Burns has long maintained that his reason for doing what he does is to \u201cwake the dead,\u201d an impulse that began after his mother died when he was 11. (The haircut he had when his mother died was, yes, the one he kept all those decades, even as age\u2014and Tom Brokaw\u2014encouraged him to leave it in the past.) To wake the dead is one answer to the question: Why spend your life this way? But in each film\u2014in particular, the earliest films\u2014we encounter perhaps an even more honest answer that helps us understand both the filmmaker and the man, who, I was told again and again, are indivisible, one and the same.<\/p>\n
In The Statue of Liberty, Burns\u2019s third film, we hear Vartan Gregorian, the onetime president of the New York Public Library, affirm: \u201cAmerica is not an actuality but a potentiality. We have to remember that the universe is not going to be seeing somebody like you again in its entire history of creation. So it\u2019s up to you to become a dot, a paragraph, a page\u2026a chapter in the history of creation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Okay, so be somebody\u2026.<\/p>\n
In The Shakers, his second film, we learn that: \u201cThe Shakers believed that ideas could take form and that God dwelt in the details of their work and the quality of their craftsmanship.\u201d And make something great\u2026.<\/p>\n
And at the end of Brooklyn Bridge, playwright Arthur Miller speaks on the appeal of the bridge: \u201cSee, the city is fundamentally a practical utilitarian invention, and it always was. And suddenly you see this steel poetry sticking there\u2014it\u2019s a shock…. So, uh, it makes you feel that maybe you too could add something that would last and be beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n
And make it so it endures….<\/p>\n
There\u2019s the skeleton key for, foremost, a tireless craftsman, as devoted as a Shaker woodworker, and his life of making. But if there\u2019s just one work that goes to film heaven?<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, I mean, I think Vietnam and Civil War and now the Revolution,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing more complicated than Vietnam and Revolution in terms of juggling complex narratives.\u201d<\/p>\n
I could\u2019ve guessed he might go with the latest. Having reached the end of The American Revolution, he was relishing the \u201cevangelical part,\u201d Burns said, when he doesn\u2019t \u201chave to leave the project yet.\u201d But he would soon accept that it was done, he said. \u201cWhich means it\u2019s yours now. And I\u2019m off to the new things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Daniel Riley<\/strong> is GQ\u2019s global content development director.<\/p>\n A version of this story originally appeared in the november 2025 issue of GQ with the title \u201cKen Burns Loves America\u2014and You Can, Too\u201d<\/p>\n PRODUCTION CREDITS:<\/strong>
Photographs by Matthew Leifheit<\/strong>
Styled by Haley Gilbreath<\/strong>
Grooming by Marilisa Battistella<\/strong>
Special thanks to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Burns has long maintained that his reason for doing what he does is to \u201cwake the dead,\u201d an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":480713,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[2766,18753,3943,60816,16367,49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-480712","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-culture","9":"tag-magazine","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-onecolumn","12":"tag-textbelowcenterfullbleed","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115333662421001165","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480712\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/480713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}