In most films music is brought in at the end, after the picture is more or less locked, to amplify the emotions the filmmaker wants you to feel. – Ken Burns
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. – Ken Burns
I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever. – Ken Burns
History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions. – Ken Burns
I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films. – Ken Burns
I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War. – Ken Burns
I think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can’t work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can’t really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance. – Ken Burns
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. – Ken Burns
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. – Ken Burns
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. – Ken Burns
I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities. – Ken Burns
I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique they have. But there’s very little that I think satisfies you intellectually or emotionally. – Ken Burns
I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we’re lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it’s worse than fear – it’s active disengagement. – Ken Burns
Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics. – Ken Burns
When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things. – Ken Burns
I don’t use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts. – Ken Burns
I subscribe to William Faulkner’s’ view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now. – Ken Burns
Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being. – Ken Burns
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. – Ken Burns
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? – Ken Burns
The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It’s our great contribution to the arts. – Ken Burns
You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living. – Ken Burns
You don’t work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches. – Ken Burns
