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One of the central elements of our film are the interviews.
And they are hugely important for many of the films.
Sometimes we have very few of them.
But most of them are contemporary people
who have been involved with it.
But also, we have historical interview people
that know something about the subject.
Getting them is totally different.
The-- the historical people are pretty easy.
You can't interview Abraham Lincoln,
but you can interview Shelby Foote.
You can't interview Frederick Douglass,
but you can interview Barbara Fields.
So that's what you do.
And that's pretty obvious.
And you get a list and you go out.
And you set up a time and you conduct the interview.
With the subjects that are part of the story of the film--
veterans of the Second World War, veterans
of Vietnam, people in country music--
that's a different sort of thing.
You're reaching out, hoping to find the best person.
That's a different set of questions
than if you're finding a scholar who knows something
about the Civil War, or knows something about the Roosevelts.
A lot of it involves some of the most significant digging we do.
And the others are sitting right there in front of us.
And-- and we need to just go out and figure out
who that cohort will be.
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We go to lots of lengths for everything,
whether it's an archive or diaries or journals.
And the interviews are no exception.
In the case of Vietnam, where we ended up
shooting about 100 people, we probably talked to over 1,000.
And it's-- it's trying to identify those people--
casting the net hugely wide, 10 to one, 100 to one--
that we might talk to, and then eventually getting
to those interviews.
What you want to do is ask them to tell you
about their experience, and take furious notes.
And you're not only writing down the details
of what they've done, but you're also noting
how well they tell a story.
And I have had an instance in "Huey Long" film
where I was interviewing a retired judge in Louisiana who
had been fiercely anti Huey Long.
And in the lead-up to the interview
The guy could not shut up.
And I just thought, oh no.
This is going to be terrible.
And we just--
I didn't know what to do.
But somehow, turning on the camera, he gave it in bites.
He's a huge part of the film.
Sometimes everything that you've got written
down goes out the window.
They're not going to tell that story again.
You can try as best you can to do it.
And they might even say, well, I'm not comfortable saying that
again on camera.
Sometimes you realize they are not
going to be a good interview.
They're-- they're too anxious about it.
Even in the pre-interview, they're stumbling.
You don't want somebody to be--
to fall apart when you put the camera there.
And that's happened, where they just have clammed up and been
unable to do stuff.
And sometimes you've been able to pull us out of a nosedive
and get us--
get us something good.
And that's-- those make for good--
good stories about interviews.
But mostly, you're very polite.
And-- and you don't do it.
Most of the people don't hear from us again,
or they hear from us, politely, that it looks like we've
gone a different way.
I would never say, you were terrible,
or it didn't work out that way.
I was once asked to give a commencement address.
And someone said, you are our third choice.
And I said, thank-- thank you, OK.
Like, you could have just asked me
to give the commencement address,
not tell me I was number three.
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What makes a great expert interview--
and that's to be sort of distinguished from
the witness--
is that they are understanding that they don't have
to tell the whole story, right?
So I'll give you an example of somebody
who hit the cutting room floor in "The Civil War."
We interviewed a historian.
He said, in 1862, they were pretty well supplied.
In 1863, things were getting a little tough.
By 1864, you know, they were really-- they
didn't have very many supplies.
And by '65, just before the surrender,
they were basically starving in some places.
Well, he just gave away the whole story.
I asked Shelby about the privations.
And he said, oh, they had a thing called sloosh.
They'd have a little bit of corn meal left over
and maybe a little bacon grease in their pan.
And they'd-- they'd fry that up.
They'd make the corn meal into a dough.
And they'd make it look like a stick.
And they'd wrap it in the bacon grease.
And then they'd put it on their ramrods
and heat it over the fire.
And they-- they ate a lot of that.
They called it sloosh.
OK, that-- I get that.
You're down to corn meal and bacon
grease is what you're eating, that I understand.
SHELBY FOOTE: You got issued corn meal and bacon.
And you fried the bacon, which left a great deal of grease
in the pan.
Then you took the corn meal and swirled it around
in the grease to make the dough.
And then you might take the dough and make a snake of it
and put it around your ramrod and cook it over the campfire.
That was called sloosh.
They ate a lot of that.
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When I'm approaching an interview subject,
or one of my colleagues is approaching an interview
subject, we just insist that we do it
completely straightforwardly.
It cannot be any subterfuge whatsoever, you know.
I'm making a film with Ken Burns, or I'm Ken Burns
and I'm a documentary filmmaker.
And we're making a film on this subject.
And we'd like to consider you to be interviewed.
And I'd like to talk to you.
Is it possible to meet with you?
If not, can we do this over the phone right now?
And is this something.
And if somebody says, look, I'm not interested,
you say thank you.
And if they're really valuable, you think,
you can bug them for another six months, three or four times.
A couple of times I was turned down
by Barbara Jordan for a film on the Statue of Liberty.
She's wonderful in it.
And she said, nope, too busy.
And I finally-- about six months later I said, look,
this is what your-- some colleagues have said.
This is what the poet Jerzy Kaczynski said.
This is what the filmmaker Milos Foreman said.
This is what James Baldwin said.
I-- I'll be happy to do it without you.
I'll never bother you again.
But I can't imagine doing this film without you.
And she wrote back and said, fine.
BARBARA JORDAN: The greatest threat
is the inner tension of the people of this country,
to liberty.
If we don't attend to it, if we take it for granted
and let people trample on it in even minute ways,
it can gradually suffer an erosion, just like the statue
itself suffered some erosion.
You have to attend to liberty.
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You never know when a person is
going to turn into the best interview in that film.
It just-- you have no idea.
And sometimes, you can come out thinking that it's great.
And then you select the interviews
and cut the whole, full transcript into a set of 20,
and got to go--
not so good.
Then you put it in the film and it's great, or vice versa.
You just don't know.
Shelton Johnson, who is the most poetic park
ranger in the entire National Park Service,
was one of these great gifts and fell into our lap.
And we just assumed that here he was, an African-American park
ranger, interpreting the story of the African-American Buffalo
Soldiers, who were Yosemite's first caretakers.
And so Sheldon was that.
But then, this is a kid born in inner-city Detroit
who had just been blown away by his first visit
to a national park, Yellowstone.
He started talking about that.
And he started talking about something else.
And so all of a sudden, Shelton became not just
the African-American expert on the Buffalo Soldiers--
which he was great on, and interpreted it in a very
nuanced and complex way--
he became all of our guides to all of it.
And it begins to tell you a little bit
about the kind of pigeonholing even those of us
hypersensitive about race could do.
Oh, he's going to cover this.
He's a scholar of that.
Well, it turns out Shelton understood everything
about the national parks, and at a visceral, spiritual level,
and communicated that to tens of millions of human beings,
many of whom--
many millions of whom--
because of him got off their couches
and went out and saw a national park.
SHELTON JOHNSON: And Yosemite Falls
seems to flow out of the clouds itself, as if out of nowhere.
It's a gathering place of water, all the waters
of the sky flowing into that one spot, which
makes it a gathering of life and a gathering of spirit as well.
And all of those things are flowing through Yosemite.
And so I think that--
what better place is there, that has such a confluence
of so many things flowing together,
and the result is music?