Burns interviewed 70 hours for MLK project
Ken Burns has already conducted 70 hours of interviews with civil rights foot soldiers in preparation for a documentary on Martin Luther King Jr.
Snapshot · Empire: World History
374. Ken Burns on the American Revolution and Empire
Explore episode
Jul 4, 2026
Where this was said
Ken Burns's Process: Never Stop Writing
At 35:06 · chapter starts 34:20
Anita asks whether it is true that Burns never writes a script before filming. Absolutely true, he confirms — and it is the defining feature of his process. He will never approach a scholar and ask them to 'get me from paragraph two to paragraph three on page six of episode five.' Every talking head in his films is a happy accident of location. The team films without concern for whether images are available, writes without fear of whether there is footage to match, and remains open — 'corrigible,' in Burns's word — to the very end. Most productions treat the script as scripture, handed down from Mount Sinai, and everything else follows from it. Burns's process is the opposite: research and writing never stop, meaning new information can reshape the film at the last moment. It makes the productions longer and more attenuated, he admits, but it makes them fresher.
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