LEONARDO DA VINCI filmmakers Sarah Burns and David McMahon | ©2024 PBS

It is perhaps impossible to overstate the influence of the Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519, on subsequent civilization. Scientist, inventor, engineer, painter, sculptor and architect, da Vinci did so much that exploring his entire life seems a Herculean task.

But that’s exactly what filmmakers Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon set out to do with their four-hour documentary LEONARDO DA VINCI, which airs on PBS over two nights, Monday, November 18, and Tuesday, November 19.

During PBS’s portion of the summer 2024 Television Critics Association (TCA) press tour, Sarah Burns (Ken Burns’s daughter) and McMahon (Sarah Burn’s husband) sit down to talk about their extensive look at the iconic genius.

“The idea for the film first came from [writer] Walter Isaacson,” Burns explains, “who was then working on his biography of Leonardo. He hadn’t published it yet, and he had a conversation with my dad and suggested it. I think [Ken Burns] interviewed [Isaacson] for his Benjamin Franklin film, so they were talking about it, and I think my dad initially dismissed the idea – this was so far outside of our normal scope of our work [which more usually deals with American subject matter]. But he told us about it, and we right away jumped at the idea, even though it was not a typical subject for us.

“I think we were just excited by the idea of telling the story about such a fascinating figure, and someone whom we knew not that much about, so, the project of getting to know him seemed like a really interesting one. That it presented these challenges in terms of the filming that were so different from the other films that we’ve made seemed exciting, I think, to think about how to tell a story that’s set more than five hundred years ago, and for which the historical record is thin at times.”

McMahon feels he doesn’t have much to add to this. “Yeah. What she said.”

LEONARDO DA VINCI includes a number of animated sequences, the most these filmmakers have employed thus far. Burns relates, “We made a film called EAST LAKE MEADOWS: A PUBLIC HOUSING STORY that featured some animation, but that was, I think, to fill in the gaps where we didn’t have footage. In this case, our thought was, ‘Let’s use the animation toward trying to put people between [da Vinci’s] ears.’

“And so, when he has a recollection from his childhood that may feel a little mythic, it invited some other visual language that we could use, and we felt like animation was maybe the best way to visually show what [he might have been thinking].”

Among da Vinci’s many gifts was his ability to convey what people were thinking and feeling in his paintings. LEONARDO DA VINCI examines why his art was so uncommonly expressive.

“I think it’s a big part of the story,” Burns relates, “both in the broad sense, his interest in nature and representing nature authentically in painting, and all of the work that he did to try to get better at that, by dissecting cadavers to understand how the human body works, and studying nature, and making these observations, and then how to translate that, how to represent light and shadow, to make the dimension in a painting, to make it feel more three-dimensional.

“All of that was his big project, really throughout his life, connecting all of these pieces, and trying to make something more authentic, more emotional. He talks about representing the intentions of the mind, so having in that face, in that portrait, something of the inner thoughts of the person being portrayed is not just their external physical being.”

LEONARDO DA VINCI Key Art | ©2024 PBS

Burns adds, “He’s also taking these very careful measurements. We mostly talk about that around ‘The Vitruvian Man,’ where he does a very meticulous study of the proportions of the human body, towards creating this kind of mathematical representation of a human body.”

McMahon elaborates, “He has many pages of drawings from his dissections of human bodies, he’s explored the shoulders and he’s dissected the face. I think he’s trying to understand what muscles might be used to create a smile that is mysterious. And so, maybe he goes deeper than his contemporaries, in that he’s actually willing to dissect the bodies and see what’s going on beneath the skin, and then using that to figure out how those muscles convey the emotion through a smile.”

Do today’s 3D animators use da Vinci’s techniques in their work? Burns thinks this is probable. “I don’t have a specific example, but I would certainly not be surprised. As David has said, we came across so many people, in all of these different disciplines, who have taken inspiration from Leonardo, and I’m sure that that’s another area where that’s the case.

“Even just the way that anatomy is depicted – one of the art historians we talked to pointed out at some point to us that GRAY’S ANATOMY – not the show, but the book,” Burns specifies with a laugh, “that way of depicting anatomy, those kinds of drawings – Leonardo was the first person who ever drew the human body like that, and that is still, to this day, how a medical textbook would depict a human body. Certainly, in some ways, all of medical study in some way leads back to the way that he was depicting the body.”

Despite the fact that da Vinci’s scientific inquiries often clashed with Catholic doctrine, the Church seemed to leave him alone for the most part. Does the documentary explore why this was?

McMahon replies, “The historical record is thin when it comes to [this]. The Church hired him. There were several churches in Florence that hired him to do altar pieces. He seems as interested in the human experience of the people in those Biblical stories as he is in portraying them the way the Church would be interested. I think [when he was] hired to do a ‘Last Supper,’ there were certain things he’d be required to put in there, but otherwise, he could kind of explore a little bit.

“When it comes to his personal life, again, the record is fairly thin. I feel like the biographers and the art historians that we talked to have a certain confidence that he was gay. The longest-running piece on any individual person in any of his notebooks is about this Salai [Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno], who came to him as an apprentice as a boy, and was with him for the rest of his life. It’s one of the few times in the notebooks where he seems a little bit pained by a personal relationship, or amused by the actions of somebody around him. And then, he was anonymously accused of sodomy. There’s not much to take away from that. Who knows what that vendetta that person had who put that anonymous note [making the accusation] in that box.

“So, these are the little tidbits that we can gather to try to make sense of that aspect of his personal life. It was not uncommon for people, I think, in his universe to be then what the Germans at that time would refer to gay people as ‘forenzers.’ And so, the Church did seem to look the other way on a thing that, otherwise, if you were found out, it could result in your death.”

There also isn’t a lot of documentation on other aspects of da Vinci’s life, such as, Burns points out, “The childhood, of course.”

McMahon elaborates, “And our allegiance was going to be to the facts that we could actually turn up. There are some biographers that we talked to who are willing to run a little bit with an idea that is not fully formed about where he was when, what he was doing, and what he was thinking, but there really isn’t much from his childhood.

“We just know that his dad was in the city, his mom was down the road raising a separate family with her husband, and that he was on his grandfather’s farm, and hung out with his uncle and it was largely okay with them, and he roamed the countryside and explored nature, and he didn’t have the kind of schooling that a kid who wasn’t born out of wedlock, who did come from a little bit of money, would have had. Maybe it liberated him to explore things that other kids weren’t. But we can’t really know, and there are other periods, too – you can see and imagine from something, you can take from the paper what period this is that he made this drawing, but there’s not a lot in the historical record that tells you where he was or what he was doing, so that was frustrating.”

Does the documentary discuss da Vinci in relation to any of his contemporaries?

“To some degree,” Burns replies. “Michelangelo is a character in the story, too. They overlap. Michelangelo is younger. They’re both in Florence and working on these projects nearby. Michelangelo is sculpting the David, and there’s that moment when we introduce Raphael, too, and he goes to Rome later, and he is even younger, but is clearly very influenced by Leonardo. And so, there are these moments where some of his important contemporaries around his time are in relationship to each other in some way.”

Actor Keith David is the narrator for LEONARDO DA VINCI. How did the filmmakers come to select him as the voice of the project?

Burns relates, “We’ve worked with him a number of times.”

McMahon says, “I am drawn to Keith as a narrator. He gets the meaning of the words, he has great pipes. One of his handlers said, ‘Oh, Keith sings in Italian.’ So, we felt confident that he could master some of those words that would otherwise be tricky. For my part, when I write, I try to hear his voice. I do hear his voice as I’m trying to write narration. And so, we didn’t really consider anybody else. In all the films that we’ve written for Ken, Keith’s been the narrator.”

The filmmakers feel that composer Caroline Shaw made a crucial contribution to LEONARDO DA VINCI. When Shaw provided a score sample, McMahon observes, “It seemed to be just right for that scene on her first attempt. I think it also helps provide connective tissue for this movie. It just holds it together.

“Sometimes, you’re wanting more out of the historical record, and it’s just not there. And so, there’s something about this movie hanging together her music that I think is really effective.

“We wanted a timeless sound. We think of Leonardo as someone very much of his time, but he’s also reaching back to the ancients, and he’s exploring what it was they had to share, and at times, he seems like he’s got a foot in the future. And her sound just seemed timeless, it sort of would work in any period.”

With narrative film and television, there are clear distinctions between preproduction, production, and post-production. These lines are blurrier on documentaries, Burns notes.

“They entirely overlap, really. From the time that we decide to make the film, even though we’re not officially in production, we’re working on another project, but we’ll start filming. We filmed at the Louvre when they had a big Leonardo exhibition in January 2020, even though we were still in the middle of our Muhammad Ali film at that time, because that was happening then, and we wanted to capture it, and we filmed some interviews at that point. But we continue our research process and our filming process even as we’re writing the script, and then even as we begin our edit.

“The other thing is that our editing process is very much distinct from a narrative fiction space. We are still shaping the story so much as we’re editing. So, we spend this time doing research, we write our scripts, and then, when we get in the edit room, we continue to refine and change the story, and make rewrites. If you are filming something scripted, you really have to have all of your material before you begin editing. For us, it’s this constant process where we continue to research and film more interviews after we’re in the midst of it.”

McMahon elaborates, “We can’t open an edit room until we have a mass of material to really lay out that timeline. We are seeking editors who are freelance, and so you want to try and find out when they’re available, so we have to plan it ahead. So, that is one deadline that we need to have a script ready, we need to have it reviewed by people. We bring on consultants, ‘This is what the subject’s about,’ and they dive in. They may look again later at our edit, so, yeah, in the moment we decide to make the film, there are often people who we should probably go out and film right away.”

Given that all three LEONARDO DA VINCI directors – Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and McMahon – are all always working on multiple projects at once, is there a distinct division of responsibility between the trio generally, or specifically on LEONARDO?

Sarah Burns replies, “Well, [Ken Burns] is usually working on several things at once, with a couple of different teams. On LEONARDO, we write together, and then we all direct together, so when we begin our edit is the point when we’re really all in the room together, wrestling with this material and how we’re telling the story, and how to make all of this material that we’ve pulled in work together. And so, that’s where we really are collaborating the most all together. He’s kind of coming and going, as he’s working on this American Revolution project at the same time, overlapping.

As for conducting interviews for the documentaries, Burns relates, “We all do interviews. It depends on the project, how we divide them up. We [Sarah Burns and McMahon] did most of the interviews for this one.”

Who is responsible for sourcing artwork, nature footage, and/or anatomy footage?

McMahon says, “We have a team. In this case, it was three producer/associate producer types. We don’t outsource any of that. We have a long timeline. We have people we’ve been working with across multiple projects, who know where to go and look for this stuff.

“We started at the interim level, and I was at some point engaged with this part of it, the sourcing of this material. So, we have contacts at many archives, we work with people who have a real nose for tracking this stuff down. In this case, it existed in a different space than a lot of what we do. We were looking for nature footage in a different way than we normally would.

“But we thought with this project that we could serve the story well by taking the image of the Archimedes Screw that was in the clip from the early twentieth century, those are French farmers, it looks a lot like the drawing that [da Vinci] made, he’s looking at Archimedes’s actual drawing.

“We felt like, because he at times feels somewhat timeless, we could show footage from the twentieth century, and we could show images that come before him. But we have a long enough timeline for that great team of archival researchers to figure out where the bodies are buried.”

What do Burns and McMahon most want people to get out of LEONARDO DA VINCI?

For McMahon, “I think that there have been very few people as curious about the world around them as Leonardo, and I think that’s probably the takeaway, that he observed longer, he was willing to challenge the accepted wisdom around things. And so, his curiosity comes out in everything that he does. It’s on every page of those notebooks.

“And I think that just his inquisitiveness – it’s clear from the first frame of the film that he’s asking these questions about everything. And sometimes they’re simple, but then they turn out to be much more complex. And sometimes, these are questions that he puts in these pages, the little studies that he’s doing. The pages never get published, and it’s somebody four hundred years later who asks the same question and has different instruments, different tools, a different type of math, where they can actually figure out the answer. But there he was, in the sixteenth century, asking the same thing, and sometimes coming to almost the same conclusion.”

Burns agrees. “It’s the same for me, really. There’s a sense of awe and wonder that he seems to have at the world around him, the natural world, that feels to me really inspiring. It makes you want to go out and try to be more like him in that curiosity and that observation and that close study of nature, and really everything around him, that is so beautiful. I mean, he just is fascinated by all of it, in this way that it feels like we could all stand to be more like that. “

Is that what Burns and McMahon got out of making LEONARDO DA VINCI themselves?

Burns laughs. “I would aspire to try to be more like that. But I do feel very lucky to get to do the work that we do, and have that opportunity to dive into a subject like this, and study it, and learn new things with each new project. If it’s anything like that at all, it’s an amazing opportunity to get to study something in that way. “

McMahon concurs. “Yeah. We wrestled with the word ‘genius,’ and we had left it out of the beginning of our film, and then a friend of ours looked and said, ‘This is one in a few billion. It feels like you should make the point up top.’ And certainly, part of Leonardo’s genius was the depths to which he was able to observe things.

“The fact that he could watch a bird or another creature that moves very quickly in their actions, and actually make a drawing that captures what’s happening. If you look at some of his drawings, and you see what he’s discerned from what he observed, and then you try to watch the same thing, it’s profound to me.

“Without a slow-motion camera,” Burns specifies.

“Yeah,” McMahon concludes. “We have all these instruments that we can use to see the same things. We definitely talked to people who look to cover similar areas specifically, who just chuckle when you ask how it is he might have come up with that conclusion without the same instruments we have. So, I think there’s a special depth to his power of observation. It’s once in a century.”

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Article:LEONARDO DA VINCI: Filmmakers Sarah Burns and David McMahon on new PBS documentary – Exclusive Interview

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