Ken Burns looks at Leonardo Da Vinci for his latest documentary
Ken Burns lives in Walpole and is an American filmmaker who is well-known for his documentary films and television series on a wide variety of topics ranging from baseball to jazz, from the Roosevelts to the Vietnam War, and much more. His latest, Inside The Mind Of A Genius: Leonardo Da Vinci, a film made by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, is a two-part four-hour documentary that will air on PBS on Monday, Nov. 18, and Tuesday, Nov. 19, from 8 to 10 p.m. ET. Check local listings and visit pbs.org or kenburns.com.
Theatre Kapow will be starting its 17th season with Life Sucks, a play described as a “brash and revelatory reworking of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.” The show will run Friday, Sept. 20, and Saturday, Sept. 21, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, Sept. 22, at 2 p.m. at the Bank of NH Stage (16 S. Main St., Concord, ccanh.com). The Hippo spoke with Director Matthew Cahoon and Managing Director Carey Cahoon about the upcoming performance and season. Visit tkapow.com.
Your work is typically focused on American themes, so was there any particular reason to make a film on Leonardo da Vinci?
No, I mean, you’re absolutely right. Everything I’ve done for the last 45, 50 years has been in American history. I was working on a film on Benjamin Franklin and I was having dinner with an old friend, Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute — then of the Aspen Institute — who happened to be a biographer of Franklin. We’d already interviewed him, and he was terrific for that film. But he had also written a biography of Leonardo. And he spent most of dinner trying to push me into doing Leonardo. And I said, ‘No, I do American stuff.’ And he said, ‘But they’re both scientists and artists and all of this.’ I finally laughed and I happened to be talking to one of my producing teams, and that is led by my daughter, Sarah, and her husband, David McMahon. I said, “but Walter was pushing this, doing Leonardo,” and they said, “We should do Leonardo.” I called Walter the next day and I said, I think there’s people who want to do Leonardo. So I was sort of backed into it, but it was wonderful. Sarah and Dave moved with my two oldest grandchildren to Florence for a year from ’22 to ’23, did all the stuff and we’ve really broken new ground with our kind of visual grammar for this film to help bring alive this person who’s so central to who we are as human beings.
How does film as a medium, as well as the new visual effects, affect the story that you’re able to tell?
Well, I’m working right now, and have been for years and years, on a big history of the American Revolution, which is incredibly challenging because there are no photographs or newsreels. So you’re calibrating new different things. This is a guy who lived in the 1400s and the early 1500s. There are no photographs either. So what we ended up doing is realizing that he was so modern, he was so far thinking, that we could just split the screen, quadruple the screen, have nine panels. We could have modern footage, anticipating the things that he would invent. We could just throw in things and we could have a different kind of soundtrack that would do it. The composer, Caroline Shaw, is the single composer of the entire track, and we don’t usually have that. We usually have multiple different things going on. So it’s kind of exciting and new for us, and at the same time is most definitely one of our films and the style is the same…
Was there anything that you all discovered that you didn’t know about?
Oh, God, everything. We never make films about stuff we know about. That would be … we’d be telling you what you should know. Rather, we’re sharing with you the process of discovery. Everything is amazing. This is a born-out-of-wedlock gay man who is arguably the greatest painter in existence, who has fewer than 20 paintings. Half of them are incomplete. He has thousands of pages of notebooks. He is, as the greatest scientist of his age, without a doubt, prefiguring Galileo and Newton and Einstein. He’s investigating the nature of flight. He’s inventing machines. He does the first, we think, the first landscape in all of Western art. He does the first experimental painting in Western art. He does the first overhead view without the benefit of being up there. He’s just a capacious mind that’s restless. He doesn’t have a microscope. He doesn’t have a telescope. But what he sees with his eye, stuff people are verifying 500 years later. He did experiments on a cow’s heart using silk and grass seed and water to see how the ventricles might work. It wasn’t proven right until we had MRIs in the 1970s.
Was it that he just innately knows certain things?
Not innately. I think it’s all about this curiosity, this sort of demanding of the universe to give up its secrets.
Was there anything you think that he didn’t get to accomplish, that he was trying to do?
Well, you know, he abandoned a lot of paintings, even commissioned paintings, because he just sort of felt like he’d explored all the things he needed to explore, and yet is restless. I think he was always trying to learn how to square the circle, which is that ancient mythological concept.
What would you say to someone who doesn’t know a lot about the Renaissance to get them interested in Leonardo da Vinci?
Well, I think all you have to do is watch the film.
He’s lived such a compelling life. Let me put it in another way. This is a two-part, four-hour film, not that long by binging standards. … You’ll know exactly why [the Mona Lisa] looks the way she looks. And that is one of the great secrets of the universe, which is what he is getting at, this profoundly deep inquiry into the meaning of all of this stuff. Why I’m here, why you’re here, what our purpose is, where we came from, where we might be going, and how things work, you know, in a practical way, he’s an inventor and it’s just wonderful to get to know him.
What are the similarities between Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo Da Vinci?
Ben Franklin is the greatest scientist of the 18th century, he’s certainly the most famous American in the world. He’s also a great artist with his pen, his words, his humor. Leonardo’s a great artist, he’s a great scientist, he’s a great inventor, so there’s lots of similarities. And yet, Leonardo doesn’t tower over him, it’s apples and oranges, and we don’t need to make comparisons but he [Franklin] is so remarkable. Flying a kite and getting an electrical charge to come down the string to a key is a big deal. The Mona Lisa and a half a dozen other paintings are way bigger deals. As are most of the experiments he made about anatomy. First person to really dissect a brain and a skull. I mean, he just did it all. It’s unbelievable.
Was Leonardo received in the same way during his time as he is now? Did people during the Renaissance know how big a deal he was?
I can say he knew that he was without peer, but he published nothing in his lifetime. So all of those images, you know, were discovered later on. All of a sudden they realized he knew everything.
—Zachary Lewis
Featured image: Courtesy photo.
