The Vietnam War is Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s latest documentary, spans 18 hours over the course of 10 episodes. By now, you probably already know why – but do you know how?

To explain just 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 completed and polished their enormous mission.

 

Interviewing Subjects

In an interview with the Harvard Gazette, Novick said that once they found who they wanted to interview, the direction of their documentary became clear. “I used to think history was boring because it lacked a human element,” she said. “By talking to people, we found the stories we needed to tell, and we really learned as we went along.” Burns compared the process to the six blind men folk tale where they touch an elephant, but each described a different creature. “If you use the good, old-fashioned narrative and do it right, maybe you can pull back and see all of it.”

In total, about 100 people are spotlighted throughout the series. “You can have more than one truth happen at the same time,” Burns said to the The San Diego Union Tribune. “What we tried to do is create a safe space for all these different perspectives.”

While finding interview subjects, Burns told Vanity Fair that he was equally cautious of including “rehearsed” veterans – veterans who postwar have entered a public life, where they may be “rewired…to speak in practiced sound bites rather than freshly from the heart.” For example, Burns and Novick reached out to John Kerry and John McCain (both of whom have been Burns’ party’s nominee for president) early on in their process to receive their input, but eventually decided to not interview them on-camera, because Burns found it potentially “too radioactive.”

 

Finishing Touches

In the same Vanity Fair interview, Burns said that in post-production, he and Novick “spent a lot of time subtracting—subtracting commentary, subtracting an adjective that might put a thumb on the scale” in regards to bias, in order to stick to their pursuit for objectively and truth.

Vanity Fair also reported that by the end of making The Vietnam War, the filmmakers had drawn “from more than 130 sources for motion-picture footage, including the U.S. networks, private home-movie collections, and several archives administered by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” 

 

Watch some interview clips from “The Vietnam War” here: