I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the conte…
Author
Ken Burns
6 quotations
About Ken Burns
Kenneth Lauren Burns is an American filmmaker and popular historical documentarian. An undergraduate of Hampshire College, his works typically chronicle American history and culture, and are often produced in association with WETA-TV or the National Endowment for the Humanities, distributed by PBS. Burns has received critical and scholarly acclaim for several of his documentaries, including two Academy Award nominations, two Grammy Awards, three Peabody Awards, and eight Emmy Awards, among othe…
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Ken BurnsI began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.
You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.
History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.
I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look…
I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear - it's active disengagement.