The acclaimed documentary-maker on his six-part portrait of Ernest Hemingway, his 40‑year career, and working during a golden age of storytelling
Ken Burns, 67, is a veteran and celebrated American film-maker who has made more than 30 documentaries in a career lasting more than 40 years. Among them is a much lauded history of the American civil war and an equally rapturously received history of the Vietnam war. His six-part documentary on Ernest Hemingway is currently on BBC Four and iPlayer and there is a forthcoming series on Muhammad Ali.
What attracted you to Ernest Hemingway as a subject?
We’d been thinking about doing Hemingway for an awfully long time – Geoffrey C Ward, Lynn Novick [writer and co-director, respectively] and me – for literally decades, since the 1980s. We needed all that time to sort of ruminate. We knew there was a lot of new scholarship that would help complicate the picture, that it isn’t just this toxic masculine guy with a bunch of wives and a literary legacy, but even more interesting dimensions that would permit us to explore things at a greater depth. There’s a tendency, particularly in our media world, for everything to be binary: good, bad, yes, no, up, down. And we found Hemingway tantalisingly complicated, which is what we like, because it is faithful to human beings.
