[MUSIC PLAYING]
I do think there's an arrogance we in the present
have about things and people that went before us.
And so one of the jobs that I feel
is incumbent upon the writing of documentary films
and the making of documentary films
is to restore to those now dead people, now gone
people, the fullness and the degree
of complication of their life, their humanness, back to them.
That's our work-- is to restore humanity
to the human beings that went before that
don't speak for themselves.
They do if you take their diaries.
They do if you write in a way that brings them alive.
They do if you treat that old photograph
as moving and not static--
all of those things.
If you play their music on the instruments
that they heard it on, then you have the possibility
of willing them to life.
You have the possibility of waking the dead.
You have to liberate your characters
to their full human dimension, whether they're historical
or not.
In my world, in the world of documentary,
of nonfiction historical work, these people
exist more out of my film than they do in my film.
And so I am trying to distill an essence of an accurate
aspect of it, knowing full well that the things I'm
drawn to and the things that I'm distilling
reflect, however unconsciously, my own biases and emotions
and inclinations.
So I'm always selecting to build a character here
and mindful that I can't make it some perfect image,
the white hat or the dark hat, that the hero will
have significant flaws, will be wounded in certain ways,
and that the villains will have their own humanity
and their own attractive aspects.
That's hugely important.
But I also know they still exist in a kind of historical reality
that I also have to be mindful of.
And that makes the making of what
we do a kind of three dimensional chess game.
And so being hyper aware of it on your own part as you
struggle to make a character real
means that you have to permit a darker side,
that Lincoln was tardy on slavery, that he
was a depressive, that he didn't do this and he didn't do that.
He suspended habeas corpus in Maryland.
And I mean, the greatest assault on the Constitution
is by the guy who saved the United States of America.
Abraham Lincoln-- you've got to be able to understand that.
What we think is, and storytelling tells us,
we must have a beginning, middle, and end
to every character that we have, in addition to the arc
of a story in general.
And in some ways, that's fraudulent.
Some people aren't like that.
Some people die early.
Some people flame out early, whatever it is.
But it is possible, in some way, to see
how you introduce a character.
So Frederick Douglass comes in, say,
in "The Civil War" in the first episode.
And we understand that this is, as we put it,
and as he put it, someone who stole himself from slavery.
So he appears there, in the beginning,
as a kind of representative in lots
of different ways of an aspiring group of people,
the black African slaves stolen from their homeland,
forced to abandon their culture, their language,
and their religions to live and serve without pay a master
growing cotton or tobacco or whatever it might be,
under the worst of circumstances.
And the very first chapter of "The Civil War"
is how bad it was in slavery.
It's called "All Night Forever."
And it begins with a quote from Frederick Douglass about how
beautiful the country is.
But when he thinks about, you know,
all the tears of his sisters and brothers
and the blood that washes freely into its rivers,
I am filled, he said, with unutterable loathing.
So it's a pretty good entrance.
And then you find out a little bit
later about how he is as part of the abolitionist
and emancipation movement.
And then he has a middle in which he's constantly
a thorn in the side of Lincoln, urging him farther
than Lincoln's willing to go, negotiating with him.
Admiring Lincoln, but also understanding how tardy
he is on what's right.
Douglas is there like a conscience on his shoulder.
That's his middle.
And his end is as an old man.
Some student asked him what he should do.
And he said, agitate, agitate, agitate.
And so the end of the arc of Frederick Douglass,
with an arc of the whole nine episodes of "The Civil War"
is something-- it's a message that comes right to moment.
Without knowing it, back in 1989 when we finished the film,
he was talking about Black Lives Matter and Trayvon Martin,
and you know, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner,
and everybody else--
who has to be sacrificed in order for us to continue
to not live out, as Dr. King said,
the true meaning of our creed.
And that is not judging people on the color of their skin,
but on the content of their character.
And so Douglass forms with us, even unconsciously knowing it,
that arc, serving a larger arc of many people.
The driving engine of story, of narrative, of arc is conflict,
is tension.
And that tension can be within a character.
That is to say, certain flaws within that person
that are working at cross purposes, that, you know,
it's, like, don't do that, you're saying to yourself.
Or you know, please do this.
No, choose him, not her.
Right?
And then, of course, more often than not,
it's between individuals or between things that we do it.
And the best stuff understands that both
occur at the same time.
So that often, in order to serve the external conflicts
and tensions, we make people one dimensional--
good guys all good, bad guys all bad.
When we do more psychological things,
we understand the dimensions and the conflicts within a person,
good or bad, and we play to that.
But the best films permit external drama
to be complicated and internal drama to be complicated.
And they only serve each other, and you
begin to understand that there could be more than one truth
to a situation.
Most recently in our "Vietnam" film,
we had the great privilege of interviewing
a very, very complicated marine named John Musgrave.
And we are with him on the battlefield
as he is trying to negotiate staying alive, killing
the enemy, not being killed by them,
understanding dynamics of warfare that are elemental.
And he's also dealing with his government.
And he's in conflict with some of the things
that they're suggesting that he does.
He's also in complete sync with the government.
He's volunteered for the Marine Corps.
He wants to be in the varsity, fighting his country's enemies.
That's what he wants to do.
His wounding is one of the most climactic things
we've ever done in a film.
[GUNFIRE IN BACKGROUND]
I mean, I've got a hole through my chest big enough
to stick your fist through.
And I'm dying, and I know it.
And I heard this horrible screaming going on.
And I was trying to figure out who was screaming like that,
because it sounded so--
and then I realized it was me.
And he disappears for a while, and we come back to him.
Now he's living on a campus, trying
to keep the loud noise of this horror
that he's been through quiet, trying
to negotiate a country that's now opposed to the war
that he thought he was nobly fighting.
And he himself undergoes an extraordinary transformation
over the rest of the film that mirrors, in some ways,
the entire country.
I remember when the kids were killed at Kent State.
And I thought, my God, we're killing our own children.
We've really gone mad.
And I wasn't-- that's when I was hiding from things.
I wasn't in anybody's movement then.
I was just drinking.
But that was one of the things that told me
America needed a wake up call.
[CROWD NOISE]
So he engages in the anti-war movement.
So we spend our time with him in his internal conflicts.
But more importantly, we're also covering
the conflicts he's having at war and after war
in the anti-war thing.
And what he permits you to do is to walk with him
and see all of the dynamics of those conflicts, both inner
and outer.