Various thoughts from Ken Burns talk

• History is the best teacher

• The goal is to make a film that … “drops out of your head and into your heart.”

• Race is at the core of the American narrative

• “All of our films are made in the editing room”  

Process: Reading, scholars, museums, archives, and interviews

• We’re 80-100 hour a week people.  

• “Remove the arrogance we have about the past”   

• “Good history is making you think it won’t turn out the way it did.”   

• “The internet equalizes…”  

• “Most of what we do is subtraction…(Analogy to syrup: forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.)   

• There’s no boundaries in music; WM quote: “Music as the art of the invisible”  

• KB as conductor of huge orchestra.   

• When something is going wrong: “Someone, somewhere, let something slide.”  

• Note about teachers — “more about how to be a person than a filmmaker”  

• Points at TJ and DoI: second greatest sentence in the English language.   

• Laws of storytelling are the same, no matter what kind of film you’re making.   (Difference between me and Spielberg is that he can make something up and I can’t.)