– 250th Anniversary of the Start
of the Revolutionary War –
by Lauren Daley | Boston.com | April 16, 2025
We reported earlier this year that Damian would voice a historic figure in Ken Burns’ upcoming 12-hour documentary epic The American Revolution. Now Burns discusses the project in-depth.
Ahead of four events in Boston, Lexington, and Concord in coming days, Ken Burns talks about his star-studded, 12-hour documentary series coming later this year.
Ken Burns is a name but it’s also a sentence.
Ken burns with passion. Every time I’ve interviewed him — whether on “Leonardo da Vinci,” “American Buffalo,” “Ernest Hemingway” — he talks a mile a minute, almost tripping over his own words, like a little kid with a new favorite subject, all but bursting with new information — but all of it interesting.
He’d called a few of his films his “most important” — including this one in our recent conversation — because his is a contagious fever-passion, the kind Jack Kerouac famously described: Ken “burns burns burns like fabulous yellow roman candles.”
Now, that passion is centered on “The American Revolution.”
“I was eating with some relatives, standing around in the kitchen, and somebody asked about the Revolution – about an hour and a half later, I stopped yakking, and I’d already brought out salt shakers to do battle maneuvers,” Burns tells me in our recent interview from his Walpole, N.H. home. “We are so excited to show this.”
The 17-time Emmy winner had no way of knowing nearly a decade ago when he started this project that the six-part, 12-hour documentary series would be ready to promote by the 250th anniversary of the start of the war itself: April 19, 1775.
But the stars aligned.
“We won’t try to compete with the Boston Marathon so we’re doing it a bit earlier,” Burns tells me ahead of his stops in Boston, Concord, and Lexington — what he calls “Ground Zero” of the American Revolution — April 16 and 17.
Directed and produced by Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, “The American Revolution” won’t premiere until November 16 on PBS — but Burns cannot wait to tell us about it.
On Wednesday, Burns receives the Third Lantern Award — presented annually to an individual “who embodies the values symbolized in Old North Church’s iconic signal lanterns: leadership, courage, hope, tenacity, and active citizenship” — at Boston’s Old North Church & Historic Site.
Wednesday evening, he joins a sold-out event hosted by GBH and BSO at Boston Symphony Hall, featuring Grammy winners Rhiannon Giddens and Johnny Gandelsman.
On April 17, Burns, Botstein, Schmidt, and historian Rick Atkinson (whose book “The Fate of the Day” releases April 29, and who is featured in the film) join for a noontime discussion at Cary Memorial Hall in Lexington, and later for an evening event at Concord’s Concord-Carlisle High School.
The film’s star-studded cast includes what looks like half of Hollywood: Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Keaton, Paul Giamatti, Jeff Daniels, Mandy Patinkin, Claire Danes, Ethan Hawk, Josh Brolin … I’ll stop there.
I called Burns this week to talk about this area’s starring role in his film, his A-list cast, his events, the film’s backstory, and more.
Boston.com: So you’ve got four events coming up here in two days.
Ken Burns: I’m at the Old North Church getting the Third Lantern Award, which is so nice. Then an evening at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, because, like so many of our films, we’ve got just phenomenal music accompanying this film. Wynton Marsalis said, “Music is art of the invisible.” Then the next day, we’ll go to Lexington and to Concord, right at Ground Zero.
But I buried the lede: This November, PBS will broadcast our documentary series on the history of the American Revolution. We’ve been working on it for more than nine years. I won’t work on a more important film.
This seems like perfect timing with this being the 250th anniversary of the start of the Revolutionary War.
It’s one of these things where you work with your head down, not thinking about anniversaries, and suddenly you realize how topical, how relevant it is. I think we’re at a position in our country where having a story that is about all of us is a good thing to have. Stories acknowledge that sometimes two competing interests might be within the same person. Story is able to help us understand the complexity of human beings, whereas politics is just a simple binary thing. It’s always much more complicated.
The story of our founding is just so interesting and so rich and so inspiring — and so bloody, which a lot of people don’t realize. They think it’s skirmishes and I understand why — we accept the violence of the Civil War and all the 20th century wars we fought in, but we want to protect the big ideas. But it turns out the big ideas are actually more inspiring when you understand the unbelievable difficulty and struggle. I mean, if you were laying odds in Las Vegas about Lexington, on the odds the patriots would do this? It would be zero. And we ended up beating the greatest, the largest empire on Earth, the most far-flung empire on Earth. It’s a miracle and it’s complicated.
There’s lots of familiar characters and also lots of completely new and unfamiliar characters — less than 1% of the population ever got their portrait painted. A lot of people exist maybe as a signature on a letter, a line in a census, a little sketch, a gravestone. We are willing these people alive.
And our cast list has never been surpassed by Hollywood or any streaming service. [No one could afford to] film all the people who have read for us, but they’ve all generously done SAG minimum: Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Liev Schreiber, Laura Linney, Sir Kenneth Branagh, Damian Lewis, Matthew Rhys — and that’s [just] a third.
Your cast list is unreal. So what sparked this film in 2015?
After “The Civil War” released in 1990, I said “No more wars.” It was so gut-wrenching. I spent all of the ’90s saying nope. Then I learned at the end of the ’90s that we were losing a thousand WWII vets a day, and a lot of kids with high school diplomas thought we fought with the Germans. My blood got up.
I spent the next nine years working on a history of the Second World War called “The War” (2007). Before the ink was dry, I looked up and said: “We’re doing Vietnam.” We spent 10 years on that. As we were locking that, in December of 2015 I said: “We’re doing the American Revolution.”
December 2015 was a month before the Iowa caucuses. So there was no calculus about who’s there, what’s going on, what umpires are calling balls and strikes. But we did a deep dive. We have generations of scholars. We interviewed Harvard’s late Bernard Bailyn [of Belmont] who died at 97. His student, Gordon Wood, who [taught at Harvard] and is now at Brown. The youngest scholar is in their 20s.
As we’ve done in many films that are absent any live witnesses, we do voices — and we have hundreds of them. Patriots up and down the United States, British officers, enlisted men, militia folks. A 14-year-old who, in 1775 after Lexington and Concord, joins the Continental Army — lots of folks you’ve never heard of and lots of folks you have heard of, but with a much more complicated and nuanced take.
You said Paul Giamatti reprises his role as John Adams. He played Adams on the HBO mini-series, and in your film “Benjamin Franklin.”
He’s a major force in this film. Claire Danes does Abigail Adams and nails it. Abigail is always right. Sometimes Adams is wrong — he doesn’t think anybody deserves a vote except propertied white men. Abigail says: If you don’t remember women, we’re going to foment a rebellion. There’s some wonderful back and forth between them.
You must’ve done a lot of research and interviews in Massachusetts.
A lot. And we’ve been filming along the Battle Road. We made the United States the main character and followed reenactment groups that were dressed as French, British militia, Continental, Native Americans, German Hessians.
We hired oxen and sleds to haul cannons over the Berkshires to recreate Henry Knox’s taking of the cannons captured at Fort Ticonderoga near Lake Champlain and hauling them to just outside Boston, which forced the British who had been occupying Boston for a long time to leave.
You said this idea was sparked in 2015 when you were working on other war films — but what sparked this story in particular?
Just this desire to know about something that seems encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality. We don’t need that now. We need to understand what happened: Who sacrificed? What were the stakes? Who was Benedict Arnold? There’s a failed invasion of Canada. There are arguments about inoculation against smallpox. I mean, Ecclesiastes said, there’s nothing new under the sun. We don’t tend to think of these people as real because all we have are paintings of men in wigs, stockings, and breeches. You think: They can’t be like us. And they are exactly like us.
It brings people together when you realize: We share this revolutionary past. Regardless of your political beliefs, regardless of your age, your sex — this is our story, yeah. We’re trying to put the us back in the U.S.
What are you hoping people get out of the film?
We work really hard to just call balls and strikes, to just acknowledge the uncomfortable stuff, the great stuff, the inspiring stuff … I think the most important event in the history of the world since the birth of Christ is the creation of the United States, which started being created in earnest on the morning of April 19, 1775 on the Lexington town green.
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