Ken Burns on Leonardo da Vinci, AI, and the future of storytelling

KEN BURNS: There are all these documentaries and sorts of reality things that are being made about a subject, and they’re wonderful and very interesting, but you notice that either that person who’s the subject or their wife or their brother or their children are the executive producers.

And you go, wait a second, that could never happen on PBS where I am because we’ve drawn this absolutely sacrosanct narrative church and state line. I can’t have Michael Jordan sitting in my editing room saying, don’t use that shot, right?

Our editing process is where our films are made. And when you put it together, there are decisions that are made — millions, no exaggeration, millions of decisions. And who makes that decision is super important.

And you definitely don’t want to do the shortcut. You definitely want to see what that thing is.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s the legendary documentarian Ken Burns. Ken has a new project coming out on PBS profiling the life and legacy of Leonardo Da Vinci, and I wanted to ask what leaders today could learn from Da Vinci and how Da Vinci himself might tackle some of the biggest issues of 2024. Ken is part philosopher, part historian, and traces a captivating thread through the past to illuminate key ideas for the future. We talk about the impact of AI on storytelling, the underestimated power of studying humanities, and so much more. It’s a rich journey, even if it doesn’t run 20 hours like some of Ken’s films. So sit back and enjoy. I’m Bob Safian and this is Rapid Response.

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SAFIAN: I’m Bob Safian and I’m here with renowned documentarian Ken Burns. Ken, thanks so much for joining us.

BURNS: My pleasure. Thanks, Bob, for having me.

Copy LinkKen Burns on his new film about Leonardo da Vinci

SAFIAN: So you’ve done films about so many things — about baseball and jazz and the Civil War and Muhammad Ali and Hemingway and Ben Franklin. But your newest documentary goes back further in history than any major project you’ve done before, focusing on Leonardo da Vinci. What drew you to Da Vinci and why now?

BURNS: Well, the “why now” question is sort of irrelevant for us long-term filmmakers because you can work on something for six years and you never sort of say, “Oh, well, this is going to come out in the fall of 2024, and things will be this way or that way, or they won’t be any way at all.”

This is the first non-American topic I’ve ever undertaken, and that was quite a difficult sort of place to get.

And we sort of broke the mold of a kind of traditional grammar to be able to contain the multitudes that Leonardo had and to be sort of stunned perpetually that no matter how distant in the past he may seem to be, he’s as modern as anybody we’ve ever come across. If, as the cliché goes, you and I are only using 10 percent of our brain, he’s using 75 percent. And so it becomes this kind of inspirational go that pulls you along into this world of observation, of experimentation, of discipline, of remembering not to put everything in silo with what both commerce and convenience do, which is put things in different boxes. He’s a scientist, he’s an artist, he’s an innovator, he’s an engineer, he’s an inventor, he’s a cartographer, he’s a botanist, he’s an anatomist; he’s everything. And he doesn’t see the distinction. And I think part of the problem today among the many, many, many problems we suffer from is that we don’t have technologists steeped in art. We don’t have that many artists who understand that the scientific dynamic is an important one to include. And so, we just have to admit that we don’t have any Leonardos and that we can borrow from the past because he’s so modern and inspire our own world with everything that he did.

Copy LinkSharing his process of discovery

SAFIAN: You obviously knew a lot about Da Vinci before choosing to do this project — or didn’t you? I’m curious if there were things that surprised you.

BURNS: Out of maybe 40 films, Bob, I thought I knew something about maybe two, like baseball and Vietnam. Each day of those productions was a daily humiliation of what I didn’t know. And every project is like that. Let me reverse engineer it for a second and say, if I just tell you what you should know of what I know, the last time I checked, that’s called homework. But if I share with you my process of discovery, then we’re on a kind of equal footing.

The novelist Richard Powers said, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

Copy LinkLeonardo’s mind-blowing innovations

SAFIAN: In this journey that you went through learning about him, were there particular moments where you were either mind-blown or surprised?

BURNS: It’s every day. It’s every moment.

When you have this restless mind, you can look at a famous painting like the Mona Lisa, and it’s a work of science. One of its early admirers was talking about her face and then dropped down to her neck and said, “I can actually see the vessels of her veins. I can see the beating of her heart.” And then you can take some of the great works of anatomy and realize that they’re works of art as well.

So, what Leonardo does among the many thousands of things he does to us, if we let him in, is he asks us to develop all of our parts, to educate all of those aspects of ourselves, and to ask really important questions: Where did I come from? Who am I? What is my purpose here? What will I leave behind?

Where am I going? Though absent a microscope or a telescope, there’s stuff that Leonardo was doing — innovations that didn’t mean anything to us about how heart valves worked until we had MRIs, and we went, “Oh my God, he got it.”

Right? Human-powered flight — he couldn’t do it with the materials of the time, but when we did do it 450, 475 years later, it’s Leonardo’s example that we’re following. He’s interested in water dynamics and military devices. He draws the first landscape, we think, in Western art.

And so we just tend to pass him off. We just say, “Mona Lisa’s smile,” make jokes, and we sort of pass by perhaps the most important person of the last millennium.

Copy LinkWhat we can takeaway from Leonardo’s approach

SAFIAN: Is there any way or in what ways that Leonardo and the way he thought about art and creativity and science that we particularly need to hear in 2024?

There are myriad ways in which his approach can be enlightening, I suppose, but maybe inspiring. There’s a kind of dedication, and first and foremost is a fundamental trust in nature. What nature does is it anchors him in lots of different ways. Spiritually, of course, but also nature is perfect, and we see in nature all the forms. He’s always looking at the microcosm and the macrocosm. He didn’t know about an atom; we didn’t know about it then. But he’d be the first today to go, “Don’t you see? There is a profound similarity in the architecture of the atom and the solar system.”

And he’s got to compete for commissions, and when he takes the Last Supper in Milan, it’s a huge thing. The bigger the size of the thing, the bigger the success, but also every flaw is magnified.

And so you’ve got this tension of competition and all of those kind of marketplace things. You’ve got all the kind of realities that we have right now. There’s nothing different. They’re all the same. He’s a gay man. He gets locked up for sodomy.

What is one of the first inventions he ever does? A machine to pull bars from windows.

The great thing about the Renaissance is that it is a period in which we’ve emerged from pandemics. Sound familiar? We’ve emerged from a kind of — we call it the dark ages because everybody’s a subject and there’s no contact, and all we have is the church and its dogma. He’s working in that. But now that we’re introducing secular humanism into this, we’re centering the human being within these stories, and suddenly we’re able to think outside the box.

Copy LinkHow Ken Burns made a film about Leonardo da Vinci

SAFIAN: So you’ve got his paintings, his codices, so much, as you say, of what he created, but he lived much longer ago than your other major subjects — hundreds of years ago. So he predates sort of modern media. No photos, no videos, no contemporaneous recordings. How did that impact what you created?

BURNS: There are no photographs, right? There are no newsreels, but in this case, with this new visual grammar, we split the screen. We filmed our own human bodies moving and making gestures. We did some animation, so it liberated our own style. But having said that, the most important thing is that there is an arrogance in the present. Somehow, because you and I are alive, we somehow know more than them. And that arrogance is the greatest impediment we have to actually evolving in our intellect and in our spirit. Ecclesiastes knew this. That’s the Old Testament, thousands of years ago: What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There’s nothing new under the sun. Human nature doesn’t change. So, if you get back there and you can figure out a visual grammar to tell the story with paintings and live cinematography, the split screens that we’re talking about, you’re dealing with the same thing.

Copy LinkWhy Ken Burns isn’t using AI

SAFIAN: You mentioned some animation. I have to ask you about generative AI, which is hitting all industries, including filmmaking. Computer-generated imagery has obviously been around for a while in filmmaking, but AI makes recreation easier and cheaper and faster. Did you consider deploying any of that to bring Da Vinci to life?

BURNS: AI, let me just see — this is rural New Hampshire. Anybody know anything about AI?

I don’t want to say I’m a Luddite, but I’ve made conscious decisions in my life. I moved here 45 years ago because I realized that the kind of work that I was going to do required a labor-intensive, hands-on, out-of-the-marketplace sort of thing.

When most of my colleagues around 1990 had shifted to computer editing, we waited another decade. And when most had already long ago abandoned film, we shot film until 2010.

And what I think the best way to say it is that you don’t want the technological tail to wag the dog. It has to be controlled in some way. I’m sure we could feed in—we’re having trouble with this scene. We could feed into AI every script that we’ve ever produced on every film and just say, “Give us a Ken Burns script for this scene that takes us from…” I’m working on a history of the American Revolution now from the Battle of Cowpens to the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. And it would do it, but it’s like—it’s like online pornography. What do you really want? You know? You want the real thing. You don’t want pornography, at least it seems to me, in terms of art or in terms of craft, except those artists who are playing with it with the intention of disrupting things in a good way. But the dangers right now are so manifest that…

I’m not sure a shortcut is always the best way.

Copy LinkThe power of narrative

SAFIAN: I’m curious, you’ve done films about ideas and films about people. Some historians think ideas are more important. Others sort of follow this great person theory of history. How do you parse that? Our world today seems very focused on the celebrity of people.

BURNS: Let me just back up a little bit and tell you that in the academic academy, after World War II, meaning when we dropped this bomb, and we knew everything was different, when we discovered that six million Jews had been murdered systematically in Europe, everything changes. So there was a sense that narrative was no longer operative. In music, we’re going from swing to bebop. In painting, we’re going from representational to abstract expressionism. And so what happens in the academic community, particularly in history — we abandon the kind of bankrupt old narrative because we’re in a new place. We replace it with different fashions of historiography, so we have Freudian interpretations, we have Marxist economic determinists, we have symbolism, we have deconstruction, we have queer studies, we have Afrocentrism, and they’re all just perfectly legitimate ways to investigate the subject.

But what if you could do all of them? What if you could go back and use narrative, which nobody can ever abandon? And so what we found in our area is that we can see all those different points of view, and we can include them.

And some of them are contradictory, and that’s okay too, because that’s the story of life. You don’t have a very simple thing. It’s only our superimposition of binary structures. You know what I mean? Male, female, gay, straight, white, black, young, old, trans, rich, poor, Israeli or Palestinian, red state, or blue state. There’s nothing binary in nature. And so these are all just artificial superimpositions. And so what I think stories do is permit us the elasticity and the fluidity — no pun intended — of being able to tolerate all of these complex things. And that’s the only way we parse it.

I’ve got a sign in my editing room. And it says in cursive, lowercase, cursive, in neon: “It’s complicated.”

Copy LinkObjectivity vs subjectivity in filmmaking

SAFIAN: As you’re talking about the complexity, there’s a lot of discussion today about what’s fact and what’s misinformation. You’re making a lot of choices when you’re doing your storytelling about what facts to include. How much do you worry that documentarians in the future will have a harder time capturing the history being made today because they won’t know what to trust?

BURNS: Yeah, it’s already happened. I think that’s less it. All you have to do is just means-test it, right? I mean, we just know. And maybe I think what you’re implying is that our manipulation of images, whatever AI can do, will somehow get to some place where we can’t tell whether former President Obama actually said this thing or it’s some deep fake that made it.

Maybe your question should be more about objective or subjective. There’s nothing objective. So the rest of it is subjectivity, but just shades of subjectivity.

I live in this village. We make maple syrup here, and you get 40 gallons of sap to get one gallon of maple syrup.

So that’s what we do. The distillation process is in itself a selection, but it’s not necessarily untrue. It’s just saying, we’re selecting this. Then you want to go to the true thing. How much can you tell? Then it really becomes morality.

We’re now seeing these documentaries and reality things that are being made about a subject, and they’re good and interesting, but you notice that either that person who’s the subject or their wife or their brother or their children are the executive producers.

You go, wait a second, that could never happen on PBS where I am, because we’ve drawn an absolutely sacrosanct narrative, church-and-state line. I can’t have Michael Jordan sitting in my editing room saying don’t use that shot, right? I love that discipline of being true to yourself.

Our editing process is where our films are made. And when you put it together, there are decisions that are made. Millions, no exaggeration, millions of decisions. And who makes that decision is super important. And what you’re talking about is that we are now asking machines—that’s basically what we’re saying—to help us get through that. That’s where I’m saying you can take the interstate from Santa Fe to Taos, or you can do the high road to Taos.

And I’ve done that. And you definitely don’t want to do the shortcut. You want to see what that thing is. A lot of technologists talk about AI’s power to sift through large amounts of data, but I love Ken’s perspective here—that the process of sifting through, as arduous as it may be, is so often where the true magic lies.

SAFIAN: After the break, Ken shares how he stays optimistic in these trying times, the advice he gives to young college graduates, and more. Stay with us.

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SAFIAN: Before the break, acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns shared what inspired him to make a film about Leonardo Da Vinci, and what we could all learn from da Vinci in 2024. Now, Ken talks about how the January 6th insurrection influenced his upcoming project about the American Revolution, and why PBS is one of the last remaining antidotes to sensationalist media. Let’s get back to it.

Copy LinkHow modern events impact Ken’s choices

You’re working on this project about the American Revolution. Like, having just gone through — not that long ago — the January 6th events, does that change or impact how you’re interpreting that chapter?

BURNS: People say history repeats itself. It never has. There’s never been the same event twice. Mark Twain is supposed to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” That’s about as good as it gets because that Ecclesiastes — human nature doesn’t change — means that that human nature superimposes itself on each generation. We’ve got the same greed and generosity, the same virtue and venality, all of that stuff is before us.

And so, what you do is you try to sort of see the way human beings act, but focus on your story because you know the second you’re done, you lift your head up and this film is rhyming in the present.

The only film I’ve ever once changed because of how much it was rhyming as I started many, many years ago in 2015, an entirely different epic about the Holocaust. As we were working on it, we began to see that instead of just rhyming, we just ignore that while it’s happening.

It’s not rhyming every single second, and the alarm bells are going off.

If you wanted to be in the most cosmopolitan place on earth in 1932, that is to say where it is leading the world in intellectual rigor, in music, in cinema, in painting, in architecture, there is no other place on earth like Berlin. The next January, ’33, the fragility of these seemingly durable structures and institutions is laid bare in a Holocaust. So we just went through a kind of montage in two or three minutes — a dizzying montage — through the late ’60s and ’70s and ’80s and ’90s, et cetera, up to January 6th. We’re reminded by just how fragile these things are. Other than that one exception of changing the last few minutes of the U.S. and the Holocaust film, have we ever sort of paid attention? It’s only after the fact, when the film is safely done, then you can sort of start to say, you could think about it this way.

And I could take any film, you name it, and I will tell you the way it rhymes in the present that’s just unbelievable.

Copy LinkDoes Ken Burns worry about the future of public media?

SAFIAN: You mentioned PBS and the freedom that the arrangement you have with them allows you to do. You’re the face and the name associated with broadcasting for the public good in the U.S. Do you worry at all about the future of PBS as a legacy media organization with a mission of public service? Like, what does it need to do now in 2024?

BURNS: It’s always been changing and innovating. It’s not — Bob, it’s not sexy, right? I mean, I admit it, right? But it’s the tortoise in the tortoise-and-the-hare story. The hare just gets tired. It’s pooped out by all that boldface, underlining celebrity-loving nonsense.

And I find that having one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other proudly out is great.

So it’s not like, “You’ve got to deliver Vietnam in two years.” It’s okay, ten and a half. You’re raising the money. We’ll give you a little bit here, ten percent of the budget. Just come back. I mean, this came out in 2017. Our Vietnam thing, it’s ten episodes, it’s eighteen hours, millions, tens of millions of people watched it, and I don’t think I have any film I can say it’s still like the definitive. It’s still the definitive.

Copy LinkThe importance of the arts

SAFIAN: There’s an irony for the audience who listens a lot to this show or business people who are pushed more and more towards metrics and the marketplace like that.

BURNS: That is a double-edged sword. So I’m working on my first film; I look about 12 years old, and it’s on the Brooklyn Bridge, so people are delighting, by the hundreds literally, no exaggeration, by the hundreds, delighting in telling me, “This child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge.” No. And all I wanted was a thousand bucks or twelve hundred bucks or twenty-five hundred to just do this film.

Which I ultimately got made, and I used to carry two three-ring binders on my desk with all the rejections.

But I met along the way the senior vice president at AT&T downtown.

William Sharwell was his name. We became really good friends. I loved him a lot. He was a really good man and gave us $12,500, which was like somebody coming, calling me up right now and saying, “We’re giving you $2 million.” Right? It’s like, it had that — what? But one day, he said, “You know what? I’ve got all these MBAs, and they’re smart kids. But I could teach them what I need them to do for me in the MBA world, but they don’t know humanities. They don’t know history. They don’t know how to write a letter that’s a page and a half long. They don’t know about ethics. They don’t know about comparative religion, any of these things that are part of the humanities that we sort of say, ‘Oh, we don’t need it.’ It’s STEM. The only way we’re going to get by are those kinds of metrics in which one and one equals two. Bridges can’t stand. Airplanes can’t fly unless we just turn out these people who are doing it. And what happens? All we want in our lives, the reason why we’re talking today, is that we want one and one to equal three. We want the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts. And if it’s just the sum of the parts, you’re stuck there.

But if it’s here, then you’ve got this great mystery. What is that difference? Whether it’s faith, whether it’s love and relationship, whether it’s art, whether it’s just humanism or rationalism or whatever it is, you cannot live. You have to stick that ‘A’, the arts, into that STEM and make it STEAM. Otherwise, we’re just going to look like another second-rate, two-bit country made up of automatons.

You’ve seen Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, right? I mean, that’s the direction unless you’ve got people who are going, “Excuse me, wait a second.”

Copy LinkFinding optimism while studying history

SAFIAN: People who delve into history could find things in history that are depressing. You seem to maintain optimism.

BURNS: I think that’s the nature because if human nature doesn’t change, then you see that even in the worst situations, we got out of it. I made a film about the Civil War. 750,000 Americans were killed by other Americans. That’s a lot of human bodies, right?

So, it’s not to pooh-pooh this; I actually think right now is the greatest crisis. I feel more pessimistic about right now just because during the Civil War, free and fair elections, peaceful transfer of power, and independence of the judiciary weren’t in question. Now, all of those things are in question, and maybe only because they can be, which is the most decadent kind of idea — that this is the ultimate corruption, that we’re just flirting with the idea that we invented the United States.

SAFIAN: Because we’re accepting it.

BURNS: We’re accepting it. We invented the thing. When Thomas Jefferson said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” they were not self-evident. Nobody on earth could make that argument. Everybody was a subject. And he was saying, “No, we’re going to be something else.” Now, clearly, he owned other human beings. He didn’t mean women. He didn’t mean the poor. But we, in the vagueness of the language, have expanded it. And that’s been our story. And now you want to flirt with totalitarianism and dictatorship. It doesn’t work out.

Well, Ken, is there anything that I didn’t ask you about that I should have?

Well, you were asking about the optimism, and it’s really there, but to me, I remember once in the ’90s, some reporter wrote a feature story and described me as enthusiastic, and it was clearly in the context of the writing pejorative, right? I had fairly thin skin then. So, I looked up the etymology of “enthusiasm,” and the Greek etymology of enthusiasm is “God in us.” So, I think we ought to all be pleading guilty to that kind of enthusiasm. That means that you’re animated, honestly, sincerely, by the stuff you’re engaged in. I always like to say I’ve got the best job in the country, and the ultimate thing is that neither you, me, nor anyone listening to the sound of our voices gets out of here alive. And we could understandably be in a fetal position wrapped on the floor, but we don’t. We raise children, we write symphonies, we tend gardens, and that’s the human thing. And that’s why you have to outrun the machine and let the dog wag the tail, not the other way around.

SAFIAN: Well, Ken, thank you so much for doing this.

BURNS: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Coming away from our conversation, Ken had me reflecting on whether I’m enthusiastic in the Greek sense of the word. I’m not openly spiritual in a “God in us” way, but I love the work I get to do, and despite all of the hardship around the world, I’m lucky enough to wake up each day motivated to make a difference. The sweep of history is so vast, it’s easy to feel small in comparison — which may be comforting for some. But for me, it’s a reminder that we only have one life to leave a positive impact on the world. So let’s give it a go, right? I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.