Ken Burns

“And I got my education there and decided to become a filmmaker when he showed me one night Sir Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out and my dad cried. And I thought nothing in his life had provided him a safe haven for emotional expression except film. So, I am going to take this film by Sir Carol Reed and be the first film, in honor of my dad, who’s also, like my mom, been long gone, but filmmaking and art is often born out of tragedy.”

“But my most favorite film of all time, if somebody held a gun to my head and said you had to pick one, which is, of course, an impossible task out of the thousands, I think that I would pick The Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa. I’ve seen it many times. It’s the fastest three plus hours that I’ve ever experienced in my life. And I’m going to climb up on this stool and I’m going to get it.”

“Now, having said that, I want to move to a comedy and I was worried that I would be a little bit too serious today. One of my favorite comedies of all times is Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be. And it was made in the middle of the Second World War, and yet it has this enduring idea that art, and particularly comedy, the hitting the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at the same time, can help to mitigate and reconcile and transcend this particular horror. And so I pick Jack Benny and Carole Lombard and Robert Stack, and a million other wonderful character actors, and Ernst Lubitsch, To Be or Not to Be. Really, really, really, really great film.”

“Oh, so… I wanted to be Alfred Hitchcock, and Vertigo is a really favorite film, and I’ve seen probably every single one of his films, maybe not every single British film, but I certainly know most of the British films and all of the American films. And I recently had an opportunity to see Rebecca and I think Joan Fontaine, there with Laurence Olivier, should be completely overshadowed, and she holds a kind of sensitivity and fragility in her performance. I’m really going with Rebecca as a really wonderful Hitchcock film, and obviously one of the great masters.”

“Of a contemporary master, I can think of no one who’s better at cinema than Steve McQueen. I was at the Telluride Film Festival and saw the, I think, North American premiere of Hunger, and I cannot adequately describe the effect that it had on me, the long shots, sometimes lasting ten or fifteen minutes, just the visual things of swabbing down the urine in the corridors outside the cells as the Hunger strike is going on. So to me, you know, Steve McQueen, who is also an amazing human being, and I’m so happy that I have had a chance to get to know him, is just a master filmmaker, and I love this film and I look forward to sharing it with my daughters and my grandchildren. So Hunger, Steve McQueen.”

“Oh, oh, I forgot I have one more film. I like Wim Wenders’s Pina. I still can remember seeing it, once again at the Telluride Film Festival in a world premiere or in a North American premiere, and just feeling as I did as a kid running out of the theater and running down the street in joy. Somebody had just put a second stage on my rocket. And that’s what we look for. Pina by Wim Wenders. Wim, who I also know, we love you.”

“What was I thinking? I know. I made a film on the history of country music, and we interviewed Kris Kristofferson and he told me the inspiration for “Me and Bobby McGee” was, in many ways, La strada. And so we actually licensed and used a little bit of La strada in our film on country music. Everything that Fellini touched I want to be part of and I understand that there may be a collection and it might be possible not just to pick out a single La strada but to have… the essential Federico Fellini, one of the great, great masters of all time, so.”