The Real Goal of Storytelling (Hint: It’s Not Being Right) | A Bit of Optimism Podcast

1. SSSimon Sinek0:00

   It is okay to try and simplify the world so that we can understand it and feel like we matter in it. And we have to accept that there's complexity that sometimes we understand and sometimes we don't. Those things have to live together.

2. KBKen Burns0:11

   You know, we make films, and they're not additive. You don't build a film, you subtract a film. We have 500 hours of footage-

3. SSSimon Sinek0:18

   Yeah, that's a brilliant way to put it

4. KBKen Burns0:18

   ... and we get down to 12. And it's, it's to do what you're talking about, to kind of-

5. SSSimon Sinek0:22

   Yeah

6. KBKen Burns0:23

   ... simplify in a way, but we also want to leave open, this is the mystery-

7. SSSimon Sinek0:27

   Yeah

8. KBKen Burns0:28

   ... of, of life that we have been handed. It's not the notes, it's the intervals between the notes that make music, and it's the cut between the shots that make film.

9. SSSimon Sinek0:38

   It's complicated. These are the words that hang on the wall of Ken Burns's editing room. These are the words that also capture how he understands history. It's complicated. There are few people whose work has actually shaped how we understand things, and Ken Burns is definitely one of those people. Whether it's our understanding of the Vietnam War, the origins of baseball, or even the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, Ken always tries to build his documentaries to tell the story from other angles, multiple perspectives, including ones we've never heard before, all of which challenge our understanding of what may have actually happened. His newest documentary, a six-part PBS series, explores the American Revolution in a way that reveals so much more depth and complexity than most of us are even aware of. To sit down with him was insane. He is so smart, and his ability to recall entire lines, paragraphs from his own work and the work of others

10. KBKen Burns1:39

    "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation."

11. SSSimon Sinek1:49

    I mean, it was crazy. I just sat back and at times [chuckles] felt a little stupid, but my God, he's fascinating. So get comfy because this is a detailed love letter to storytelling and an invitation to consider what history can teach us about who we are and who we're still becoming. This is A Bit of Optimism. [upbeat music] Your work feels more important to me now than ever because I think television is a large part of where we get our opinions, not just our information, but our opinions. We already know that people don't know what to trust or who to trust, and even documentaries are biased. And your work seems to stand out from those where you are willing to, I think, start with what you believe is a blank slate in your head and say, "Let's see where the story goes." How did you get to that? Because you, you're a documentarian. You can't help but have an opinion. How do you make sure that you stay even when you're telling a story?

12. KBKen Burns3:00

    That's a really wonderful, um, question, Simon. I remember the first day of film class in college at Hampshire College, a brand-new experimental school in its second year when I arrived in September of '71. The first day was, uh, just this question about objectivity and subjectivity. There's nothing objective, no matter what a documentary may claim. Even those proponents of cinema verité aren't. They're pointing their camera in one direction, not looking in the other. So what you have are degrees of subjectivity, and I think that that's where we've tried to be, uh, free, as you said, a blank slate when we begin. We're not trying to impose our own beliefs on the material, nor are we buying into any particular set of historiographies, that is to say, the way in which you engage the past. Maybe it's Marxist, maybe it's Freudian, maybe it's semiotics, deconstruction, queer studies, Afrocentrism. I mean, there's lots of fashions of historiography. You know, I resort to a baseball metaphor, calling balls and strikes. Um, we have in our main editing room a neon sign that says, in lowercase cursive, "It's complicated," and it works on many levels. One is, you know, if you've got a scene and it's working, and no filmmaker wants to touch a good scene, right? It's working. Leave that alone. But if you find new contradictory information that would destabilize this perfectly working scene, you're making it perhaps less perfect, less better, and we're always willing to do that. So that's the first line of it. But a lot of it gets to the larger questions that, you know, uh, we live in a media culture, in a computer culture in which everything is a one or a zero or a good or a bad-

13. SSSimon Sinek4:42

    Mm-hmm

14. KBKen Burns4:43

    ... a yes or a no, a- and there are no binaries, actually, in life. We know this from our friendships. We know it if we look in the mirror. So there's complicated things. So the tendency to say, in the case of the American Revolution, something I've been thinking about for the last 10 years and worked on a film about, you know, you can throw George Washington out because he was an owner of slaves. As the writer Rick Atkinson says, "You can't square that circle morally."

15. SSSimon Sinek5:06

    Mm-hmm.

16. KBKen Burns5:06

    In lots of ways, it's indefensible, and yet we don't have a country without him. Babe Ruth, if I go back to baseball, strikes out many, many more times than he gets a hit or a home run. But all in our highlight reel superficial world, that's all we show is Babe Ruth hitting a home run. He also comes up only once every nine times at bat, so it means that we're s- also obligated not just to focus on all of the things, his strikeouts, his game-ending double plays, as well as his walk-off homers. You have to look at the other people, and that's what we've tried to do in that. And so if you go in without an ax to grind, and I don't have one, you're telling a story. The novelist Richard Powers says, "The best arguments in the world," and that's all we do, and that's all your question is implying, "The best arguments in the world won't change anybody's point of view. The only thing that can do it is a good story."

17. SSSimon Sinek5:55

    Mm-hmm.

18. KBKen Burns5:56

    Which means you're not force-feeding what that change is.

19. SSSimon Sinek5:58

    Mm.

20. KBKen Burns5:58

    You're just offering them the range of complexity that allows them to sit in that contradiction, to sit in that undertow, to sit in what Wynton Marsalis said in our jazz thing. "Sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time."And we can hold that with the people we love. We can have to hold it with ourselves, otherwise we go crazy. And so we've tried to extend that to the work. And so what happens is that amongst a sea of stuff, we come out having spent 10 years trying to get it right, staying up at night over, you know, everything is footnoted, and it says, I'll make this up, 16 dead, 16 battleships, 16 months, and there are two scholars that have said this. And then all of a sudden, we've locked the thing. The narrator's gone home. It's it. And then we learn that a third scholar believes that it may not be true.

21. SSSimon Sinek6:45

    Right.

22. KBKen Burns6:46

    So we go scanning all of the stuff that's been read, and we find a perhaps six episodes ahead, take the perhaps, copy it, and move it back and say perhaps 16th-

23. SSSimon Sinek6:57

    Yeah

24. KBKen Burns6:57

    ... months.

25. SSSimon Sinek6:58

    Yeah.

26. KBKen Burns6:58

    Battles.

27. SSSimon Sinek6:58

    Yeah.

28. KBKen Burns6:59

    Yes, and then we sleep better at night. Now, even if we had left it alone, even that scholar would never have given us a hard time.

29. SSSimon Sinek7:06

    Yeah.

30. KBKen Burns7:06

    But if you do that a million times, and literally a million times in every film project, particularly the series are more than that-

Episode duration: 54:12