The Vietnam War is Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s latest documentary, spanning 18 hours over the course of 10 episodes, looking at one of the most contentious wars in our country’s history and unearthing it from every possible angle. Ten years in the making, it makes you wonder – what exactly was it like to tackle such an ambitious project?

To explain just what went down to make this project, Burns and Novick spoke with several publications to detail the making of this epic documentary series, and their process can be broken down into a few pieces. Here’s just a glimpse of how they started their process.

 

The Beginnings

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Burns and Novick explained that tackling the Vietnam War was the natural progression to take after finishing their World War II documentary series, The War, way back in 2006. And with this subject, time was on their side; when they were making The War, Burns and Novick found themselves racing against the clock to talk to WWII veterans who were in their 80s and 90s. Additionally, they believed enough time had passed since the end of the Vietnam War that “tempers had cooled” so “perspectives could be gained.”

From the start, Burns knew what he wanted to avoid when making The Vietnam War: the “old tropes and invented tropes” of Vietnam movies churned out by Hollywood, and the “avuncular Monday-morning quarterbacking” from academic-types “who have never set foot in Vietnam.”

 

Showing Every Perspective

Burns and Novick spoke with The San Diego Union Tribune about how they had been working on the project for 10 years, and a large part of that reason had to do with their storytelling approach. Their goal was to “tell the story from all sides — American, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese — and to include the viewpoints of those who supported the war and those who opposed it.”

The Washington Post reported that in order to gain insight from all sides, Burns and Novick had to make several trips to Vietnam. In fact, by the end of their quest, they filmed interviews with 100 people, examined 100,000 photos, and looked through 5,000 hours of archival footage. But despite their grueling amount of work, they knew they were only going to know the stories of a fraction of the 58,000 veterans whose lives were taken by the war.

Being one of the most divisive wars in US history, Burns had some sage advice for his fellow filmmakers working on The Vietnam War with him, as he detailed to The Austin Chronicle. He insisted that the filmmakers “consider their role to be historians, not delivering praise or blame, but ‘like umpires, equal-opportunity critics calling balls and strikes.’” Burns also insisted that the film “should illustrate that ‘multiple truths can coexist at the same time.’” In a conversation with the former director of the LBJ Library and Museum Mark Updegrove, he said they “wanted to show every possible shade of gray.”

 

Watch a trailer for "The Vietnam War" here:

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