Ken Burns Wants You To Park It

Without the National Parks Program, Yellowstone would be an amusement destination called Geyserland. At least, that's what famous documentary director Ken Burns (The Civil War) told thousands of people in Central Park Wednesday night, where he premiered footage of his new documentary, The National Parks: America's Best Idea. The 12-hour film, which begins airing Sunday on PBS, took Burns and writer Dayton Duncan 10 years to make, and spans both time and geographical space—the camera dwells equally on bears catching salmon in the 2000s and photos of John Muir from the 1870s. The award-winning documentarian sat down with NEWSWEEK's Sarah Ball to talk about what he calls "the application of the Declaration of Independence to the landscape," or why the heck he loves the parks so much. Excerpts: (Article continued below...)

What's your first memory of visiting a national park?
In 1959, when I was 6 years old, my dad took me to Shenandoah National Park. My mother was dying of cancer, and our household was a grim and demoralizing place. My father was a very distracted dad. He never played catch. He never went to ball games. But one day he scooped me up and took me on this glorious weekend. And it wasn't a repressed memory, it was just forgotten in all the tragedy. My mother died a few years later, and my father died way too soon. But it was a great gift: going to Yosemite had reminded me of this time as a boy.

Do you think most people have such a strong connection?
You wake up in the parks. Everybody [we spoke with] had their molecules rearranged in the parks. Everybody that we interviewed to help tell this story had the same experience, and I think most of us who worked on the film had that same kind of life-changing experience. There's a paradox: you see these places and you feel your insignificance, and yet that makes you feel bigger. Just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self-regard. It's sort of corny, but it was a privilege.

It took you 10 years to make this film. Was it a difficult task?
This was by far my most ambitious project: how do you film from the gates of the Arctic in northern Alaska to the Dry Tortugas off the Keys, to Acadia in Maine, to Hawaiian volcanoes? And this is not a travelogue. This is not a nature film. This is not a recommendation of which lodge or inn to stay at. It's a history of ideas and individuals. We then had to figure out how to calibrate the evolution of those ideas, and how to intertwine the 50-plus lives that we introduce to you in a way that is dramatic, and still nonetheless does justice to the arc of the national parks. The easy way of saying it is that it's like a Russian novel, but instead of being set against the backdrop of an epic war, we're set against the backdrop of some pretty spectacular scenery.

How did you get the idea to make the film?
It's right in our wheelhouse, and I want to stress "our." In the formal sense, [writer and longtime collaborator Duncan] came to me 10 years ago and said, "Let's do the national parks," and it took me a nanosecond to say, "Of course." About that same time, 10 years ago, we were in the middle of producing our film together on Mark Twain, and we were talking to the novelist Russell Banks about Huckleberry Finn. Banks was saying—and we certainly agreed ourselves—that this was Twain's greatest work. And then he said, "It's our Illiad and our Odyssey." He went on, "Though most of us share a common European ancestry with those who wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey, we Americans were grappling with two new themes that Twain alone, among writers—but also among politicians and philosophers and artists of the 19th century—was willing to deal with honestly and openly. And those twin themes were race and space." Those are all I've been focused on for the last 30-plus years.