Archives » Wednesday, October 31, 2007
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David Botti
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Oct 31, 2007 10:06 AM
Last month filmmaker Ken Burns debuted his seven-part World War II documentary on PBS, "The
War," an epic chronicle of combat and home front experiences. I spoke
with him this week at the Columbia University Graduate School of
Journalism about working with veterans during the six years of
production on the film. Today’s is the first post in a multi-part
series. Excerpts:
S.H.: For The Veterans History Project
you gave advice to regular people interviewing veterans in their own
families. You talked about establishing a “comfort zone” for the
interview. How did you do this with vets you interviewed for The War?
BURNS:
What we look for at the essence of an interview is free exchange. We
aren’t investigative journalists. We aren’t there with their tax
returns for the last ten years grilling them. This dynamic is most
critical when you’re interviewing veterans, because quite often you’re
dealing with people who have, understandably, locked away horrific
things that they’ve seen, and horrific things that they’ve done–and
people they’ve had close to them that they’ve lost.
You have
to be respectful and mindful of the fact that they may not get there.
That they may not reveal that. And there’s no amount of trickery or
cajolery worth it to try to do that.
So, what we look for is
to film them in a comfortable situation. To do so in places where they
feel comfortable, to be non-threatening, but to also pursue questions,
and not just have a rigorous set of questions, so that you might miss
following up on something that was quite meaningful.
A particular veteran [Quentin Aanenson]
in our films said “I loved airplane flying when I was a kid, that’s
where I want to go–that’s where I want to be sometime.” But if you
watch his eye crinkles you know that’s not where he wanted to be. That
what he saw when he eventually became a pilot was so horrible. And so
we moved–we just tested him, and he gave up stuff his wife had never
heard, his children had never heard before. Maybe I missed lots of
stuff he would’ve told me.
I was with him in a public
discussion a year after we finished the film, and he told us something
he had never said on film: that he’s lived outside of Washington D.C.
for the last 50 years, and every time he and his son went to a
Washington Redskins football game, as he was singing "The Star-Spangled
Banner," he went through all the friends that he lost in the war. He
never told his son, never told anyone else, and as he began to tear up
in an audience of his sons and all the other people, you began to
realize that you were present once again at the very thing you hope to
have, not just with veterans but with anybody.
Particularly with
veterans because they are getting at the dynamic of combat and a
war–the most exaggerated state that human beings get. Not something
that’s distant, but something that’s present.
This is a guy who
wakes up most every night from nightmares, from the Second World War,
done for him for 60 years, with his hands in a palsy, in a shake
because he’s remembering the time when he caught some Germans out in
the open and was cutting human beings in half with his 50mm machine
guns off his Thunderbolt [fighter plane].
He still has this. His
wife always reads him as he comes into the kitchen, and will sometimes
hand the cup of coffee to the other hand.
Sometimes I found with a veteran [Paul Fussell],
a man who’s actually written about war, and is known as kind of a
well-spoken and avuncular chronicler of the human experience of war–I
found myself saying, 'I’m not interested in that.'
I’m
interested in you as a 19-year-old lieutenant on the line whose average
life expectancy was 17 days, and you didn’t take a shower, or brush
your teeth, or change your clothes in six months. And you outlived
those odds until you were severely wounded, and they moved you to the
head of the line, and patched you up for the invasion of Japan which
fortunately did not happen otherwise you would’ve gone mad.
I just said to him at some point early on “you saw bad things.”
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