Ken Burns Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.”

“In most films music is brought in at the end, after the picture is more or less locked, to amplify the emotions the filmmaker wants you to feel.”

“I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.”

“I think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can't work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can't really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance.”

“Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.”

“In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?”

“Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.”

“History's just been made for sale to an inside deal.”

“By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz.”

“I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.”