“It’s been wonderful to have the old dog learn some new tricks,” said Ken Burns, now in his fifth decade as a filmmaker, speaking about his first non-American documentary subject. It’s also the furthest back in history that Burns has ever stretched for one of his films, though the topic is uniquely modern. “Leonardo da Vinci” (PBS) is a four-hour journey into the mind of perhaps the most curious man who ever lived — the Renaissance-era engineer, theorist, sculptor, scientist, anatomist and artist responsible for the most famous painting of all time.
The two-part series was co-directed by Sarah Burns and David McMahon (Burns’ daughter and son-in-law), who moved with their kids to Florence, Italy, while writing and researching the documentary. Produced with precision and a genuine emotional sweep, the project also features split screens, dynamic cinematography and unexpected on-camera contributors (including a heart surgeon and an Oscar-winning filmmaker), marking an inventive new chapter in the Ken Burns canon.
“Leonardo“ signals a departure for you in terms of subject matter, but how do you think he still exists in a continuum with your other work?
KEN BURNS The primacy of nature has been a huge ongoing theme in the films, including in “The American Buffalo” and “The National Parks.” Or as Leonardo might say, the imperfection of human beings to see ourselves and our potentiality reflected in nature. The central idea with Leonardo is how he dreamed for the rest of us, which has also been a big theme. He had no microscope and no telescope, and yet you feel like he understood that there is a profound similarity between the architecture of the atom and the architecture of the solar system. He didn’t actually know that, as we do now, but he anticipated that sense of natural unifying truth in the world.
He was born in 1452, but the documentary gives us a sense of the times he lived in and how exciting it must have been to see his work.
DAVID McMAHON When he displayed the cartoon of his “Virgin and Child With Saint Anne” in about 1502, word was spreading like crazy about him. People were saying, “This guy is doing extraordinary things and you have to rush to see it.” It was one of those transformative times.
KEN BURNS It’s interesting, I remember I was 24 years old in 1977 at the Ziegfeld, the biggest theater in New York, watching the premiere of “Star Wars.” And when they went into hyperspace, 2,000 people stood up and screamed their heads off. And there’s a way in which Leonardo reminds me of the “Millennium Falcon” going to light speed — that energy and that cutting-edge excitement and creativity.
For movie lovers, the participation of Guillermo del Toro is also special. He is the first modern voice we hear, speaking poetically about the relationship between knowledge and imagination. How did he become involved?
SARAH BURNS It was a bit of serendipity. We knew we’d have art historians and biographers, but we’re always looking for different perspectives on our subjects. I came across some images of Guillermo’s notebooks, and the way that he incorporates sketches of mythical creatures and monsters along with text on the page reminded me of Leonardo. So we reached out by email to connect with him on Zoom.
KEN BURNS We got on Zoom and Guillermo just went off about Leonardo. So not even five min- utes in, I said, “Guillermo, hold on, we’re bringing a camera crew to you.” It was amazing. He gets the idea that Leonardo’s mission, his sacred duty, was to interrogate the universe. And you see in Guillermo the same restless quality and the same unbridled joy. He just can’t sit still. When the inter- view was over, he said he had to go because he was flying to Japan with J.J. Abrams to buy toys.
The documentary makes ample use of split screens, where we see Leonardo’s sketches of manpowered flight next to footage of birds, for example. How did you develop that style?
McMAHON Our objective was to put everybody between Leonardo’s ears. And our pole star was his notebook drawings, which are best understood in many cases if you see them alongside the world as he observed it. By putting these things side by side, you understand his thinking better and the mathematical relationships he saw among things. We weren’t going to be discovering new facts about his life — people have tried to do that — but instead, with those split screens, with our cinematography, we could get people closer to experiencing Leonardo in a more ecstatic way.
The project addresses the strong consensus that Leonardo was a gay man, though you present what is known about his personal life without turning it into a tabloid topic.
KEN BURNS Yeah, it’s just a fact. Perhaps some peo- ple have a desire to make more of a drama out of his sexuality or to make it more salacious or scan- dalous. But Leonardo is telling us all the time that nothing is binary, everything is fluid.
McMAHON We didn’t sensationalize his sexuality, of course, and Florence at that time was a place where you didn’t have to be particularly concerned if you were gay. It occurred to me that the bodegas in Florence in Leonardo’s time were like Warhol’s Factory. You can imagine all of these young artists socializing with each other. And the recreational activities or the drugs of choice may have been dif- ferent, but the youthful energy and hunger could have been very much the same.
The documentary climaxes with the “Mona Lisa,” which is depicted as an awesome crescendo of his life’s work. It seems like the whole narrative was designed to land on that spot.
SARAH BURNS Yes, it felt like the “Mona Lisa” was the most challenging of the paintings to tell the story of. A lot of people have a sense that it’s overrated — you go to see it at the Louvre, there are a million people taking selfies, and it’s not necessarily the best way to experience a piece of art. And so holding it until the very end, we hoped that it could be better understood as a beautiful culmination of all his scientific explorations, all of his sketching and painting, and the studying that he’d done across his entire life.
KEN BURNS I hope people don’t make jokes any- more about her smile. (Laughs) It’s a facile way of turning off curiosity. It’s a way to arm’s-length her, when she’s like the key to the universe. You know, right there in her eyes, in her hair, in her neck and in the background, in all those things is a Rosetta Stone of human existence. That’s what Leonardo gave us.
This story originally ran in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
