Ken Burns: History Doesn't Repeat Itself
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Qualifying plan required. Wi-Fi were available on select U.S. airlines. Deposit and Hilton honors membership required for 15% discount. Terms and conditions apply. They said, boy, this is really good, but no one's going to watch it. Stephen Bochco has a new police procedural that they sing called Cop Rock, so nobody's going to watch your thing. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Literally With Me. Rob Lowe. One of my favorite filmmakers is with us today, Ken Burns. His...

I think it's 12-part documentary on the Civil War. Changed my life. It remains probably my favorite piece of television ever. But he's also made amazing documentaries on baseball, Vietnam War, the Roosevelt's Dust Bowl, and his current is on Leonardo da Vinci.

Can you imagine? Which airs on PBS November 18th and 19th at 8 p.m. And he's got an amazing just lineup of docs to come that I want to get into with him. So let's get to the amazing and legendary Ken Burns.

Ken, how are you? I recall meeting you at some point. I was doing the West Wing and we met. Where did we meet? We had a great conversation. Yeah, I was trying to think about that too, Rob. It's been too long because this old tired mind is, you know, I know that I've met you. I know that we hit it off. I knew all those sorts of things, but you know.

And whether I had Cheerios this morning, I can't remember. I know. What is becoming... We'll do the documentary on the mind and our losing it. Yes. Well, you know what's so amazing is that Leonardo da Vinci has got the most capacious mind of anybody I've ever come across. And you just sort of feel...

Yeah.

mind is a wonderful thing to do. It's kind of, in a weird way, surprising to me that it took you as long as it did to get you to Leonardo da Vinci in a weird way. Yeah, but now I feel like, what an idiot, 40 years. And it's a funny story because I was working on a film several years ago on Benjamin Franklin. And one of his biographers, one of many biographers that we had interviewed and

was a friend of mine, Walter Isaacson, and I were having dinner in Washington, D.C., and he told me, you know, I also wrote a biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I said, I didn't know that. He goes, yeah, and I think you should consider it like a twofer. Like, you should do both of them because they're both artists and they're both scientists. I said, Walter, you know, I don't do non-American topics.

And then after dinner, I was talking to my daughter, Sarah Burns, and her husband, David McMahon. We've collaborated on the Central Park Five and Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali. We've got a whole skein of American topics up ahead of us. But when I said, yeah, and Walter kept pushing Leonardo, he said, that's a great idea. So years later, they then go to Florence with my two oldest grandkids for a year from 22 to 23, and they wrote the script and

You know, now that it's done, you feel like, oh, I've always known him. And what took me so long? I have so much that I want to talk to you about. And you kind of just piqued my interest with they wrote the script. Is the process for every documentary you've ever done the same? Or does it change based on who your subject is? Like, you want to do Leonardo, you want to do Da Vinci.

Is that the same as you want to do baseball? Do you want to do the Brooklyn Bridge? It all starts in the same fashion? Yeah. And I'll tell you, though, we're a little bit different. It's all public television, right? So we've got one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other proudly out. We don't have investors. We're not looking for buyers. We are...

interested in underwriters, people who, like for Leonardo, are going to be patrons, you know, that will say, do this. Unlike Leonardo, I finish all the stuff that I do. He's only got 20 paintings, half of which are unfinished, but that's his prerogative. We also do things a little bit different. There's traditionally, even within documentary, a kind of set period, you know, to research, three weeks, three months, make it up, set period to write.

a script is produced, it maybe goes through a couple iterations and then you inform the shooting and the editing. Boom, done. Yep. We never stop researching. We never stop writing. We shoot from the very beginning. We shoot stuff we're interested in, whether there's a place in the script to fit it in. The worst place in the world. If you see a talking head in our film...

It is not because we said, can you get us from paragraph two to paragraph three on page three of episode two. It's because it's a happy accident of trial and error. And that what happens is a much longer, more attenuated, but more organic form. And so if you're courageable to the end, that allows you to change things up to the very end. Editing is a much, much longer period, but...

What a wonderful grace that is to be able to evolve and to understand that you need, in this case, a new kind of visual grammar. As Sarah says, my daughter Sarah says, he's a lateral thinker. So why wouldn't we split screens? You know, this is a guy who's born in the last half of the 15th century and goes into the first 20 years

of the 16th century, there are no photographs, there are no newsreels, but we've got photographs and newsreels and all sorts of stuff going on in two screens and four screens and eight screens and 12 and rocket ships and footage from the early 20th century. And we filmed models doing movements of their muscles to...

emulate his studies. We have pictures of live drapes as we're looking at his studies of drapes. We have people who in Florence to this day recreate the relatively simple pigments in clamshell and how they made the painting. We found a guy who writes in the backwards mirror script. He's a lefty like me. And instead of smudging, he wrote everything backwards, right to left, but in a mirror script. So just think about if you're writing a grocery list, you're doing that.

I mean, everything he wrote down, 6,000 pages of his codexes are philosophies and principles of flight and of birds, of water dynamics, of human anatomy, of dissections, of botany, of, you know, and also sketches of people and all sorts of things.

It's all doing it in a backwards mirror script as he's writing all this stuff. Wait, wait, explain to me. What is backwards mirror script? Why wasn't he just writing it? If you're going to write the word dam, right? As in, let's just say, for brevity's sake, the thing that you build to hold back water. Yes. We do a backwards D. Yep. And then an A.

And then an M, like that. And he would just write very quickly across the page in Italian, in a variety, an older Italian dialect, but one that you would recognize. Every single thing. So that if you think about, you know, rubbing your tummy and patting your head, you know, it took us a while when we were seven or eight to be able to do that.

He's doing a much more complex version of that as he's writing the most complex treatises on the nature and philosophy of painting. Why would he do so? Why wouldn't he just write it? As a lefty, as all my life, if you look at this area, it's all smudged. So rather than go left to right, in order to not smudge, he goes right to left. Oh, it's...

He's leaving no trail, just as if I assume you're a righty. Yes. And so you're not leaving a trail because you're ahead of whatever you're writing. Understood. And I, if I even signing autographs for book plates, no matter how hard I try, I've got Sharpie all up and down my hand like this.

So he decides not to do that. But it isn't just backwards. It's mirror script backwards. So it's only going to work if you hold it up to a mirror. You can see what it is. Everything he wrote, everything, grocery list, Mike Hogue complained about an assistant, his idea on the Pythagorean theory, how squaring the circle takes place, what the anatomy of the similarities between the anatomy of a hand and the anatomy of a leaf is.

how the aortic system of the human body, the circulatory system mirrors this. I mean, he doesn't have a telescope. He doesn't have a microscope. And yet he's at that fundamental thing of the microcosm and the macrocosm. Everything is recreated. So we, beneficiaries of those strong devices, know that there's a profound similarity in the architecture of the atom and the solar system.

He's already figured this out. I mean, he may not know what an atom is. He may not even have identified the solar system, but he certainly sees within nature all of these patterns. And nature is his greatest teacher. So at an age when people are emerging from a kind of orthodoxy, literal and figurative of the church, he's...

liberating himself even in the thing we call the Renaissance, which is also centering humanness too, and is interacting with the rest of the world. So Italians can have pasta and ravioli from the Chinese, and we can also be into mathematics from the Muslims and into experimentation from the Muslims where Aristotle and Plato, who were now emerging enough to go jump back over the dark ages and pick them up and say, it's all about observation. He's doing all of this stuff, all of it.

and he knows more than anyone else. In fact, at the end of his life when King Francis I of France takes him to be his final patron and says, "Do whatever you want. I have no commission so you can do whatever you want." He's telling everybody, "Look, I've got the smartest guy on the planet on my court." Right? And it's like Steph Curry on another kind of court. And he's saying, basically, "This is my Aristotle to my Alexander." Right?

And the only thing is, is that Aristotle, as great as he is, as completely dominant as he is, is a philosopher and a writer and a thinker. Leonardo is that. And the greatest scientist of his age, an anatomist and a botanist, and somebody who understands about gravity. And oh, by the way,

own inventor and a drawer of machines and military stuff. He does the first landscape we think in Western art. He does the first aerial view without the benefit of a balloon. And he's also the greatest painter of the age and maybe of all time. That's subjective. But we certainly know the most famous painting in the world is his.

And so, you know, if we're using 10% of our brain, as we're told in the cliche, then he's using 75% or 85%. And don't you want to be like Leonardo? That's my whole thing that I've gotten out of this. I just go, what have I done with my life? I know. To say it's humbling is an understanding. To what do you ascribe his...

his, I mean, to say genius is the understatement, but where does a guy, is it from the universe? Is it from God? Is it from where, why him? Why then?

How? So I think it may be all the unanswerable ones, a gift from God of the universe, just a spectacular gift to humanity to remind us of capabilities periodically. You know, and I would say he's the man of the last millennium and William Shakespeare has an argument. Mozart has an argument and, and Bach has an argument. Thomas Jefferson, George Will said in my biography 25 years ago has an argument, um,

But none of them do all those things and then more as he did. So let's just look and examine what very little we know about the person, the tabloid TikTok, which is great. We're liberated from not having to follow Justin. Then he had an affair with this brother. I feel like we know nothing about his personal life. He's born out of wedlock, which means he cannot take the names of the male characters.

Pig figures in his family. His father's a notary who works in, meaning lawyer, accountant. Works in Florence, but the ancestral village is Vinci, which is west of Florence. And he's had an affair with a peasant woman, Caterina. We know even less about her. He's around for a long time. She comes in and out of the story, but just without any...

any detail, just shadow, shade. Because he's born out of wedlock, can't be given the names of the family, Guido, whatever it might be. So he's given the name of the patron saint of freedom, Leonardo. So where is he parked? He sees his mom, but he's mostly living with his paternal grandparents. And so their son, his uncle, Francesco, is a great

influence on him and nature is all around. And so nature is the first teacher. And so he understands at a very early age, the perfection of nature, the proportions of nature, the equilibrium of it, the imperfection of human beings in the face of this. I live in rural New Hampshire. That's where I live. And every day I get my own daily dose of

not humiliation, but humility that comes from what Emily Dickinson called the far theatricals of day, the sunsets, the sunrises. Just seeing the Milky Way here because there's not much light that's blocking your way and just go, oh yeah, I'm kind of insignificant in this.

and this thing so he then his father brings him into Florence and gives him and has him start an apprentice with one of the great artists of the day Andrea del Verrocchio who's a good painter and a good sculptor and

And has a bodega workshop in which there's all this communal activity going on with assistants and apprentices. And they're making jewelry and leather and all of that sort of stuff and sculpture. So it's this noisy, wonderful thing. And it's where he imbibes an interest in music and an interest in philosophy and mathematics and all the things that they're doing. And he turns out to be one hell of a painter and dressman.

And Verrocchio recognizes them. He asks him to paint Christ's feet in a painting that he did that's underwater. And then one of two angels. And it's clear Verrocchio looked at them because we can look at them. And he went, he's better than me. Right. And so in some ways, Leonardo gets released. And then all of a sudden,

His life goes on. He begins to get conceptions. There's one of our scholars, art historians in the film, who thinks that his first solo painting, the Annunciation, is his best. My favorite one. He's already done what we think is the first landscape.

In Western art, we didn't think of the landscape. We began to think maybe there's a background, and then background became more important. But he just painted a landscape of the Tuscan hills, and it's just a drawing. He's done the first experimental painting. He takes a commission to do an adoration of the Magi, a very familiar biblical scene, as most of the great paintings are.

And he endows it with unbelievable muscularity, and he's got all these characters and all reacting, and he leaves it alone. He's changing things as it goes along, which is why we think it's the first experimental painting. But then he abandons it. We don't know whether all the questions he was asking of himself – forget about the commission, which he abandons –

he'd answered, or maybe he realized that the questions that he had couldn't be answered. And there's one figure in the right-hand corner, lower right-hand corner, where he was looking away and it's him.

And it's sort of like, it's sort of my, to me, it was sort of saying, I'm out of here. Either for the first or the second reason. Either he satisfied all the questions and now he doesn't need to work on this painting anymore. Or he knows that this painting isn't going to get him. And he's always saying, dimmy, dimmy, dimmy, tell me, tell me, tell me. Is anything ever finished? And he does finish stuff. That Annunciation is finished. And so is The Last Supper, which is a commission by Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, which is the invention of cinema.

for you and me, this is not just a frozen moment. He's not just able to paint people realistically in his paintings. He wants to know just who they are, but also, as he puts it, the intentions of their mind, what they're feeling, what they're thinking. And you see that. And because this dramatic moment of a charismatic leader in an occupied city, as Ross King, one of the biographers of Leonardo says,

And he's got this shocking moment that the people are plotting against him. He says to his assembled disciples, one of you will betray me. And so this thing is rippling out in the scene. And as you look at The Last Supper, it feels like it's like a strip of film in a way. And you just, you stand in awe of this. And I think if you were today, of all the characters I've studied,

You know, he's the oldest dead, more than 500 years, but I think he'd be the one that'd be cool today. He'd go, oh, yeah, you figured that out. You got to the moon, right? How did you do that? Was that like, did you do that, you know? And I think he'd be a filmmaker. You know, he'd probably be out of a job. He's the bee's knees. I don't know. I have to use a scientific term, the bee's knees. ♪

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Every day, our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart. But then, there are moments that remind us to be more human.

Thank you for calling Amica Insurance. Hey, I was just in an accident. Don't worry, we'll get you taken care of. At Amica, we understand that looking out for each other isn't new or groundbreaking. It's human. Amica. Empathy is our best policy. That life. How old was he when he died? 67. So it's a well-lived life. And by the end...

You know, he's got, there's a couple of paintings of him. We think that a Verrocchio sculpture of David conquering Goliath, where you see Goliath's head underneath David's foot, and you tilt up this very gorgeous boy that arrives in a gorgeous curly haired figure. We think that was Leonardo. And then there's a few other places where we think he's put himself in, and it's very attractive. But later on, all we see is the long bearded guy, the Gandalf. Yeah, that's the one that comes to mind.

So one of our jobs is to, as someone said, rip the beard off Gandalf. That is to say, just sort of return him. This guy was funny. He was droll. He is a musician. He sang. He put on big pageants, staged them for the Duke of Milan when his son was marrying off this person or that person. And they're elaborate, elaborate spectacles. We had to resort to animation in a very impressionistic way to just sort of suggest this. And...

At the very beginning of the film, one of our scholars, a Frenchman named Serge Bromley says, he's a work of art before he even began a work of art. Everybody wanted to know him. He's funny. He's pleasant. He's sympathetic. He dresses outrageously. He's got a great sense of humor. He's not the tortured Michelangelo. He's not the kid, the new kid on the block, the James Dean of Raphael. And he's not, you know...

Caravaggio, the murderer. He's just this...

guy that goes through life. He's very probably gay, and maybe that has given a distinction to some way, but it's a time in which it's both hated, as it is now, and then also accepted, as it is now. And so there's an interesting tug. He's arrested in Florence as a young man on charges of sodomy with four other guys and three other guys, and one of them happens to be the son of a rich guy, and we know what happens. They get off. Right, right. And one of the first inventions of

is that he devises a machine for removing bars from a prison window. Wow. So maybe that's a big factor. I just think being born out of wedlock, having nature as a teacher, and then wanting to know and questioning all received wisdom. Even when the Renaissance re-imports Aristotle and Plato and Archimedes and all of this sort of stuff, he's going, yeah, but...

And even when he hears all this stuff that's coming in from other contemporary influences, he's going, yes, but. So he's constantly testing it. And, and,

He may be at the time, and Francis I thinks he is, the smartest person on earth. And what a great, great story that is. And I felt that we were liberated by the absence of lots of particular detail about the tabloid aspect. Not tabloid, that's the wrong word, but just like the day-to-day, what his feelings were. Mm-hmm.

And so we figure that this person becomes a lover and a companion, and we figure that this other person becomes part of the household, what it is. But in a way, it doesn't matter. If you call balls and strikes, there's no speculation. Oh, I think that was high and outside. It's either high and outside or it isn't. And so you've got a choice to make. And so if you just tell it straight, then all of a sudden you're forced back to the notebooks. 6,000 pages, 4,000 pages, whatever people think, right?

They tell you everything, not about what he's feeling and his relationship to the world. Every once in a while, my mother came back or this is the expenses for burying her. But the rest of the time, it's a treatise on the nature of painting, which he wants to leave for all time. It's on gravity and it's on flight of birds. It's on anatomy. I mean, I know a doctor in New York who only trusts the foot drawings of Leonardo, right? Really? Yeah.

Rob, he builds a heart. He's been able to get to some people who die and do human dissections because he wants to know how to paint human figures, right? So he's working. He figures on the heart, and he then takes an ox heart, and he makes a model of it, and he figures out, no, they're not two chambers as Galen, the ancient physician 1,300 years before, thought. They're four chambers, but the valves work this way.

And then he uses water. He knows about water dynamics and the flow of things. So he's pumping in water with grass seeds so he can watch the movements and the currents within the heart. He uses a piece of silk as the valve, right? You're following me, this? This is nuts. This is bonkers. There is no application. There is no application at the time. Nobody is thinking about cardiology. Nobody would in their right mind think, oh, something's wrong with his heart. It's silted up. He sees that when he dissects somebody. He goes, this is like, I've seen this in rivers. This is like, I've seen this in rivers.

This is all silted up, right? It's arteriosclerosis is what we call it today. But nobody's going to do anything about it. But he builds a heart to figure out there's no practical thing about how the heart works. So 450 years later, MRI proves that everything in this model is true.

We have the model. We've had it for centuries. But MRI said, oh yeah, this is exactly the way the human heart valves work as blood is transferred from one chamber to the other. How lucky are we and what made it a certainty that a mind like that wouldn't be lost to the mists of time? Like what kind of happy accidents have to go along the way where he goes from those beginnings to the court

uh of the king of france it's so interesting because he's writing all the time and nothing is published in his lifetime i mean thousands and thousands of pages and so if you look at his life he had nobody knows about the mona lisa he's still carrying it he's not delivering it to his client this rich florentine silk merchant of his 24 year old carrying the mona lisa with him for quite a while if

15 years. 15 years. He never delivers it to the client. He's got this study he's been doing for ages of St. Jerome, this penitent from the early first millennium who's just old man. And because he's learning more and more about anatomy, he's getting the sinews and the muscles just right. And there's agony in this stuff. He's a couple of other things in all of his notebooks, right? Yeah.

So he's thinking he's going to publish, but he doesn't. Maybe that's a good thing. You know, Galileo publishes, gets in trouble with the church for saying things, the implication being that everything isn't revolving around the earth, but the opposite of that. And then...

He's getting to all of those things. He understands how the eye works. He's beginning, he was the first person to dissect a brain and he cuts it laterally. And you'd think this would be exactly what everybody would do, but he's really trying to find it. Nobody had done it before.

He's really trying to find out how the brain works and where the center of the soul is. He knows that the eyes are the windows of the soul. He knows that the stuff comes in and is refracted upside down and that the brain, the sensus communis, is translating it into right side up. He's getting all of this stuff without the benefit of a telescope or a microscope. And then it doesn't get published. And then it sort of accretes out. People start saying...

Well, his best painting is in a monastery dining room outside of Milan, the Last Supper. And we do have the Adoration, and we do have the Virgin and the Rocks, and we do have this, and we do have that. But there's not that much. Fewer than 20 paintings, half of which are finished. As it begins to accrete, first painters get a hold of handwritten copies of the Della Petura, the study of painting. And then scholars get it. Then it's published.

And then other stuff is published. And scientists and psychiatrists, Freud writes about an early vision that he had of this kite, a raptor, that comes down into his crib. He says his first memory is of the tail brushing his lips. And of course, Freud, we know what Freud thinks that is. His mother's breasts, for all of you who are not reading Freud lately, perfectly reasonable not to read Freud. And so it just comes out. And then...

Because he's been dissatisfied, he's never had good patrons, he's not fulfilling them, lots of patrons are angry at him, he's not well-to-do. The French king, the French know because they conquer Milan, the previous predecessor conquers Milan and says, looks at the Last Supper and says, holy, I want this. And his engineers say, it'll crumble the second we try to pick it up and take it away.

So the next, his successor says, well, if I can't get the Last Supper, I could get the guy who painted the Last Supper. So he writes him in Rome and says, please come and stay with me. You don't have to do anything. You can do whatever you want. I have no expectations of you other than to be in my court. And so he pulls these notebooks, an infinity of volumes one person observes. And then all these paintings, including the wife of Lisa Gianconda,

who is the epitome of all of his paintings because it is a great work of science. Later, Vasari, who in the middle of the 16th century is rhapsodizing about the Mona Lisa, just drops down from the face where the chiaroscuro and the somato means that there's no lines, there's no differentiating, everything blends into everything and you just, you wonder at that. So he's got the three-dimensional person

But then in her smile and in her eyes, and as he says, I can see the beating of her heart in her neck.

What has he become as we call our second episode of Painter God? He's taken inanimate objects and he's breathed life in them. Somebody 50 years later says, I can see her heart beating. He knew that much of anatomy. He had painted her about the way her hair was, what the background, how the mist in one area of the background is a different density than the mist lower down and et cetera, et cetera. The rocks, the rivers, all of the things, the dress, the chest. I mean, you were just...

And this is a 24-year-old wife of a well-to-do Florentinian silk merchant who at 24 already has five kids.

And she is the epitome and I think quite reasonably the greatest painting in the world. The most famous, for sure. For sure. It has to do, it gets stolen in 1911 and finally turns up again. And if anybody wants to understand why it's in the Louvre and not in the Uffizi or in the Vatican Museum, it's because Francis I has asked him to come. And so the French get the stuff he brought. And so...

You cannot describe it. People always say, what do you want people to take away from the film? And Sarah and Dave and I, uniformly, we always sort of say,

We've made it. We've spent seven or eight years studying this, three intensely working on this. And we just, as soon as we lock it and mix it and online it and it's corrected in the titles and we submit it to PBS, it's yours. It's not ours. So you get out of it what you eat. Nothing, anger, rapture, whatever. I still cry at the Virgin of the Rock scene and the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, even though I've seen it like hundreds of times.

But this time I thought, you know, I want people to be more like Leonardo, you know, just to use more of the brain, to be more attentive, to concentrate more, and to never, Rob, never make a joke about her smile again. Because when you hear the description of it, you will understand that everything about that expression

is all of the human project boiled into one thing. All of the things that none of us get out of here alive, all of the possibilities, all of the joys, all of the sorrow, all of the fact that he has given to a two-dimensional thing, just pigment on a poplar panel. That's it. Life. Pigment on a poplar panel. Every day, our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart.

But then there are moments that remind us to be more human. Thank you for calling Amica Insurance. Hey, I was just in an accident. Don't worry, we'll get you taken care of. At Amica, we understand that looking out for each other isn't new or groundbreaking. It's human. Amica. Empathy is our best policy.

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Yeah, I just saw the Mona Lisa again three weeks ago. You did, and you know what it's like. Oh, there's so many people. It's not as big as I thought it was. I don't really get what it is, and then

And then what happens is we were able to get it when nobody was around and to film it and to refilm it and to shoot it three or four times. And the same with The Last Supper and other of the paintings. And sometimes you have to use with the codexes because they're falling apart and very fragile, just really good high resolution stuff. But to make it come alive is to feel what...

Going into a gallery doesn't permit you to do. It doesn't permit you to have that kind of something. We know, Musee d'Orsay, you can sit with some Cezannes, you can sit in the middle and you can commune with them and you can go up and look at them and maybe feel something of his extraordinary greatness. But until the Louvre mounted that Leonardo exhibit, which was amazing, I got to go in on a day off to sort of scout for our shoots and just see them. And all of a sudden you go, oh, I see. You know, it's just...

It's wonderful. And the people that we, you know, we didn't know anything going in. So we had to really read and study and also speak to great, not just great,

art historians and biographers. That's the first, that's the moat around the castle of Leonardo. They know that stuff. But we wanted to go out. So we talked to an engineer. We talked to a heart surgeon. We talked to Guillermo del Toro, a filmmaker whose own notebooks are exact like Leonardo type stuff. And we called him and I said, Guillermo, do you know anything about Leonardo? And he started going and I said, it was a Zoom like this.

I said, shut up, shut up. Wait, don't say another word. We're coming to film you. So I flew out to LA and we did it. He just got it. The first words you hear in the film are Leonardo's first sentence and then you hear Guillermo off camera and then you hear Leonardo again and then you hear and see Guillermo. But we have a theater director and writers, Adam Gottnick, people for whom the outer world

you know, the borders extend of who have been influenced by this singular genius. So, Kenneth Clark called, and I've buried the lead, the most curious man on earth. Really? The most curious man. He just always had questions. And, you know, I remember in the first spring of COVID in 20, and we're sort of locked down and I'm up here, I love it.

And I walk all the time up here, and I continue to do that. But that spring, I remember I never missed a moment of spring. Like, you always go, oh, at the winter's end, you live in California, the winter end, it's beginning to bud, and the next thing you know, it's fully leafed. I saw exactly how every leaf unfolds. I saw how every bud grew into this, how every blade came up, how every bird made its appearance as if,

cued by some offstage manager. I saw every, as Emily Dickinson called it, far theatricals of day. I just...

saw it. And it was just this great gift of observation in a time when we're all not sure what this planetary smog is going to do to us. So it was a great gift. And I felt for a moment as we then got into Leonardo, this is what he did every moment of every day of all the days of his life. What do you think he would have been like had he grown up

Had he been born in our time? I think he'd be the same thing. I mean, you don't know what the circle, you know, it's your excellent question. Is this a gift from God? So whenever Leonardo is born, then we're all the beneficiaries or whether certain circumstantial things of being born out of wedlock, of living in nature for so long, of having a distant relationship to mother and father, but having a close one to grandparents and uncle and

Being gay, whether any of that or none of that has anything to do with it is just all speculation. But you just sort of feel like we could use a Leonardo now. And what I would suggest and what I'd offer is...

We do have him now. He is the most modern person I've ever come across. I mean, the great arrogance we make today is that we think somehow that history is not relevant, that somehow because we're alive, there's an arrogance to our position in the present that somehow because we're alive and they're dead, we must know something more than them, which is not true.

People like to say history repeats itself. It never has. There's been no event that's happened twice. Mark Twain is supposed to have said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. If he said that, it's fantastic and absolutely right, because I have never worked on a project where I haven't lifted up and seen it rhyming in the present in so many ways. Ecclesiastes, which is the Old Testament, maybe gets it better. What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun.

which suggests that human nature doesn't change and it superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events. And so we hear these motifs and these echoes and these themes, the rhymes of history. So,

we don't know what would happen if he's here, but he'd recognize us and we'd recognize him for the character he was, the flamboyant dresser, the singer, the musician, the bon vivant, the person that you wanted to have at your dinner party. That's probably my favorite, one of my favorite things because you would think

There's a version in your mind, if you don't know that part of him, where you could, based on his work and his cerebral observational nature, that he could be sort of pondering quietly in the corner in his, you know, garrets. And in fact, he's the life of the party. He's the life of the party, as Serge Bomly says, a work of art before he even began a work of art. And so there's something wonderful about that. He does theatricals and he...

sings and plays musical instruments. And I think getting beyond the Gandalf of it or the tortured artist of it is a really important thing. If you want a tortured artist, that's Michelangelo, that's Van Gogh. They'll do you fine. But there's something really great about somebody who appears to be so fun-loving as he is, and yet

ponderous in that he is asking the central questions that most of us, you know, we have permitted us to forget what the human story is, right? None of us get out of here alive. None of us. An exception will not be made in our case and we will live forever.

And one could reasonably assume that if this was foremost on our minds, we could all be in the fetal position, but we don't. We tend gardens, we raise children, we write symphonies.

we paint the Mona Lisa. This is a really great aspect of the human project. A lot of stuff going on right now, not so much. But this is the stuff that's the consistent through line of possibility, of dreaming, of inspiration. And that's where he can serve us really, really well. Because the paintings don't go away. The writings don't go away. The example, the drawings, the kind of

contemporariness of these anatomies are here to stay and so of all the people I've studied he seems the most modern in every sense of the word that's it's such a terrific thing I mean I we're trying to make we're doing a history of the revolution trying to make George Washington human he's very human and deeply flawed and and opaque and difficult to know and Jefferson's the same way and

who rivers, John Adams said of Jefferson, rivers that have no bottom and are just deep and ever-flowing. You know, you just... We're all that. And all biography is failure, Rob. I mean, the person closest to you in your life, I would suggest...

has inscrutable aspects. So how do we even presume to go back 500 years and resurrect this guy? You can't, but we're obligated as humans to try. You think you're going to get out of here alive? You're not. But what are you going to leave behind? And he is asking all those central questions. What is the nature of the universe? Where did I come from? What is my purpose? Where am I going to? When does it premiere on PBS? I don't think that's one of his questions.

Can you imagine? And when? And when will a biography on an American say, he is, by the way, the neighbor of Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer. Yes. And all of the North and South

of this hemisphere is named after the first name of his neighbor, Vespucci. So maybe he's the proto-American. So I haven't really left the topic. It'll be available for streaming on PBS.org and the PBS app. And actually, for those people that are still alive who buy DVDs, they seem to be buying mine. And so it's available on DVD and Blu-ray. And we're very happy about that. And it's...

It's as satisfying, you know, this is, I don't know, whether it's 39 or 40 or 41 film, and whether it's an hour long or it's 20 hours long, it's one film. This is as satisfying a project as I've ever done, and now I'm getting greedy. I'm 71, and I'm working on five or six at once because the thing I love more is to make a film better during the day. I know you know what that's about. You put your head on the pillow and you go,

yes, I move that along. And even if you wake up the next morning and go in and go, what idiots thought that was going to work? You at least feel that you've advanced the ball down the field, even if you get penalized for illegal motion. This has been as satisfying as anything that we've worked on. And the fact that I get to work with my oldest daughter and my son-in-law, and we don't argue, we don't fight, no drama to report. It's just like,

I'll say, gee, I'm not crazy about that movie. Oh, no, no, no. And then the next time they go, you were right, the music didn't work or vice versa, dad. I work with my son on stuff too and it's exactly right. It's so fulfilling. You're super lucky to be able to have that experience. Isn't that great? And that you do it. And I very early on, like a lot of people work their way up and there's interns or apprentice editors or associate producers and

And then they're co-producers and they're producers and then you're a co-director. But when we did the Central Park Five, based on my daughter Sarah's book, didn't go to law school, wanted to write about them, um...

It was like, of course, you guys are co-directors. And then, you know, same with Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali and the stuff we're working on now. And another team and I are working on this history of the American Revolution, which I hope a year from now we can have a conversation about because, you know, the revolution is...

You know, we accept the violence of the Civil War and World War I and World War II in Vietnam, but we have put the revolution into kind of like a bug in amber, like a Mickey Mantle rookie card, you know. Don't touch it. It's just some white guys thinking great thoughts in Philadelphia. And it is. But it's also so much more, and it makes it more complicated and more interesting. And it makes the creation of us, both the uppercase U.S. and the lowercase us,

that much more impressive and inspiring. It was a civil war. Our civil war was not a civil war. It was a sectional war. You know, it was the North against the South, South against the North. This revolution is a civil war. We're killing each other between loyalists within families, you know, the brother against brother that we use the trope in the civil war, you know, maybe happened six times, but...

It's every family has somebody. You know, Lucy Knox, who marries Henry Knox, who's the guy who brings the cannon from Ticonderoga to Washington and Cambridge, and they line the Dorchester Heights, and the Brits go, yikes, we're out of here. And at that point, there is no British garrison anywhere in the United States, in the 13 colonies. They move up to Halifax, and everybody says, okay, George...

You know, we enjoy your retirement. Goodbye. He goes, what are you talking about? I'm going to New York because he's going to retool in Halifax. He's come back to New York. And that's, of course, where the biggest battle of the revolution happens. But Lucy Knox, his father, mother, brother, sister and aunt are all loyalists. And they're goodbye to Halifax. They've lost everybody.

So this is the story of the revolution, the story of women. It's the story of blacks. It's the story of native people. It's the story of Germans, mercenaries and their wives. It's English people who are not one monolithic point of view. It's Americans who are not. It's children who

They're all there, and we've got a wonderful group of voices, some of whom you may have heard of, like Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti and Claire Danes and Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks and Morgan Freeman and Samuel L. Jackson and LaTanya Richardson and Damian Lewis and Hugh Dancy. And I'm now, my feeble brain, there's about five times as many folks who are just reading off camera, like a journal of somebody, Liev Schreiber. Yeah.

you know, Paul Giamatti, uh, Mandy Patinkin, you know, just best of mass to come in and read and just give it a, uh, a flavor. My sixth time great grandfather was a German Hessian who arrived, who arrived in seven, literally in 1776 in New York Harbor and was a part of the battle of New York and then was taking prisoner in the battle of Trenton. Yes. Marched to Philadelphia and, uh,

then took part in the program where if you renounced your

If you renounced Germany, you could stay. There's a really common story among the Hessians. They weren't all Hessians because a couple of groups came from... They were hirelings of princes, right? That's right. And they were very celebrated for their ferocity. But there was already some significant German migration to the United States by that time. And so a good deal of New Jersey and Pennsylvania had German stuff. And so you would find that when...

devolved in New Jersey to guerrilla warfare that some of the Hessians would just dissolve into the countryside and a lot of them one of my most moving figures is that

Of those that went back, more than a quarter came back to the United States, this time with their families to settle. Like they'd seen this place where they were supposed to conquer this uprising and they weren't successful at that, but they wanted to come back. And it's just a testament to all of the...

upside downness of this and that we also had some great guys around. There are no Leonardo's, but they're pretty great. They come pretty close. I can't wait for that. As a son of the American Revolution, I am super excited.

Super excited about it. Thank you. This was so great. I'm a fan, as you know. I hope it's not another two decades before we... Yeah, yeah. Let's make sure the paths cross sooner than that. And I do think... I think I met your... I think your daughter was on her way to either... It was some Ivy League school when we met. My oldest went to...

to Yale, that's Sarah who I work with, but Lily Burns was the principal of Jack's Media, which got bought out by Imagine. She went to Columbia

And I would imagine in just the roll of the dice that you might have met Lily because she's done Russian Doll and Emily in Paris and Broad City and Search Party and Desus and Mara and Samantha Bee and stuff like that. You did well for yourself, kid. Congratulations. You know, at 71, I'm learning new tricks. My daughters are teaching me. I have two more daughters below them that are beginning to rise up. And just be careful about the Burns girls, you know.

I know. I'm not sleeping on the Burns Girls. I know where those big brains come from. Thank you. This was great. And thank you for all your work. I mean, I always tell everybody that the Civil War is my favorite piece of television ever made. Thank you. Thank you. And I will forever be indebted to Sullivan Ballou and Shelby Foote. Amazing. I mean, what an amazing...

What an amazing—that one is a perennial evergreen. I tried to raise money from it from the usual sources like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and others, and they had honored the success of the four or five or six films that came before, an hour, an hour and a half long of photographs, and they said—

They turned down the first time because they didn't think it would sustain over the then five hours, one hour for each of the years of the war. And I finally, when I did get the money, I finally said to some executive at PBS, you know, I think it's going to be nearly 12 hours. You know, because he'd been through all those dramas of people saying nobody's going to watch still photographs forever.

for that long. And then he looked at me, he's really great guy named Ward Chamberlain, passed away a few years ago, great hero of World War II. He used to drink a little bit and talk about World War II. I said, I'm not doing another war movie, but if I do, I will interview you. And of course, the next war movie I did was World War II. And I interviewed him as he's a bad eye and meningitis as a kid. So he could only be a nurse in the American field service, you know, stretcher bearer and just saw

horrific stuff and volunteered in North Africa and Italy, just amazing, amazing life. Anyway, he said, is it good? I said, I'll show you. I think it's okay. And I said, it's only going to cost 12 or 15% more, not 100% more. And so he said, I'll protect you. And he did. He set a pick and the rest is history. It was really so well received. All the critics at the press tour, which I know you've had to go to,

said it was at Century City at the, you know, Century Plaza. He said, boy, this is really good, but no one's going to watch it. Stephen Bochco has a new police procedural that they sing called Cop Rock. So nobody's going to watch your thing. It was really good. I said, well, they thought it was really good. I guess that's for something. And I just felt, oh, I'm the tree that's falling in the forest.

You know? That's the best. Cop Rock, lost to the mists of time. Lost to the mists of time. Thanks so much. It was awesome. My pleasure. Great to be with you. That is one smart dude. And what an amazing filmmaker. And I'm sure most of you are familiar and have seen multiple things that he's done. But on the oft chance that you have not...

please make up for lost time and have a look at anything, and particularly Da Vinci Sounds Insane. I will see you all next week here on Literally. Again, I love that you guys support the show. I love it. It means a lot to me. And I love doing it, and I do it for you, and I hope you're enjoying it. And until next time, I will see you when we're back together on Literally.

You've been listening to Literally with Rob Lowe, produced by me, Sean Doherty, with help from associate producer Sarah Begar and research by Alyssa Grau. Engineering and mixing by Joanna Samuel. Our executive producers are Rob Lowe for Low Profile, Nick Liao, Adam Sachs, and Jeff Ross for Team Coco, and Colin Anderson for Stitcher. Booking by Deirdre Dodd. Music by Devin Bryant.

Special thanks to Hidden City Studios. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time on Literally. Every day, our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart. But then there are moments that remind us to be more human.

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