As a child, Ken Burns had dreams of making big-screen spectacles worthy of Howard Hawks and John Ford. He saw himself devoting his life to producing classic tales of romance set against struggle, much like director Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947).

Documentary film legend Ken Burns at work behind the camera. (Photo by Jason Savage)

Everything seemed so clear for the born storyteller and lover of music and photography, that is, until the early 1970s, when he had his “molecules rearranged” by a documentary film course at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass.

Fascinated with fact

Here Burns realized that there is more drama in what is and what was than anything the human imagination could conceive. The wide-eyed student who entered with a fixation on fantasy emerged fascinated with fact.

Now, more than three decades and some 20 films later, Ken Burns is a living legend in the world of documentary filmmaking—a position that he lives up to with his latest work, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.

A grizzly bear fishes for salmon at Brooks Falls, Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska. (Photo by Craig Mellish)

This 12-hour, six-part PBS documentary series was ten years in the making, over which time Burns and his crew scoured archives, interviewed dozens of current and former park rangers, and captured footage in 53 of the 58 natural national parks from Acadia and Yosemite to Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon.

The American story

The final product is a collection of archival images and original cinematography masterfully woven into a tale that ultimately tells the American story. From his office in New Hampshire, Burns talks about the film with the same passion that fueled his masterpiece documentaries on the Civil War, the game of baseball, and jazz.

“Our national parks symbolize the first time in human history that a group of people set aside land, not for kings and noblemen, but for everyone,” he says. “We invented it, and it only could have come from a people struggling to figure out how to govern themselves. What we found was that the history of the national parks precisely mirrors the larger arc of the American narrative.”

Filmmaker Ken Burns adds another epic documentary to his dossier with his latest work, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, a six-part, 12-hour series which originally aired in the fall of 2009 on PBS. (Photo by Jason Savage)

Burns brings this narrative to life, in part, through the voices of actors like Peter Coyote, Andy Garcia, Eli Wallach, and Tom Hanks, whose talents match their fame.

“The actors that we pick to do the voices, we choose not because they’re famous, but because they’re good,” says Burns. “In the first nanosecond, you’re thinking to yourself, ‘Wow, that’s Tom Hanks,’ but in the next, you’re listening to what he’s saying as he brings to life characters important to the story.”

Among the figures that Hanks plays is Congressman John F. Lacey, a key proponent of an 1894 bill protecting the last wild buffalo herd at Yellowstone National Park. Burns highlights Lacey as an example because of the critical role he believes conservation plays in telling the story of the nation’s park system.

Preservation—warts and all

“A big part of the story that we’re telling in this film hinges on the idea of preservation, and when I talk about preservation, I’m referring both to the good and the bad” he says. “We’re saving natural scenery like waterfalls, geysers, and the grandest canyon on Earth, and we’re also saving the ugly parts of our past, such as slave cabins and the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar, all with the notion that this great country can be greater still.”

Harnessing the many elements of filmmaking, which include his trademark dramatic pans and lowlight cinematography, Burns sought to capture the majesty of these sacred places both visually and narratively. In fact, the 56-year-old director confesses that his work on this film amounted in many ways to an emotional transformation, wherein the sheer beauty of places like Yosemite further solidified the importance of these parks to the nation’s past and present.

After shooting thousands of feet of film and hundreds of hours of editing, Burns manages to take viewers on a guided tour of the parks from 1851 through 1980. When asked what he hopes viewers will take away from this, he says that he doesn’t want to prescribe how people should react.

He does, however, express his hope that people will go and visit these places, and offers a parting anecdote as an illustration of his past success.

“A few years after the Civil War series was broadcast, I was in Gettysburg walking across the lawn with the superintendent,” Burns recalls. “At one point along our walk, he came across a popsickle wrapper, and looked up at me and said, ‘It’s all your fault.’ Then he smiled a big grin and told me that his attendance had gone up 200%.”

Such is the power of the past and present as shown through documentary film.