[MUSIC PLAYING]
We should be pretty honest that we're there for-- in most
of our interviews, for what we could call the tough stuff,
the difficult stuff, the painful stuff,
the things that bring up the memory of death or loss
or horrors that no human being should see.
And it's not that you're going to hit them with it,
but you're going to figure out a way in which you made them
comfortable enough that they feel comfortable enough
to share that.
And that's the way it should be.
So we're working in our film in the Second World War,
called "The War."
We're telling the story of the Second World War, the greatest
cataclysm in human history, mostly through the eyes
of people from four geographically distributed
American towns.
But we've also got a few ringers in there.
And we have a historian, Paul Fussell,
who was actually in combat as an infantry man.
He was in France in 1944 and 1945,
where the life expectancy of a Second Lieutenant--
which he was--
by age 19 was something like 17 days.
In 17 days, you were either killed, severely wounded,
or you went crazy.
And he went six months without ever brushing his teeth,
without ever taking a shower, without ever
changing his clothes, because he was really good at what he did.
And what he did was not get wounded, not
die, not go crazy, and more important,
knew how to kill the other-- the enemy, and do it very expertly.
So we had a we had a--
gold in our hands.
But he's also an academic.
And so he came with a certain amount of self-consciousness.
He was, in the first three reels, palpably--
palpably-- anxious.
And it manifested by the fact that his mouth
went completely dry.
And we always sit some water next to somebody
so that they can, you know, take a sip and, you know,
clear their throats.
But this wasn't working for him.
And you could-- you could almost hear his heart pounding.
And there was an awkwardness.
And so the first reels were something like this.
It wasn't the material was so bad,
but you understood that the way he was vibrating,
it wasn't quite working.
So--
KEN BURNS (ON VIDEO): What was the mood of the country right
after Pearl Harbor?
Did all the young men rush to enlist?
I mean, what was just the general tenor.
PAUL FUSSELL (ON VIDEO): OK.
My friends, who were different from me, they were athletic.
I was not.
I was aesthetic.
My friends all rushed off to join the Marine Corps
as Patriots.
And they were all accepted immediately.
And within about two weeks, they'd
been sent off to Marine training.
So there's nothing wrong.
He's expository.
But you can see he's so nervous.
And he's feeling the need to sort of add more detail.
They were athletic.
I was aesthetic.
He's-- that was a great line.
It would have been great, but it kind of had an unnaturalness.
And he himself wasn't sure whether he would add it in.
I have spent the first few reels desperately trying
to make him comfortable and nothing's working.
And I've actually stopped and I've said, Paul, you know,
it's OK.
Take a drink of water.
This is great.
You're doing terrifically.
And I was considering after a while doing this "En Francais,"
which is our signal since the beginning
that we started Florentine Films that that meant
the cameramen wouldn't roll, and we wouldn't waste the very
precious, very expensive film, and that we'd
record something and honor our subject.
But he was too important, and I knew he had a lot to say.
He'd written extraordinary books about warfare
and about his experience in warfare.
Then, in between a reel change, he
had been talking about the kids that
were sent up as replacements.
And I said, wait a second, Paul.
How old were the kids?
And-- and he said, oh, 18.
And I said, how old are you?
And he goes, 19.
And I just-- I suddenly got it.
That he hadn't yet accessed that 19-year-old person
that he once was.
And so I said, you saw bad stuff.
And his-- he changed entirely.
All of a sudden, the academic fell away.
And he wanted to say, I saw bad stuff.
But all of his-- he felt somehow constrained,
that he had to be the avuncular historian, perhaps
the patch on his tweed jacket, and offer pearls of wisdom.
And that I didn't need him to do that.
I needed him to be Paul Fussell, the 19-year-old Second
Lieutenant who was out living every single hour
the actuarial tables for his position,
for his job description.
And so, you know, now we're into roll 145.
This is in 2003.
It's February.
And something begins to happen.
KEN BURNS (ON VIDEO): That's amazing.
PAUL FUSSELL (ON VIDEO): I'd say it changed a lot of minds.
KEN BURNS (ON VIDEO): You've seen some bad stuff.
You seen some horrible things.
PAUL FUSSELL (ON VIDEO): Yeah.
KEN BURNS (ON VIDEO): Tell me about that.
PAUL FUSSELL (ON VIDEO): Well, I think
the most horrible was one of the first horrors I confronted.
It was the-- the day after our night relief
for this unit of the 33rd division.
First it was the dead German boys
lying all over the field of battle
and beginning to turn yellow, and so forth.
Their eyes open.
I'd never seen a cadaver with eyes open before.
I'd seen dead people, like my relatives in coffins or so on.
Their eyes were always decently closed.
And when you see violently killed people
with holes in them and missing limbs and so on, staring
at you with open eyes as if they were alive,
you feel terribly disconnected from things.
Are you supposed to say something to them?
Are you supposed to say, I'm sorry?
Did it hurt much?
And so forth.
I came across two German kids dead, lying on their backs.
They'd been killed the day before the unit
we were replacing.
And they were so young I couldn't believe it.
I thought they were between maybe 12 and 14 years old.
And at the end of the war, of course,
the Germans were absolutely scraping
the barrel of everybody.
Old men who could hardly walk and little kids from, you know,
late grammar school.
These kids had little uniforms on.
They were wearing caps, not helmets.
And each of them had been shot through the head.
And the blue-- bluish red brains of one
were coming out his nostrils.
They had their eyes open too.
And the other one, his bluish-red brain
was coming out just from under his cap.
And sort of displacing his cap as he wore it.
And that really gave me a jolt.
I cannot describe what I went through.
It was terrifying.
And you see he's still nervous.
He's still licking his lips.
But all of a sudden, he's not looking at me, and he-- he
doesn't seem to be in the room that the interview is
taking place.
He's looking off.
It doesn't really matter what I'm asking.
I'm just saying, what else, and yes, and you know,
you saw bad stuff, and what did you feel.
And he's looking off to the place where he was.
And that is when an interview becomes gold.
Can I just say something?
Saying the word "gold" is so incredibly insulting.
It's as if we're in some business in which, you know,
we measure it by the success of what we extract inquisitively
from people, as if we've raped them.
Vampires that have sucked the blood out of them.
And that's not what it's about.
And that's not who I'm about.
I'm about some reciprocity that at the same time honors Paul.
And I have done a disservice to Paul
by saying that it was gold.
What he gave us was a bit of his soul, and he did it generously.
He may-- however unconsciously, what
it did is it added immeasurably to our film,
and I am forever in his debt.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So now you have a raw interview, right?
And what are you going to do with it?
How does it fit in?
You've got lots of other interviews
that you have to integrate.
You have a script.
You have a timeline.
You know, where is it?
And-- and-- and the placement of our talking heads
aren't so defined.
We didn't go to him and say, Paul,
get us from here to here on this page
of this script in this episode.
We just did an interview with him.
And so we're trying different places
that it's going to fit in.
And in this episode, you know, there's a kind of evolution.
You want that character development
you'd have in a dramatic film.
And so he's beginning in the early days,
talking about kind of the-- the youth of the--
the soldiers.
I mean, he's 19.
His replacements were 18.
He calls them kids.
And we get one of those comments about bad things.
I mean, we couldn't spend them all.
It was just too potent.
It would be too-- it would be-- it would destabilize the film
if we were to use it all.
But here's the context of--
I mean, here-- here is that comment
in the context of our film.
PAUL FUSSELL (ON VIDEO): And at the end of the war, of course,
the Germans were absolutely scraping
the barrel of everybody.
Old men who could hardly walk.
And little kids from late grammar school.
These kids had little uniforms on.
They were wearing caps, not helmets.
And each had been shot through the head.
And the blue-- bluish-red brains of one
were coming out his nostrils.
They had their eyes open too.
And the other one, his bluish-red brain
was coming out just from under his cap, and sort of displacing
his cap as he wore it.
And that really gave me a jolt.
I seldom refer to it.
But it was my introduction to some painful facts,
that this war is serious.
We are going to kill people, regardless of their age,
as long as they're wearing German uniforms.
And they were going to try to kill us.
So let me try to explain how I tried
to honor the raw material of what Paul Fussell gave us
in the interview.
So we're obviously in the context of other action.
We've brought him there through narration.
There's a loud battle going on.
And there the narrator says, "there
to replace other people."
And you're seeing a soldier sort of sitting by a campfire.
The sound effects, the sounds of war which have been so loud
and cacophonous and multi-dimensional,
give way to a very simple piano.
You then see, without seeing Paul, what he's talking about.
These two different dead bodies, both young.
Hideous shots.
Then we go back to the interview as--
byte, as I had shared with you earlier.
And we're using generic footage of soldiers,
young kids in the German army.
And it's one of the few times, I believe,
where the film stops and is sympathetic.
And Paul gave us the license to do that.
This was a film that was all going to be
the American point of view.
All the multiple stuffs.
We weren't going to be trying to get feel--
know what the Germans felt and what the Japanese felt.
We weren't interested in that in that film.
But in that moment, you suddenly have this sense of it
all being the same.
And then the narrative proceeds on.
And throughout the film, what was
in the back half of that interview
with Paul Fussell, every time we could use him,
it had a kind of potency to it.
The-- it was like whiskey that was, you know,
really high proof.
And it was just very careful.
We could only take a drink or a sip now and then
of what Paul had to say.