Ken Burns Says He’s Working on Seven Films Right Now

The filmmaker has stayed busy during the pandemic

documentarian Ken Burns
Ken Burns visits SiriusXM Studios on September 10, 2019 in New York City.
Steven Ferdman / Contributor via Getty Images

Most of us have struggled to maintain productivity during quarantine, but not Ken Burns. In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, the famous documentarian revealed that he’s currently hard at work on a slew of new projects — seven, to be exact.

“I’m working on seven films right now,” Burns told Scott Pelley. “I mean, we got Ernest Hemingway, we have Muhammad Ali, we have Benjamin Franklin, we have LBJ biographies. We’re doing a history of the American Revolution and a biography of the buffalo.”

There’s no word on when we can expect these new films to be released, and Burns didn’t offer any further details about their subject matter, but he did address the way they’re all part of a broader, American story — as Pelley put it, “the story of a people straining for union.”

“This is what stories do,” Burns said. “They do liberate us from the tyrannies of our limitations, and our past, and our foibles. And so this is what we human beings do to negotiate this all too short passage that we call life. And I’m so grateful that I live in the United States of America, I mean that. I mean that. And that I get to tell stories about us, the U.S.”

You can watch the full 60 Minutes segment here.

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