Making The Civil War: 25 Years Later

("When Johnny Comes Marching Home" on piano) - There's a photograph I'm very fond of.

It shows three Confederate soldiers who were captured at Gettysburg and they are posed in front of or alongside a snake rail fence and you see exactly how the Confederate soldier was dressed.

You see something in his attitude toward the camera that's revealin' of his nature.

And one of 'em has his arms like this.

As if he's having his picture made but he's determined to be the individual he is.

And there's something about that picture that draws me strongly as an image of the war.

- My interest in the Civil War was born as a little kid.

I was given plastic figures of Civil War battles with some bridges and decimated tress, but a lot of blue and gray plastic soldiers.

And my brother and I would play all the time.

- Blue and the gray, Ken and I used to play blue and the gray.

I was always Confederate.

It had a kind of a quaint sense of Union and rebels.

Always the rebel, never the victor.

- All of the first films that I worked on had completely accidentally, the Civil War as a determining factor.

- [Narrator] The bridge was half again as big as any built before it.

- [Ken] The Brooklyn Bridge wouldn't have been made without this new metal called steel which the war helped to promote.

The guy who built the Brooklyn Bridge, Washington Roebling got his practical training as a bridge builder during the Civil War.

- [Narrator] They believed in pacifism and feminism.

Freedom from prejudice.

- The Shakers declined precipitously after the Civil War, not because of social or economic changes, but because of the psychic changes in a country that had just murdered 750 thousand of their own people.

The Statue of Liberty was a gift from the French intended to celebrate the survival of the Union, despite Lincoln's cost, and be delivered to his widow.

It took longer than that.

The Congress, everywhere you turned, the most important moment was clearly when there were two Congresses.

One in in Montgomery, Alabama and later Richmond, as well as Washington, D.C. and so I realized this was the central event in American history.

I was compelled to do something.

And then I read and finished on Christmas Day, 1984, a novel of the Battle of Gettysburg called The Killer Angels.

And I was so taken by it that I just said this is the next project.

- By the time Ken began to see all of these kind of, and feel all these connections in his early work, I think he also, a huge light bulb went on and went like, this is completely undertreated.

Where is the contemporary 1980's, 1990's version for a general public of this extraordinary event.

With all these characters.

Here's this guy Ken who is hyper-sensitized to the power of photography, 19th century photography, old pictures.

With the most important event in American history.

Which has been asleep, Rip Van Winkle style, for a generation.

- Let me say I have a almost unbroken record of giving Ken bad advice.

But the worst advice I ever gave him, was not to do the Civil War.

I thought it was a terrible idea, that we would fail, that it was gonna be endless details of paintings and you know, snorting horses, and cannon fire, and he and Ric persevered and we ended up doing it.

And I am terribly grateful we did.

But it was not my idea.

- It was an idea that was terrifying.

It was just bigger than all of the subjects put together times 100.

A lot of it was a learning curve for me.

Of upending those preconceptions and trying to shape a narrative that issued from what sort of happened and try to balance what happened on the battle field with what was happening at home and what was taking place in other areas and that sort of went against the grain.

Nobody was interested in the specific battles anymore.

It was all about causes and effect.

And we said, yeah, but what happened during those four years is hugely important to who we are.

(guitar music) - It's the most important event in our history.

We're still fighting it.

And it just seemed enormous to me when we got started.

But then as we went along, we found characters that you could follow.

And we realized, most of all, that you can't tell everything.

It's a film, it dictates that.

So you try to get as much as you can in.

Then it began to seem just like a fascinating challenge.

- Basically, Jeff wrote the script, but Ric and I were so deeply emersed in the stories and the books, particularly Ric, that we were constantly writing other things.

- Jeff is one of the great American narrative historians.

His sort of effortless grasp of big picture and detail.

- [Narrator] Advance units of the Union army camp for the night on the old Chancellorsville Battle Field.

Where winter rains had washed open the shallow graves.

- The Union troops coming across the same ground, discovered the rains had washed open the fresh graves from the year before.

Rains had washed open the fresh graves from the year before?

I mean, that's like classic Jeff.

Where suddenly using simple, simple words, put together, which create such an intimate sense of what it would have been like to be there with no fuss, no pretension, no calling attention to itself.

- I research for awhile, several months I guess, and then it goes along.

Sometimes I start in the middle, I go back, go forward and back.

The hardest things are the beginning and the ending of every film.

And you fiddle with the ending until they finally sort of claw it our of our hands (laughs).

You look for the story within the big mass of material and then the great and wonderful thing, the thing I love most about it is braiding the story so that everybody that you've gotten to know, you come out with at the end.

And that's challenging but also a lot of fun.

- The dramatist personae, we all worked on together.

That is to say, listing the folks you'd get to know, both well-known like the Lincolns and the Grants and the Frederick Douglases and the Robert E. Lees, but also ordinary folks.

The Sam Watkins and Elijah Hunt Rhodes that were our ordinary grunts south and north.

And then periodically we would want to capture something that hadn't been you know, in the original narrative but because of photographic stuff I discovered, suggested new themes.

We shot what we wanted to shoot, what we were drawn to visually and Jeff wrote what he wanted to write.

This outline that we talked about, advised by two dozen extraordinary scholars who never agreed on anything, and it made for some pretty interesting meetings, but it also permitted us to also distill a whole bunch of different commentary coming from different directions.

- I'm the only person I know who looks forward to meetings.

I love them.

We sit in a room, there are a bunch of really, really bright people in the room and their only goal is to make a good thing better.

And then reassemble two weeks later and make that good thing still better.

And that's, you know, what could be more fun than that?

I just eat that up.

("Johnny Comes Marching" in Celtic style) - I photographed a lot of The Civil War with Ken and also with Alan Moore who we'd been working with really since the beginning of The Civil War.

And the same core team has been working on all these projects for more than 30 years which is kind of incredible.

- When people think about film production, they think about, "Well, we shot for 75 days."

We didn't do this, we shot over several years and it may be flying to Memphis to just do an interview with Shelby Foot or the weeks and weeks and weeks Ric and Mike Hill and Buddy Squires and I spent in the Library of Congress filming in their collection just with our little easel and our magnets and putting the shots up and going, "Yup," and then maybe doing five or 10 shots within that shot, putting the next one down.

"Nope, okay, what about this one?"

- We would just start to deconstruct a photograph and we would have to move the camera every time we wanted to get closer.

So we would rephotograph something from six feet away.

And then decided that we wanted to move in another two feet for a different image.

And then we'd decide we wanted to do a pan from the left to the right.

And we would go through and literally exist, live within these photographs.

- What I learned was there is a very special way to see a still photograph.

I hadn't had that experience before.

I'd been a still photographer, so I knew how to make a still photograph, but I hadn't really thought about how you look at a still photograph and can find a story within it.

- [Narrator] March 5th, 1863.

The arm of the slaves is the best defense against the arm of the slave holder.

- One of Ken's great talents was that he knew if he saw a photo and it had such and incredible layering of information in it, he would find ways to visualize that to tell a story.

- [Narrator] The first thing in the morning is drill.

Then drill.

(men drilling) Then drill again.

Then drill, drill, little more drill, then drill.

Then lastly, drill.

Between drills, we drill and sometimes stop to eat a little and have a role-call.

(battle rages) (cello music) - Some days are devoted to live cinematography.

Capturing at dawn or at dusk, the vibe.

And my favorite one is going late one afternoon to the Andersonville historic site.

We met a superintendent who didn't understand the idea of a magic hour, particularly in the summertime, and wasn't gonna let us film until after he opened up at eight.

So we said, "Can't we do this?"

And he said, "Nope!"

And we pushed back and it wasn't gonna happen.

So the next morning, we got there at 5:30, climbed the walls, shot the most spectacular footage at first light of those incredibly close proximate gravestones of the thousands of Union soldiers who died of starvation or disease or maltreatment at Andersonville, climbed back over the fence, then he arrived at eight o'clock, we went in and shot the handful or archives that he had and smugly left.

(guitar music) - The most beautiful light is the light of dawn and dusk.

Before the sun gets too high in the sky were you lose shadows and you have a sort of bluer, hotter color temperature to the sun.

So that required being on location at least an hour before dawn, before the sunrise, and staying on location til at least the hour after the sun has set.

And that can go, that can make for pretty long day in the summertime especially.

- That landscape work is done when we think that the light, and the weather, and the circumstances are gonna be right for that particular part of the story.

And we do spend a lot of time going back to places to get the optimal moment of, whether it be the trees leafing out, or the dead of winter, or the longest day of the year, or the coldest place, or the hottest place, that's where we go.

There's no faking it with that material.

And it's, and it's integral, it's really important because all of these things, the still photographs, the landscapes, they're all some form of historical residue.

They're all something that we can touch of the time and place where these stories took place.

- There was one special day that I remember, which, I think actually, anyone who's seen the series will remember the images as well.

I'd dropped a friend of mine off at Dulles Airport, he was flying off to, you know, Asia to do some documentary, and I had the evening to myself and my camera in the back of my car and I thought, well, I'm right near Manassas, so I'm gonna go down and just sort of check out the battle field.

I had sort of one of these blanket permissions to just go in and shoot.

It was an amazing sunset and I had driven down a road and saw a cannon on a ridge.

And the cannon was totally isolated.

On just a grassy knoll.

And the sky became blood red and I was there at the right moment and shot a sequence of about five minutes, wide, medium, closeup, of this single cannon on the edge of the horizon.

Those shots then were used by the editors during the sequence about the letter from Sullivan Ballou to Sarah.

That five minutes was like transcendental for me, as an experience as a cinematographer, but it also provided Ken and his team the images that I think helped tell this really amazing story.

("Dixieland" on fiddle) - I had just come off the Hughie Long film, I was still working on it and I had become friends with Robert Penn Warren, the novelist and poet.

The first Poet Laureate of the United States.

And he called me up one time and said, "Thinkin' about the Civil War."

He had this wonderful elliptical Kentucky accent.

"Thinkin' about how, if you're gonna do it right, you're gonna talk to Shelby Foot right away."

- The first time we filmed Shelby, we trundled down to Memphis and went to his house and I think that we shot maybe six rolls of film, which is about an hour of running time, our film at that time ran 11 minuted per roll.

- When it was over, I turned to Buddy Squires, the cameraman, who'd been in the intimate room.

My brother was there, I don't even think we had a sound man.

I think we set it up and did it ourselves, but you know, you don't know what you have in front of you.

And I turned to Buddy and I said, "What do you think?"

And he said, "I think it's kind of boring."

- We kinda looked at each other and it was like, well, he's kinda slow.

He's kind of very methodical in the way he speaks.

He's not really very energetic.

We're not sure if this is going to work.

- You know, even Ken had no sense of how extraordinary the interview was.

It was really only looking at the material, going back.

Usually it's about 15% of an interview is usable, fantastic interview.

This was like, 90% of the interview was usable.

- Well, all of a sudden, he took up so much of our oxygen in our film in the best kind of way.

- Early in the war, it was a Confederate veteran, a young country boy, on guard duty, he's walkin' his post in the woods.

And there was an owl, unknown to him, in a tree nearby.

And the owl said, "Hoooo!"

And the boy, tremblin' with fear, said, "It's me sir, John Albert, a friend of yours."

(laughing) - There was one day on The Civil War when we decided to take Shelby Foot to a battlefield.

We had spent all this time with Shelby in his living room in Memphis talking about the war, but we thought maybe there would be something special actually taking him to this place that he knew so well.

And indeed, it was an extraordinary day.

Getting up at dawn, driving all through the battlefield with him, having him stop and explain what happened here and who died here and where the forces moved here.

And somehow, that combination of being able to be with this incredibly knowledgeable man, in this place where so much had happened.

- Before the war, it was said "The United States are," grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states.

And after the way, it was always "The United States is," as we say today, without being self conscious at all.

And that sums up what the war accomplished.

It made us an is.

(upbeat fiddle music) - Initially it was supposed to be just five one hour shows.

Each hour covering a year of the war.

And then as they were, as Jeff and Ric and Ken were writing the script, it kept growing, and growing and as we were editing, we realized that it was much more than, you know, we were winding up with three and a half rough cuts on one episode.

And at some point, Ken finally made a decision that we really should expand the length of the show from five shows to nine and divide years in half.

And figure out different ways to break it down.

- [Narrator] More than once during the Civil War newspapers reported a strange phenomenon.

From only a few miles away, a battle sometimes made no sound, despite the flash and smoke of cannon and the fact that more distant observers could hear it clearly.

These eerie silences were called acoustic shadows.

- It took about two and a half years to edit it and the ratio of how much was in the assembly that stayed in the final film, it was huge!

It just, you know, thanks to Jeff's writing, thanks to Shelby Foot, thanks to the power of the photographs.

That is just came down from 16 to 12 and there were zillions of changes made along the way.

But it was remarkably there in some form that it stayed from very early on.

And so there was just no question.

This is not gonna be, Ken didn't go, "Oh, well, we have to cut out 11 hours of footage."

It was just, we have to raise that much more money.

- [Narrator] In October of 1862, at his New York Gallery, Matthew Brady opened and exhibition of photographs entitled "The Dead of Antietam."

Nothing like them had ever been seen in America before.

- I think the hardest part was approaching the battles.

Because the battles were crucial to the story of the war and all of the photographs were taken before the battles began or after the battle was over.

Because photography was so new, it was only 22-years-old at the time of the Civil War broke out, it was the first war that was really heavily photographed.

But the lenses were slow, the cameras were slow, they were cumbersome.

And so during the actual battles, it was very difficult to take a camera out and try to shoot any kind of action scenes.

And so that was a real tough conundrum for us.

And the way that we solved the problem was with sound effects.

We discovered that if we built a really rich sound effects track of gunshots, and cannons, and men shouting and running, and you put those over the empty landscapes, or you put them over the dead, the audience started to imagine that the battle was happening and taking place.

- [Narrator] Exactly at (birds chirping) one o'clock, a giant artillery barrage, intended to soften up the Union defenses before the attack, began with a deafening explosion.

- [Man] Fire!

(exploding) - [Narrator] Mead had just left his commanders finishing their lunch as an orderly served them butter, a shell tore the man in two.

(exploding) - [Man] A storm broke upon us so suddenly, that numbers of soldiers and officers who leaped from their tents (exploding) or lazy siestas on the grass, were stricken on their rising with mortal wounds.

And died.

(exploding) Some with cigars clamped between their teeth.

Some with pieces of food in their fingers.

(exploding) - [Elijah] The flying iron and pieces of stone struck some men down in every direction.

(exploding) About 30 men of our brigade were killed or wounded.

Elijah Hunt Rhodes.

(exploding) - Ken and I were so shocked that after the film was broadcast, people came up to both me and him separately and said, "I was amazed at the newsreel footage you got of the Civil War battles."

(laughing) And Ken and I were like, there was no film back then guys!

There was no newsreel, you were looking at still photographs.

- I've had a couple of experiences in my lifetime making movies that have been beyond transformative.

Watching the fine cut of the funeral of Jackie Robinson in Baseball.

Filming in my first film, Roll 53, the Spectacular Light around the Brooklyn Bridge one evening on a, what had been up to that point, a very dreary day until the sky broke in the west and all of a sudden, I've never in my life come close to it again.

But I think all of those are trumped by a moment when we're mixing The Civil War.

It was our want to add a very complicated sound effects track and we'd gotten to the Ford's Theater scene.

And we had laid down the narration, we'd laid down the music, we'd laid down some background noises of a cough and crowd noises and applause and this tinny sounding Victorian play, Our American Cousin.

Footfalls, and door slams, and done all of that.

We hadn't laid down the gunshot.

(knocking) (door slamming) And it's all analog, so you can't just digitally press a button, you gotta back up and make a running start.

And then the mixer, Lee Dichter did.

And then somebody next to him, turned around, her eyes sort of bright with tears and I realized what this moment was.

And I yelled, "Stop!"

- And the mixer looked up at him and I looked up at him and he stood up and he said, "Let's wait a minute.

It's, I don't, I just don't want to kill Lincoln yet."

He said, "Let's just let him live for a few seconds longer."

I mean, he teared up, I teared up.

The mixer was looking at us like we were insane.

(laughing) - And then I sort of nodded to Lee, he backed up again, we laid down the shot, we got the right caliber of sound.

And then finished the film a day or so later and went home Christmas 1989.

But I don't think it's ever left us, that for a moment, we felt like we had just kept Abraham Lincoln alive.

And it was, incredibly powerful.

- [Narrator] Booth fired.

Then vaulted over the front of the box, caught his right spur in the draped flag and landed on stage, breaking his left leg.

He waved his dagger and shouted something to the stunned audience.

Some thought he said "Sic semper tyrannis," thus be it ever to tyrants.

Virginia's state motto.

Other's heard it as, "The south is avenged."

For a long moment the theater was still.

Then Mary Lincoln screamed.

(melancholy piano music) - I sort of measure my life before The Civil War and afterwards.

I remember I did a hundred interviews that summer and somebody interviewed me from some astrological newspaper or magazine and I just though, okay, whatever.

And after the interview, she had called up my assistant and said, "What has he doing on the 24th of September?"

And she looks at the book and it's the first clear week in a long time, she goes, "Nothing."

And she goes, "Woah, it's a big day."

So on the 23rd of September, which was a Sunday night, the series premiered.

The next morning, was the 24th when the Nielsen overnights came in.

(cheering) People were calling and Johnny Carson was calling and "Would you be on this?"

It was the subject of the monologue every one of the first four nights that week.

- There was no way in the world we had any idea that The Civil War would be one tenth as successful as it became.

It took us all by surprise.

- I mean we thought we had done a really good piece of work.

We thought it would be well received by PBS and well received by the PBS audience, but the outpouring nationally, the enormity of the ratings, the press, I mean, it was just astonishing.

- People were talking about it everywhere.

It was on the cover of Newsweek.

There was something that just grabbed people.

And I'm not, I honestly don't know what it was, but it was the thing that Ken knew was there and was willing to take the risk to go find.

And was willing to spend the five years, put his entire reputation on the line, and bring this incredibly talented group of people together.

Ken had a vision of what this might be.

He was right.

- I think that the reason why The Civil War still has staying power, and I think it probably will for some time, is that it's eager from it's first frame of action to convey not just the facts but what it was like to be hit on the head by those facts.

It was always about conveying the inner experience of absorbing the meaning of the past.

- The most meaningful comment, or the most wonder compliment I think I ever received I think, was from Ralph Ellison, whom I didn't know at all.

And I was introduced to him at a dinner after something and I told him how important his work was to me.

And then he said, "What do you do?"

And I said, "Well, I've just written The Civil War."

And he grabbed my hand and he said, "Thank you for telling the country what my people went through."

I've never forgotten that.

- [Narrator] This year's brought about many changes.

That at the beginning would have been though impossible.

The close of the year finds me a soldier for the cause of my race.

May God bless the cause.

(hopeful string music) - I think in a way it helped many filmmakers who were trying to break into documentary and make it a popular genre for general audiences.

Suddenly it was okay to be a documentary filmmaker.

And you could actually have a popular audience for it.

And it's now shaped a whole genre of historical documentary that now many other people are seeing the power of and it's kind of created it's own movement.

- I'm not surprised that we're still talking about the Civil War as a historical event.

It is the most important event in American history.

I am flabbergasted that our film has the kind of legs that it does, that any time it's a school day in America, it's being shown hundreds and hundreds of times.

Not the whole thing, but little bits and pieces.

That a quarter of a century after it's broadcast, that it might have the ability to move people, to educate people, to sponsor in people a desire to get up off the couch, turn off the TV set, and go to those battle sites.

Attendance skyrocketed and every time it's rebroadcast, the park service always says, "We noticed a little tic."

Or the superintendent of that battlefield or that battlefield.

It promoted the work of others.

I mean, Shelby Foot called me up one day and said, "Ken, you made me a millionaire!"

The sales of his book just went through the roof.

That's a wonderful thing.

That it remains the highest rated series in public television history is a wonderful testament, I think, not just to what we did, not just to the centrality of the Civil War, but also what PBS means in the life and sort of mental and emotional health and intellectual health of our country.