Ken Burns Quotes
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By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz.
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The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.
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I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.
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I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.
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In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?
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The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.
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The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice.
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I have made all my films for my children with the exception of my first film because my oldest daughter wasn't born when I was making the film about the Brooklyn Bridge.
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The flame is not out, but it is flickering.
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You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.
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You don't work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches.
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In most films music is brought in at the end, after the picture is more or less locked, to amplify the emotions the filmmaker wants you to feel.
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You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.
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I think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can't work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can't really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance.
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When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.
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I never, ever want to apologize for a film. If it's bad I'll say it's my fault. And that's what I can say so far in all the films that I've done, that if you don't like it, it's entirely my fault.