Ken Burns: Telling tall tales

Tacked up on Ken Burns' office door is a quote from famous theater director Tyrone Guthrie, which reads: "We are looking for ideas large enough to be afraid of again." Burns calls it "a wonderfully convoluted sentence," but it's this concept that Burns and his team embody. Those at Walpole, New Hampshire-based prodco Florentine Films are known for tackling mammoth topics in series such as Jazz, Baseball and The Civil War. "We just grab a whole subject with gusto, and perhaps naivety, and find a way to tell the story," says Burns, who has been making films for more than 30 years.

When it comes to script writing and gathering archival materials for these mega-projects, Burns employs untraditional methods. "What we try to do is sort of ass backwards from what a lot of my colleagues do," he admits. "We go out with the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing; we pursue the visual angle unconcerned with whether we're following the dictates of some template that a script represents. Inevitably, we'll be writing new things to fit images we have, and going back out to find new images to fit scenes that have been written."

To help make the most of the script, Burns often uses first-person voices to complement a third-person narrator. While he notes there are very few first-person voices in his current project - a 14-hour, seven-part series for pbs called The War - several of the ones used are recognizable. Take, for example, actors Samuel L. Jackson and Tom Hanks, the latter of which reads the voice of a Minnesota newspaper editor. Still, Burns swears he's not intent on netting big names to use as narrators. (He did, after all, give a 13-year-old girl from Walpole a massive role.) "Quite often, there is an intersection between the most talented in our country and celebrities," he says, "but we never look for celebrities. In fact, you've seen the films that have been derailed by people trying to identify them and not listening to them."

The characters followed in The War, which is set to air next September, stray as far from celebrity as you can get. In the works for almost seven years (from the point at which Burns says "this thing happens inside of me where I have to do [a topic]"), the series shows the American experience in the Second World War. But rather than focusing on the top down, "living in the White House with Franklin Roosevelt, or in Churchill's underground war rooms, or in the chancellery with Adolf Hitler," Burns says it follows 40 "so-called ordinary people," the majority of whom are from four us towns, from Connecticut to California.

The story begins, explains Burns, with the intimate tale of a 16-year-old boy in Alabama who has been rejected by his girlfriend. He joins the army and goes to the Philippines, thinking he'll be safe there. One of many people followed from the first episode of the film to the last, this boy fights bitterly in hand-to-hand combat, his army eventually surrendering to the Japanese. He survives the infamous Bataan Death March, then a series of horrific Japanese prison camps in the Philippines, and later on mainland Japan. "He comes close to dying time and time again until he finally survives the war," says Burns.