Video Q&A with Documentarian Ken Burns

Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker Ken Burns ("Brooklyn Bridge," "The Civil War," "Baseball," "The West," "Jazz," "The War," "The National Parks") is the subject of a recent 43-minute video interview on a Website called Big Think, which has conducted talking-head Q&A's with "more than 600 experts, from hedge-fund managers to neuroscientists."

You can watch the interview in one uninterrupted chunk below, or in thematic segments:

* Ken Burns: The Art of the Interview 2:17
* Why Everyone is Not a Filmmaker 3:10
* Is American History Cyclical or Progressive? 3:35
* History as Good Storytelling 4:47
* How the Film Shapes the Filmmaker 3:58
* Ken Burns’s Greatest Themes 6:51
* In a Film About Land, Stories About People 5:41
* What Makes Ken Burns’s Films Unique? 6:03
* Selling Them “The Brooklyn Bridge” 5:45
* Ken Burns: Historian, Filmmaker, Both? 3:03



Burns proves himself to be an excellent interview subject when answering the question, "What's the best interview question you've ever asked for a film?"

There are entertaining lessons here for all documentary connoisseurs -- producers and viewers alike.