Ken Burns’s 4 Tips for Finding the Story in Your Documentary

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.

Whether you’re an aspiring cinéma vérité filmmaker eager to make your first film or just interested in the documentary filmmaking process, check out the following tips for finding the story in your documentary from world-class documentarian Ken Burns:

1. 1. Accept that you can’t predict the outcome. Documentary filmmaking is more fluid than narrative filmmaking, where there is a completed screenplay featuring a three-act structure, character arcs, and set plot points. “Documentary filmmaking is a huge evolutionary process,” Ken says, “in which you can't possibly conceive what it looks like at the end at the beginning.” Unlike feature films, you don’t need to plot your entire documentary feature from beginning to end. Allowing the story to unfold throughout the production process can result in a film with a unique point-of-view on a real-life event. Documentary filmmakers should be prepared to follow the subject matter and storyline where it takes them. To learn more about structuring a documentary, explore our comprehensive guide featuring exclusive tips from Ken Burns here.
2. 2. Research widely. To document actual events, histories, people, and cultures, you must find the documents, people, and objects that will tell your story. Casting a wide net when researching can lead you to incredibly interesting findings that change or enhance your documentary for the better. Look for photographs, books, home videos, historical records, and pursue as many leads as possible. “Collect as much as you can,” Ken says, “and see what is talking to you.” There may be instances where there is a great story without an accompanying image. Allow the screenwriter to write the story and worry about the image issue in the editing process. This tactic can make post-production more challenging, however, uncovering a new visual for the story may lead you to a powerful discovery that you can include in your film.
3. 3. Leave your baggage at the door. Unconscious bias can negatively impact your ability to tell a story. Making the conscious decision to release your preconceived notions and clichés will open you up to different points of view and help you avoid telling the same story from the same perspective as other filmmakers. When shooting began on The Vietnam War, Ken was forced to rethink everything he thought he knew about the war. “I went in rather arrogantly thinking I knew a lot about it because I'd lived through it,” Ken says. “I knew nothing. And I had to just reset to zero and say, ‘Forget everything.’” Setting his biases aside, allowed him to find a truly original documentary narrative for the project, addressing the complex social issues of the war.
4. 4. Anchor your story in the truth. According to Ken, one of the biggest dangers in documentary storytelling is straying too far from the subject, or truth, in service of the narrative.“The treacherous swamps and quicksand … [are] the times in which the entertainment outweighs the facts, the times in which you make decisions of omission that actually are detrimental to important truths of the subject that should be surviving,” Ken says. The easiest way to stay connected to the truth during the documentary filmmaking process is to return to the facts to re-anchor the story.

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