Ken Burns says documenting the American Revolution made him ‘optimistic’ about the country’s future

Documentary filmmaker and historian Ken Burns has cemented his career on bringing history to life. In an interview with “Meet the Press” that aired Sunday, the filmmaker challenged how the nation remembers its founding and the Revolutionary War.

“I think we have sanitized the war. And I think it’s out of an understandable fear that if somehow we reveal how dark and bloody it is, that it will somehow diminish those big ideas in Philadelphia in ‘76,” Burns told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker.

Burns has been making documentaries for 50 years, but his 1990 project “The Civil War” put him on the map and earned him two Emmys, two Grammys and a Peabody Award. His newest series is a six-part documentary titled “The American Revolution,” a project he began working on in 2015.

In his latest series, Burns dissects America’s origin story and argues why democracy was an “unintended consequence.”

“The idea was to create a kind of aristocracy of these white male property owners. But in order to win this Revolution, other people are going to fight,” he said. “The Continental Army, at the end, is filled with teenagers, ne’er-do-wells, felons hoping for a pardon, recent immigrants, people who don’t have property, second and third sons. And they fight the Revolution, and they’re going to need something at the end. So what they get is democracy.”

Burns added that his documentaries often “rhyme” with the future and drew parallels between the Revolution and present day, such as a push to make Canada the 14th state.

“The rhymes to this moment are so particularly helpful because I think we can, as Chicken Little [said], ‘The sky is falling,’ you know, ‘everything is bad, we’re so divided.’ We are really divided, but we were way more divided then, way more divided during the Civil War, way more divided during the Vietnam period,” he said.

When explaining why it was important to include the voices of women, Native Americans and African Americans, Burns said leaving those stories out creates an incomplete picture of history.

“If you edit things out, you have a myopic view of what actually happened. It doesn’t diminish the big ideas. In fact, it makes them more interesting,” Burns said.

Burns unprompted mused that the country’s founders “would not be surprised at all, that somebody was seeking more authoritarian power.” And that instead they’d be “abjectly disappointed” that Congress “has abdicated so much of the power.”

He has spent years establishing a trademark style to his filmmaking: animating still photographs with subtle zooms and pans, a technique immortalized as the “Ken Burns effect” preset in iMovie by the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

“[Jobs] said ‘All Mac computers, starting in January 2003, will have this,’” Burns said, describing when he was first shown the iMovie preset. “I mean, I know that that thing has saved lots of weddings, and vacations, and bar mitzvahs, and, you know, memorial services.”

As more filmmakers are using artificial intelligence tools in their content creation, Burns said he hopes the role of AI in documentary filmmaking will be “minimal.”

“I hope it’s a research tool that helps you find that document that you didn’t know existed or that painting of Benedict Arnold, who doesn’t have a good painting here for obvious reasons,” Burns said. “But the idea that it might generate things is really unacceptable to me.”

Burns also weighed in on federal cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provided crucial funding for PBS, NPR and local radio and television stations. The organization officially shut down after Congress passed spending cuts that reduced its budget by more than $1 billion. Burns, a longtime supporter of public media, said the consequences will be far-reaching.

“We’ll survive. The problem is, what about the filmmakers that are coming up? What about those rural stations that depend on much greater funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting than my 20%, which is a huge, big hit that we have,” Burns said. “I worry about them. There might be news deserts. Who will be covering the school board? Who will be at the city council meeting? And maybe that’s the intention of it.”

Throughout the interview, Burns reiterated his belief that “history is our best teacher” and that, despite deep divisions, he believes people can remain “optimistic” about America’s future.

“I live in a tiny town in New Hampshire, and people have various points of view — like, widely varying points of view — and we listen to each other and we talk to each other. And obviously things get frayed at times, but we have built in our system the mechanisms for repair and the restoration that I think are central to the response to this moment.”