In a previous interview with Ken Burns, the director told me, “If I was given 1,000 years, I would not run out of topics of American history.” It turns out, he barely needed 70 years to pivot to an overseas subject. In “Leonardo da Vinci,” the documentarian and his co-directors David McMahon and Sarah Burns have created a two-part biopic about the ultimate Renaissance man. “The name of my company is Florentine Films, and we finally have a film worthy of the name,” Burns said from his home in Walpole, New Hampshire. The four-hour documentary finds the veteran filmmaker stretching beyond his familiar techniques and experimenting with innovative forms befitting his subject. “Leonardo da Vinci” debuts 8 p.m. EST, Nov. 18 and 19 on PBS, PBS.org and the PBS app.
I interviewed Burns via phone. Our conversation has been edited slightly for clarity and length.
TRUTHDIG: How did “Leonardo da Vinci” come about?
KEN BURNS: I was making a film about Benjamin Franklin and am friends with one of his biographers, Walter Isaacson. We were having dinner, and he started this full-court press to get me to consider making a film about Leonardo. I said, “I only do films on American topics.” He kept pushing, saying, “Franklin’s arguably the greatest scientist of the 18th century and a great artist in words, and Leonardo’s the greatest artist of the 15th and early 16th century, and also an unbelievable scientist.”
“I suddenly realized: An old dog could be taught new tricks.”
After dinner, I spoke with my daughter [Sarah Burns] and son-in-law [David McMahon], who I collaborate with. We were in the middle of working on “Muhammad Ali,” and I told them Walter kept pushing me to do a film about Leonardo, and they said: “Let’s do it!” I suddenly realized: An old dog could be taught new tricks. Also, a neighbor of Leonardo’s in Florence, Amerigo Vespucci, happened to be an explorer and we name everything in the Western Hemisphere the “Americas.” He’s as close to a proto-American as you can get.
TD: How do you compare Leonardo to his artistic contemporaries?
KB: With his minimal output, one could argue each one of his paintings were beyond what everyone else was doing.
TD: Your film documents that Leonardo often didn’t finish his commissioned paintings. Why?
KB: He only painted 20, and fewer than half were finished. There are thousands of pages in sketchbooks, beautifully illustrated. He set the bar so high that when he exhausted within the parameters of the piece in front of him the ideas that he wished to explore, he said, “Is anything ever really finished?” When he does finish something, like “The Last Supper,” it’s pretty spectacular. He’s just so far ahead of anybody that he just tires not of the work of the commission but he’s just exploring his own questions, how the birds and plants might be, engaging every aspect of inquiry.
TD: How did Leonardo combine art and science in his work?
KB: His embryonic studies, anatomies, dissections are beautiful works of art. He’d see no difference between his inquiries in any way. He’s about as well-rounded as you want to be. His legacy is so inspiring.
TD: What do you consider Leonardo’s most significant inventions and scientific contributions?
KB: They’re so numerous it’s hard to itemize them. He designed machines that were real, practical, fanciful, inventive and things centuries ahead of their time that he knew wouldn’t work. He had no telescope or microscope [yet] figured out, almost 500 years before MRIs, exactly how the heart valves work. He was a scientist, an anatomist, a botanist, a painter. He was just one thing: curious.
TD: Which of today’s technological inventions do you think would intrigue Leonardo most?
KB: That’s interesting. I think he’d love the 3-D printer. He’d want to know everything, from cars to rockets to jets and the helicopters he anticipated. He’d be so surprised by how universal his influence is to this day. He’s the most modern man I know, even now.
TD: Was Leonardo political?
KB: Not really. He seems to be against war, although he designed instruments of war. He doesn’t seem to be particularly religious, although he takes many commissions from churches and paints many religious scenes.
TD: Da Vinci was believed to be gay. What role did homosexuality play in his life and art?
KB: I don’t know. There’s only a few tantalizing things, a scandal, where he was arrested, but fortunately one of his fellow arrestees was the son of a very wealthy family that got the charges dropped.
People came into his entourage, his studio and workshop and became lovers, companions for the rest of his life. He was painting the human condition, and there was a great deal of androgyny in some of the things he does, the beauty of the angels, some of the male figures — one is thought to be one of the people he was connected to, Salai. I find his being born illegitimate probably more significant than his sexuality, which made it impossible for him to go to university. So he was saved from becoming a notary, like his father.
TD: Earlier, we discussed how, if he miraculously came back, Leonardo would scientifically marvel at 2024. It would be interesting to see him in West Hollywood, experiencing a society where gays could marry.
KB: Yeah. That’s really true. He’d be very pleased. He was known as incredibly pleasant, engaging, funny — as one of our talking heads says, “He was himself a work of art before he became art.” He’d revel in a society, in some parts of the country, that might tolerate who he was and not discriminate against who he loved.
TD: What’s the story behind the “Mona Lisa,” and why does it still fascinate us?
KB: It’s an extraordinary work of science. Contemporaries of his said they could see the blood coursing through her veins, her heartbeat. Leonardo never finished and delivered it to the client, this wealthy silk merchant, del Giocondo, and his 24-year-old wife who already had five children. When you see the film, you won’t have to make a joke about the smile anymore. Leonardo captured for all time the universality of the human predicament and equation [in] the most famous painting in the world.
TD: Your film is about a painter widely regarded to be an artistic genius. Co-director David McMahon said that for this film, “our traditional approach alone would have been insufficient.” How did Leonardo’s brilliance affect your documentary’s style?
KB: Say you like to play basketball in the park with the local kids, and what if you suddenly have Michael Jordan as your teacher? You’re going to up your game. So we ended up with Michael Jordan and decided to up our game.
TD: Is “Leonardo da Vinci” creatively freer and more cinematic than your previous works?
KB: No, all of my films are cinematic because they’re all films. I’m okay with “freer.” His genius helped to liberate us from traditional ways we told stories and to experiment. … It really helped explode and change the grammar of how we communicate. It has split screens, multi-image screens, animation, modern footage, rocket ships, film footage from the early 20th century, plus Caroline Shaw’s score, all of which help bring alive this protean figure, one of the most inquisitive minds of all time.
“He was just one thing: curious.”
All of these elements are trying to rise to his stature. In order to appreciate the dimensions of Leonardo, it was important for us to try and push aspects of our presentation, and we’ve done that. If we use only 10 percent of our brains, he used 75 percent. Just being around Leonardo is inspiring and incredibly vibrant.
TD: Tell us about the international group of experts who provide commentary for the film.
KB: We knew that Guillermo del Toro had notebooks that were, like Leonardo’s, filled with notations and drawings. There are three Italian scholars, a Muslim scholar who appreciates the engineering dimensions, a British surgeon and two British biographers, American historians. We wanted to just surround Leonardo from every possible point of view to help us understand. Adam Gopnik, an incredible writer, says Leonardo “craft the code of organic form.”
TD: Da Vinci died 505 years ago. What’s Leonardo’s relevancy to our own time and place?
KB: Getting to know him, it’s like he died five years, not 505 years ago. There’s something ultimately searching, inventive, generous, an incredible animating spirit that wishes to know ever more about the workings of the universe. The greats like Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Socrates, Shakespeare and Leonardo are not only very prescient about their times, but about ours.
TD: What’s next for Ken Burns? Back home to America?
KB: Oh yeah, and through the end of the decade we’ve got a big series on the American Revolution airing November 2025. We’re working on a massive series called “Emancipation and Exodus,” from Reconstruction to Jim Crow to the mass exodus of Blacks out of the South to, as Richard Wright put it, “the warmth of other suns.”
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