Ken Burns speaks with 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley
Filmmaker Ken Burns says issues of race are a theme throughout almost all of his documentaries. Scott Pelley profiles Burns on the next edition of 60 Minutes, Sunday, November 8 at 7:30 p.m., ET and 7 p.m. PT on CBS.
“Before my mom died, I would watch, and I would hear from the other room about the dogs and the fire hoses in Selma. And it would make me as upset, as upset in my gut, as the worry about my mom,” Burns tells Pelley, about how the struggle for civil rights was making news while his mother was dying in 1965. “And it was almost as if I was transposing the cancer that was killing my family, and the cancer that was killing my country. And if you look at my films, almost 40 of them, you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of films that don’t end up dealing with race.”
Burns is known for crafting his historical documentaries for PBS with rare archival images and insightful interviews. Such as in, “The Civil War,” and “Baseball.” “I told people that ‘Baseball’ was the sequel to ‘The Civil War,’ and I meant it. I meant it,” says Burns. “How we play games, and the nature of immigration, and the exclusion of women, and popular culture, and advertising, and heroes, and villains, and our imagination, and race, and race, and race are who we are.”
Pelley interviewed Burns in Walpole, New Hampshire, where he lives and works on numerous projects at a time. “I’m working on seven films right now… We got Ernest Hemingway, we have Muhammad Ali, we have Benjamin Franklin, we have LBJ biographies. We’re doing a history of the American Revolution and a biography of the buffalo.” But it’s not really work, says Burns. “I have had the privilege of spending my entire life making films about the U.S., capital U, capital S. But I’ve also had the privilege of making films about ‘us,’ the two-letter, lowercase, plural pronoun, that has a kind of intimacy and warmth to it.”