Q&A with filmmaker Ken Burns on THE WAR

THE WAR, a co-production of Florentine Films and WETA, was produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick and examines the myriad ways in which the Second World War touched the lives of the American people. Recently, filmmaker Ken Burns spoke about the production.

What led you to make this film at this time? And what was your approach, as a filmmaker, to this epic conflict?

I think that the overwhelming deciding factor to create The War was the knowledge that we were losing 1,000 veterans each day in the -- this is a loss of tangible memory that I just couldn't countenance as a historical filmmaker. I also fear that we as a nation are losing our historical compass. Many Americans are not demonstrating a grasp of the nation's history and that was a motivating factor as well.

The Second World War has often been smothered over in bloodless gallant death as the "Good War," but of course it was in reality the worst war. Sixty million human beings lost their lives violently and it was very important to us, in making this film, to try to bear witness to what actually happened. Literally, the question that we asked was: "how did this happen and what was it like?" Our attempt was to give an overall sense of what happened in the war but to do so intimately from a bottom-up, human perspective. This is not an encyclopedic view of the Second World War, as the caveat at the beginning of each episode makes clear.

You and your colleagues have filmed all around the nation, interviewed hundreds of people and sifted through miles of archival film footage. What did it take to put this project together?

About six years. We say that the Second World War is the greatest cataclysm in human history in the first sentence of our formal introduction -- and it is. But we have limited this to just the perspective of individuals most of whom come from four geographically distributed American towns -- and in so doing we still ended up with an archival retrieval effort beyond anything that we've ever done before. We have drawn on material, both still and moving, from around the world. We have looked at hundreds if not thousand of hours of newsreel footage and used 5,000 segments in the film. We have scoured hundreds of archives and looked at countless documents and tens of thousands of photographs. We have chosen a handful of people to help tell our story; and we delved into the personal archives of those people and of the towns they are from and merged their stories with the more familiar public archive to create this intimate portrait of the experience of battle. What has taken so long is the digestion of that material.

You focus in the film on individuals from four American communities -- Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; and the small town of Luverne, Minnesota for the film. Why?

They are sort of haphazardly chosen but with some method to our madness. There is a northeast town, there is a southern town, there is a western town and there is a Midwestern town. We chose Waterbury, Connecticut, a wonderful town known as "Brass City" since the 19^th century. A great manufacturing town, they made cocktail shakers, lipstick holders and alarm clocks and suddenly rearranged their molecules and just dedicated everything -- 24/7, 365 days a year -- to the war. There is a marvelous group of people in town that we meet.

We then read a memoir by a man named Eugene Sledge from Mobile, Alabama, that we loved and when we arrived in Mobile, he had just passed away. His family introduced us to his friends and we cast our net wider. We were able to engage the services of a great actor, Josh Lucas, to read Eugene Sledge's memoir and bring his story to life. Mobile became our southern city and there we found Sid Phillips and Katherine Phillips, who are featured prominently in the film.

We chose Sacramento, California which, like Waterbury and Mobile, was transformed overnight into a "war town" -- ending up with three military bases ringing the outskirts of town. There were compelling stories of people in Sacramento going off to war.

Then we needed a small town and had met a pilot that lived outside of Washington, D.C. whose story was amazing and he said he was from Luverne, Minnesota. We went there and in our first cursory look into the archive of the town found that the newspaper editor, Al McIntosh -- who had passed away as well in the '70s -- through his writing was one of the greatest historical gifts that we had ever come across. We got Tom Hanks to read his magnificent writings and bring the intimate warp and the weft of small town life to the story.

We understood that we couldn't be all things to all people. There were just so many stories, so many battles, so many campaigns, so many constituencies that could not be included, but were representative enough that we get a sense of the totality of human experience that goes into a war. The poet William Blake said that you could find the universe in a grain of sand. So we essentially were looking for an American universe in four small towns.

Many of the personal testimonies are compelling and, in fact, riveting. Was it difficult for veterans to speak about their experiences on film?

It's interesting -- many of the men who fought in World War II were 18, 19, 20 years old. They were asked to be professional killers. They saw horrible, horrible things. And when the war was over, it was as if society had said, "Okay, get on with the rest of your life." And most locked away their secrets. You can understand, but you can also honor, respect, and forgive the reticence of that generation. We were very privileged to be ushered into the lives of these people -- many of whom shared painful stories -- sometimes for the very first time. We just attempted to honor what they were saying.

Your films have often featured scholars interpreting historical events, but you chose not to in The War. Why?

There are some people who are considered scholars in our film but we haven't asked them any scholarly questions. Probably the most famous person in the film, for example, with the exception of Senator Daniel Inouye, is Paul Fussell, who has written extensively about war and was himself a soldier. We asked these participants in the film the same questions that we asked other veterans. Essentially, if you weren't in this war, or you weren't waiting for someone to come home from this war, you are not in our film. We wanted the experience of the Second World War unmediated by experts. We wanted it pure and undiluted to the extent that we could. Everybody here is personally invested.

At the beginning of your production The Civil War, you lead off with an Oliver Wendell Holmes quote about the "incommunicable experience of war." What were some of the greatest challenges of producing a film on this subject and about a conflict of this magnitude in the American consciousness?

We wanted to shed a lot of the unnecessary baggage that has clung to World War II studies and just asked the essential experiential question "What was it like?". Speaking of the Holmes quote in The Civil War, soldiers in that war said that once they had been in combat, they had "seen the elephant." I love that phrase. The thing that soldiers knew was that there was something profoundly life altering about being in a situation where your life is threatened -- everything is heightened. We knew this was true of all wars. And in making a film about the Second World War, we wanted to try to approximate what that was like.

One of the reasons I held off so long in working on a film about the Second World War is that I found working on the Civil War project so emotionally draining. We were dealing with still photographs that were removed from the actual experience of battle, which we tried to will to life with a complicated sound effects track and first- person commentary along with our narration and music. I knew when we were going into The War that we weren't going to be dealing with our great great grandfathers anymore. We were going to be dealing with our fathers -- and to have them alive and to narrate these stories and to have footage of the thing they are talking about would be very powerful. Of all the thousands and thousands of photographs of the Civil War, not one is of actual combat. And I can tell you that many of the photographs and a good deal of the footage in The War are not only of combat, but almost precisely of what people are describing and where they are describing it. We are approaching a kind of cinematic verisimilitude in moments that really is hypnotic -- and it pulls you in. That relates to the statement by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: "We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we still feel the passion of life at its top." At that moment when your life is most threatened, life is vivified -- and we were looking for the expression of that throughout the film.

What was the greatest revelation to you as a filmmaker and interpreter of history as you made this film?

You know, I think, it is not any one thing. It is the accumulated impressions that accrue imperceptibly like layers on a pearl over the course of many, many years that we work on a project. Sometimes it's a fact; sometimes its just essential humanity of somebody we've talked about; sometimes it's a transcendent power of a still photograph; sometimes it the immediacy of a piece of footage; sometimes it's the combination of a little bit of music with those images where suddenly one plus one don't equal two any more, but equal three. This is what you live for as a filmmaker. This is why I pinch myself everyday and think I am so lucky to have this job. Every day was a revelation, and in this film, every day was difficult, because we were dealing with human beings' ultimate sacrifice. I say "we" because this film represents the dedication of so many talented people -- editors, cinematographers, and writers, as well as producers -- who really worked day and night to give the best they could.

When people experience the film, what do you hope they will come away with?

I want them to come away with their own experience. We don't have a political ax to grind, we don't want to advocate anything -- except on behalf of the heroism of the soldiers who fought in that war. I am very excited about sharing the film with the country. Every time we have held screenings, the reaction is the same. They all say, because of the power of the experience conveyed, "This is terrible and wonderful at the same time." I want viewers to come away with a sense of what the war was like. If they say, in describing the experience conveyed and of the film itself that it was "terrible and wonderful," then I think we will have succeeded.

What's your next project after The War?

We are about a quarter of the way through editing a big series slated for 2009 -- a six-part, 12-hour film on the National Parks. Not a travelogue, not an inventory of the lodges you should stay at or even a nature or wildlife film, although it will have beautiful images and nature and wildlife in it. Instead, it is the story of what American historian and novelist Wallace Stegner said was "America's best idea" -- the notion that for the first time in human history land would be set aside not for the privileged but for everybody, for all time. We pursue the historical story of how these parks came into being by tracing the ideas and, most important, the individuals behind their creation, examining the changing idea of national parks over the nearly 150 years since we invented them.