I have made all my films for my children with the exception of my first film because my oldest daughter wasn’t born when I was making the film about the Brooklyn Bridge. Ken Burns Read Quote
Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America. Ken Burns Read Quote
Like a layer on a pearl, you can’t specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl. Ken Burns Read Quote
You don’t work on something for six years and be blind to the myriad of other approaches. Ken Burns Read Quote
The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice. Ken Burns Read Quote
When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things. Ken Burns Read Quote
When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn’t mean that the other 39 are bad. Ken Burns Read Quote
I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn’t put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on. Ken Burns Read Quote
I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head. Ken Burns Read Quote
I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content. Ken Burns Read Quote
