Rapid Response: Ken Burns on Leonardo da Vinci, AI, and the future of storytelling

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1:23But you notice that either that person who's the subject or their wife or their brother or their children are the executive producers. And you go, wait a second, that could never happen in PBS where I am because we've drawn this just absolutely sacrosanct church and state line. I can't have Michael Jordan sitting in my editing room saying, don't use that shot, right? I love that discipline of being true to yourself. And we just, our editing process is where our films are made. When you put it together, there are decisions that are made. Millions, no exaggeration, millions of decisions. And who makes that decision is super important.

2:06You definitely don't want to do the shortcut. You definitely want to see what that thing is.

2:17That's the legendary documentarian Ken Burns. Ken has a new project coming out on PBS profiling the life and legacy of Leonardo da Vinci. And I wanted to ask what leaders today could learn from da Vinci and how da Vinci himself might tackle some of the biggest issues of 2024. Ken is part philosopher, part historian, and traces a captivating thread through the past to illuminate key ideas for the future. We talk about the impact of AI on storytelling, the underestimated power of studying humanities, and so much more. It's a rich journey, even if it doesn't run 20 hours like some of Ken's films.

2:58So sit back and enjoy. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

3:11I'm Bob Safian, and I'm here with renowned documentarian Ken Burns. Ken, thanks so much for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks, Bob, for having me. So you've done films about so many things, about baseball and jazz and the Civil War and Muhammad Ali and Hemingway and Ben Franklin. But your newest doc goes back further in history than any major project you've done before, focusing on Leonardo da Vinci. What drew you to da Vinci? And why now? Well, the why now question is sort of irrelevant for us long-term filmmakers because you can work on something for six years and you never sort of say, oh, well, this is going to come out in the fall of 2024 and things will be this way or that way, or they won't be any way at all.

4:00This is the first non-American topic I've ever undertaken. And that was quite a difficult place to get. We sort of broke the mold of a kind of traditional grammar in order to be able to contain the multitudes that Leonardo contains and to be sort of stunned perpetually that no matter how distant in the past he may seem to be, he's as modern as anybody we've ever come across. And if, as the cliche goes, you and I are only using 10 % of our brain, he's using 75%. And so it becomes this kind of inspirational goad that pulls you along into this world of observation, of experimentation, of discipline, of remembering not to in silo everything with what both commerce and convenience does, which is put things in different boxes.

4:48He's a scientist. He's an artist. He's an innovator. He's an inventor. He's a cartographer. He's a botanist. He's an anatomist. He's everything. And he doesn't see the distinction. And I think part of the problem of today among the many, many, many problems we suffer from is that we don't have technologists steeped in art. We don't have that many artists who themselves understand that the scientific dynamic is an important one to include. And so we just have to admit that we don't have any Leonardos and that we can borrow from the past because he's so modern and inspire our own world with everything that he did.

5:28You obviously knew a lot about Da Vinci before choosing to do this project, or didn't you? I don't know. I'm curious if there were things that surprised you. You know, maybe out of 40 films, maybe two I thought I knew something about, like baseball and Vietnam. Each day of those productions were daily humiliations of what I didn't know. And every project is like that. I I mean, just let me reverse engineer it for a second and say, if I just tell you what you should know of what I know, the last time I checked, that's called homework. But if I share with you my process of discovery, then we're on a kind of equal footing.

6:08The novelist Richard Powers said, the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. In this journey that you went through learning about him, were there particular moments where where you're like mind blown or surprised or, I mean, I'm sure it happened all the time. It's every day. It's every moment. You have this restless mind in which you can say, look at a famous painting like the Mona Lisa, and it's a work of science. Like one of the early admirers of it just was talking about her face and then drops down to her neck and says, I can actually see the vessels of her veins.

6:46I can see the beating of her heart. And then you can take some of the great works of anatomy and realize that they're works of art as well. And so what Leonardo does among the many thousands of things he does to us, if we let him in, is he asks us to develop all of our parts, to educate all of those aspects of ourselves and to ask really important questions. Where did I come from? Who am I? What is my purpose here? What will I leave behind? Where am I going? And so though absent a microscope or a telescope, There's stuff that Leonardo was doing in innovations that we couldn't, actually, it didn't mean anything to us about how heart valves worked until we had MRIs and we went, oh my God, he got it, right?

7:30Or human powered flight. He couldn't do it with the materials of the time. But when we did do it 450, 475 years later, it's Leonardo's example that we're following. And he's interested in water dynamics and military devices. He draws the first landscape we think in Western art. And so we just tend to like pass him off. We just say, Mona Lisa, smile. We make jokes. And we pass by perhaps the most important person of the last millennium. Is there any way that, you know, or in what ways that Leonardo and the way he thought about art and creativity and science that we particularly need to hear in 2024?

8:07for? There are myriad ways in which his approach can be enlightening, I suppose, but maybe inspiring, is it? There's a kind of dedication. And first and foremost is a fundamental trust in nature. And what nature does is it anchors him in lots of different ways, spiritually, of course, but also nature is perfect. And we see in nature all the forms. And he's always looking at the microcosm and the macrocosm. He didn't know about an atom. We didn't know about it then, but he'd be the first today to go, don't you see there is a profound similarity in the architecture of the atom and the solar system.

8:49And so then he's got to compete for commissions. And, you know, when he takes the last supper in Milan, it's a huge thing. And the bigger the size of the thing, the bigger the success, but also every flaw is magnified. And so you've got this tension of competition. You've got all the kind of realities that we have right now. There's nothing different. They're all the same. He's a gay man. He gets locked up, you know, for sodomy, but one of the first inventions he ever does, a machine to pull bars from windows. The great thing about the Renaissance, it is a period in which we've emerged from pandemics, sound familiar?

9:25We've emerged from a kind of, we call it the dark ages because everybody's a subject and there's no contact and all we have is the church and its dogma. And he's working in that. But now that we're introducing secular and humanism into this, we're centering the human being within these stories. And then all of a sudden, we're able to think outside the box. So you've got his paintings, his codex is so much, as you say, of what he created. But he lived much longer ago than your other major subjects, hundreds of years ago. So he predates sort of modern media, no photos, no videos, no contemporaneous recordings.

10:07How did that impact what you created? Well, you know, there's no photographs, right? There are no newsreels. But in this case, this new visual grammar, we split the screen. We filmed our own human bodies moving and making gestures. We did some animation. So we liberated our own style. But having said that, the most important thing is that there is an arrogance in the present that somehow because you and I are alive, we somehow know more than them. They're gone. And that that arrogance is the greatest impediment we have to actually evolving in our intellect and in our spirit. And so the Ecclesiastes knew this, that's the Old Testament, thousands of years ago.

10:51What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. there's nothing new under the sun. Human nature doesn't change. So if you get back there and you can figure out a visual grammar to tell the story with paintings and live cinematography, the split screens that we're talking about, you're dealing with the same thing. You mentioned some animation. I have to ask you about generative AI, which is hitting all industries, including filmmaking. Computer generated imagery, obviously, been around for a while in filmmaking, but AI makes recreation easier and cheaper and faster. Did you consider deploying any of that to bring da Vinci to life?

11:28AI? Let me just see. This is rural New Hampshire. Anybody know anything about AI? You know, I don't want to say I'm a Luddite, but I made conscious decisions in my life. I moved here 45 years ago because I realized that the kind of work that I was going to do required a kind of labor-intensive, hands-on, out-of-the-marketplace sort of thing. When most of my colleagues around 1990 had shifted to computer editing, we waited another decade. And then when most had already long ago abandoned film, we shot film until 2010 or more. And what I think the best way to say it is that you don't want the technological tail to wag the dog.

12:14It has to be controlled in some way. And I'm sure we could feed in, you know, we're having trouble with this scene. We could feed into AI every script that we've ever produced on every film and just say, give us a Ken Burns script for this scene that takes us from, I'm working on a history of the American Revolution now, from the Battle of Cowpens to the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. And, you know, it would do it. But, you know, it's like online pornography. What do you really want? You know, you want the real thing. You don't want pornography. At least it seems to me in terms of art or in terms of craft, except those artists who are playing with it with the intention of disrupting things in a good way.

12:58But the dangers right now are so manifest that, you know, I'm not sure a shortcut is always the best way. I'm curious. You've done films about ideas and films about people. Some historians think ideas are more important. Others sort of follow this great person theory of history. How do you parse that? Our world today seems very focused on the celebrity of people. Let me just back up a little bit and tell you that in the academic academy after World War II, meaning when we dropped this bomb and we knew everything was different, when we discovered that six million Jews had been murdered just systematically in Europe, everything changes.

13:40And so there was a sense that narrative was no longer operative. In music, we're going from swing to bebop. In painting, we're going from representational to abstract expressionism. And so what happens in the academic community, particularly in history, we abandon kind of the bankrupt old narrative because we're in a new place. And we replace it with different fashions of historiography. So we have Freudian interpretations. We have Marxist economic determinists. We have symbolism. We have deconstruction. We have queer studies. We have Afrocentrism. And they're all just a perfectly legitimate way to investigate the subject.

14:22but what if you could do all of them? What if you could go back and use narrative, which nobody can ever abandon? And so what we found in our area is that we can see all those different points of view and we can include them. And some of them are contradictory and that's okay too, because that's the story of life. You don't have a very simple thing. It's only our superimposition of binary structures. You know what I mean. Male, female, gay, straight, white, black, young, old, rich, poor, Israeli or Palestinian, red state or blue. I mean, it's like there's nothing binary in nature. And so these are all just artificial superimpositions.

15:04And so what I think that stories do is permit us the elasticity and the fluidity, no pun intended, of being able to tolerate all of these complex things. And so that's the only way we parse it. We just, you know, I've got a sign in my editing room and it says in cursive, lowercase cursive, in neon. It's complicated. As you're talking about the complexity, you know, there's a lot of discussion today about what's fact and what's misinformation. You're making a lot of choices when you're doing your storytelling about what facts to include. How much do you worry that documentarians in the future will have a harder time capturing the history being made today because they won't know what to trust.

15:50It's already happening. I think that's less it. All you have to do is just means test it, right? We just know. And maybe I think what you're implying is that our manipulation of images, whatever AI can do, will somehow get to some place where we can't tell whether, you know, former President Obama actually said this thing or it's some deep fake that made it. But maybe the question should be more about objective or subjective. There's nothing objective. So the rest of it is subjectivity, but just shades of subjectivity. I live in this village. We make maple syrup here. 40 gallons of sap gets one gallon of maple syrup.

16:26So that's what we do. The distillation process is in itself a selection, but it's not necessarily untrue. It's just saying we're selecting this. Then you want to go to the true thing. How much can you tell? And then it really becomes morality, where now there's all these documentaries and sort of reality things that are being made about a subject, and they're wonderful and very interesting, but you notice that either that person who's the subject or their wife or their brother or their children are the executive producers. And you go, wait a second, that could never happen in PBS where I am because we've drawn this just absolutely sacrosanct church and state line.

17:12I can't have Michael Jordan sitting in my editing room saying, don't use that shot, right? I love that discipline of being true to yourself. And we just, our editing process is where our films are made. When you put it together, there are decisions that are made. Millions, no exaggeration, millions of decisions. And who makes that decision is super important. And what you're talking about is that we are now asking machines, that's basically what we're saying, to help us go through it. And that's where I'm saying, you know, you can take the interstate from Santa Fe to Taos or you can do the high road to Taos.

17:52And I've done that. And you definitely don't want to do the shortcut. You definitely want to see what that thing is. A lot of technologists talk about AI's power to sift through large amounts of data, but I love Ken's perspective here that the process of sifting through, as arduous as it may be, is so often where the true magic lies. After the break, Ken shares how he stays optimistic in these trying times, the advice he gives to young college graduates, and more. Stay with us.

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20:04So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash mos and get up to three months free. Before the break, acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns shared what inspired him to make a film about Leonardo da Vinci and what we could all learn from da Vinci in 2024. Now, Ken talks about how the January 6th insurrection influenced his upcoming project about the American Revolution and why PBS is one of the last remaining antidotes to sensationalist media. Let's get back to it.

20:46You're working on this project about the American Revolution, like having just gone through the January 6th events. Does that change or impact how you're interpreting that chapter? People say history repeats itself. It never has. There's never been the same event that's happened twice. So Mark Twain is supposed to have said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. That's about as good as it gets because that Ecclesiastes, human nature, doesn't change means that that human nature superimposes itself on each generation. And we got the same greed and generosity, the same virtue and venality, all of that stuff is before us.

21:25And so what you do is you try to see the way human beings act, but focus on your story because you know the second you're done, you lift your head up and this film is rhyming in the present. The only film I've ever once changed because of how much it was rhyming is I started many, many years ago in 2015, an entirely different epic about the Holocaust. And as we were working on it, we began to see that instead of just rhyming, we just ignore that while it's happening. It's now rhyming every single second and the alarm bells are going off. If you wanted to be in the most cosmopolitan place on earth in 1932, that is to say where it is leading the world in intellectual rigor, in music, in cinema, in painting, in architecture, there is no other place on the face of the earth that you would be other than Berlin.

22:24The next January, 33, not so much. So the fragility of these seemingly durable structures and institutions is laid bare in a Holocaust. And so we just went through a kind of montage in two or three minutes, dizzying montage through the late 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s, etc. up to January 6th. we're reminded just how fragile these things are. But that's it. Other than that one exception of changing the last few minutes of the US and the Holocaust film, have we ever sort of paid attention? It's only after the fact, when the film is safely done, then you can sort of start to say, you could think about it this way.

23:07And I could take any film, you name it, and I will tell you the way it rhymes in the present that is just unbelievable. You mentioned PBS and the freedom that the arrangement you have with them allows you to do. You're the face and the name associated with broadcasting for the public good in the U.S. in a lot of ways. Do you worry at all about the future of PBS for like a legacy media organization with a mission of public service? Like what it needs to do now to, you know, in 2024? It's always been changing and innovating. The thing is, Bob, it's not sexy, right? I mean, I admit it, right? But it's the tortoise in the tortoise and the hare story.

23:49The hare just gets tired. It's pooped out by all that boldface underlying celebrity loving bullshit. And I find that having one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other proudly out is great. So it's not like you got to deliver the Vietnam in two years. It's OK, 10 and a half. You're raising the money. We'll give you a little bit here, 10 percent of the budget. You know, just come back. And this came out in 2017, our Vietnam thing. It's 10 episodes. It's 18 hours. Millions, tens of millions of people watched it. It's still like the definitive thing. There's an irony for the audience that listens a lot to this show, which are business people who are pushed more and more towards metrics.

24:34Yes. You know, toward the marketplace, like that is on the Lloyd good. And it sounds like what you're saying is like, it's a double-edged sword, right? It's a double-edged sword. So I'm working on my first film. I look about 12 years old and it's on the Brooklyn Bridge. So people are delighting by the hundreds, literally no exaggeration, by the hundreds delighting and telling me, this child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge. No. And all I wanted was like a thousand bucks or$1 ,200 or$2 ,500 to just do this film, which I ultimately got made. And I used to carry two three ring binders on my desk with all the rejections.

25:09But I met along the way, the senior vice president at AT &T downtown. William Sharwell was his name. We became really good friends. I loved him a lot. He was a really good man. And he helped gave us$12 ,500, which was like somebody coming, calling me up right now and say, we're giving you 2 million, right? It's like, Like it had that, what? But one day he was like, I got all these MBAs and they're smart kids, but I could teach you what I need them to do for me in the MBA world. But they don't know humanities. They don't know history. They don't know how to write a letter that's a page and a half long.

25:45They don't know about ethics. They don't know about comparative religion. And so any of these things that are part of the humanities that we sort of say, oh, we don't need it. It's STEM. The only way we're going to get by are those kind of metrics in which one and one equals two. Bridge can't stand. Airplane can't fly unless one and one equals two. Let's just turn out these people who are doing it. What happens? All we want in our lives. The reason why we're talking today is that we want one and one to equal three. We want the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts. And if it's just the sum of the parts, you're stuck there.

26:21But if it's here, then you've got this great mystery. What is that difference? whether it's faith, whether it's love and relationship, whether it's art, whether it's just humanism or rationalism or whatever it is, you cannot live. You have to stick that A, the arts, into that stem and make it steam. Otherwise, we're just going to look like another second-rate, two-bit country that is of automatons. You've seen Fritz Lang's Metropolis, right? I mean, that's the direction. Unless you've got people who are going, excuse me, wait a second, please. People who delve into history could find things in history that are depressing and could look at the world in the future and be like, oh, it would be better if X or Y happened.