In the lead up to his next great opus, The American Revolution, which will unpack the story of our nation’s founding across six nights in November, the master filmmaker is journeying across the country to screen portions of the epic and spread the word.
The enthusiastic storyteller, who popped by Houston for a screening in early June, estimates he’ll be making “35 or so” stops before the tour is done. And it is clearly no coincidence that after documenting the founding of America, Burns and his filmmaking team of co-director Sarah Botstein and adviser Jane Kamensky, are attempting to see much of it before the saga airs.
“This is a story about the Americans who occupied the eastern seaboard,” Burns explains. “But actually, the story is for everyone who ever agreed to be an American, or thinks they are an American, or perhaps even for those who wish they were an American. It is a story for everybody because of the significance of the Revolution in world history. The idea that we would be ‘citizens’ and not ‘subjects’ is a big thing.”
Doubtlessly inherent in a process that took eight years to complete, Burns is unabashed in his desire to find the humanity in this well-trod subject. “I think the Revolution hasn’t really been told,” he states plainly. “It’s been smothered in sentimentality and nostalgia, and that’s largely because all we see are paintings in stockings and breaches and powdered wigs.
"But it is really important to tell the story of the Revolution and the fact that the odds were zero when it began of success. That even the boldface names we know were complicated human beings, and oh by the way, there are hundreds of other people that you’ve never heard about. We’d like to share their story; they just didn’t have the station in life to let their portraits be painted." In the era when even basic information is questioned, and misinformation is ruthlessly peddled, Burns describes a process of arming the team with resources to ensure the truth prevails.
“Every age has its pernicious myths and conspiracies and wives tales,” he assures. “You are always in the process of not trying to get rid of them, but really consciously try to tell a more complete story of what happened. Why the Revolution seems to many people inaccessible or as scholar Maya Jasanoff says in our series ‘detached and unreal’ is that we only see them through these romanticized painting or portraits. There are no photographs or newsreels.
"We have had to recalibrate our style of filmmaking to create our own newsreels through following re-enactors for years and our own set of photographs, downloading 12,000 visual images and maps and other things. Then to depend on words of scholars like Jane Kamensky and others to help us fill in the gaps in this sort of superficial conventional wisdom about the Revolution which really deserves, particularly as we are heading to the 250th and trying to find a way to reignite the passions of our founding.”
Kamensky, the president and CEO of Monticello/The Thomas Jefferson Foundation and one of the on-camera talents narrating the series, illustrates the delicate dance the team does connecting the vast interconnecting stories across the series’ 12-hour run time. “I am one of about two dozen scholars who has participated in this film, both on camera and off,” the Ph.D. explains.
The off-camera work went on for a long time before the shooting began, and as in all the Florentine film crews productions, it’s a long discussion, no questions in advance, but just teasing out the expertise of a chorus of people and then figuring out how to connect scholarly rigor to these deeply humane stories.”
“These were ordinary people in extraordinary times. As we all are every day. One of the things I hope the scholars contributed was the vitality of a huge cast of founders, not just 56 people in the state house in Pennsylvania but… tens of thousands of people who were caught up in this drama and each were history makers and made by history in their own ways.”
For those who have kept up with Burns’ usual PBS output over the past four decades, the subject of the Revolution has long been a fascination for the filmmaker. In fact, he’s previously covered two of the Founding Fathers in their own focused chapters, Thomas Jefferson in 1997 and more recently, Benjamin Franklin in 2022.
How this impacts this version of his Revolution might be evident, Burns agrees. “Had I not done a two-part, four-hour biography on both Jefferson and Franklin, there probably would have been a lot more of both of those men in the Revolution. Franklin is arguably as responsible as George Washington, or perhaps just a step behind him in the fact that we are successful having first imagined what it might be like to be an American as a postmaster traveling these very different colonies.
"Most importantly, of course, is his relation to France coming into the war, and his ability to manipulate the French court and to be able to share with them good news from the battle field that permits them to sign two treaties that means the difference in who wins the revolution. That’s all there. But I think that probably had I not spent so much of my life digging deep into Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Franklin that they might have had a larger role here.
“What happens is, not in compensation or in any calculation, but you begin to dig deeper into other people who are less well known, including the most least well known person named George Washington. Who has come down to us so completely smothered in that nostalgia, so completely coated in mythology, that it became super important for us to get to the heart of who he was: a deeply complex and flawed human being, not necessarily a great military tactician without whom we wouldn’t be talking right now. We’re happy to share the glorious news of his centrality to this narrative.”
One of the flourishes the Burns documentaries bring to life is the special relationship between historical figures and a company of well-cast (and highly decorated) celebrity voice talent. The American Revolution may prove to be Burns’ most show-stopping cast of contributors yet.
“We always get to record archival voices with extremely talented actors,” co-director Sarah Botstein says. “That is something Ken has done since his first film On The Brooklyn Bridge. On this film, we have the most archival voices we’ve ever done on any series and the variety of voices and the length of the war permitted us to work with a huge number of actors around the world over a two year period of time. The cast is extraordinary: there’s Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Kenneth Branagh and Claire Danes and Samuel L Jackson and Morgan Freeman, as well as younger actors which I confess I didn’t know as well, but everyone in our office under 30 was very excited about Maya Hawke and Joe Kerry and Josh Hutcherson and Alden Ehrenreich.”
Love of history drives these performers, it seems – and the Florentine Film crew is seemingly giddy to be able to feed their habit to want to learn as much as possible. Botstein continues: “They come in and are fascinated by our process, intrigued by the historical characters that they read for. Matthew Rhys is Thomas Paine for example and he came in a few times and just wanted to learn more. Josh Brolin couldn’t believe he was going to be George Washington!”
Sharp-eared listeners will have to identify from a cast of hundreds, including those above and the likes of Edward Norton, David Oyelowo, Paul Giamatti, Jonathan Groff, Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney and Michael Keaton.
In a fun test of the ear, Botstein is excited to keep some casting decisions a secret until airtime. “They really love the work and we are grateful to them, and excited for the country to try and figure out who is who.”
Botstein, who worked with Burns on multiple projects including The War, The Vietnam War and The U.S. and the Holocaust, highlights the work of their tireless editors for ensuring that all these pieces could fit together seamlessly.
“For every image to have a relationship to what comes after and came before it,” she says. “The challenge was how to visualize the 18th century in a way that was visually compelling, historically thoughtful and appropriate and would give audiences a sense of what existed from the time. How to imagine the people from the time, and how to use battle re-enactments and the live cinematography [and] this glorious land that this very brutal war was fought on.”
This labor of love comes together at both an interesting time for America, and an interesting time for the Public Broadcasting Corporation, which continues to see attacks from Washington at times when they are needed most.
On this subject, Burns speaks candidly and with clarity in PBS’s defense. “Yeah, we made a film on that National Parks and it came out in 2009. We subtitled that film America’s Best Idea. Yeah, it wasn’t the best idea – the best idea is the stuff we’re dealing with in the Revolution. But once you have started a country that was founded on these principles, you’d be hard pressed to find something that was a better idea than the national parks. I think public broadcasting is the Declaration of Independence applied to communications.”
“I couldn’t possibly have done my films anywhere but public media and that’s why I’ve spent my entire professional life there. It is short sighted in the extreme to take what is a very modest amount of money, and claim it is somehow highjacked by partisanship, when in fact this largest of all broadcast networks, 330 stations are mostly in rural areas, and those are the people who are going to suffer most by that.”
“In some cases, PBS may lose 10-15 percent of the funding they need to go on, that could you imagine be made up. As a filmmaker I might need a little bit more, but a station in a rural area where they depend on our primetime schedule and children’s programming, but also continuing education and classroom of the air and crop reports and homeland security information and emergency information and weather. All of those things central to their lives and it might be that this is going to disappear among the very people who need it the most. So we would like to make a plea right now as we begin to contemplate the genius of the United States, one of the manifestations of that genius is the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967.”
The other contemplation that is unavoidable in the nature of the political discourse in the country at this moment. In some ways, Burns offers a comforting balm to those who fear intently on the prospect of America making it to her 250th next year.
“We are having conversations about the meaning of democracy,” Burns acknowledges, “And it might be helpful to hear how divided we were, violently divided back then. How much this [Revolution] wasn’t an easy lay-up – this was an extremely mid-court three pointer, if I can beat that metaphor to death. We are very lucky to have existed and it’s this extraordinary moment in human history that has created at least 249 years this country and all the glories of it.
"Even those who participated in it, knew that while the British surrendered and the treaty of Paris gave them the area of the 13 colonies… that the ideas, the discussion and argument of the ideas were going to go on. So there is always something incredibly present about thinking about the American Revolution, because you are thinking of this ongoing impossible idea of people who were very used to being under the yoke of an Authoritarian, they were gonna try something different.”
“The American Revolution” will broadcast on PBS starting on Sunday, November 16 at 7 p.m. and new episodes will run six consecutive nights. The full series will also be available to stream on PBS.org and on the PBS App.
Correction 7 a.m. 7-11-25:In the original story, several of the quotations were attributed to the wrong person. This is now corrected. The Houston Press regrets the errors.
Vic covers the comedy scene, in Houston and beyond. When not writing articles, he's working on his scripts, editing a podcast, or trying to hustle up a few laughs himself!
