Ken Burns talks about making 'The War'

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Award-winning documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, who brought us "The Civil War," "Brooklyn Bridge" and "Baseball," recently teamed with Lynn Novick to create "The War." He talks about the idea and the process of creating a massive story about the most destructive war in history.Q: With so much information in pictures, film, and primary sources, did you face a different set of challenges than, let's say, with the Civil War documentary?A: In some respects, when you take 20th- or 21st-century topics, you end up with the tyranny of choice. But the difficulty for us was with the number of pre-existing films, a sort of cottage industry that the Second World War has become. We felt it was less a problem of too much material but, how do you give this material new meaning? How do you focus on what really happens to regular people, so-called ordinary people, in the midst of battle?Q: Your job is mining memories of strangers. I would think it could be a very intimate experience.A: It's hugely intimate. We are exchanging Christmas cards. These people seem as intimate and familiar to me as aunts and uncles and grandfathers. It's been an unbelievable experience for all of us.Q: You have said you could not have done this documentary 10 years ago because the veterans weren't talking.A: Yeah, it's a funny thing. I think we hit the right moment. Ten years ago these guys were not talking. They felt they had not been given permission to speak. The death of buddies or the sense of your own mortality sometimes gets you to talk. Sometimes your immediate family -- the emotional, familial connections are so complicated that it's more the grandchildren that you're able to speak about your experiences for the first time. A man might say, "I haven't told this to anybody but my grandson." And 99 percent of them will be gone in 10 years. It will be impossible to do this, and the Second World War will become an abstract thing of history.Q: Why did you decide to explore this topic?A: We began to realize, we are losing 1,000 (veterans) a day. Kids thought we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War (that's what one school survey showed). An unbelievable percentage of our graduating high school seniors just had no idea of who the major combatants were. It's terrifying. It speaks to this kind of media culture we live in today, this consumer culture, which is dedicated to this notion that if you just buy the right things, this brand of blue jeans or cologne and you smell the right way that everything will be all right. Of course, that's just a palliative to keep you from understanding the real tough stuff of life, which is sometimes wars happen and teenagers get hired to do this stuff.Q: You essentially package the past, and the music in your documentaries is sometimes overlooked but is such a powerful element in storytelling.A: It's a hugely important element, and I think one of the reasons why it's so effective ... has to do with the fact that music in most films, features and documentaries, is added at the end to amplify emotions you hope are there. We record our music at the very beginning. It often dictates the pace and rhythm of the scene. It's organic. We might edit a chorus or a verse out or begin in the middle, but it has a kind of authentic use.Q: Since you have studied this war, in the making of the film were there moments that seemed almost divinely infused?A: I don't think so. We found the question of spirituality present almost everywhere. We found the question of the soul's survival to be a hugely important one. The experience of war itself -- this great human paradox, when your life is threatened and violent death is possible at any moment -- everything is vivified; heightened to a degree not felt in any other part of your life. Not at the birth of your child, not at the death of your parents, not at sex, not in school, not in sports, but in war. How horrible that the highest human experiences happen there, but they do.Q: Why do you think we are so reluctant to learn the lessons of the past?A: I think it's in us, I am sorry to say. This is the flawed nature of human beings. Part of our responsibility is to try in our own way to perfect that impulse. Too often people with no experience of war, who have abstracted or glorified it in their own minds, make the decisions that send thousands, then tens of thousands, then millions, of people to their deaths. Patricia Sheridan can be reached at psheridan@post-gazette.com. (Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)