He is trying to find the largest common denominators that make us who we are, and contribute from every possible direction. His daughter certainly could and did with the Central Park 5 documentary. I don’t think that those are Ken’s goals. Both men are at the top of their game, and they’re quite different.
#Country music ken burns narrator movie#
See, I’m a huge fan of Alex Gibney, and did a number of things for him, but, I haven’t worked with Alex since the Enron movie because I thought he was angry with me, because I made a deal that my payment would depend on the box office scores of the movie. He wound up having to pay me a lot of money. That’s the part for which I can take credit.Īs you have worked with Gibney and Burns on more than one occasion, can you say what is distinctively different about how you work with them? But I can carry the reader through complicated sentences with lots and lots of subordinate clauses without getting lost. What I actually believe, candidly, is that my real skill is… my mother’s voice box. Same with Clifford Brown and Dizzy Gillespie. So I trust that a lifetime of reading, writing, thinking and exploring the world is already in me, and I bring them all into the studio… Every chord, every harmony and every counterpoint that the text arouses in me is going to be somewhere within the modulations and nuances of my voice… beyond consciousness. If that music wasn’t in his body, he could not have played at that speed. Allen Ginsburg said it…Ĭharlie Parker did not have time to think. Those images generate a certain level of emotion, and my voice automatically responds to it. I never do anything, because my feeling is that my first impressions will be the deepest, and when I read the text, I see images in my mind. They sweat and labor over these texts, as does Ken. Ken has great writers: Dayton Duncan, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Geoffrey C. My feeling is that if I put a lot of emotion into the text, I’m displacing the space that you have in which to experience your own emotion. Whether it’s “Country Music” or any of Burns’ work - or the work you have done with Alex Gibney - have you come to a place where you feel narration can offer you as much as theater? But I have no ego with that. I’m a musician. Sometimes I will ask him how he hears it, and with that, I might imitate the music that he’s hearing. He’s protecting the neutrality of the text. There was a pen.’” He might not like a rising tone at the end of each line. He likes “Just the facts, ma’am.” He might say, “You went up on ‘and’ on page seven.” And I’ll say, “Open the window, and jump out of it.” And we do it again. When I run a list, I will go: “There was a phone. My people are Jews - we’re a very minor key people. He has a very specific sense of music (to the narrative). He might just, for instance, remind me that this is a grave moment. Maybe he hears my voice in there as he’s editing… I don’t know. So I know that there’s some elastic in there. He never tells me that I have to bring a line in at 28.9 seconds. The film, though basically locked… the text is edited around my performance. We can do an episode and a half a day.”… On day three, he jumped out of his chair and told me that he would never use anybody else.Įach of you figured out how the other works.
He said that he would rent a studio for a month and we would have a go at it. I’ll see you in the studio.” There was a kid of a gelled pause, after which he said that would never work, that I didn’t realize how impeccable he was to, which I told him that he didn’t know how good I was. I said, “What is that?,” upon which he answered how all this would allow me to take notes of the script and such. When Ken came to me to record “The National Parks,” he came in carrying a stack of yellow legal pads, a stack of highlighters, a box of pencils, and CDs of each episode. Well, I’ll tell you, and I think is a funny story. He said that he’s going to keep me busy into my late 90s.Īre you narrating to the picture? How does it work with Burns? It’s quite a long run you’ve had with Burns, with no sign of stopping.
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