--- title: 10 Questions with Ken Burns | TIME description: His documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea debuts Sept. 27 on PBS. In this live event, Ken Burns answers reader questions canonical: https://time.com/video/1dCqT9oy/ og:title: 10 Questions with Ken Burns og:description: His documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea debuts Sept. 27 on PBS. In this live event, Ken Burns answers reader questions og:url: https://time.com/video/1dCqT9oy/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/1dCqT9oy/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 10 Questions with Ken Burns twitter:description: His documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea debuts Sept. 27 on PBS. In this live event, Ken Burns answers reader questions twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/1dCqT9oy/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # 10 Questions with Ken Burns > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: 10 Questions with Ken Burns [Watch (HLS stream): 10 Questions with Ken Burns](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/1dCqT9oy.m3u8) (6:56)  _Published 2009-09-25. His documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea debuts Sept. 27 on PBS. In this live event, Ken Burns answers reader questions_ --- Jul 27, 2023 1:14 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [MONEY Answers Your Burning College Questions](/video/BrjaptxE/) ### MONEY Answers Your Burning College Questions [Ken Burns Speaks at WUSTL Commencement 2015](/video/yOOzfLJA/) ### Ken Burns Speaks at WUSTL Commencement 2015 [10 Questions for Sir Ken Robinson](/video/vE3YyKqf/) ### 10 Questions for Sir Ken Robinson --- ## Transcript >> I'm Rick Stengel. I'm the editor of Time Magazine and we're delighted to have you here as a somebody-- as a great American historian once said, " More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other stores ." And that is why you're a national treasure. Again, welcome. It's great to have you here. >> Thank you, it's my pleasure. >> Okay. >> Thank you very much. >> Again, thank you all. >> Thank you all. >> So, the first few questions are about the documentary and about what you've just done. You've been working on it for the last ten-- >> Ten years. >> Ten years shooting for six. >> Wow. So, All right, here's a tough one, which National Park is your favorite? Tim Warden, Yorba Linda, California. >> Well, like your own children, you'd be a bad parent if you had favorites, but I think the parks perform a kind of open heart surgery on people and permit you to have the experiences and memories that aren't necessarily tied to their beauty, but tied to your experience of who you saw them with. And, Yosemite gave me one of the most powerful and complete experiences I've ever had as a human being, really rearranged my molecules. >> Of all the amazing places you've filmed in our National Parks, which of the spots that take your breath away? This is from Heather Neighbors- Thompson, Birmingham Alabama. >> It's so hard. They're so varied. You know, you go from the Dismal Swamp that someone called the Everglade, which is this amazingly diverse habitat, to the Hawaii volcanoes where they're making new land, to the gates of the Arctic to Acadia National Park, where the first rays of sunlight hit the United States, the view at Yosemite or from the brim of the Grand Canyon. A few weeks ago, I took my youngest daughter who's 4- 1 / 2 and we climbed up to Delicate Arch in Arches National Parka and I just thought I was on another planet. And I watched this girl who had no idea what a National Park was, danced with joy as the native peoples must have 10, 000 years ago in the space of this beautiful, eroded national sandstone arch and felt better as a human being. >> That's lovely. Parks like the Smoky Mountains, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon are particularly impacted but the huge influx of visitors each year and many folks have argued that access and preservation are not compatible goals. What is your view on where the balance should be struck between access and preservation? >> We think that the parks have the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape and there's so much about our democracy that is paradox. Now, these parks were created with the idea that they should be for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. That's in the language, but to be left unimpaired for future generations. And we ran the risk of loving them to death. One park service director said, " We could wear out the scenery and anybody who's been in a traffic jam in the Yellowstone knows what I'm talking about ." But these are good democratic problems to have. The worst thing, like our vigilance towards liberty, would be that there would be apathy towards these parks and then our own, internal, extractive and acquisitive, some would say rapacious nature would come in, that's the part of, you know, looks of the stream and things dam, looks that have beautiful standard timber and things [ unk ] and then we would lose them. So, I'd rather be a modern democracy wrestling with how you deal with that contradiction than I would to try to proscribe access to this orderly democratic institution. >> Well, it is. I mean, it's a small the democratic idea. >> It is indeed. >> And we talked a little bit about if they are in the introduction, I mean talk about how the actual idea of it came about. >> Well, you know, it's so interesting. The first idea, the first impulse was spiritual. These places are so beautiful. I have had my heart opened to them and this is the American genius not just our political freedoms, but our religious freedoms that we could worship God, not in some dogmatic devotion imposed in the cathedral built by men, but as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau would echo and John Muir would further echo, " In these cathedrals of nature ." And so the first impulses are that. It's only later that it becomes conservation, Teddy Roosevelt. >> Uh huh. >> Patriotic under Stephen Mather, the first director of the Park Service, he called them " vast school rooms of Americanism ". Later economics [ unk ] these become engines of local economies for many regions and now we grapple with complex, environmental and ecological issues like climate change. So the parks have had to be this floating thing with the initial impulse, I think. What's so interesting was people wanted to save it Because they thought they could find God more easily there. >> What first led you to document stories through film? What was your biggest inspiration when you were a boy and in your early days of directing. Lindsey Smith Hall, Roanoke, Virginia. >> My mother died when I was 11. There wasn't a moment when I as alive that she wasn't dying. Several years afterwards, my father who had a strict curfew let me stay up late at night to watch movies on TV and I watched him cry for the first time. He hadn't cried when my mother died. He hadn't cried at the funeral and I suddenly at age 13 or 14 realized the huge power of film, that here was the place that he felt he could express emotions. And I vowed right then and there I wanted to be a film maker, but I wanted to be a feature filmmaker so my father and my mother's death were the great goads and then I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts and all of my teachers were social documentary still photographers including a great photographer named Jerome Liebling Who became my mentor and reminded me there's much more drama in what is and what was than anything than human imagination are dreams of and that's how I became a documentary filmmaker focusing in American history. If only perhaps to wake the dead, one friend of mine told me years later knowing for well the dead that I really wanted to wake. >> This is from Tamara Newman from Bayville, New Jersey. " Speaking of documentaries, what is your opinion of Michael Moore's style of documentary filmmaking? >> You know I think he is an extraordinarily talented filmmaker and I'm always quite concerned when people come up and want to suggest that there ought to be some laws to keep him from doing this. WE have a constitution in the bill of lights. He is permitted to say whatever he wants to say and advocate for whatever he wants to advocate. His style is not my style but just as my style is not his style. So, I think we can recognize him as a great propagandist and for most of the life of documentary films and that's what they've been doing and it's just degrees of subtlety of that propaganda if you will and so I think God bless Michael Moore and anyone else who wants to pick up a camera and try to tell a story. 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