#97 — The Impossible War
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Summary
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick discuss their new documentary, The Vietnam War, which premieres on PBS on September 17th, and is available on DVD and Blu-ray very soon after that. In this conversation, the filmmakers discuss their thoughts on the Vietnam War and what it means to be a veteran of the war, and what they hope the documentary will teach us about the experience of those who served in the conflict. They also discuss the impact of the film on the lives of veterans and their families, and how it changed the way we think about the war and the people who fought in it. Sam Harris is a writer and host of the podcast Making Sense. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and has been featured in The New York Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, and the Hollywood Reporter. His work can be found on Amazon, and he is a regular contributor on NPR and NPR Worldwide. His music can be heard on many other platforms, including SoundCloud, and his music video is also available on SoundCloud and Vevolution, which you should check out on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Thank you for listening to this episode of Making Sense! Subscribe to Making Sense: The Making Sense Podcast! Subscribe to our new podcast on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to our podcast on Stitcher.com/Making Sense Subscribe on Podchaser and Stitcher Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your fellow podcast listenership on the Making Sense podcast on the Podcasts and other social media platforms on our Podcasts on the PodCharity and Podcasts Connected to the Podcasts Listings Join Us on FB and Subscribe to Our Podcasts & Podcasts On Podcharity Subscribe & Share Us On Social Media Places Learn More About Meep & Subscribe to Their Story on This Podcasts And Places To Watch It Outtro Music on Podcasts Outtro Browsing Places And Places And Podcasts A Podcast on The Vineyard On The Podcasts Collectorship And More Thank You - Thanks & Share This And This And Other Things On This Podcast # & And This & This And Such A Review And This Other Things , This And More On This And Their Story On This & Such And Such And This ... -- A Thank You & Such A Good Vibee
Transcript
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on January 12th, and Philadelphia on January 14th.
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Okay, today I am speaking with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.
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They are filmmakers who have made some of the most beloved documentaries of our time, and
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certainly changed the way that documentary films have been made over the last few decades.
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And they're releasing their latest film, The Vietnam War, this weekend on PBS.
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It premieres on Sunday, the 17th of September, and it will be available on DVD and Blu-ray very
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It's 18 hours long, and as you'll hear in this conversation, it fairly blew my mind.
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It really is a remarkable piece of work, which took Ken and Lynn and the rest of their team
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10 years to make, so you'll hear much more about it and my experience watching it over
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the next hour, but I really recommend that you take the time to watch this series.
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If you thought you knew something about the Vietnam War and what it was like to live through
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it, I would dare say even if you fought in that war, there's something to be learned from
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Ken and Lynn, thanks for coming on the podcast.
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Well, listen, to say that I'm a fan of your work is certainly an understatement, and I think
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that's probably an understatement for almost anyone who encounters your work.
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You have made so many amazing films together, probably most famously the Civil War, which
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virtually everyone has seen, I imagine, but there was Prohibition, Jazz, Baseball, just
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so many great films, and these are miniseries, really.
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I mean, these are many hours long, and now you've released, or you're bound to release the
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latest, which is the Vietnam War, which is 18 hours long.
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I really don't want to do a spoiler thing for you.
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I've had a full immersion experience that most people watching it on PBS won't, because
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I have the discs, and I've watched those 15 hours in the last 48.
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It's really, really amazingly intense, and it strikes me that this is an utterly unique
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document for reasons that you couldn't fully control.
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I mean, first of all, there was an endless amount of footage of the actual war, which you
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And there's also the fact that there were so many people who experienced the war who are
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And then there's the additional fact that we are at enough remove from this particular
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war in time, now about 50 years, so that you can have this perspective on it and give it
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And finally, and this is something you really had no control over, there's the fact that
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you're releasing this now, at this moment in history, and it has a resonance, which I
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really, I feel like it wouldn't have had, had you released this, let's say, in the first
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I mean, it strikes me as an incredibly relevant and prescient document right now.
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It's like looking into a time capsule, but it's also, I also felt like I was looking into
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And so I don't know if it strikes you that way, but it just seems like this is a gold
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This is the great gift of history that we always forget, and I would suggest that had
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we released it 10 years ago, it might also have stunning and different kind of resonances.
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Human nature never changes, and so whatever's going on now, the past is always going to resonate
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But I think it's quite startling right now, and nothing that we intentionally timed the
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Indeed, most of the editorial work was done on this before the caucus and primary seasons
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But this is a film about mass demonstrations taking place all across the country against
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the current administration, about a White House in disarray, obsessed with leaks, about a
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president certain the press is lying, making up stories about him, about asymmetrical warfare
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that confounds the mighty might of the U.S. military, about huge document drops of stolen,
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classified material into the public sphere that destabilizes the conventional wisdom and the
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current conversation, and accusations that a political campaign reached out during the time
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of a national election to a foreign power to help them influence that national election.
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But all of these were true back in 2006 when Lynn and I began working on it, as they are still true
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now, and all of them and dozens more are from Vietnam that resonate in the present.
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Strangely, some of the resonances are inconvenient, or at least uncomfortable, in that their polarity
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I mean, so for instance, there was some, I forget which administration did it, I guess it was LBJ.
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At some point, there was the allegation that Russian operatives were stoking the anti-war movement,
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And, you know, whether or not that could have been true then, it certainly played as a completely cynical
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bit of paranoia, whereas now we have this increasingly well-documented meddling of Russia
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It was a bewildering experience, frankly, to watch this film.
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Yes, and then you have the actual evidence that the Nixon campaign reached out to South Vietnam
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to get them to boycott the peace talks that had suddenly improved and were improving Humphrey's chances.
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And Johnson gets wind of this and calls up Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate,
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And in our film, the next call that you hear is Nixon sort of saying, oh, you know, Mr. President,
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And so you have an exact correlation, just as the other one seemed kind of absurd and paranoic.
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But now, true, this one is, you know, a fact, but we're now trying to connect the dots in
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So let's step back from the actual content of the film for a moment and just talk about
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And then I want to move through the story a little bit systematically, because it's,
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it really is an education that most of us haven't had on just how damaging the Vietnam
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Well, we, we've been thinking about the Vietnam War as one of the most important events in
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And it's been sort of on the back burner for many years, sort of lurking there, along with
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And when we finished our film on the Second World War, we hadn't been broadcast yet, but
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it was around 2006, Ken turned to me at one of the mixing sessions and said, you know,
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And yet we took a big, deep gulp because we knew even then how enormously complicated
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We really wanted to try to tell it from every possible side and to listen to people who have
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very strong feelings about it, sometimes conflicted feelings.
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And to understand Vietnamese perspectives as well as Americans.
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And so it took us 10 years to kind of wrestle this enormously challenging story to the ground.
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And the footage you have is amazing, both the contemporaneous footage of actual battles,
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And you seemingly have an endless amount of footage of our own side, which is also,
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it just strikes me as strange that it exists in so many cases.
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Well, we had a free press that was unfettered in their access to the war and the theater of war,
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in this case, unlike World War II in Korea, where the press was very much censored and controlled.
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And Vietnam represents that one outlying situation that permitted the press at great risk to themselves.
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And in fact, hundreds of journalists and videographers and filmmakers and sound men were killed during the course of the war
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to provide this, you know, seemingly bottomless amount of footage.
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What happens, though, is that they congregate in archives all around the world.
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And a traditional film production only has the resources to spend a little time in each archive, if they can even get there.
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So what happens is that we tend to push around our plate the same footage over and over again.
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And it's footage that we have, but we've also had the luxury of spending a decade and having the deep dive
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and permitting us to go into the archives and spend more than just a cursory amount of time,
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but literally months and years getting to know them and finding out all the nooks and crannies of that archives,
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not just footage, but also still photographs, to benefit this production.
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So while the classic images are there, the classic famous moments, we are able to deconstruct them in,
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we think, a different kind of light, whether it's the napalm girl, Kim Fook,
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or it's the assassination of Lem in the streets of Saigon during the Tet Offensive by the head of the national police, Luan,
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or other famous things, we can in some ways deconstruct them.
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But more importantly, for these quotidian moments with fighter pilots and helicopter crew chiefs and marines
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and army guys ambushed or in battle charging up hills, you have a kind of immersive experience that places you there.
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And one thing you should know is that 98% of the footage comes to us without any sound.
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And we have to therefore then research ourselves what an M16 sounds like as opposed to an AK-47,
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as opposed to a traditional tripod-mounted machine gun, as opposed to other kinds of armaments,
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and what the sounds of the engines of an A3 as opposed to an A4 sound like,
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and what they actually look like to get it straight.
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And so much of the years involved in this is the attempt at verisimilitude,
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and in many cases those battles that you referred to have new footage, perhaps never-before-seen footage,
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but also a sound effects track that may number into 150 or 160 individual sounds to create the moment of battle.
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I didn't know that, but in retrospect it seems like the sound design was amazing.
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I mean, there was something, I felt like I had not actually seen war footage like this before.
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Well, we were our own sound editors we've worked with for years and years,
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What was the most telling test was when we would have playbacks of the completed episodes
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and invite periodically the head of the archives, say at CBS or ABC or NBC,
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a principal source of material, as you can imagine,
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and watching them watch stunned at how their footage had been used,
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and then finally brought to life with this complex sound effects.
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And they found themselves as distracted and immersed into the story
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when their job was to sort of evaluate the uses of it.
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And we felt thrilled, and they were extraordinarily helpful at every juncture
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in making sure we could find and get every lost bit of footage,
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And that extended to still photographs and audio tapes from the presidential library,
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the presidential tapes that are so extraordinarily intimate and damning.
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Yeah, I mean, just to have that as a resource, I mean, those LBJ tapes are unbelievable,
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because what you have, both in the case of LBJ and Nixon, I guess Kennedy too,
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And what is perfectly obvious from the earliest stages of this war
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is how hopeless it appeared even from their perspective.
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And yet we meander further and further into this quagmire for years and years.
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And there's a point in the series where you think,
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surely the war is about over, given what we're hearing,
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I want to ask you a little more about your process before we dive into it,
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How is it, given what they were clearly thinking,
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that this war was possible, that it unfolded the way it did?
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Well, you know, we don't have historians appearing on screen
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So we really try to just put the pieces together
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and using this remarkable real-time audio of conversations in the White House
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as you hear LBJ and Nixon and Kennedy talking about what they're doing
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and the information they have available to them.
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And then you have to, as a viewer, sort of try to think yourself about,
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well, why are they continuing to prosecute a war
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when they don't think they have a very good chance of success?
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And one of the things that comes up again and again
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is that they're worried about getting re-elected.
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They're worried about whether the American public would want to be told
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That's a pervasive theme, a drumbeat from very early on.
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That's a real question for people who assume, you know,
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They're always worrying about getting re-elected.
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And the Vietnam War is a huge byproduct of that.
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Yeah, it was this concern over the loss of face,
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When you actually understand what's happening on the ground
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and you're just sending waves upon waves of people
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the descriptions of these battles where the whole goal is to take a hill,
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but there's no point in actually taking the hill.
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And once they take it at the cost of hundreds of lives,
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they occupy it for like an hour and then walk on down the other side
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because there was no point in getting the hill in the first place.
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The picture of futility that develops here over the course of the series,
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you basically live out the political implications of it hour after hour
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as you see the resistance to this war building.
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I want to just ask you a little more about your process.
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I live and work in New Hampshire and Lynn lives and works in New York.
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So the New York office became the kind of production center during the production.
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And so there's, thanks to the way we're talking now,
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all sorts of ways in which we collaborate instantaneously on this.
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And it's just, we have an extraordinary group of colleagues,
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Jeffrey Ward, the writer I've worked with for, you know, 35 years.
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Editors I've worked with for, you know, even, you know, that amount of time as well,
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Co-producers that have assisted us, people who are researching pictures.
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It's an extraordinarily close-knit family divided between New Hampshire and New York
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And you're right to focus on that because process is everything that we're about.
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We're not about setting a prescribed research period and then followed by a writing period
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out of which is produced some document that is now written in stone
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that informs the shooting and the editing, but in fact, an open-ended process that never
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stops researching, that never stops writing, that is constantly willing to shoot or reshoot
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or add a new interview and is always looking for new material, whether it's footage or still
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And I think more to the point, it's easy to say never stop researching, but that means
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constantly being aware, particularly on a subject as controversial and as constantly shifting
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as the scholarship about Vietnam, aware of the most recent scholarship.
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So we find a lot of our work just changing, you know, a number from four to three when we
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find out that that was how many regiments of North Vietnamese soldiers went down the Ho Chi Minh
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The last year and a half as we were sound editing and onlining and mixing, we were also removing
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adjectives and adverbs that we thought maybe, perhaps, might have suggested a particular
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We wanted to be umpires calling balls and strikes, and it was hugely important that our process
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And I think this production, more than anything else, bears the fruits of that kind of diligent
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adherence to process insofar as this was the most challenging of any production we've ever
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engaged in and very satisfying because we were able, even in the darkest moments, to
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trust to our process and to yield to it and understand that eventually structures and arcs
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and storylines would emerge, that things that we seemed overly identified with would be lost,
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that new things we would have to incorporate, that the little darlings would all have to
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be eliminated, but new ways of understanding it.
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We, you know, filmmakers, particularly my experience is when you have a scene that's working, the
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last thing you want to do is change it if it's working.
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But inevitably, in every scene, you found out new information that complicated each minute
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dynamic within every scene, and instead of sort of pushing back and perhaps settling,
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we sort of reveled in and moved towards that complication and tried to, every time, engage
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what was difficult about this and proved our point that we felt all along that particularly
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in war, but also in many other things, more than one truth can obtain at the same time and
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And as Lynn said, we had decided at the beginning to engage all sorts of perspectives, not just
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American perspectives, but North Vietnamese, the winners and South Vietnamese, the losers who
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lost not only a war, but their country, which disappeared off the face of the earth after barely 20 years
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And so every day was a constant reminder that that open-endedness, the willingness to be
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corrigible, the willingness to suddenly realize you might have to double back on yourself, the
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necessity to, at the very beginning, jettison preconceptions and baggage in favor of a Vietnam
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war that betrays even those like me who lived through it, betrays our original, you know,
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It was exhilarating and humiliating and about as stimulating as you could possibly imagine.
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I just wanted to chime in one thing about the way that we collaborate, because as Ken was
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speaking, it's hard to explain, but, you know, we're documentarians, right?
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We're actually trying to organize this enormous amount of material that Ken described into a
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coherent narrative that works sort of chapter by chapter, scene by scene, episode by episode
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into some kind of coherent whole over 18 hours.
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And what happens is it's a process of distillation, and it's enormously creative, and it is enormously
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And, you know, it really comes down to sort of intuitively suggesting ideas about what might
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or might not work in the film, and then trying them out and listening to each other, and then
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And that is what we do day after day after day in a very open way that I think is unusual in
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how most people go about their jobs, where you just get up every day, go to work, hear
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to hear what each other has to say and how to make our film better.
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And it could be little tiny decisions or huge decisions about, you know, what's in an episode
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or what's in a scene or which character we're going to amplify and what we're going to cut
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and what word we're going to choose and where we're going to put the comma and which picture
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we're going to look at and what, you know, what music we're going to hear and where the
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There's a million decisions, and it is, as Ken said, a process.
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And one of the most, it's almost euphoric when we're all working together toward this
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thing that ends up being bigger than any of us.
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And I just feel very lucky that we get to do it together.
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I'm glad you mentioned the music because talk about an embarrassment of riches.
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And it's actually a point that's made in the film about the protest movement, that somebody
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at some point says that the protest movement itself was immensely empowered by just how good
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the music of the time was, which is something I had never really thought of.
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But that point is brought home in just how you score this thing, because it's just one
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I want to go back to something you said, Ken, about moral relativism, because what you get
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The status of the war in so many respects is so ambiguous morally that it almost demanded
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Whereas you went there as though from Mars without any agenda, and you just let each side
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And it's an amazing experience to witness a war from both sides in this way, where there
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I mean, there are some obvious bad guys, and perhaps we can talk about that.
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But the picture of the pointless wastage of human life and the gains, such as they are,
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It's because it's just, you can understand both sides, and yet the whole thing seems
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It is remarkable, and it's not a story you could have told, say, of our fight against
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No, and we did do a film, Lynn and I, on the history of World War II, and, well, it was challenging.