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Tavis: I'm honored to welcome Ken Burns back to this program. He has become one of the great cinematic storytellers of our generation, with films on everything from the Civil War to baseball to jazz. His latest project is, of course, "The War," which has been airing right here on PBS over the past two weeks. If you missed any or all of "The War," it begins re-airing on a weekly basis this Wednesday night on most of these PBS stations.

The acclaimed documentary is also available on DVD. And for the history buff in your house, there is also the soundtrack from the film and the book, "The War: An Intimate History, 1941 - 1945." First, though, from the 15-hour epic co-directed by Lynn Novak. Here now, a scene from "The War."

[Clip]

Tavis: Ken Burns, you've done it again.

Ken Burns: Thank you.

Tavis: I don't know how you do it so consistently, man, but every time you step to the plate on one of these things, you put it over the fence.

Burns: Good people to work with.

Tavis: Yeah. Tell me about that scene we just saw.

Burns: Well, Lynn Novak, the co-director, did an amazing interview with Katherine Phillips Singer (sp) of Mobile, and to me, it represents the geography of grave, something we never get into when we're talking about the Second World War, so smothering with that top-down view of generals and politicians who don't do the fighting and the dying or the real worrying that ordinary folks do.

And she tilts her head; she knows exactly a house, and in that house is a mother who's grieving. And over there is another mother who's grieving; and I think that's the kind of war that we were trying to tell in this series. Not the usual history book; not the one that abstracts all these issues - atomic bomb or Holocaust - but one in which these experiences are part of the tapestry of ordinary experience by so-called ordinary people. And as soon as you scratch the surface of ordinary people, you see there are no ordinary lives.

Tavis: Tell me more about that decision to only talk to everyday people, to ordinary people, not the generals, not the politicians. This whole series, 15 hours, everyday people.

Burns: Everyday people. We just felt that the whole story of the Second World War has been told so many times from that top-down position, from the abstract position of the Monday morning quarterback or the armchair historian. We don't need that, and in fact, there's an urgency. We're losing 1,000 veterans a day. This is a film we could not have made 10 years ago.

These folks were not talking, they're just that reticent. And in five years, they'll be gone. And in five years, this story will become the province of historians who will necessarily, no matter how good they are, abstract the story. But for this time being, could we not just stop and say, "What is war actually like?" People don't actually want to know the answer to that question.

It is so horrible when we take our teenagers and we turn them into professional killers, and then when they come back we say, "Okay, don't be professional killers again." What is it that takes place? What did they see? What did they lose? How did they feel in those things? And that's all we wanted to do, is simply to bear witness to that.

There can be lots of other documentaries that have been made and will be made that are loaded down with all of the big ideas, but we just wanted to just bear witness. And you know what? A funny, paradoxical thing happens, that as you bear witness to just what it's like to be in combat, intimately, all the context comes along with it, all those big ideas trail behind, and you get it all.

It gets caught up, and it gives you, I think, the viewer, a chance just to experience it. Nobody's saying this is what you should think, this is how you should feel, this is the context in which you need to see it. This is just what happened.

Tavis: I think that's what happens, though, Ken, when you tap into the humanity of people.

Burns: I agree completely, and that's what we're looking for. We wanted to listen to them. We didn't want to say, "Now, can you tell us, Tavis, about your experience in the Battle of the Bulge, and we're on page 23 of episode six, and can you get me from paragraph two to paragraph three?" "That was terrific, can you say that again?" This is what happens in documentary filmmaking.

We went before we had a script and said, "Can you tell us what happened to you?" "Okay, now, we see that you twitched a little bit, so I'm going to push that a little bit. Now, did it really happen that way?" And you discover old, familiar stories. "Oh, Battle of the Bulge, we took over a French farmhouse, and there was a wine cellar, and we got drunk."

And that's all they've told their family. That's the story that they're sticking with for 60 years, and all of a sudden, turns out it's the coldest winter ever. Their best friend dies, stiff as cordwood. He lifts this body, tosses it onto the back of a flatbed truck. We've got enough time, Lynn and I, in our research to find footage like that and to bring that scene alive.

That's a different kind of war than the one that's carefully protected. And we understand and we forgive why these wars get carefully protected, but I think for a couple moments here we break through, and you sort of have a sense, oh my goodness, I know what this is like.

Tavis: I want to go back to something you said about four, five minutes ago, Ken, and that is the reticence on the part of these persons to have told these stories 10 years ago. What drives - what's behind that reticence?

Burns: A lot of complicated factors. One, nobody really wants to know what happens, because you don't want the answer to be "Well, I turned around and my best friend's head exploded. And Mama, you don't know how good a friend he was. I met him in basic training and even though we just spent a year together, that's a concentrated year and he means everything to me.

"I saw bad things, I did bad things. This is what war is about. I lost good friends, I was scared, I was bored, I was hot, I was cold." These are conditions universal to all war, that's why we call it "The War - " to honor what the veterans and the people who lived through it still call it to this day, but also to understand that if you transcend the uniqueness of particular circumstance, of geography or origin of the soldier, you're getting that stuff that people from the Peloponnesian Wars felt.

That you can get a guy - tap a shoulder of a guy coming back from Iraq, he's gonna say the same thing. And in fact we had - we gathered together an Iraq veteran, a Vietnam veteran, and one of our guys, and finally the Iraq guy said, "I'm an echo of you. You're an echo of me." He heard the similarities in their story. And that's where that reticence - it's born in not really feeling like they have the equipment or the desire to let out of their psyche the worst things that have ever happened to them.

But at the end of their lives, with grandchildren knocking, posterity knocking, the end of their life knocking, they're beginning to open up and I think it was just incumbent upon us to get out of the way and just listen.

Tavis: I'm glad you explained why we call this just "The War," given that there have been so many of those in our history.

Burns: Unfortunately.

Tavis: As a filmmaker, what about "The War" makes it "The War?" That makes it stand out in such a unique way?

Burns: We say it in the opening sentence of the film; this is the greatest cataclysm in human history. It's the biggest thing that's ever happened on this planet, manmade. It's responsible for the deaths of nearly 60 million people; we'll never know. It was that bad - we will never know. Sixty million human beings, every one of them had a mother. How does this go on?

And now we've kind of conveniently draped it with some mythologizing. We call it "the good war." It's safely black and white. We've uncovered some color footage that belies that, where the blood is really red, and there's some awful stuff. I remember showing it to a middle age woman, not a war buff, not an expert, doesn't watch "The History Channel."

She says, "It's horrible. Don't take out a single dead body." That's what we're trying to get at, is this biggest of all human cataclysms, which will, I think, always be - I hope will always be referred to as "the war."

Tavis: I think by asking this next question, I can really get two answers. The question I wanna ask is, the structure, the framework of the project - you go to four towns, basically, and what I wanna get at in that answer, which I wanna give you time to address, is how you decided to pick those four towns, and how that led into some controversy that wasn't in this thing initially.

Burns: Yeah, we wanted to tell a bottom-up story. We thought first maybe we could do it with one town, but there wasn't just a range of combat experience, and that's what we were after: specific combat experience. We weren't trying to figure out what the last name on your driver's license was; we wanted to find out about a representative combat experience so we could bring back the war.

Not every battle, not every person, but just a sampling that as William Blake the poet said, "You can find the universe in a grain of sand." So we expanded it - let's do four geographically distributed towns, random, because we wanted them to be any town, and we wanted the people that we discovered to be anybody. Not representing any particular group, but representing a collective American experience where we understood that in shared sacrifice, together, we had made ourselves richer.

Another contradiction - how do you give up and get richer? Well, this is at the heart of our faith, but it's also at the heart of what happened in a political, military narrative in the Second World War. So we picked these towns for various reasons; all distributed. Reached out - Lynn reached out in all these places, talked to more than 600 people, looking for combat experience.

And the people who came forward, we were able to weave their stories together knowing full well we couldn't tell every story. Before the film was aired - well before the film was aired, and without having seen a single frame of it, some Hispanic groups complained that they were not represented. We had followed Japanese-American narratives.

Japanese-Americans had that hypocritical experience of being interred and then asked to volunteer for specific combat duty. African Americans came forward and they, of course, were forced to fight in segregated units or even denied the opportunity to fight - weren't allowed to get that kind of glory. And we listened, we kept sort of saying we didn't intend to be comprehensive, but we're in the storytelling business.

Hispanic narratives haven't been told, haven't been integrated into an American narrative for their 500-year history on this continent. So we identified some veterans, we filmed some extra stories, and without compromising the integrity of the artistic work that we finished a year and a half ago, we're able to add on to a couple of episodes some phenomenal stories that prove our point.

Each one of these Hispanic veterans say, "I was an American, not Hispanic. The blood they shed was red, the same as everybody else." And I think people have understood it. It's part of, perhaps, calling it "The War." It is perhaps the false sense that when we do something, it's comprehensive. But I go back to all of the hand-wringing at the Civil War.

"Oh, no, this is the only story that's going to be told, you didn't tell this general, you didn't tell this battle, you didn't tell this, you didn't tell that." And then look what happened. In the 17 years sine, there have been hundreds of documentaries on the Civil War. And what we've done has just said we are the drop in the pond, and those ripples out, we're willing to listen to.

Tavis: As a filmmaker, it must be tough, though - and not just a filmmaker; not just any documentarian. You, as I said, have become the documentarian of our times, the documentary filmmaker of our times. It must be tough, though, when you take on a project like the ones you choose, because they are so ambitious to begin with.

It's almost a foregone conclusion that you're gonna catch some hell from somebody between the start and the finish line, (laughter) because the project is so ambitious to begin with.

Burns: Hey, I tell you that in the end, this was a compliment. They were saying, "We don't want to leave the station on a Ken Burns film - " in this case, it's a Ken Burns and Lynn Novak film - "without being included." But if you think about it, every big film I've made - 18.5 hours of baseball, 17.5 hours on jazz, 11.5 on the Civil War, 14 on the West, now this one, nearly 15 hours - that the biggest complaint is what we left out?

(Laughter) Well, you just go "whew," because nobody's saying, "Hey, man, this is really boring." Everybody who are watching it, we've got ratings through the roof, the book, without even the benefit of the broadcast, is on the bestseller list. The presales on the DVDs, and you realize we have an opportunity now to come together.

Arthur Schlesinger, one of my favorite historians, passed away a few months ago, but he liked to say, "There's too much pluribus and not enough unum." And this is what the Second World War speaks to. Everybody had their oars in the water, pulling in the same direction. Today we're all independent, free agents. At what point do we say, “We can just be together on something?”

And that's what we've found in the initial couple weeks of the broadcast, people have come together. They wanted to watch that when everyone else was, they wanted to share their experiences. We've initiated an oral history project with the Library of Congress, Veterans' History Project, and people - kids are recording their great-grandfathers.

They may not know that we were fighting against the Germans with the Russians; they think it's the other way around. But they're not going to download from us some simple lighting and shooting instructions, they've got sample questions they're gonna ask, and we can bind ourselves together and maybe be more unum than pluribus for once.

Tavis: Let me ask you just for a moment to - and I know you well, so I know it's going to be tough for you to do. But I want to just set your modesty aside for just a second here. It's got to make you feel really good when you take on a project like this, invest the kind of time for years, energy and effort into something like this, and it is met with the kind of beyond critical acclaim - I'm trying to find the right word.

We say critical (laughter) acclaim all the time, but it's so much more than that. But it's met with such a wonderful response from every - the critics have just - the critics, and to say nothing - screw the critics, but the critics love it, but the everyday people who are watching it every night love this stuff.

Burns: On my way here, a sanitation worker was turning a corner in New York City, leaned out of the truck and said, "Hey, man, good job." And Lynn and I get this every day, and it is so gratifying. I always already felt I had the best job in the country; it educates all my parts. I go back to a little town in New Hampshire where any kind of notoriety or celebrity, plus $0.50, gets you a cup of coffee. (Laughter)

So there's no worry about swell ego. But you feel like, after working for six and a half years, blood, sweat, and tears. We struggled, we got into these peoples' lives, we had nightmares, we worried about them, we've lost a few and it feels like we've lost somebody from our own family. We've grieved in the same way that Katherine was grieving, and we've come here at the end and you feel like you can declare victory, like the good guys won.

Tavis: Let me ask the flip side of that question. I hear now what the reward is, what was the greatest challenge in trying to pull - I can only imagine, again, taking on something this massive that the challenges were many, but what's -

Burns: Huge. Every film is a million decisions; this was 10 million decisions, literally. I'm not exaggerating. And so for us it was finding the 40 people, recording, getting good stuff out of them, as Lynn did, and then getting into the editing room and figuring out a way to interbraid and intertwine and interconnect their stories set against the backdrop of the biggest thing that's ever happened on this planet.

And that's finding from hundreds of sources, footage, and new and never before seen. But more important, every documentary filmmaker wants to say, "Hey, I've got stuff that hasn't been seen." It's how you use that footage. Do you use it as b-roll? The phrase in our business of just something that's running, vamping along?

Or does it engage on some level where one and one doesn't equal one; it doesn't even equal two - it equals three. And what is that more? And that's what you're looking for, every single day, and to me, the most difficult thing about this process is how to know when to let something that's terrific go. You say, "That's fantastic, but it cannot stay."

And if I think I had one skill in the editing room, just saying, "You know what? That's terrific, but it's destabilizing this scene; it's destabilizing this episode." And how do you let it go and feel okay about it? And we all work together - the writer, Geoffrey C. Ward, another producer, Sarah Botstein, all the editors who put their heart and soul into this thing.

And then you look around and it feels really good when somebody comes up and says, "Hey, man, good job." That's all you need. That's the best review - or a veteran, about a year ago, came up and said - tears streaming down his cheeks - he said, "I waited all my life for somebody to show it the way it actually was, and this is as close as to what I saw."

And kids at West Point came up to us, standing ovation. People at the Castro Theater in San Francisco - every shape, color, sex, region of the country, said, “Thank you.” And I just thought, this is what it is - unum, not pluribus.

Tavis: How do you get - I do this for a living, obviously, every day, and I'm honored to have you on the program, as always. On a piece like this - and I get asked this question all the time - how do you get folk to open up? I talk to people who are friends of people who are on the show, who know these persons who I talk to every night; people like you.

And they say - and I say this with all humility - they say, "Man, that was a great conversation. I've never seen anybody get that out of them." And I just say to people all the time I practice being a generous listener. I think if you listen generously -

Burns: Yeah, that's exactly - that's all of it.

Tavis: But how do you get these people to open up like this?

Burns: I feel - I've been doing this for more than 30 years, and I feel I'm most like a student when it comes to interviews. I just wish to be the most humble, that if it doesn't go well, that's my fault, not their fault. And it is about that kind of active, human listening, and Lynn, who did most of the interviews with the veterans, and I think to some extent they opened up because of her sensitivity; because she was a woman.

Also, I think they were willing to share some secrets they might not have with me. I did a handful of interviews and got incredibly dramatic things out of it. But the meat and potatoes work of this project was done by somebody listening; somebody empathetic. I'm not going to fill in the script. Oh, oh, really? And let's pursue that. And I finally - I remember I said to one person, I just looked up to him and I said, "You've seen bad things."

This guy has written about the war, and I think he came in thinking he was going to be an expert. I said, "You've seen bad things." And all of a sudden, he was that 19-year-old who hadn't taken a shower, hadn't changed his clothes, hadn't brushed his teeth in six months - six months - on the front line. He's a lieutenant, and his average life expectancy was 17 days.

He spent six months waiting for those odds to catch up with him, and when they did - severely wounded - he went to the head of the line and they patched him up. He was a good killer. They patched him up and got him ready for an invasion of Japan that didn't happen because of the bomb. And this guy was raw. It was like I wasn't talking to an 80-year-old man; I was talking to a person who was right there.

That's the mistake we make with memory and with what we're trying to extract from somebody. There has to be an exchange; I have to give back in order to get something out of there. And memory isn't some distant thing. It's on our hard drive now. And if you honor that, then it comes out, and then they are present, and you suddenly realize that as Faulkner said, "History is not was, but is."

And that's what we felt for a few rare moments - he wasn't just talking about the battle that took place 60-plus years ago; we were in it. And his gift to us was by grabbing us by the hand and taking us along into this, in this case, horror.

Tavis: Speaking of was and is, how propitious is the timing of the release of this, given that we are in another war that people in this generation may be calling "The War?"

Burns: And you do. In our conversation, we refer to the Iraqi war as "The War" right now. We started this project before 9/11. We did most of the interviews before the invasion of Iraq. And yet a hundred times, a thousand times in the film you'll be reminded of something that is happening now. Somebody says something, you'll think about Abu Ghraib.

Somebody will complain about equipment; you'll think about all the outsourcing issues and problems that we have. The opening comment of the film, Sam Heinz (sp) says, "There's no such thing as a good war; there are only necessary wars and just wars." And it makes you think, what is a necessary war? And for people in democracy who have the luxury of being able to elect the officials that send us to war, if we know what the cost is, which was the primary mission of us in this film - what is the cost of war?

What actually transpires at the battlefield, then we've got to be pretty damn sure that the wars we get into are necessary ones. History is the set of questions we in the present ask of the past, and so it's informed by our wishes and our hopes, our anxieties, our dreads, and so it's very much a part of the future. Where do you want to go?

Well, I'm going to have to go back and find out where I've been before I can actually tell you where I'm going to go.

Tavis: It's impossible, Ken, that said, to have a conversation about this war, the Iraq war, and the conversation not turn toward the political.

Burns: That's right.

Tavis: It might start on the emotional but it turns to the political. It might start on the personal, but it turns to the political. What I am so amazed about is how you did this piece and stayed away from the political.

Burns: You know what? What politics is - and it's so very interesting, and it sucks up most of the oxygen of our daily discourse - is it's just a little dialectic. A yes-no, good-bad, red state-blue state kind of thing going on like this. It is the obligation, finally, not just of art, but of human life, to see above that, to see beyond that, to contain the contradictions, to understand that my enemy, politically, has the same feeling for their kids as we have for our own.

That we love in the same way, that we experience jealousy and rage and love and affection in the same way, and if we can't transcend that, then we are right. That's what the Hispanic thing was about, it was my saying, "Oh, yes, we can take the high road here. We can produce some more stuff; I'm in the storytelling business. Throw me in the briar patch. I'm happy to be there. Let me go and tell another story."

That just makes the human family bigger. It makes the storytelling equation better. And I think that's our obligation right now, so why get involved in the petty politics and the what-ifs and the abstractions of the Second World War but focus instead on these transcendent moments that permit us all to negotiate not only those cruel events, but the cruel ones that are taking place on our television screens in the nightly news.

Tavis: I think that what makes these documentaries work, once you get everything else done, is the voice. The person who brings that story to you, who pulls you in with that sound, telling you the story, you go to the same guy on all your documentaries.

Burns: Every time.

Tavis: Tell me right quick about this guy you go to all the time.

Burns: Well first of all, the voice starts with Lynn and mine, and added by Geoffrey C. Ward, the writer. And then who gets to read that voice? I'm the scratch narrator all through the thing, and then I have to find somebody to be my voice. And for the last 10 years, it's been Keith David, an amazing actor. And I bring him in, and he and I see each other, we recognize each other.

Isn't that what all of this is, is some recognition? And Keith just gets it, and so when he reads, all of a sudden, it gets a little bit bigger and a little big bigger, and we have that ability to speak to somebody else. And people around the country are responding, and they're talking about it, and that's all we wanted to have happen.

Tavis: Well, Keith gets it because Ken Burns gets it, and we are all the better for it, the nation and the world, because Ken Burns lives and works. The new piece by Ken Burns is "The War," starting again Wednesday night on PBS. If you missed any of it, get the DVD - you're gonna want this in your collection. Ken Burns, I appreciate you so much, and your work as well.

Burns: Other way around, thank you so much for having me.

Tavis: Good to see you. That's our show for tonight.