“The story of America is improvisation,” the American filmmaker Ken Burns told me back in 2001, during an interview about his landmark documentary series Jazz. Jazz, baseball and the American constitution were all devised on the fly and, as Burns put it then, “Answer the question, as Americans, ‘Who are we?’” Twenty-five years later, we’re talking again, this time about his two-part documentary charting the life of Leonardo da Vinci, screening on BBC Four this December, and the subject under discussion again is improvisation. “You might think of Shakespeare or Bach or Goethe as being figures of an equivalent cultural weight,” Burns explains, “but Leonardo, huge as he is, only ever completed a handful of art works. He was absorbed more by the process—with the exploration of what he was doing—than in finishing anything. So, yes, once more we find ourselves talking about improvisation.”
Burns has built his reputation, which in the United States hits peaks of adulation reserved for Melvyn Bragg or David Attenborough here, around the uniquely rich sequence of US history documentaries he has produced steadily since 1981. His first film, Brooklyn Bridge (1981), was intricately researched and spoke with cast-iron authority but also itched to communicate with the widest possible audience—and set a template in the process. Since then, Burns has produced films about topics ranging from the Statue of Liberty, Thomas Jefferson and the Civil War to prohibition, Mark Twain and the Vietnam War, the aim being to teach Americans about America. Currently in production are films about the American Revolution and Barack Obama. Leonardo da Vinci—four hours long and crafted with an attention to detail that is pure Leonardo—is, to date, his only project to look beyond the US for its subject and a film Burns thought he would never make.
“I had my arm twisted by my friend, the writer Walter Issacson, who had written a biography of Benjamin Franklin and appeared as a commentator in my Franklin film,” Burns recalls. “You’ve got to do Leonardo, he kept insisting over dinner. I pushed back, telling him that I only touch American subjects, but he was persistent. Walter had also written a biography of Leonardo, and I certainly couldn’t fault his logic: Leonardo, like Franklin, was a scientist and an artist. But I remained unconvinced and left the restaurant, I must say, feeling rather put-out that Walter had been so insistent.”
Enter Sarah Burns and her husband David McMahon, Burns’s daughter and son-in-law, who decided that, actually, making a Leonardo film was an excellent plan—and moved to Florence with their young family for 12 months to ensure it happened. Sarah and David had collaborated with Burns on earlier films about Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali, and their input to the Leonardo film proved essential. “I had made films on the Civil War and Mark Twain,” Burns tells me. “I was used to dealing with historical periods of which no footage exists, but Sarah was instrumental in deciding how to make the Leonardo film work on screen. Leonardo was obsessed with nature and the connections between things. The circulation system of the human body, the skeletal system, the measurements of mathematical proportion that he was observing elsewhere—all these were factors as he worked on the Mona Lisa. Before he started work, he needed to know everything he could know about human anatomy. So Leonardo’s example shifted our own technique of filmmaking, freeing us to experiment with split screens and animation, and mixing footage in from the early 20th century to show how Leonardo bounced ideas between different parts of his brain. He was never an artist one day, a scientist the next.”
On the grounds that underscoring his film using off-the-peg library music would have been antithetical to this idea of original thinking, Burns commissioned a new score from the New York composer Caroline Shaw. Among the talking heads he assembled are the expected experts on Renaissance art and history, but also civic engineers and a cardiac surgeon who explained how unerringly accurate Leonardo’s thinking about human anatomy was, acting on little more than basic dissection and high-level intuition. Burns considers Leonardo’s achievements as painter, sculptor, anatomist, cartographer, engineer and scientist—“He also worked as a musician, don’t forget”—to have been a unique endeavour within the last 1,000 years of human history. “But as much because he didn’t see any distinction between them. How many scientists today are steeped in art? How many artists today understand how deeply transformative science could be for their art? We must concede that there isn’t anyone like Leonardo around today—and we continue to look to him from our vantage point in the 21st century because he is so modern, and, whatever questions anyone wants to ask of the world, it’s likely he had something to say about it.”
Logging in and out of a web of ideas, forging connections and constantly updating and revisiting, Leonardo’s brain does seem like a Renaissance Internet of Things. Does Burns take a view on what Leonardo’s example has to tell us about how information is presented today, especially when it comes to AI? “We need to be careful about this. Does AI have the potential to transform the world in ways that Leonardo might have recognised? Perhaps. But AI is about reshuffling and collating information we already have. There is no originality of thought. Ask AI about aerodynamics and it will assemble everything that exists already. For Leonardo, though, this was merely first base. He wanted to find out that which we don’t already know. Leonardo was already thinking way beyond AI.”
I feel curious about Burns’s own creative process. Does he discover the shape and direction of his films through the process of making them—a kind of exploratory improvisation of which Leonardo might have approved? Or is everything already nailed down once the cameras begin to roll? “It’s a slow, highly labour-intensive and hands-on process, shooting interviews and building a script from the information I collect. Then, by the time we arrive at the editing, we’re burdened with more material than we could ever use,” Burns explains. “But this allows us to shape the film organically and spontaneously. Part of the reason why I moved to New Hampshire, away from the city, during the 1980s, is that what I do—this gradual piecing together of information—cannot be accommodated by commercial filmmaking. My films were edited in the old-fashioned way until the early 2000s, not because I’m suspicious of technology, but because I believe in the craft of filmmaking. AI could, perhaps, allow me to cut corners and speed up the process—but taking shortcuts is never conducive to good filmmaking.”
A key section in his documentary recalls original responses to the Mona Lisa. “You have people looking at that painting in awe,” Burns says, “like they could feel the rhythm of her heartbeat and see the pulse moving in her neck. On the canvas was an intensity of visual information that nobody had quite achieved before—and, through that, a sense that you could reach out and touch a real person.” All of which, Burns says, makes him think that Leonardo invented the idea of film, too.
Running alongside the breathless evolution of Leonardo’s thinking, Burns was eager to portray the real person, too. “If the word ‘genius’ could be applied to anyone it’s Leonardo,” he explains, “but he defied completely any ‘tortured genius’ stereotype. He did have a tortured relationship, it’s true, with Michelangelo, who was much younger and to a certain extent a ‘young pretender’—but tortured more because Michelangelo was himself a tortured individual. Accounts suggest that Leonardo himself was the life and soul of any party. He was happy and, apparently, approachable and exceptionally friendly. His clothes were designed to turn heads, and, although he never commented about his sexuality, we know that he maintained loving relationships with men throughout his life. Early on, he was arrested for sodomy, but, after someone very rich intervened, was released quickly. And what was the first thing he did? He invented a device for prising the bars off windows.”
Luck usually favouring him, Leonardo had a knack of making lemonade from lemons. His father had been a notary, his mother a peasant, and had he not been born out of wedlock—in Vinci in 1452—he would have been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. Illegitimate children, though, were forbidden entry to university. “University,” Burns speculates, “might have forced Leonardo to think more conventionally, limiting that sense of absolute wonder he had about the universe and everything within it… well, I don’t know. Could Leonardo have ended up as a notary? It’s hard to envisage how his true interests could have been supressed, but the fact he was left to his own devices was undoubtedly a good thing.”
Going to Florence helped form the Leonardo we know. There he became an apprentice of the painter Andrea del Verrocchio, well regarded at the time, now celebrated as much through the reflected glory of his association with Leonardo. The work Leonardo did in Verrocchio’s studio, assigned the lowlier tasks of patching in details that were, apparently, too trivial for the master himself, made onlookers stop and take notice. Leonardo’s brushwork was far more advanced than Verrocchio’s. His signature stamp of not merely representing the human body in paint, more making the paint take on human dimensions, was already at play.
“Leonardo discovered that nature is never wrong. Everything started for him with his interest in nature, then ultimately returned to it. He realised—immediately, pretty much—that nature was in all the forms he wanted to paint or draw, whether long flowing hair or the complex proportions of a building. Nobody at the time knew about atoms, but the idea of the atom—as the basic building block of everything—is already implicit in Leonardo’s work. The power of the church was, of course, omnipresent in everything, but Leonardo—as much as he was creating great religious art such as The Last Supper—was anticipating a secular society in which human experience would become the centre of everything. He pushed far beyond the accepted mindset of his era.”
We spoke, Burns in New York, a few weeks before the American election, at a time when half of Americans—just under, as it turned out—were daring to hope that the country’s first female black president would be elected. What does Burns feel about the atmosphere into which his Leonardo film will be released? “During the Civil War, Americans killed 750,000 other Americans,” Burns responds, after taking a quiet moment of reflection. “That’s a lot of human bodies—and the Civil War also claimed the life of a president, Abraham Lincoln. But even during the war, the peaceful transfer of power was never in question, neither was the independence of the Supreme Court. Today, those basic assumptions are under question. This situation is a greater crisis, I fear, than the Civil War. Americans could use their democratic vote to effectively, after 250 years, do away with democracy.”
Before our conversation, Burns had just taken a walk over Brooklyn Bridge. “You see the subjects of my films never leave me; I get to check in with them all the time. But one of Trump’s myriad flaws is his profound ignorance of history, so what is he going to be able to tell anyone about 1865? Mark Twain is said to have said that ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,’ and making parallels between what happened at the Capitol on 6th January 2021 and the Civil War and American Revolution is certainly tempting. Events change but human nature, for better and worse, stays the same.
“Leonardo was fascinated by how human beings behave, and I, as a filmmaker, am fascinated by how Leonardo behaved. And so I make my film, put it out there—and hope it resonates with the present in some way.”
The first part of Ken Burns’s Leonardo da Vinci aired on BBC Four on 16th December. The second part will air on 23rd December. They will both be available on iPlayer.
