Documentary maker Ken Burns: a lens on the Roosevelt dynasty

Photograph composite of the three Roosevelts used in publicity for the documentary. Credit: Photographs courtesy of Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Documentary film-maker Ken Burns is one of the chief chroniclers of the American story. From The Civil War (1990) and Baseball (1994) to Jazz (2001) and The National Parks (2009), he has helped define America to itself.

Politics and war, culture and place, have set Burns’s documentaries apart from others. His scope is broad and his stories are long. His insights are always perceptive. And his style — the so-called “Ken Burns effect” — is his signature. No documentary filmmaker attracts a bigger audience..

Burns’s new film, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History presents the complex story of one of America’s greatest political families with a focus on Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. It has been watched by 50 million Americans.

In a new interview with The Australian, Burns talks about The Roosevelts — which is now showing on Foxtel — how he approaches the task of storytelling and new documentaries now in development.

When The Civil War premiered on PBS in 1990, it was watched by 39 million people — a record first-viewing audience for the US public broadcaster. The film, which Burns said was about “the crossroads of our being”, changed how Americans perceived the US Civil War. It also changed Burns.

“I had no idea that the film would have the impact it had,” Burns says. “I went from being an unknown filmmaker to one much more recognisable. For me as a filmmaker it was hugely important. While I had been making films for a decade, it helped me to develop my craft significantly.”

To mark the 25th anniversary, next month PBS will broadcast a frame-by-frame restored version of The Civil War. The nearly 12-hour documentary recounted the war in stunning detail, brought to life through black-and-white photos and voice-overs by renowned actors, and leavened with commentary from historians. Some of those interviewed, such as Shelby Foote, became stars.

“I think we tapped into this incredible thirst for history, to bring it from the academy to the larger public without losing the complexity,” Burns says. “We all look to the past in order to better understand where we are today. Perhaps The Civil War helped us make that connection. Given how race continues to dominate the conversation in the US, as you saw with the Confederate flag following the tragedy in Charleston, the Civil War remains highly important and relevant.”

Burns says the documentaries must embrace “bottom-up ­history” as well as “top-down history”. To present a richer account, it is necessary to mesh together the stories of politicians and citizens, generals and soldiers, businessmen and workers. “Like life, history is complex. I think we need to tell the stories of ordinary people as well as those who are more involved in setting policy. The two are interwoven. For The War (2007), our film about World War II , we ­inter­viewed only ordinary people in four towns yet we were able to cover all of the major events of the war.”

The Roosevelts is about two branches of one of America’s most well-known families: the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, personified by Theodore; and the Hyde Park Roosevelts, including Franklin. Teddy (a Republican) and Franklin (a Democrat) were fifth cousins. Both served as US president, governor of New York, assistant secretary of the navy and in the New York state legislature. Teddy’s favourite niece, Eleanor, married her fifth cousin, Franklin in 1905.

“They are among America’s greatest political families,” Burns explains. “Collectively their lives take us from the Civil War to the modern era, an extraordinary ­period that saw the rise of the US as a cultural, economic and ­foreign power. They are also fascin­ating individuals who believed strongly in public service, overcoming great hardship, notwithstanding their wealth, to ac­complish a tremendous amount to improve their country.”

After 14 hours of The Roose­velts, the overriding impression left is how remarkable it is that these gigantic personalities who, despite their personal flaws and frailties, transformed themselves and then sought to transform their nation and the world.

“How they each handled adversity was very much part of their success,” Burns says. “It clearly drove each of them, providing a greater sense of focus in a way. In the case of Franklin in particular, I also think his illness contributed to his extraordinary empathy.”

This “intimate history”, which explores character and personality to better inform the public person, also shows how these unique individuals were very aware of each other and the different branches of the family.

The film describes Franklin, at his law firm in New York in 1908, in conversation with his colleagues about their dreams for the future: “Most hoped just to become partners one day.” But Franklin had a bigger dream: to become president. He was just 25. But nobody laughed. “His name, after all, was Roosevelt.”

Burns says that while Franklin and Teddy were not close, Franklin was inspired by his famous “uncle” and the values he later brought to his time as governor and ­president. A challenge for the filmmaking was that there are few photographs of the three Roose­velts together, even though Teddy gave Eleanor away to Franklin on their wedding day.

“We are very accustomed to telling stories when there are ­limited, sometimes no, photographs available,” Burns says. “I don’t think anyone even noticed in the case of The Roosevelts. The story is so rich, and the archive so extensive, that we had an overabundance of materials to choose from.”

There are glimpses of Australia in The Roosevelts. In 1943, Eleanor travelled to Australia as a representative of the American Red Cross.

In her travels abroad during the war, she amplified the messages of her husband’s administration. “Eleanor was the most ­successful first lady in our country’s history, in many ways the first modern first lady,” Burns says. “She was hugely aware of her impact on her husband and how she was an envoy for his ideas and policies.

“But she also pushed him hard to adopt programs that he was less inclined to support, especially when it came to issues related to civil rights and equality at home. Ultimately, as you know, she was very much an internationalist and I think the fight for equality she saw in the states important to her vision for the Universal ­Declaration of Human Rights.”

Teddy sent the Great White Fleet to Australia in 1908, a story he recounted in his memoirs, boasting of the warm reception US soldiers received. It was the early manifestation of a new ­global role for the US in the 20th century.

“(He) had a vision of the US, even though he was keenly aware of its flaws, that was grounded in a sense of optimism and good,” Burns says.

“His progressive ideals for the US extended to foreign policy, sometimes blinding him to the actual impact the US was having.”

Burns has been making documentary films since the early 1980s. His first film, Brooklyn Bridge (1981), was nominated for an Academy Award. He has several new projects on the go, including an ambitious 10-part film about the Vietnam War scheduled for 2017.

“My co-director, Lynn Novick and I, as well as our writer, Geoff Ward, and our producer, Sarah Botstein, have spent the past four years totally immersed in the ­history of the Vietnam War,” Burns says.

“We have availed ourselves of a tremendous amount of new scholarship, both in the US and in Vietnam, and have had the great privilege of trying to tell this enormously complicated story from multiple perspectives: Americans who fought in the war and those who fought against it; Vietnamese who fought on the winning and losing sides of the war, North and South. We have worked hard to understand what actually happened, and why we Americans are still arguing about it.

“We have been humbled by the courage of the dozens of ordinary people who agreed to be interviewed for our film, and whose wrenching testimony has helped us find meaning in the epic tragedy of the war.”

Burns says he is “hugely busy” working on new projects. His next film will be about baseball star Jackie Robinson, to air on PBS next year. In 1947, when Robinson signed to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers, he “lifted an entire race, and nation, on his shoulders when he crossed baseball’s colour line”, says the synopsis for the film.

Burns also is developing a multi-episode history of country music (2018) and a two-part film about writer Ernest Hemingway (2019). “I’m also working with others on a number of films, including one about a Unitarian couple that saved Jewish children and others during the Holocaust,” Burns says.

Several of Burns’s documentaries — including The Civil War, The War and Prohibition (2011) — are available for download on Australian Netflix. So, after nearly 40 years of documentary filmmaking, does he have a favourite?

“No,” he says. “They are like children. You love them all equally while enjoying their different personalities.”

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History is showing on Foxtel’s History Channel.