8 Tips for Writing a Documentary Script From Ken Burns

Ken Burns has been making documentary films for more than 40 years. Ken’s films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including 15 Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, and two Oscar nominations. In September of 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken was honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award. A December 2002 poll conducted by Realscreen magazine listed The Civil War (1990) as second only to Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North as the “most influential documentary of all time,” and named Ken Burns and Robert Flaherty as the “most influential documentary makers” of all time. Since making his first documentary, the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical feature documentaries ever made, including The Statue of Liberty (1985), Huey Long (1985), Baseball (1994), Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery (1997), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The Dust Bowl (2012), Jackie Robinson (2016), and The Vietnam War (2017) His latest documentary for PBS, The Gene: An Intimate History was released in April 2020.

Documentary screenwriters still have room for innovation. You don't have to do interviews, use first-person voices, or even voice-over narration, it’s all about putting your own stamp on your work. If you want to write a documentary film screenplay, check out the following tips from world-class documentary filmmaker Ken Burns:

1. 1. Use the narrative elements at your disposal. Documentaries, for the most part, are written, which means that we depend on, as the central skeletal structure of our film, a written narration. Ken remembers coming into the documentary world, inheriting the sense that direct cinema, the cinéma vérité, experimental works were closer to art or cinema than anything narrated. Ken wanted his scripts to have a dimension that could be at moments considered literary and literature, not just connecting the talking heads—connecting the dots of a didactic, expository educational film. When writing, it’s important to tell the most dynamic story you possibly can. Use narrative elements to add dimension to your documentary script. “In an industry where quite often people are suspicious of words, how much they are central to who we are,” Ken says. “Don’t be afraid of them. It’s how we’re communicating right now.”
2. 2. Use early drafts to determine your film’s narrative arc. Scriptwriting is the central determinant of what the narrative will be, in that so much of what comes out of the first draft is telling us louder than anything else what the potential film has the possibility of looking like. To write a documentary screenplay, the writer will begin to assemble the research, ideas, treatment, adding new facts, and incorporating notes as they work toward a finished screenplay. What Ken looks for early on in the writing process is the unanticipated dramatic arc that the material itself is demanding. Throughout the documentary filmmaking process, a story arc will begin to emerge with something that is going to be determinant. That doesn't mean that it isn't changed in a million different ways—and of course, the addition of an image makes a huge difference. However, in terms of the structural question that everyone must be asking, those first drafts are hugely important in determining your story’s arc.
3. 3. Find impactful ways to tell your story. Your documentary film has the facts, but you deliver it in a kind of poetic vehicle that makes sense to people. Ken shares how he described the Great Depression’s impact in one of his documentaries using poetic detail. Instead of focusing on statistics, Burns described how in Pennsylvania, financially burdened people with prior criminal convictions purposely broke the law so they would be sent back to jail where they were guaranteed three meals a day. Find a way to personalize the material with your words. You can still talk about real issues while using creative language.
4. 4. Build structure around facts. It is the responsibility of the documentary filmmaker to verify the narration of your interview subjects. Sometimes you have multiple sources, some that say that it didn't happen, some that say that it did. You have to use the best and most available scholarship. Even if the scholars don't agree about interpretation, you can try to get to some facts. You really have to get those facts right in order for the other things, like the more emotional, interpretive, and anecdotal things to work. If you don't have a strong structure based on fact, then you're lost. Then you're into conjecture. You're into argument. You're into theory. You're into conspiracy. That's where it leads.
5. 5. Use different narrative points of view. The third-person narrator kind of operates almost in an objective sphere, describing what happens. The first-person voice has a kind of intimacy that says that those events occurred to or happened to real people, Ken says. A combination of the two narratives creates something that's fuller and richer and more dimensional. In some ways, we're talking about the wonderful tension and reconciliation that takes place between objective third-person writing and first-person experience. There's a respiration that takes place. There's an inhalation and exhalation. It has to do with the pace and rhythm of editing. It has to do with the length and duration and quality of image. It has to do with the interplay between third-person narration and first-person voices. It's always a way of breathing so that you are permitting an audience to do what they are actually doing, which is breathing. You want them to hold their breath at times, but you want to give them their own agency.
6. 6. Words are not set in stone. Ken insists that the writers on his projects are free to write all the things that they think should be in a script. The writer cannot be worried about whether there are images to illustrate. That's not the writer's job. The writer's job is to just write that scene. So inevitably the process of work on the script involves cutting it down, editing it. Even the good stuff—sometimes it just doesn’t fit as you begin to work in pictures and an hour- or a two-hour time limit. The script will undergo many drafts during the editing process. You read the writer’s words, then change a few words, then submit to some historians, they’ll give some notes, then you do a rewrite, then share it more broadly. Even as you’re recording the words being spoken, they’ll change again, because things you read are not the same as those that are spoken. The script will continue to change during the post-production process, up until you finish editing the final film.
7. 7. Use caveats when the facts are missing. The excavation of history is a detective piece, and in that archaeology, you don't necessarily get every shard of that piece of pottery that you're putting together, so you can't fully show what that is. We have to figure out ways to, in our language, communicate that it isn't absolutely true. You can't say, "They did this or they did that." You can say, "He may have been looking for." That's the kind of wiggle room that we do. We can't actually prove it, because that person is no longer around, and all the evidence suggests exactly that, but because we don't have that final piece in the puzzle, you have to say, "may have been," or, "would have been." 8. Use words to fight abstraction. When making Civil War (1990), Ken and his team wanted to ensure that viewers understood that “the existence of chattel slavery was the main principal cause of the Civil War.” When we get into a discussion about slavery we abstract things, Ken says. So many times people have said to Ken, "Well, you know, slavery would have died out in a generation and a half." Okay, so be a slave for a generation and a half, Ken counters. “The abstraction of the reality of our historical past, particularly with regard to slavery, is abhorrent,” Ken states. Ken chose to combat this abstraction by using a quote from Frederick Douglass, powerful visuals, and a spiritual song from the time during this portion of the documentary.

Become a better filmmaker with the MasterClass Annual Membership. Gain access to exclusive video lessons taught by the world’s best, including Ken Burns, Spike Lee, David Lynch, Shonda Rhimes, Jodie Foster, Martin Scorsese, and more.