'It was inspiration': Ken Burns on his new film, 'Leonardo da Vinci'
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DENVER — When Ken Burns visited Rocky Mountain PBS in 2023 to promote “The American Buffalo,” he explained that all of his films — he has directed more than 30 — try to answer one question: “Who are we?” And by “we,” he means Americans.
But this time, Burns’ visit to the Buell Public Media Center in Denver was part of a press run for a film unlike anything in his oeuvre — its subject is not American.
“Leonardo da Vinci,” directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon is a two-part, four-hour film premiering on Rocky Mountain PBS Nov. 18. Ken Burns spoke with Rocky Mountain PBS about the inspiring effect of examining Leonardo’s genius, and the globe-trotting effort that went into making this documentary.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Rocky Mountain PBS: Welcome back to Colorado. Last time you were here, you were promoting “The American Buffalo.” We were talking about answering this question of “who are we, as Americans?” Now, you're promoting a different film. It's your first non-American subject. How did you settle on Leonardo da Vinci, and why now?
Ken Burns: The folks most responsible for it are my co-directors: my oldest daughter, Sarah Burns, and her husband, David McMahon. And we've collaborated for years and years on a number of projects, including the Central Park Five and Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali.
Ken Burns: The folks most responsible for it are my co-directors: my oldest daughter, Sarah Burns, and her husband, David McMahon. And we've collaborated for years and years on a number of projects, including the Central Park Five and Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali.
I didn't want to do it. One of our biographers, Walter Isaacson, had suggested this, and I just said, ‘you know, I don't do non-American topics.’ And I walked out of the dinner a little bit, miffed that he kept pushing and pushing. And, I called up Sarah and David and they said it would be a wonderful thing.
And so they've run with it. And really, the film is very much a Florentine Films production. And at the same time, it's got a new grammar and a new kind of relationship to music and a new kind of relationship to the visual way that we talk about it. And then at the end of the day, a good story is a good story is a good story.
And I love being over 70 and being able to — you know, this old dog got taught a new trick, and I owe it entirely to Sarah and Dave and their sort of certainty and confidence and also the willingness to dive into a subject, and for all of us together — the entire team — to figure out solutions to some really complicated problems.
You know, I'm working on a history of the American Revolution now, as I have for many, many years … and there were lots of problems when there are no photographs and there's no newsreels. And here's somebody [Leonardo da Vinci] that we’re dealing with in the mid-to-late 15th century and the very early 16th century.
That poses a lot of problems. And yet filmmaking is all about overcoming those problems. So Leonardo becomes this wonderful new friend that we've made, in a new language, in a new idiom, in a new kind of a way of approaching things. It's been wonderful. And Sarah and Dave are the authors of that interest.
RMPBS: You mentioned some of the films you'd worked on previously with Sarah and David: Central Park Five, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali. Very much rooted in social justice and racial justice. Did this feel like a departure from that, working with them on this?
KB: No, it's funny. I know what you mean. And you're absolutely right. And this isn't that at all. At the same time, a film, it's all the same no matter what the subject is. It's all a complicated thing about how you get up in the morning, put your pants on one leg at a time, and figure out how to solve complex issues of storytelling. And that's what this is.
This happens to be a guy — most of us use about 10% of our brain, we’re told — [Leonardo] may be using 75%, and I'm really interested in who that is. And you know, to say genius is not doing it justice. To say polymath is not doing it justice. To say Renaissance man — which, of course, he literally is — is not doing it justice.
We know he's painted the most famous painting on Earth. He's obviously one of the great painters. But then you say, ‘how many paintings did he have?’ It's fewer than 20. And how many of those are finished? Fewer than 10. And then you go, ‘wait a second. I have to know more.’ And that animating curiosity has kept us going for years and years and years. It sent Sarah and Dave and their two small children to Italy for a year, to do cinematography and research and writing and filming the intimacies of how we're going to overcome [having] no photographs [of Leonardo]. Then coming back and all of us struggling to figure out how to make it into a film.
RMPBS: I hear what you're saying, that polymath doesn't even begin to describe it. Adam Gopnik, in the documentary, describes Leonardo as a “supreme figure,” and I feel like that was a good description. It’s like Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, and then you almost run out of people.
KB: Right. You know, I made a film — oh my goodness, it's almost 30 years ago — on Thomas Jefferson. And despite all the flaws, which we enumerated in the film — and there are many in there — George Will commented in the film that you could argue that he, Jefferson, was the man of the last millennium, and to which you immediately think, ‘yes, okay, but.’ You start putting up arguments and then you wonder, ‘what are the alternatives?’ And you come up with Shakespeare, you come up with maybe Mozart, or Bach. You come up with Leonardo da Vinci, and I have to put my money there.
He doesn't have a telescope and he doesn't have a microscope, and he doesn't have calculus, and he's figuring stuff out a century before Galileo and Newton and several centuries before [now]. People would confirm the results of his studies only after we had MRI's in the 70s.
He’s about this monumental curiosity that every once in a while in our own lives, we touch on. We just have a moment somewhere where our observations are heightened. And we see it most often in nature. And that was his great inspiration, too.
It's just so irresistible and makes you want to be a better person, a smarter person, a more observant person. We do everything in our lives to categorize: he's a scientist and a painter. When he's painting, he's a scientist. When he's doing science, he's a painter. He doesn't see the distinctions between them. He's a human being, and he's closer to what our purpose here on life is, which is unanswerable. And I think he he asked that question more firmly and more resolutely than anybody else I've ever come across, including the Benjamin Franklins, the John Muirs, the Martin Luther Kings — the people that I've come in contact with who seem to be really pushing the boundaries of the big questions, ‘who am I? Where did I come from? What is my purpose in life? Where am I going?’
RMPBS: Speaking about the breadth of his work, I feel like visually, with this documentary, you communicated the relationship between art and science, and nature and man, in a really interesting way. Can you tell me about the use of the split screen and how you came up with that or settled on that?
KB: Well, this is David and Sarah, realizing that in a way, the limitations of the 15th and early 16th century could be the opposite: liberations. And so if this guy is thinking about stuff in a way that feels so achingly contemporary now, and dreaming up machines and things that he didn't think we're going to work in his lifetime, that we give him credit to, it demands new kinds of solutions.
The narrative is traditional. We're using paintings and drawings where we might have had photographs and live cinematography, as we do in all films.
We're also, as his imagination takes off in any arena, saying, ‘why not use two screens or four or 9 or 16? And why can't you run it backwards and forwards? And what about some animation and we how could we, in our own tiny, narrow-minded way, honor the extent of his creativity?’
RMPBS: Was it intimidating to make a film on a subject so omnipresent?
KB: Maybe it should have been. I liked our attitude all the way through, which was our attempt to rise to the occasion. And that's an exhilarating aspect to it. You can be cowed, but it's better to be exhilarated and want to be like Leo, you know?
It’s not about the film, though we really are proud of it. It’s about the man. It's about what he asks us to be, which is better, smarter, more curious, more insightful, more dedicated, more hard working. And so it was the opposite of intimidation. It was inspiration.
RMPBS: I found the film to be very moving. Visually it's very interesting. It's very different from your previous films. But something that really stood out to me was the score.
KB: Oh, I'm so glad you brought that up! I think I can say without insulting Sarah, [the score] was David's thing. We were experimenting early on, editing with lots and lots and lots of different composers and things. And it was working pretty well. Dave really wanted to move all his eggs into one basket with the young, extraordinary composer Caroline Shaw, who also works not just instrumentally with musical instruments, but with two groups of choral voices — one called Roomful of Teeth — who are all about using the voice as an instrument of a different kind.
[David’s] relationship, his enthusiasm for that was so infectious that you kind of had to just get out of the way. And so, with the exception of a couple needle drops towards the end of the film, which are important narratively to just bring us into the present, it's all her.
She's an extraordinary composer, and she was equal to the task and got it about Leonardo.
RMPBS: What was Dave and Sarah's research like? I know they moved to Florence for a time.
KB: They moved to Florence for a year, from July of ‘22 to July of ‘23. They made several trips before and after.
Already a lot of research had been done, interviews had been done. But you could conduct some interviews with scholars, mostly Europeans: British scholars, French scholars, Italian scholars. Some Americans. But you're also doing live cinematography of the area around Tuscany and also near Milan and up in the Italian Alps.
You're following the Arno River — he's [Leonardo] very much into water studies. You're also there in a city which is dedicated to keeping alive the spirit of that 15th century bodega, the workshops where you'd have sculptors and painters all together, but also jewelry makers. And so you have pigments being created and you have all sorts of stuff happening.
The name of my film company, which I started in 1975, is Florentine Films. So now we might have finally come home.
RMPBS: You have achieved your destiny.
KB: We’ve achieved our destiny [laughs]. It's so wonderful. It's also a beautiful, beautiful language, Italian. It is also this period of the Renaissance, Florence being the center of it. It’s a place where you want to be aware of, not just, Leonardo da Vinci, but the other people who are there, like Michelangelo and Brunelleschi and Verrocchio and the other people who are part of this extraordinary outpouring of artistic talent. And so you're just rubbing up against the newest of the new and the best of the best.
RMPBS: I'm paraphrasing, but the film begins with a quote from Leonardo where he says a good painter must depict two things: the person and then the intentions of their mind. Right. That seems to me like something you do with your films. Is it harder to do that when your subject is someone who we don't have interviews with or archival footage?
KB: No, I don't think so. It's very kind of you to say that. It took me hearing Leonardo saying it to realize, ‘boy, I wish that's what we were doing.’
And so I think what we've tried to do in all the films is what I call … emotional archeology. He's [Leonardo] already doing that and doing it in such great dimensions.
Another way of answering your question, which is to the point, is to say one of the big jokes is that his most famous painting [Mona Lisa] is of a wife of a well-to-do silk merchant. And we make jokes about her smile. When you see this film, you won't ever joke about it again. Or you can joke about it, but you will know why it is what it is. That is to say, it will be so transforming to get to that place where whatever's enigmatic and therefore uncomfortable for us — and therefore we have to make it funny or too mysterious — you'll realize that what he was able to touch was something so essential to this human project.
And gee, you know, just to be close to that for a few years, I consider that one of the luckiest aspects of my job.
RMPBS: You could make a documentary just on the “Mona Lisa” or just on “The Last Supper.” Was it difficult to try to balance how much time you were spending with each of his works?
KB: Getting to know the arc of a life is a really important thing. And so to me, I'm actually proud of the fact that “The Last Supper” scene or the “Mona Lisa” scene — “Last Supper” is the longest scene about anything in the film — are still short and even one of my favorite paintings, “The Virgin of the Rocks,” is under three minutes and makes me cry every time I see it.
It's just so powerful. And so it was important for us to be able to gobble the whole of him [Leonardo] up. And it's interesting. In his biography, if you’re looking for lots of little tidbits, you're not going to get much. There's very little that we know about him. We know some important things that are sort of in our tabloid sensibility. All right, he's gay. He's born out of wedlock. We know … a few things, but not the way we know the ins and outs of moments of Jackie Robinson's life or Muhammad Ali's life.
And so in a way, that's liberating. So then you can say, ‘yeah, sure, here. Here are the things we know.’ But isn't it better to be wondering about this first real painting on his own? “The Annunciation” or the “Virgin of the Rocks” or “The Last Supper” or the “Mona Lisa,” or the anatomy, or the drawings, or the inventions or also what's going on in Italy?
RMPBS: One of the historians talks about how at the end of Leonardo's life, there's this kind of disillusionment, and he's disappointed that he's not going to be able to finish all these things. I'm wondering how you might relate to that.
KB: [Laughs]. Well, you know what? There's a couple of things. He speaks about death with a kind of anger earlier on, and I kind of went, ‘why? You know so much about life and death is such a part of life. And you're going to be dissecting cadavers, and you're understanding the beauty of a man who dies of natural causes at that age. What's that unfulfilled thing for you?’
I know for myself that if I were given a thousand years to live — and I will not be — I would not run out of topics in American history. So there is that sense now, not just of urgency, but of greed [laughs].
You know, I'm working on more films now at 71 years old than I have ever worked on at one time.
RMPBS: I was revisiting some of your previous work and some of the previous press you've done about your older films, and I want to float a comparison by you and, and see how it lands. There's a part in the film where they're talking about Leonardo creating for the sake of creating. He’s not finishing his work, but he's just really interested in the process.
And that reminded me of the Frank Lloyd Wright documentary that you made. You spoke about how Wright’s roofs might have leaked or sagged in certain places, but it was really just about the creation of it all. Do you think that's a fair comparison?
KB: Here's the thing — and this is an intimate human thing — Frank Lloyd Wright isn't a very nice person. I didn't like him. Of all the biographies that we've done, he's the last guy I'd want to go out and have a beer with, or get in a car and do a cross-country trip with. Leonardo? Absolutely.
But you're absolutely right. When you are at that level of pushing the limits of everything, you're asking too much of every single project. Not in a bad way, but just after a while, the limitations in that frame of that painting, of that piece of poplar that he's working on, it's just … ‘I'm done.’ You know, it's not what the commission has suggested, but he said that to himself: ‘Tell me, tell me, tell me. When is it ever finished?’
And there are a few spectacularly finished works of his, ‘The Last Supper’ included. And so, yeah, I get it. Frank Lloyd Wright is a towering genius and is, I think, still without equal among American architects. But you're not drawn to him in the same way. Leonardo compels so much. There's an arrogance about Wright and a kind of egomania about him, a selfishness that I haven't yet haven't yet felt with Leonardo.
RMPBS: What is the one thing that you hope people take away from this film?
KB: You know, it's sort of the question and it's one that we resolutely refuse to answer. Not because it's not a good question. It's that we make a film,and then when it's done, it's not ours anymore. It's yours. And then it's really my question to you: ‘What do you take away from this?’
Because we don't want to prescribe a certain area of inquiry on your own, nor do we wish to say, ‘this is exactly the way that you should approach it.’
We just have complex, layered narratives. And so what you get is what you get. I love this guy. I wish that my life was filled with as much energy and curiosity and observational skills as his. It's not. It hasn't been. It will never be. But it's okay to want to be like him.
RMPBS: One of my takeaways was that I felt profoundly dumb in comparison to this guy.
KB: Leonardo, no matter how small he makes you feel, that's a good thing. When we were working on the national parks [documentary], I came across a quote from a guy who was writing about Mount Denali in Alaska in the nineteen-teens. It was then called Mount McKinley … and he said it reminds you of your atomic insignificance, right? That's a good thing. Because strangely, in the paradoxical ways … experiencing your own insignificance makes you larger in spirits. Just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self-regard.
That's why I can't put Frank Lloyd Wright and Leonardo in the same place, because one is diminished by that self-regard and the other is so humble in the face of this great handiwork, which in nature and in Colorado you have in abundance. You look out your window and you have that possibility to be awakened in that moment by something bigger and older than yourselves.
And yeah, I suppose it can make you feel small, but that also might be an inspiring aspect.
RMPBS: Well, Ken, is there anything else you'd like to add?
KB: This has been great. Thank you.
RMPBS: Thank you so much for your time. It's good to see you again.
KB: My pleasure. Nice to see you.
Type of story: Q&A
An interview to provide a single perspective, edited for clarity and obvious falsehoods.
An interview to provide a single perspective, edited for clarity and obvious falsehoods.
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