2:39:11
Speaker 1: back in if you want it. So we left it out.
2:39:14
Speaker 1: And I thought it worked, Brian. He came to me,
2:39:16
Speaker 1: looked sad. I said, I'll put it back in. And
2:39:18
Speaker 1: for about six months, we went back and forth. And
2:39:20
Speaker 1: then finally he came to me and he said, you
2:39:22
Speaker 1: were right. And I said, you can put it in
2:39:24
Speaker 1: the book. We'll put it in the DVD extras. We'll
2:39:27
Speaker 1: do all the things that you need to do. But
2:39:29
Speaker 1: that's the kind of four o'clock in the morning courage
2:39:32
Speaker 1: you need to do is take out something that like it, Joe,
2:39:35
Speaker 1: it worked perfectly. so well and yet you remember the
2:39:40
Speaker 1: movie Amadeus too many notes too many notes you know
2:39:43
Speaker 1: and you just go you gotta you gotta do that
2:39:45
Speaker 1: I'd rather the reason why we have the it's complicated
2:39:49
Speaker 1: is because there's not a filmmaker on earth that doesn't
2:39:51
Speaker 1: want to change a scene that's working but we have
2:39:54
Speaker 1: spent our entire professional lives changing scenes that were working
2:39:57
Speaker 1: when we found out new compromising sort of contradictory information
2:40:03
Speaker 1: and maybe it made the scene less maybe the scene
2:40:06
Speaker 1: disappeared but it actually serves the honor and the virtue
2:40:11
Speaker 1: of whatever that story requires. And this is true so
2:40:15
Speaker 1: many things in the American Revolution that are close to
2:40:18
Speaker 1: me because we're just coming off the months and months
2:40:20
Speaker 1: of these unbelievable sacrifices of having to take out one
2:40:24
Speaker 1: phrase of a sentence or changing one little thing just
2:40:27
Speaker 1: to help fine-tune it. Nobody would notice if I left
2:40:30
Speaker 1: it in and you looked at it twice and then
2:40:31
Speaker 1: I took it out the second time. I don't think
2:40:33
Speaker 1: you'd notice it. But I'd notice it. So I'd wanted
2:40:37
Speaker 1: to to be. And that's the beauty of public broadcasting, too,
2:40:41
Speaker 1: is that it gives you that chance to do that.
2:40:44
Speaker 2: There's not a platform that would allow you to do
2:40:46
Speaker 2: it that way.
2:40:47
Speaker 1: I don't think there is another platform. I assume that
2:40:50
Speaker 1: a list directors in Hollywood who have, you know, the
2:40:54
Speaker 1: final say enjoy that as Steven Spielberg, who is, you know,
2:40:58
Speaker 1: one of the great directors of all times, I'm sure.
2:41:00
Speaker 1: But there's still suits that are coming in. There's still
2:41:03
Speaker 1: people who are giving him notes. We get notes from scholars.
2:41:06
Speaker 1: We get notes that are sort of like this. You've
2:41:10
Speaker 1: got lots of voices of loyalists in there. And that's
2:41:13
Speaker 1: really good because people tend to ignore the loyalists. They're
2:41:16
Speaker 1: just de facto bad people. And you don't make them
2:41:19
Speaker 1: bad people. But you don't have a loyalist who goes
2:41:22
Speaker 1: through several episodes that you follow throughout the film. So
2:41:26
Speaker 1: we had this loyalist quote. In our fourth episode, in
2:41:29
Speaker 1: the Battle of Bennington, where this guy named John Peters,
2:41:33
Speaker 1: who's been in Vermont, been driven out by the Patriots.
2:41:36
Speaker 1: He's gone to Canada. He's formed a revolution. The family,
2:41:39
Speaker 1: his wife and small infant kids are driven out. They
2:41:42
Speaker 1: find a British patrol boat somehow on Lake Champlain. They reunite.
2:41:46
Speaker 1: He starts a regiment, a loyalist regiment, his 15-year-old son.
2:41:49
Speaker 1: They find themselves with Burgoyne's army around Bennington, where they've
2:41:53
Speaker 1: been told there's great loyalist sympathies and not that many patriots.
2:41:58
Speaker 1: It's the opposite. There's no loyalist sympathies or none that
2:42:01
Speaker 1: anybody's speaking up for. And there are lots of patriots
2:42:03
Speaker 1: and they're defeated. But at one moment, this man, John Peters,
2:42:07
Speaker 1: is on a parapet of a quickly made redoubt of
2:42:10
Speaker 1: a fort that they've put up to try to repel
2:42:13
Speaker 1: the attacking Americans. And he hears the voice of a
2:42:17
Speaker 1: man named Jeremiah Post. who is saying, Peter's you damn Tory,
2:42:22
Speaker 1: which is the other insult that you would give to
2:42:24
Speaker 1: a loyalist. And he recognizes the voice of his best
2:42:30
Speaker 1: friend growing up and cousin of his sister. And at
2:42:35
Speaker 1: that moment, Jeremiah Post, the rebel, the patriot, stabs him
2:42:40
Speaker 1: with the bayonet into his bone, but it's deflected by
2:42:45
Speaker 1: the bone of the rib cage. At that moment, as
2:42:48
Speaker 1: Peter said, I was obliged to destroy him, and he
2:42:51
Speaker 1: kills him with his pistol.
2:42:52
Speaker 2: Wow.
2:42:53
Speaker 1: That's the American Revolution. So we had that quote, and
2:42:56
Speaker 1: it was like, but why don't we go and put
2:43:00
Speaker 1: John Peters in episode one and episode two and episode
2:43:03
Speaker 1: three and episode four and then episode six when he's
2:43:06
Speaker 1: leaving and moving to Nova Scotia permanently and not going
2:43:09
Speaker 1: to be a part of this new deal. But you
2:43:12
Speaker 1: want to know what the American Revolution is about? Killing
2:43:15
Speaker 1: your best friend on a hill west of Bennington, Vermont. Right.
2:43:25
Speaker 1: You know what I mean? I mean, we say kind
2:43:27
Speaker 1: of without thinking about the Civil War, brother against brother,
2:43:30
Speaker 1: you know, and it's I guess it's true a few times.
2:43:33
Speaker 1: But the revolution is like that. Henry Knox, who's this
2:43:36
Speaker 1: sort of big, amiable bookseller who Washington somehow figures out,
2:43:40
Speaker 1: picks out of a crowd. And he said, oh, go
2:43:41
Speaker 1: to Ticonderoga and get those cannon recaptured earlier in the
2:43:45
Speaker 1: year and bring them back here. I got to drive
2:43:48
Speaker 1: the British out of Boston. And Knox does. Sleds, impossible,
2:43:51
Speaker 1: hundreds of miles over land and over Lake George and,
2:43:54
Speaker 1: you know, terrible weather. And he gets it there. But
2:43:58
Speaker 1: he's married to this young woman named Lucy whose parents
2:44:02
Speaker 1: are loyalists. And so she loses in the revolution her father,
2:44:07
Speaker 1: her mother, her brother, and her sisters. That's the choice
2:44:11
Speaker 1: she made by marrying Henry Knox, this sweetheart of a
2:44:15
Speaker 1: bookseller named who learned most of his stuff about artillery
2:44:18
Speaker 1: and gun emplacements from the books in his bookstore and
2:44:21
Speaker 1: from serving as, you know, in the local militia. And
2:44:24
Speaker 1: he puts the guns, he gets the guns up top,
2:44:27
Speaker 1: and the British wake up and go, uh-oh, we're out
2:44:30
Speaker 1: of here, and they go up to Nova Scotia to regroup.
2:44:34
Speaker 1: Massachusetts thinks the war's over. They thank General Washington for
2:44:37
Speaker 1: his service and enjoy his retirement. He goes, are you
2:44:40
Speaker 1: kidding me? I'm going to New York, which is exactly
2:44:43
Speaker 1: right because that's where the British will attack next and
2:44:45
Speaker 1: the largest battle of the American Revolution is the Battle
2:44:48
Speaker 1: of Long Island, and I won't spoil it for you
2:44:51
Speaker 1: what happens.
2:44:52
Speaker 2: Please don't. Ken Burns, you're a national treasure. Thank you
2:44:56
Speaker 2: so much.
2:44:57
Speaker 1: Thank you, Joe.
2:44:58
Speaker 2: I really appreciate you being here. I really enjoyed it,
2:45:00
Speaker 2: and like I said, I've been a giant fan of
2:45:02
Speaker 2: your work for a long time, so this is a
2:45:04
Speaker 2: huge treat for me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
2:45:07
Speaker 1: Bye, everybody. Bye.