Ken Burns Previews ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ Film at National Press Club

WASHINGTON — The renowned documentary filmmaker Ken Burns stopped by the National Press Club earlier this week with co-directors Sarah Burns and David McMahon to preview their latest work, a new film on the life of Leonardo da Vinci.

The four-hour documentary, a departure for Burns, who typically focuses on America and American subjects, will air on PBS over two nights on Nov. 18 and 19.

While there has been no shortage of film treatments and books about da Vinci, this latest production from Burns’s Florentine Films brings an almost tactile sense of detail to this intimate portrait of a remarkable life in the Italian Renaissance.

In the hands of Burns, who made his first documentary nearly 50 years ago, his daughter, and son-in-law McMahon, da Vinci becomes a man in full again some 505 years after his death at the Clos Lucé in Tuscany.

The documentarians trace his life from his out-of-wedlock birth to a peasant woman and a notary and his apprenticeship to a distinguished Florentian painter to the creator of such timeless works of art as the “Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper.”

They also describe in rich detail his emergence as a scientist, engineer, architect, cartographer, sculptor and muralist as he sought to survive and prosper in a time of war and religious upheaval in his Mediterranean homeland.

But this is far from another trek down a well-worn trail. Over the course of nearly 240 minutes, the trio reveal a da Vinci largely lost to time, the raconteur and delightful dinner companion, and the tireless conversationalist who could and often did, talk about everything under the sun.

What proved most remarkable of all during an hour-long talk moderated by National Press Club President Emily Wilkins of CNBC, was that the project almost didn’t get undertaken at all.

“Oh, I was dragged kicking and screaming into this,” Burns admitted with a wry smile.

“I was working on a film about Benjamin Franklin and one of the people we interviewed was a dear friend, Walter Isaacson, who was a biographer of Franklin,” he said of the genesis of “Leonardo da Vinci.”

“We had dinner in Washington and all through dinner, he kept insisting that we should pair up Franklin with another great scientist and artist, Leonardo da Vinci,” Burns said.

“This went on the entire dinner. Walter making this argument. And I said, very politely, ‘I just don’t do non-American topics.’”

The reality, Burns admitted, was that as has been his custom throughout his career, he was “deep into five or six projects” at the time, and didn’t want to be seduced by another he’d have to add to the list.

Still, the conversation fresh in his mind, he mentioned Isaacson’s pitch to his daughter and son-in-law, whose immediate response was, “We can’t not do this.”

“I think we were compelled by just how fascinating a character Leonardo was; it’s really as simple as that,” Sara Burns said, recalling the conversation.

“There is a way that someone like Leonardo is famous where it turns out we don’t really know that much about him,” she said. 

“I mean, we know the ‘Mona Lisa’ and we know that he was a scientist and an engineer, and that he designed an early version of a helicopter, and from those few things, it’s easy enough to let the mythology to build up around him and for this kind of distorted image become the man we ‘know.’

“So the opportunity to explore a life like that and to try to scrape away the mythology and get at a three-dimensional, complicated person was really exciting,” she continued.

“The other thing that was exciting to us was the challenge of telling a story that played out and was originally told in another language, on another continent,” she said. “And that gave us the opportunity to challenge ourselves to tell a story in a different way than we had in the past.”

“Listening to my eldest daughter is always a smart thing to do,” Ken Burns quipped.

“But, seriously, we, meaning the three of us, had worked together on a number of documentaries already, “The Central Park Five” ,,, “Muhammad Ali.” We were already working on three projects that would extend to the end of the decade, and despite that, they said yes, they wanted to do this project.

“So Isaacson’s argument’s fell on deaf ears until Sara and David said, ‘Why not?’” Burns said.

Which goes to show, the documentarian said, why there’s never a good answer to the “why now?” question when it comes to one of his projects.

There’s always so much going on at Florentine Films over a variety of extended timelines that “there’s never really a conscious thought of this being the particular time [to do a film],” he said.

McMahon recalled the early days of diving into da Vinci’s life as being as exhilarating as they were challenging.

“One thing Leonardo was not was a diarist. He did not leave behind a lot of writing about how he was feeling about anything on any given day,” he said. “On the other hand, he did leave behind extraordinary notebooks, an incredible trove of studies in geology and anatomy and physiology and other topics that do show what he was thinking about all these subjects that were interesting to him.

“So we began to feel, early on, that while you weren’t going to get to see him — because there are no photographs or archival films — these notebooks were going to allow us to get between his ears.”

Ken Burns said while startlingly different in some respects from his past documentaries, many of the thought processes that went into making “Leonardo da Vinci” are similar to what he’s done in the past.

“I think every time you take on an historical subject, you find it encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia and superficiality … and those things kind of separate us from it; the mythology Sara referred to earlier keeps us at a distance,” he continued.

“Every film I’ve worked on has been that way,” Burns said. “I mean, I am working on the history of the American Revolution, and in looking at someone as important and central to us as George Washington, you realize he’s someone most people know zero about.

“So what you begin with, essentially, is some very modest baggage of your own, and this mythologizing, and you start scraping it away,” he continued. “In Leonardo’s case, the task was getting past this idea that he was a wizard. That’s he’s Gandalf, [from “The Lord of the Rings”], and getting down to this incredibly interesting person.

“I mean, he’s renowned as a painter today — despite the fact he did fewer than 20 paintings in his lifetime, and half of them are not finished — but what most people don’t know or talk about was what an amazing personality he was, a real character.

“He was a musician who played and sang. He was a flamboyant dresser. He staged theatrical productions. And he was somebody you wanted to have dinner with,” he said.

“So all of a sudden, while making a film like this, there’s a moment when the scales fall away from our eyes and we see something anew. That’s our thing,” he said.

“And rather than telling our audience what we know, we share with them our years-long process of discovery,” he added.

McMahon said as he began to unpack da Vinci’s life, he was struck by how the artist was both a product of his time and place, and someone whose imagination also makes him seem incredibly modern.

“He was one of the first among his contemporaries to sign his work,” Sara Burns said, picking up from her husband. “Prior to Leonardo and Michelangelo painters were artisans. They were craftspeople. They made things. They didn’t sign them.

“Leonardo is one of the first to kind of elevate painters to a superstar status, and to say, ‘This is a pursuit of the mind, not just the hand,’” she said.

“He did a preliminary drawing for his “The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne,” [an unfinished oil painting commissioned as the high altarpiece for the Church of Santissima Annunziata in Florence], and people lined up for days to see it when it was put on public display,” she continued.

“At the same time, he compiled those thousands of pages of notebooks on his investigations into many, many scientific pursuits, and none of it was published during his lifetime,” she said. 

“So what’s really fascinating is looking at the mythology that built up — the idea that he ‘invented’ the helicopter or the parachute, for example — which is not exactly right. We have those things today, but not because he created them for us,” she said.

“What he did do was imagine them 450 years before someone made an entirely human-powered flight,” she said. “He saw the possibility that humans could fly, and had very good ideas about it. He just didn’t have the tools at the time to make it happen.”

“One thing I thought a lot about as we made this film is that a lot of what fascinates us today about this incredibly multi-faceted figure is stuff people in his own time knew nothing about,” she added.

A member of the audience asked whether the new documentary revealed information that hasn’t been touched on in previous documentaries. In response, Ken Burns suggested it is possible to do that in his films, but not really the point.

“There are probably a handful of the films we have done that have sort of broken new ground in terms of scholarship,” he said. “Our Vietnam documentary comes to mind.

“But in that case, we were lucky because the people we spoke with on camera, that first inner circle of historians and biographers, had spent their professional lifetimes examining the war, and were offering fresh and knowledgeable perspectives that hadn’t been widely broadcast before,” he continued. 

“Here, we spoke with filmmakers, theater directors, painters, writers, art researchers and engineers, who gave us a way to cut through some of the complexities of Leonardo’s story. That said, there’s nothing new here. What’s new in the case of all of our films is how you tell the story,” he said.

“Most people presume that our work is additive, that we’re building something. In reality, it’s subtractive,” the filmmaker said, offering a surprising insight into his working process.

“What we are actually doing as we get closer and closer to completion is pulling things away,” he said. “For instance, we have huge shooting ratios when it comes to the amount of footage we shoot compared to how much we use … There’s always, 10, 20 … 40 times more material that you’ve shot … and what you’re constantly trying to figure out is what part of that [footage] tells the story you’re trying to tell.”

Returning to the specifics of the audience member’s question, Burns said he doubts there’s a da Vinci scholar out there who will sit up and say, “‘Wow, I’m hearing this for the first time.’”

“It’s much more likely that they might say something like, ‘I was moved by your presentation of da Vinci’s ‘Virgin in the Rocks’; it is now back in my heart where it had been only in my head for several years.’

“Now, that kind of thing is important to us, but more important is the reaction of somebody that’s not a subject matter expert … who comes to the material out of curiosity and desire to know more about our subject,” he said. 

“That’s who we made this for, and that’s because, in many ways, we were as curious and ignorant about the subject as they are,” he concluded.

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and at https://twitter.com/DanMcCue