Ken Burns
Ken Burns
Kenneth Lauren "Ken" Burns is an American filmmaker, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs in documentary films. His most widely known documentaries are The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The War, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, Prohibition, The Central Park Five, and The Roosevelts. Also widely known is his role as executive producer of The West, and Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth29 July 1953
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Oh, I'm just sitting here dying about it,
History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.
I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.
I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.
Like a layer on a pearl, you can't specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl.
I never, ever want to apologize for a film. If it's bad I'll say it's my fault. And that's what I can say so far in all the films that I've done, that if you don't like it, it's entirely my fault.
I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.
A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.
We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?
The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.
The flame is not out, but it is flickering.
I have made all my films for my children with the exception of my first film because my oldest daughter wasn't born when I was making the film about the Brooklyn Bridge.
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 content.
In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?