Ken Burns, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker, has described his latest epic series, The American Revolution, as the most important film he will ever make. The six-part, 12-hour documentary, which airs this week on PBS, has been a decade in the making and features an all-star cast including Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, and Josh Brolin.
Burns, now 72, said he and his co-director Sarah Botstein agreed that they would not work on a more important film. ‘Hopefully there are as important things coming up but this one has a singularity to it,’ he told the Guardian. The series draws on thousands of books and historical materials, with commentary from dozens of historians specialising in slavery, Native American history, and the British empire.
The documentary employs Burns’s signature style of slow pans and zooms across still images, period music, and readings of diaries and letters by actors. Burns assembled what he called ‘the best single cast ever assembled for any movie or television show, period’, including Kenneth Branagh, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Morgan Freeman, Paul Giamatti, Tom Hanks, Samuel L Jackson, Michael Keaton, Laura Linney, Edward Norton, Mandy Patinkin, Liev Schreiber, Dan Stevens, and Meryl Streep.
Burns rejected criticism that he used celebrities for star power, insisting that these are the finest actors in the world who bring history alive. ‘Tom Hanks can read a phonebook, as far as I’m concerned. Meryl Streep, the same thing,’ he said. The series also introduces audiences to lesser-known historical figures, many of whom never had a portrait painted, by weaving together the first-person voices of nearly 200 individuals.
The production schedule, which spanned a decade, allowed for flexibility in recording, including sessions via Zoom during the pandemic. Burns recounted working with Josh Brolin, who recorded his lines as George Washington in a few free hours in Atlanta before flying off to his next engagement. The documentary is defiantly traditional, reminiscent of The World at War or Burns’s own The Civil War, in an era of streaming and podcasts.
