Sarah Burns and David McMahon on Leonardo da Vinci

Documentary First, Episode 239. Christian Taylor talks with Sarah Burns and David McMahon, co-directors with Ken Burns of the PBS film LEONARDO da VINCI. 59 minutes. Released November 18, 2024.

Listen: Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other apps
Watch: YouTube
Read: Full transcript

How do you make a four-hour film about a man who left no footage, no photographs and no diary?

That was the puzzle Sarah Burns and David McMahon took on in LEONARDO da VINCI, the two-part PBS documentary they directed with Ken Burns. Their earlier films together were 20th century American history, with footage to spare. Leonardo left paintings, a few of them, and thousands of notebook pages. That's it. So they had to invent a new way to tell a story.

In Episode 239 of Documentary First, host Christian Taylor talks with Sarah and David, who are married and have made films with Ken Burns from The Central Park Five to Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali. David tells how he got his start in documentary filmmaking, keeping an editor's workstation tidy on Ken Burns's Jazz, back when the series was still cut on film and two lost frames were a real problem. Sarah explains why Leonardo was nothing like the brooding genius we picture. He liked to sing and dance and play music, and he was someone you'd want to be around.

The film was about seven years from first idea to broadcast. Along the way came a year living in Italy, 18 months waiting for permission to film The Last Supper, and a night with the Mona Lisa in an empty Louvre. To show a man for whom, as David says, "art and science are just a blur," they changed how they work: split screens, animation, interviews in Italian and French, and a score by Caroline Shaw with the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth. As David puts it, Leonardo "seems to have one foot on Mars."

In this episode, you'll learn

• What cutting Jazz on film taught David about rhythm
• Why David calls Leonardo perhaps "the most curious human ever to live"
• Why Sarah says Leonardo was fun-loving, not a solitary, brooding artist
• What 6,000-plus notebook pages reveal about how he thought
• How split screens and animation filled in for missing footage
• Why they interviewed Guillermo del Toro, a heart surgeon and an engineer
• Why some interviews were kept in their original languages
• Whether there's a rule for how many talking heads a documentary should have
• How they got three hours alone with The Last Supper
• Why the team took a chance on a vocal ensemble in the score

Questions and answers

How did Ken Burns make a Leonardo da Vinci documentary with no footage?

Co-director Sarah Burns says there was no footage, no photographs and only a few paintings, so the team changed its style. Split screens put three things side by side: what Leonardo saw in nature, what he drew on the page and his other work. Co-director David McMahon adds that animation helped show what Leonardo was imagining, like his theory that swirling blood helps heart valves open and close, which took 450 years to prove.

Who directed the PBS Leonardo da Vinci documentary?

LEONARDO da VINCI was directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon. Sarah and David wrote it, and the three of them produced it with their colleague Tim McAleer. It aired on PBS November 18 and 19, 2024, in two parts and four hours. Sarah says she and David moved to Italy for a year for the filming, and the team worked out the story together in the edit room.

What do Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks reveal about him?

David McMahon says more than 6,000 pages of Leonardo's notebooks survive, and they are where you can get inside his head. He was not a diarist, so they say little about his feelings. Instead they hold his thinking: studies, proofs and even grocery lists. David thinks Leonardo meant them for publication, for young artists and future scientists, but none of it was published in his lifetime.

Why did Guillermo del Toro appear in the Leonardo da Vinci documentary?

David McMahon says the team noticed that Guillermo del Toro keeps notebooks while preparing a film, drawing the creatures that will fill his movies with orderly notes beside them, much the way Leonardo organized his pages. They reached out, and del Toro said yes. He has the first word in the film and one of the last because he draws so much inspiration from Leonardo.

How long can you see The Last Supper?

About 15 minutes, in a small group. David McMahon describes the visit: you enter a chamber, the door closes behind you, and only then does the next door open into the old monastery dining hall where the painting is. Sarah Burns says her own 15-minute visit went by incredibly quickly. For the film, David says it took 18 months to get permission, and the crew had three hours to shoot it.

Who composed the music for Ken Burns's Leonardo da Vinci?

Caroline Shaw wrote the score. David McMahon says the team didn't want period music, and at first worried that the voices of the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth would fight the dialogue. Instead it made Leonardo feel more human. Shaw worked with a vocal band, a string quartet and a percussion ensemble, and scored the entire film.

Where can I watch Leonardo da Vinci by Ken Burns?

The PBS show page lists LEONARDO da VINCI as streaming on PBS, and kenburns.com lists places to buy it.

Chapters

Times match the YouTube video.

• 0:00 Sarah Burns, David McMahon
• 8:13 Who Was Leonardo da Vinci?
• 17:30 Telling a Story Without Footage
• 22:56 Too Many Talking Heads?
• 28:37 Inventing a Visual Language
• 34:00 A Rule Breaker's Private Life
• 37:50 A Year Living in Italy
• 40:16 Filming The Last Supper
• 46:27 Caroline Shaw's Score and Narration
• 53:28 Mona Lisa After Hours
• 56:09 DocuView Deja View Picks

Watch the film

LEONARDO da VINCI streams on PBS. Purchase options are listed on kenburns.com. Credits are in the PBS announcement.

DocuView Deja View picks: Sarah recommends When We Were Kings (1996), Leon Gast's film about the run-up to the 1974 fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, which she and David watched while making their Muhammad Ali film. David recommends How to Survive a Plague (2012), David France's film about how ACT UP used civil disobedience to push for AIDS treatment. See every guest pick on the DocuView Deja View page.

About the guests

Sarah Burns is the author of The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding (Knopf, 2011). With David McMahon and Ken Burns she produced, wrote and directed The Central Park Five, which premiered at Cannes in 2012, was named Best Non-Fiction Film of 2012 by the New York Film Critics Circle and won a 2013 Peabody Award. With David and Ken she also made Jackie Robinson (PBS, 2016; Emmy nomination for writing, WGA Award), East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story (2020), Muhammad Ali (PBS, 2021; WGA nomination) and LEONARDO da VINCI (PBS, 2024). She was raised in Walpole, New Hampshire, and graduated from Yale with a degree in American Studies. Sarah's bio

David McMahon first worked with Ken Burns in 1999, on Jazz, and is Sarah's co-director on every film above. Raised in Clarence, New York, he graduated from the University of Michigan. He and Sarah are married and live in Brooklyn with their children. David's bio

What's next: Sarah and David are at work on Emancipation to Exodus, about the Black experience in America from emancipation into the beginning of the Great Migration.

About Documentary First

Documentary First is a weekly podcast about the people behind documentaries and how the work changed them. Host Christian Taylor, director of the award-winning The Girl Who Wore Freedom, talks with filmmakers, distributors, entertainment lawyers, actors and more, from Ken Burns and PBS American Masters creator Susan Lacy to first-timers, across nearly 300 conversations. Each week brings one of two formats: a long-form conversation with the people behind films for HBO, Netflix, PBS and independent film, or The Deep Dive, where Christian takes one insight from a recent conversation and follows it wherever it leads. Listen Notes ranks the show in the top 5% of all podcasts worldwide. New episodes every week.

Follow the show | Support on Patreon

This episode is sponsored by Artillery Sports. Use the code DocFirst for 10% off your first order at artillerysports.com.

Full transcript

This transcript was made from the recording and lightly cleaned up. It may contain small errors.

Christian: Welcome everybody to Documentary First. I'm your host, Christian Taylor, and I am a documentary filmmaker myself. Today I'm thrilled to welcome to the show two highly respected, very talented filmmakers, Sarah Burns and David McMahon. Hi, you guys. Welcome to the show. I'm so incredibly honored to have you here.

Sarah and David: Hi, Christian. Thanks for having us. Thank you, Christian.

Christian: Yeah. You are so, it's so great. I am, I talked to your father not long ago, Sarah, and he was just, he talked about American Buffalo and I just was delighted to hear that you guys had a film coming up and you could come be with us. So it's a, it's an honor. I want to read your bios real quick. We talked about those earlier before you came on and there's a lot here that's in common. So we're going to hear that right now. Okay. Sarah Burns is the author of The Central Park Five, a chronicle of a city wilding, Knopf 2011, and along with David McMahon and Ken Burns, the producer, writer and director of the documentary, The Central Park Five, about the five black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly convicted in the infamous Central Park jogger rape of 1989. And now that was recently in the news, wasn't it? I think people will recognize that as someone that took out an ad in the paper to call for their conviction. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012 and was named the best non-fiction film of 2012 by the New York Film Critics Circle and won a 2013 Peabody Award. She produced and directed along with David McMahon and Ken Burns, the two-part four-hour Jackie Robinson. a biography of the celebrated baseball player and civil rights icon, which she wrote with David McMahon. The film aired on PBS in 2016, and she and McMahon were nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writer for a Nonfiction Program and won a WGA Award or Documentary Script. In 2020, they both produced and directed a documentary about housing project in Atlanta called Eastlake Meadows, a public housing story. And together with Ken Burns, they produced and directed a four part Biography of Muhammad Ali, which premiered on PBS September 21 and was named the best television show of 2021 by awards daily writer, David Phillips. She and her husband were nominated for a WGA award for documentary script and she was born and raised, Sarah was born and raised in Wapol, New Hampshire. She graduated from Yale with a degree in American studies and now lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, David and their children. All right, now David has a lot in common with Sarah. He's been making award winning documentary films for more than 10 years. Well, it's got to be more than 10 years. How many years has it been?

Sarah and David: probably needs to be revised. Right, well first worked with Ken going back to 1999. So, but he and I have been producing films together for 15 years.

Christian: And I asked you earlier, we'll just go ahead and jump right in there because most of reading your biography is going to be the same. How did you guys meet?

Sarah and David: It's well covered. Well, we first met when Dave was working on the jazz film 20 plus years ago. Yeah. Yeah. I moved to Walpole, New Hampshire, a tiny town in Southwest New Hampshire, where Ken has had his operation for decades. And I started by volunteering at his edit house where he was cutting a 20 hour film on the history of jazz on Steenbecks. And so the house had

Christian: is for your dad. Yeah?

Sarah and David: you know, five edit rooms and a producer hub and the edit rooms had an editor, an assistant and an apprentice each responsible for cutting two episodes of this 10 part 20 hour series. And so I was able to get work helping. an editor basically keep tidy her workstation, which was a steam back and a splicer and a bin full of strips of film and tiny trims, which would be the small pieces that she would take out as she's moving a cut by one, two, three or four frames. None of which can get lost by the way, because when Pam comes in and says, we need to lengthen that shot by two frames, you need to make sure that you have physically the two frames, which are a film strip.

Christian: my goodness. What year was this? What year was this?

Sarah and David: This is not, I moved up there in 98, so this was 99, 2000, the film premiered on PBS in 2001. Well, when we were into a period at that point where you could cut a movie using Avid technology, but the drive space was so expensive. So to do a 20 hour film where the shot ratio was maybe one to 40.

Christian: That's not that long ago, really!

Sarah and David: They could not yet raise the money to have the drive space to have all that media to cut this 20 hour movie. It was still cheaper to shoot Kinescope, the archival footage off a TV in a room that we set aside for that and then to edit on SteamVex.

Christian: That's insane. And the reason I know this is not exactly the same, but I worked in radio and television on Capitol Hill in the eighties. And I first learned to edit on a Nagra. It was a reel to reel audio machine where you had to use a razor blade and tape to actually cut and edit. And it's very similar because how in the world do you edit things with the splicer and tape them together and figure out exactly what you're doing? It's so hard.

Sarah and David: you

Christian: that way.

Sarah and David: What was so great about it for an apprentice, someone who hadn't studied film and had worked only in video and had studied history in college, was that you begin to tell right away from the editors who knew where the cut was supposed to go on the first try. And so then you realize that it's about pacing, knowing right where to make that edit. And then the next one. And so the editors who were experienced, and in some cases, really brilliant editors, they're film would move through the sprockets with really smooth kind of ease. And then there'd be one splice and you go, okay, this is about rhythm.

Christian: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's so much more of an art really than it is today. Like it's a manual art as well as creative art. So very interesting.

Sarah and David: Yeah. The cost to making a poor edit, which is you need to take it apart, find the other piece, put it back together. You know, we're all rushing to get our films finished and want as much time as we can have to edit. And that would be a cost if you were spending a third of your day putting the film back together because your edit was a mistake. Right. It's what she seems to do, undo now on the computer. Yeah. Try something different.

Christian: Yeah. Yes, exactly. Well, I want to finish your bio because there is some stuff that we need to add. we're getting most of the stuff then is the same because they have worked together on so many different projects. What I didn't mention before is that they have just completed the film. Well, it is a two part four hour series on Leonardo da Vinci and it's going to air on PBS in November 2024.

Sarah and David: Thank

Christian: And David was raised in Clarence, New York, and he was a graduate of University of Michigan. They live in Brooklyn, New York with their Sarah and their two children. So that is their biography. And today we are here to talk about Leonardo da Vinci. So you guys tell us a little bit, can you give us the logline of this film? And let's just dive right in.

Sarah and David: Well, I think this film... it's, as you said, it's two parts. It's a biography of Leonardo. So of course it's about his artwork, but it's really most of all about getting inside his head, trying to understand how this extraordinary mind worked, what he was thinking about and how he made these connections across all of these disciplines so that his paintings become these kind of experiments themselves that are incorporating all of these scientific studies and observations that he's making in nature and just bringing all of that together and understanding. who this extraordinary man was.

Christian: You know, there was a quote near the end. I think it was Guillermo del Toro maybe that made this quote. The one act an artist brings to the world is to give you a way of gazing into it. Yeah, is that his quote? That's amazing. And he said, very few artists give us their mind or their soul, but Leonardo gives us both. And I thought that was a beautiful way to sum up exactly what you had spent four hours telling us, because his mind is so vast. And by the time we had come to the end and I realized you had spent, how long did it take you to make this series?

Sarah and David: The idea came seven years ago. We were on the project every day for about a three year period.

Christian: So let's say seven years. So your mind has been in this for seven years. After all of that time, if I asked you to give me a handful of words and phrases of how you would describe this man, what would you say?

Sarah and David: Yeah, I have to start with curious. I he may have been the most curious human ever to live. I mean, he would look at things that we see every day, stop and try to unpack how it is it was doing what it was doing. He was somebody who wanted to understand the laws of nature and then to apply them to whatever it was he was working on. And so he's watching a bird in flight and thinking about... how the bird is climbing and how it's maybe preserving energy by using the wind currents the way it is. And these are things that most days we don't stop to notice. But he's absorbing all of that. And so deeply curious. I'd also say imaginative. mean, he's a guy who comes of age in the 15th century at a time when humanism has come in line and people are still using the lessons of the ancients, going back to Aristotle, to guide what they think about the world around them. And so he's receiving that and he's also challenging it for the first time. So he's sort of of his age, but he's a guy who's launching a new age of challenging conventional wisdom. And he's applying not just what he's seeing to that, but he's... incredibly imaginative. He doesn't have the tools that we would have today to do the work that he's doing. He doesn't have modern mathematics. He doesn't have the instruments. And so he's using his imagination to figure out how to challenge the things that have been handed to him from down the years. And so uniquely imaginative, which makes him feel modern too, for another word. He's a guy who's of his time. He's got one foot in the past in some ways, and he also seems to have one foot on Mars. It's a really impossible convergence of imagination and curiosity. I don't know. I think that was really well said. I think the curiosity certainly stands out in that his sort of powers of observation and just the breadth of his interests. This is someone who...

Christian: What about you, Sarah?

Sarah and David: I mean, there's a kind of determination to it. He really wants to understand everything about everything. And that sometimes means he doesn't finish projects because he gets distracted by the next thing that he's trying to figure out that he needs to understand. But there's just this incredible sense of wanting to kind of gather all of these ideas and learn everything he can from what's around him, even with these kind of limited tools at his disposal. I mean it was, I will say that spending three plus years with him was a great joy because you know, you really feel the way that he takes joy from these things. This is not some kind of solitary brooding artist that we might imagine. This is someone who was very much in the world and... I think people are sometimes surprised to learn that he was such a, he was sort of a fun loving person. His contemporaries described him, you he liked to sing and dance and play music and, you know, he was a person you would want to spend time with, a person you want to be around.

Christian: Yeah, if you just looked at his works and you only saw what he did, whether it was his writings or his artwork, you would think that he was this very serious minded, intense person. So to hear people say that he was funny and fun loving and, you know, that he liked to dance and have a good time, it really did seem like a contrast. I wondered, do you think at all that there may have been a bit of madness to the man? because there was such, you sometimes they say that, you know, madness and genius are related.

Sarah and David: you Yeah, it's hard to say. The historical record is relatively thin. And so we do get some people who spent time with him, who observed him or socialized with him, who talk about how wonderful a guy he was, fun to be around, a talented musician, good at reading poetry, obviously a great painter. But there is no evidence that he was on any kind of spectrum or he had any kind of madness. And he's not a diarist. He didn't leave us with a lot of writing about how he was feeling about things, which in some ways limited and focused the film, which is We could not really tell you often where he was day to day and how he was responding to friendships or the world around him. But you can really get in his head, because what's in that notebook is all the complicated thinking that he was having about whatever it is he was working on. some 6 ,000 or more pages that we know of notebook entries from his life that are preserved for us to review. And then in there are 100 ,000 different sketches, preparatory studies, geometric proofs, grocery lists, things that he jotted down. And I think he really meant them for publication. He wasn't publishing his lifetime, but he didn't think of himself as just an artist or as an artist at all. He thought of himself as an intellectual who wanted to share his findings in the form of the things that he He wrote, and so those are also written and prepared as though they're supposed to reach a particular audience. And so there's a tidiness to them and he wants to reach young artists and tell them about his theories on painting, or he wants to reach future scientists and explain to them his theories on water. And so what we get in the end is this incredibly organized set of information that he, through his curiosity, was able to. decipher about the world, put in an order that could make sense. And then, know, what he did with them, he put them on a shelf. As I said before, none of it was published. And it was only because of his kind of amanuensis, Francesco Melci, who took all that intellectual property, preserved it, and... It was then able to be discovered over the next 500 years and shared to a mass audience. And it's left us wondering, can we find one more page? Can we find one more note in a margin that tells us something about him? Might there be one drawing that no one has yet discovered? We just want to know more because what he left behind is so intriguing.

Christian: Yes. In some ways, he did remind me a little bit of Thomas Jefferson. You know, just in the way that he thought and how curious he was and how ahead of his time he was on a much bigger scale, actually. But there was some similarity there. You impact him in a way that did make me want to know more. I'm sure there was so much more that didn't make it in. Yeah.

Sarah and David: Yeah, always. mean, you know, when we write the first draft of the script, it's always usually at least twice too long. We gather a lot of more material than we could ever possibly use. so a huge part of our process, once we get in the edit room, is just distilling all of that material that we have, kind of boiling it down so that we hopefully capture the essence of Leonardo and introduce him to you in a useful way and a complicated way. But of course, there are things that don't fit. Sometimes that's context, sometimes that's details about Leonardo's life, but it's a necessary part of the process to make it as compelling as it can be and the right length to tell the story the way we want to tell it.

Christian: Yes. So speaking of difficult things, said, I told you earlier, I'd like to ask you two things. So I want to know what is the thing you're most proud of and then what was the biggest challenge? Start with the first.

Sarah and David: Well, I think with this film, in some ways that's the same. My answer is the same. both of those questions, which is that the, I'm gonna start with the challenge part of it, because I think it explains the other half, which is that this film is really different from anything we've done before. The films that we've collaborated on the past have all been 20th century American history. We've had, you know, our Muhammad Ali film was our last film. had, massive amounts of footage and photographs that we had access to. This is an incredibly well-documented person and lots of incredible material. The challenge was figuring out what to use from all of that great material. In this case, there's obviously none of that. There's no footage, there's no photographs. There are his works, which the paintings are relatively few, and the notebook pages, which is an incredible... sort of account of what he's thinking about. But there's limited things to show visually to tell the story. So that presented a challenge, also I think a really great opportunity. And I think the thing that I'm most proud of is the ways that we adjusted and evolved the style that we've used in other films in order to account for that and to tell the story in a way that was appropriate to this story, which is a different story with different kinds of material. And so there's use of a lot of different techniques that we haven't used before, including split screens, where we can really show multiple images at once and think about the way that Leonardo was this lateral thinker and making connections across all these disciplines, sort of represent all of those things at once, what he's seeing in nature, what he's drawing on the page or observing or trying to understand about that. and his other works and kind of combine that all at once so that we can better get inside his head. So it's sort of a different approach, but I think it really serves the story well. Sorry if I stole your. No. Yeah, I have other thoughts about why the film succeeds and the challenges and how we were able to harness those and make something other than to answer the same question. I'm excited about a lot of things, but one I'll share today is I think we gathered a really great collection of experts. to share their perspective on the film. You mentioned Guillermo del Toro before, we have a Mexican born filmmaker. We have an Iranian engineer. We have a playwright from the Midwest. We have a painter from the South. We have a heart surgeon from the UK. We found an incredible kind of ensemble cast of people who had discovered something about Leonardo that gave them great inspiration and it informed career choices or informs how they do their work each day. And they knew Leonardo Leonardo's story well, but we're able to point at one specific thing that I think further expanded my sense of who he was. And they all shared this with a kind of enthusiasm that made me really excited about Leonardo. And Guillermo del Toro has the first word in the film and one of the last, and that's because Leonardo, he draws great inspiration from Leonardo. And how we got to him was that we found that he keeps notebooks as he's preparing for a film. And in them, he will draw the fantastical creatures that will populate his movies, and beside them, he will write text in a very orderly fashion. And as you page through them, and you can find them online, if you've studied Leonardo's notebooks at all, go, wow, these look a lot like how Leonardo organized his thoughts on the page when he was doing the work. And so we reached out to Guillermo and we said, you know, Leonardo and he said, yes. And as a very successful creative type who drew inspiration from Leonardo. He was able to communicate, I think, some facts about Leonardo's life, but really just a passion and excitement for this guy who lived so long ago for whom he still finds inspiration. And we found that again and again, whether it was an engineer from Caltech who would comb the notebooks seeking some little thing that looked like an experiment. Maybe it was just a thought experiment. or maybe it was actually an experiment that Leonardo ran and then work with his graduate students to see if they could do the modern version of that experiment without the math, without the instruments and see whether Leonardo's conclusion is accurate now 500 years later with the technology that we have to do the experiments. And I could keep going. I left every one of these that I did and I know you did too, just feeling like we're onto something here and then letting them elevate Leonardo. and speak to his creativity, his curiosity, his, you used this word earlier, I'll use it, we could talk about it, his genius, and share that with our audience.

Christian: I'm so frustrated we only have an hour to talk about this because we could just go on. There's just so much from this man. You talk about the experts that you found and I was just blown away by all of the people that you discovered and how passionate they were and how much they knew. And I wondered, in my own film, there were so many people that I talked to that had testimonies about my film in particular was about World War II. when I was putting the edit together, I was troubled because I thought I might have too many people for the audience to remember. Also, mine were subtitled. so there was a lot, half of the film was French people who were subtitled. And I was worried that I might lose my audience and they might forget from the beginning to the end who those experts were. And I wondered. would it matter did you struggle with that you know are we using too many experts is it gonna be too much subtitles how did you deal with that

Sarah and David: Yeah, I mean, I don't think we worried about having too many people, too many different people. That is something that, I mean, I guess as we're deciding who to interview, we sort of get to that point where it feels like we have enough, both enough information, enough commentary that's gonna help us tell the story and also enough variety. So as Dave was talking about having this cast of characters really wanting to have different kinds of perspectives, right? Of course we're gonna talk to the Leonardo experts, the art historians, but. having these other perspectives is really important too. And then I think, you know, we also had different languages as well. We have two interviews that were conducted in Italian and two that are in French. So not the bulk of them, but some pretty significant kind of characters in our film of our interview subjects who are speaking other languages. I don't know, mean, think in that case, actually really wanted to have those. A couple of those people are folks who just as easily could have done those interviews in English, but it was important to us. in presenting Leonardo to remind our audience of his Italian-ness, of the fact that he lived in what's now Italy. Of course, it was city-states at the time, but the Italian peninsula. And then at the end of his life in France, and that that's really important to his story and for us to remember as an American audience for this story that that's where this takes place. And so we really wanted to hear those languages. And so we actually kind of leaned into that as much as we could as well.

Christian: Yeah, that was my decision exactly. wanted people to hear the language, not have somebody talk over them. And because I felt like you then are connected to the people in the story. And I thought that was a beautiful choice. And I did wonder as a newer filmmaker, is there a rule? Is there a rule in documentary filmmaking of how many people are talking heads you should have? Or is it just what you feel as a filmmaker will help you tell your story? You've been in this business for a really long time. What is your opinion about that?

Sarah and David: I don't think there's a rule, just has to work and you're struggling through each edit to make all of the stories that the film contains clearer. You don't want people to confused or tripped up by overburdening them with unnecessary information or having too many perspectives. But I think, you know, depending on the story, maybe you want to offer multiple perspectives in order to complicate it. Or maybe you want to slow things down and just make sure that you want the French speaking person to offer the perspective that's most important to get communicating what the film wants to communicate. so in our filmmaking, although you know, there's a, I think Ken created a kind of language for telling stories. I think he's always been the first in the edit room to say, there are no rules. We just need to make this work. And so in this case, it called for a different kind of visual language. It called for perspectives from. a number of different geographies. We want a Leonardo who's of the world, not just of the small city state that he largely or to that he spent most of his life in. And so that's what we were aiming to achieve. And whatever the techniques or the voices were that we were going to use, they just had to work and be clear to people at home. People have to understand. So we want that to be a great translation, one that honors what the French speaker or Italian speaker said. one that can be understood at home and one that can push the story forward.

Christian: Now you just mentioned your father-in-law Ken Burns. Can you tell me why? I he's listed as being part of this documentary film. Tell me what his role was.

Sarah and David: So he, we all are producers, the three of us along with our colleague Tim McAleer, Dave and I wrote the film and then the three of us along with my dad are the... directors. In this case, actually moved, the two of us moved to Italy for a year while we were doing the filming and researching and writing was sort of all happening from there. And then when we get in the edit room, we have two incredible editors, Kim Milley and Woody Richmond, who cut these two episodes. And that's the point where we all kind of get together and really kind of wrestle with the story, how it's gonna... evolve and how we're going to work visually with what we have and all of that. So that's the point where we really all kind of sit down and put our heads together on figuring out what the film is, what the story is.

Christian: That's wonderful. Now you also talked about just the visual challenge of the way that you put the film together. That was one of the things that I found most fascinating. And one of the things that I enjoyed the most, and we're to talk about the different elements, was the creative out of the box thinking. You didn't take one way of telling the story. I noticed a lot of time lapse photography. I noticed archival video. video, I noticed archival photos. One of the things that was my absolute favorite is you took artists who were reproducing Leonardo's works and you filmed them in a split screen showing Leonardo's work and them reproducing it. I also loved how you had experts talking about Leonardo's techniques in one screen and showing how that technique was accomplished in the other with a modern day artist, as well as in the split screen showing the beauty of the painting that he had done. It was wonderful because it gave me an idea of exactly what that technique looked like from the 1400s. So that was genius, but you also used animation at one point. So there was just so many different techniques. Talk me through those discussions and the decisions to do that.

Sarah and David: Yeah, very early on, because of some things that Sarah said before, the lack of imagery from that period, as you mentioned, Christian. we were thinking about how we could create a kind of visual language for this that would communicate everything we wanted to and would help us overcome those limitations. As Sarah said, the split screen was about being able to put maybe what Leonardo was observing in nature, which we could capture on our own through the work of our brilliant cinematographer, Buddy Squires, who's been working with Ken going back to their college days. found footage of something that he had written about that we found in some archive that communicated that idea, but many years later, maybe in black and white footage from the 20th century. And then maybe an artist that we had hired to work on the actual process of making that painting, we can put them all on screen at the same time and see the nature itself, see maybe how the idea looks in today, this many years later. and then maybe the actual, what it would have done, what it would have looked like for him to have painted it. So that, we wanted to be expansive in the imagery that we used and help communicate, as Sarah said, the sort of lateral nature of his thinking. There's art and science are just a blur. It's all sort of the same, but different. When it comes to the animation, I felt like we would... excerpted these passages from his writing, and a lot of it was communicating his thinking. We wanted to get in his head. Sometimes he's having a recollection. Sometimes it sounds prophetic. And it felt like in order to really get to that, we would need to be in an animated sequence. We wanted to bring to life the thing that he was imagining or thinking in an effort to get you between his ears. Or maybe there was a complicated experiment that he was running. So we needed an explainer. You know, when it came to the research he did about the heart, he was explaining a complicated thing in his writing about how blood creates vortices that might help the flaps on the valves open and close, a theory that would took 450 years to prove. We really, it's so complicated. We needed to ourselves make something that could show with some beauty exactly what it was he was thinking. So not to go too far with all of this, but For a sequence, if we needed an animation to help us get inside of his head, we work with a wonderful team at Big Star. We called upon them to be as imaginative as possible to help give that three dimensions. If we were thinking about some kind of machine that he was innovating, and we knew that he had drawn part of the mechanics of it from something he observed in nature, that invited us to put the drawing. maybe Sarah referenced an Archimedes screw earlier and then maybe something in nature that had the shape or in this case maybe a spiral from a snail shell. And then you could just get people at home going, I see how he connected these dots as Sarah said. I just, it felt like it would bring us closer to understanding him. It feels like there's an ecstasy in this discovery for him. It's in between the lines and what he wrote in those notebooks. And so it was all toward the music, the imagery, toward everyone maybe feeling that dopamine hit that we imagine he got from making all these connections and rendering something from his imagination that no one had thought of yet. So visually it had to have layers. It had to have a kind of energy that would have to come from us in helping it closer to the energy we imagine that he brought to his endeavors.

Christian: Yeah, I thought it was brilliant. you know, as a younger filmmaker, I always feel like, okay, I must stay inside the lines of all of these rules. I felt like you just broke so many because you've mixed so many different forms in this one series and it worked. You know, there was just not the same techniques to describe everything, but that was Leonardo.

Sarah and David: you

Christian: You know, he didn't do everything the same, everything. How do you explain? He was a mathematician, you know, he was a writer, he was a painter. He mixed all of those things together as well. And so you had to follow suit if you're going to tell a story, right? Yes.

Sarah and David: He was a rule breaker too. He was someone who didn't have a huge respect for authority, I think, know, Bible stories he painted them. But I don't think he cared much for the church and didn't seem too concerned with sort of following all of the rules and the doctrines. You know, he was happy to go up in the mountains. And when he found marine fossils up there and go, well, why are these here? Why are there sea creatures, fossils of sea creatures on the tops of mountains? So the biblical deluge does not explain this sufficiently. And so he went and tried to figure out. why those were there and he wasn't terribly concerned about what the church was trying to tell everyone about that, you know. So he was someone who was always questioning authority and questioning the kind of received wisdom and so I think, you know, hopefully we could take a page from that attitude about it.

Christian: Yeah, it's always wonderful. That's one thing I loved about Ted Lasso, you know, his current words about being curious. I mean, I love that challenge to today's society about how important it is to be intensely curious about everything and everyone. It's something that we can take away, I think, from your film and from Leonardo is to continue to be curious. One of the things that you talked about in terms of not following the rules was he did leave enough. and lead an alternative lifestyle, you know, in his choice of partners. And he was okay with that back in those days. There was no shame is what you said. And did he have any long term partners or what did you learn about his personal life? Was he connected to people? he or was he solitary?

Sarah and David: Yeah, mean, it's a little hard to say because the historical record is thin and he's not, as Dave said, he's not writing diaries. So we don't always know what he's feeling about things and especially about other people. What we know is that he was gay. That seems very clear from the records that there are. that at that time in Florence, that was relatively common and people could be somewhat openly gay, though the church frowned on it. and could potentially get in trouble, was enough of an accepted thing, especially in communities of artists, that it was not necessarily dangerous. There was a moment when he was, there was a sort of anonymous accusation made against him and some other men, and he probably spent a night or two in a jail cell because of that, but ultimately the charges were dropped. But we don't know what he felt about that or how that impacted his life necessarily. In terms of partners, Again, it's hard to say. There's a man named Salai who came and joined his entourage as a boy, initially as an apprentice, but then stayed in Leonardo's life for the rest of his life and very clearly became some kind of partner, lover, we assume. It's clear that they had some very deep connection like that. it's mysterious too, because we just don't know. that down and so it's it's hard to know for sure.

Christian: That did not seem as important to him as everything else for sure. So speaking of connections, your family is obviously very close. I did talk to your father, Sarah, about that when he was on, you know, he chose to live in New Hampshire and be close to family and he's always valued relationships like that. And you guys have stayed together, worked together, and you also spent a year in Italy together. That's, you know, talk about really getting to know your subject. Talk to me about why you made that choice and what it was like to live there, what you learned while you were there, and did it make a difference?

Sarah and David: You Yeah. absolutely, it made a difference. Our decision to live there was about, you know, we were going to have 60 plus shoot days and they're kind of going back and forth. would have been challenging. so settling there was easier, but it was also about inhabiting the spaces that Leonardo had inhabited. I mean, there are extant buildings. You can go visit, say, the Last Supper in the cafeteria at the Santorini della Grazia, which is now a museum. And it's on the wall. What's left of it remains on the wall. But it's also the landscapes. For somebody who spent a lot of time in nature observing birds, It felt like seeing those native birds in Tuscany was going to help us make more sense of what it is he was researching and what it was he was finding. Waking up in the Italian Alps and looking at the weather conditions there and watching the sun come up and seeing how the... the kind of atmospheric perspective that Leonardo got was going to be important to us to writing about what it was he was exploring. So if we could pull it off, that seemed like the obvious way to go and get a sense of his story and start putting together based on things we were observing on the ground there.

Christian: Yeah, my film took place in Normandy and when I was there, there's just something so powerful like being on the beaches where everything happened. It's just so inspiring. You feel a spirit there. I don't know if we make it up in our heads, but it's just you're there and it just is in you and you feel inspired to write where you see it's in the clouds and in the light and I could write so much better and imagine so much better while I was there. So I get that for sure. You speak of The Last Supper. I was there. I actually went there. I went there to see his work and saw many of the things there. The Last Supper was so interesting to me because it's very difficult to see. There's this prescribed way now that you have to see it and you only get like a very few. short time and why don't you talk about, I was curious as to how that experience was for you. Talk to me about, and truthfully, your access for filming anything in Europe because there's just so many rules and so many challenges. So talk about your filming there.

Sarah and David: Yeah, well, was 18 months from the time that we requested permission to the time we were able to get access. And so we were lucky to have a long timeline. We actually had to go back. was the one thing we had to go back and do after we had come back here, after we had finished principal filming. You described it perfectly. It's in the space. It's still on the same wall. All of those walls haven't been standing since he painted it. Some of them were knocked down during the Second World War. They have in recent years done an excellent job of restoring a painting that, because of the technique Leonardo used, not a conventional mural technique, but instead a technique of his own devising, a technique that would allow him to use more vibrant colors than what traditional mural technique would allow, and to paint over a long period of time. and use a technique that was important to him that allowed him to layer, to use layers to get a particular quality of light and shadow. So he wanted to do that with this mural, but it did start falling off the wall in his lifetime. And so they have, there had been a number of attempts to restore it. The recent ones have been very good, but it's now really guarded close. mean, you enter into a chamber, the door closes behind you. Then the door on the other end opens and you're allowed to go into the cafeteria where it hangs. It's in the cafeteria of a former monastery at the Church of Santa Maria del Gato. And so they're reluctant to let people film it. until you have a long negotiation figure out the terms. We were given three hours to shoot it. It was really important that we did. You can get high resolution scans of all these paintings, but I think what you feel in filming it or what we felt is that the actual texture and how it seems as though these disciples are sort of... leaping off the wall, not just because of the brilliance in the way in which he rendered them, but because of its decay. And it feels like they're sort of trapped under this paint and moving to get off of it. I thought that was something when I first saw it that stood out to me. And then there are passages for which it seems there's almost none of the original paint left. And then there are certain passages which have held up neatly. You know, in the film, we're trying to understand how these disciples are responding to Christ's pronouncement that one of them is going to betray him. These are his band of brothers. are the 13 of them gathered at the table. And Leonardo is trying to understand the psychological effect that would have hit when this one that they're so dedicated to and love so deeply says, one of you is gonna lead to my I'm doing here. And so it's a really dramatic moment and Leonardo is interested in how it is they would all respond with the tendons in their neck bulge. Would they clutch the knife they were holding more closely? Would they look to each other? Did you just hear that? And that's really what what you feel in it. If you look at last supper's that were painted before Leonardo, you see a much more sort of chill scene. He's offering the bread. and the wine and they're ready to receive it from them. That's not what's happening in Leonardo's painting. And so we wanted to capture in the details that we needed to these disciples in reacting. And I think we also really wanted to feel that texture that I described a moment ago of a painting that it's been a struggle to keep as much of it on the wall as we can for posterity.

Christian: what I, there's a rule about how many people can be in the room at the same time now. Do I don't remember what that is. Do you remember? It's, yeah. Yeah.

Sarah and David: Not sure, but it's, it's fairly limited, it's a fairly small group and you only get 15 minutes in the room. And it feels very short. And despite the condition of the painting, which as Dave was saying, not, you know, it's, it's, hasn't survived that well, although some of the restoration has helped. but you can really. I mean, can stare at It feels like you could stay much longer. I wish I'd had a lot more time. I didn't get to go when they filmed it and had three hours, but when I visited for my 15 minutes, it goes by incredibly quickly. You barely even notice that there's actually a very nice painting on the other wall in the room that nobody even stops to see because you're so focused on your 15 minutes with The Last Supper.

Christian: Yeah, it's and it's because of the heat and what I found so tragic was that in you know, the story that sticks with me there are two things is that, you know, in trying to preserve it, they put at one point, you know, they tried it all through the ages. At some point, they didn't care about it at all. And so they cut a doorway through part of it, which is still there, like you still see part of it missing, which is so tragic. And then they realized, okay, it was important. So they put a veil or a carpet or some sort of thing in front of it, which made it worse and it destroyed it more. And I thought, man, that was just terrible. So I do encourage people to go and see it. Even if it's only 15 minutes, it's definitely worth it to go and see his works for sure. Italy and Florence and where he was and the things he did, it's absolutely worth the trip. Okay, but we're running out of time, but one thing that really impressed me, there's so much about this series, but I'm a voiceover actor and the voiceover in this series was phenomenal. The choice of your narrator and the job that he did carried it beautifully all the way through. I'd love for you to talk about that. But also you had different people reading his, you know, just reading different parts of his, who he was, what he was thinking. talk about the other people that were voicing things for you in your series.

Sarah and David: Yeah, so our narrator is Keith David who has been We've worked with in the past on several projects and he started with jazz, maybe the first one. was the first one. He did with my dad. So he's been a narrator of quite a few projects and he just has a really terrific voice and he's very good at this job. know, it's not just having a great voice, of course, that makes someone a good actor, as you know. And then our voice of Leonardo was an Italian actor named Adriano Giannini. It was again, like we were saying before about the languages, it was really important to us to have an Italian Leonardo to make sure that that was, we're sort of reminded of that. And so we also, we had him read these passages that we translated of Leonardo's writings into English, but we also had him read a lot of it in Italian. And so there are moments in the film where you do get to hear him in Italian reading these. It's sort of in the background. mean, we're not. subtitling it or anything, but just to give a sense of the language and the beauty of the language and the words that he actually wrote on the page, it was important to us to have that in there as well.

Christian: Yeah, I wondered if those were his exact words and thoughts, Leonardo's, if, because they were so powerful and it was very, very interesting to hear what he, to hear his own thoughts. I thought that was great.

Sarah and David: Yeah. Yeah. It's what I find interesting about it, what was challenging is it's, you know, someone writes a letter to a loved one. They may have an interior feel. You want to communicate the emotion of that. He is always writing to everybody it seems, or to himself. It doesn't seem like he ever wrote anything that we could find that was to one other person. You know, he's got painters in mind, or future scientists in mind. Or as one of our interviewees said, it seems like as he's wrestling with something, to her it sounded like sometimes he was like saying to himself, as she said, you know, gotta get this right. And I could feel that. Adriano did such a nice job of, I think, communicating. both that that sort of interior sense that he's speaking to himself but also some of the stuff just reads like it's for a classroom full of ambitious young painters and that comes across too. Another thing about Adriano is that he, when we wanted Leonardo was speaking English with an Italian accent that Americans would hear and go, well that's an Italian speaking English and he did that really well. There are a lot of great Italian actors who trained in London. and they speak English beautifully and you wonder, is this person British or Italian? It wasn't gonna land properly in American ears. so Adriano, every once in a while there's a word that... He's sort of almost too Italian to just nail. We wanted to have somebody who could do that and you would accept and understand totally what he was saying, but just go, right, we're listening to an Italian. And as Sarah said before, you know, we don't want an Anglified Leonardo, we wanted an Italian Leonardo. So that was important and he really got that.

Christian: Now talk to me about the music. So typically in other documentaries, you know, you've used songs that are known and in the time period of the stories that you're telling, this is different. It's placed in a different time. And so talk to us about the score.

Sarah and David: Yeah, and almost exclusively, with some exceptions, we've used found music, which has been very effective for us in anchoring a scene, a sequence in time. But also it goes to how we edit the movies, which is if you're cutting a sequence and you want to introduce, say, the boxing promoter, Don King, and you want to use, right away you go, we got to use sympathy for the devil. We're going to introduce him right about the time that that was released. And boy, that does seem in some ways to be speaking to him that we might edit that scene on top of that song. We might be in that editor room for many months and the song may never change. And so the picture really sticks to the music because you're building it on top. But I think a more conventional way is to use a temp score and then in the end, working with the composer, get. a version of that that is hopefully better and also sticks to the picture. In this case, we didn't want to use period music. We were talking early on about how strings and percussion might be perfect for this. We wanted it to feel epic, but we were maybe only going to use a quartet. We were introduced to the music of Caroline Shaw, and it sounded perfect. early on before we started trying it in the movie, we went and listened to her vocal band, as she would call it, Room Full of Teeth. And they do all these vocalizations and it felt like, that would be really competitive with our dialogue tracks. We can't have these human voices and the dialogue tracks, they'd be fighting each other. We found out right away that it was a match made in heaven and that the vocalizations from Room Full of Teeth or other ensembles, vocal ensembles that we worked with in our temp track, it elevated Leonardo. It made him feel more human. For a guy who, as we talked about, didn't leave a diary behind, you don't get to know what he's thinking, you could really feel his humanity, I feel like through... these vocal bands. So we got in touch with Caroline, she agreed to make a score for this, and she worked with a vocal band, a string quartet, and a percussion ensemble. And they made beautiful music, and she wrote music that intuitively seemed to go with the sequence, whatever it was, you know. It could really like, you know, drive Leonardo on a journey, you know, between Milan and in Florence if that's what was happening, or it could just add a layer of mystery to a rendering of the Virgin Mary who's struggling with her ambivalence over her son being sacrificed and her maternal instinct and letting this thing that has to happen for humanity happen. Her music always seemed to just capture it perfectly and elevate it. And she did successfully score the entire film. And it was really a joy to work with her and a thrill to see. how the music she wrote connected to Leonardo and elevated the movie. It's a great.

Christian: I agree. I agree. was beautiful. All right. Last question. I want to know about what you got to film and work with. Did you get to touch and hold or see any original documents or things of his? Did you go in any spaces? Talk to me about what access you had.

Sarah and David: Yeah, we didn't actually really handle the documents and notebooks. notebooks and the drawings we mostly used from, you know, from these high res scans that we could get or photographs of those. But the paintings, a lot of them, we did go film in person and get to kind of experience. And in some cases, like as Dave was saying, the Last Supper, you know, three hours in the room just with the crew. I was able to go to the Louvre when they had a show, a big Leonardo exhibition, the 500th anniversary of his death in 19 and 2020. So before we were even officially in production on the film, but it was important to go film that. And so they had gathered quite a number of Leonardo paintings in addition to the ones that they have in their collection and other works by his contemporaries into this big exhibition. And they were amazing and let us get in there and film the Mona Lisa. you know, when it was empty and to film this exhibition overnight when it was empty and to really get to spend time with these works. mean, I think going to see the Mona Lisa can sometimes be a bit of a disappointing experience for people because of the crowds and you have to sort of wind your way through this little rope line and you get up close only for a second and everyone's taking selfies. And it's a really extraordinary painting and I don't know that that's the best way to view it. And so getting the chance to be there and to get up really close to it, to film it, and to have the room to ourselves. Standing in front of the St. Anne for me, The Virgin and Child of St. Anne was a really amazing experience. That's a painting that's been restored in the last decade, and so it's just vibrant and incredible. And to get up close to that was amazing. That was really, that felt very special to get to be in some of those spaces with those works kind of like church instead of with the crowds.

Christian: Yeah, yeah, that's really neat. All right, well, this has been wonderful learning about this amazing documentary. I really do encourage people to see Leonardo da Vinci. comes out in November on PBS. Do you have a specific date?

Sarah and David: 18th and 19th, November 18th.

Christian: 18th and 19th. Well, we have one more thing to do. is now time for everyone's favorite segment, docu-view deja vu. All right. You guys are documentary film producers. Do you have documentary films to recommend to our audience?

Sarah and David: Yeah, absolutely. I would suggest When We Were Kings, which is pretty well known, of course. But we, of course, watched that as we were thinking about our Muhammad Ali film. And it's an extraordinary documentary directed by Leon Gass. It came out in 1996, but it's about the run-up to and the fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in 1974. And it's just an amazing, a lot of verite footage from that. time and this concert before and it's just joyful and really wonderful to watch.

Christian: never seen it and I didn't know about it so thank you for that recommendation. Where can we watch it?

Sarah and David: I think it's available streaming. It's definitely around. Yeah.

Christian: OK. All right. David, do you have one?

Sarah and David: Yes, I would recommend How to Survive a Plague by David France, a documentary that came out in 2012, and it's about the growth and evolution of ACT UP and how they use civil disobedience to force. government and pharmaceutical companies to release treatment to cure AIDS. And yeah, it's a profound story of how of civil disobedience and in sort of how a movement can come together. And it's put together with found footage, you know, VHS tapes and meetings that they found in the New York Public Library, broadcast news, and then members of ACT UP who appear on camera.

Christian: Interesting.

Sarah and David: And it's just a wonderful portrait of a really challenging time in a group of undeterred people for whom their lives were at stake, who were able to put this movement together and heroically force the hand of government to get these treatments released. It's profound. Yeah.

Christian: Wonderful. All right. Thank you so much. It's been a lovely pleasure to have you here. Do you guys have anything else you're working on next that you can tell us about?

Sarah and David: Yeah, we are underway on a film that we're calling Emancipation to Exodus. It's about the black experience in America from emancipation and into the beginning of the great migration.

Christian: I can't wait to see that one. That one's going to be awesome. All right. Well, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to have you here. Thank you, everybody, for listening to Documentary First, where we believe everybody has a story to tell, and you can be the one to tell it. Bye, everybody.