S.H.: For The Veterans History Project you gave advice to regular people interviewing veterans in their own families. You talked about establishing a “comfort zone” for the interview. How did you do this with vets you interviewed for The War?
BURNS: What we look for at the essence of an interview is free exchange. We aren’t investigative journalists. We aren’t there with their tax returns for the last ten years grilling them. This dynamic is most critical when you’re interviewing veterans, because quite often you’re dealing with people who have, understandably, locked away horrific things that they’ve seen, and horrific things that they’ve done–and people they’ve had close to them that they’ve lost.
You have to be respectful and mindful of the fact that they may not get there. That they may not reveal that. And there’s no amount of trickery or cajolery worth it to try to do that.
So, what we look for is to film them in a comfortable situation. To do so in places where they feel comfortable, to be non-threatening, but to also pursue questions, and not just have a rigorous set of questions, so that you might miss following up on something that was quite meaningful.
A particular veteran [Quentin Aanenson] in our films said “I loved airplane flying when I was a kid, that’s where I want to go–that’s where I want to be sometime.” But if you watch his eye crinkles you know that’s not where he wanted to be. That what he saw when he eventually became a pilot was so horrible. And so we moved–we just tested him, and he gave up stuff his wife had never heard, his children had never heard before. Maybe I missed lots of stuff he would’ve told me.
I was with him in a public discussion a year after we finished the film, and he told us something he had never said on film: that he’s lived outside of Washington D.C. for the last 50 years, and every time he and his son went to a Washington Redskins football game, as he was singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” he went through all the friends that he lost in the war. He never told his son, never told anyone else, and as he began to tear up in an audience of his sons and all the other people, you began to realize that you were present once again at the very thing you hope to have, not just with veterans but with anybody.
Particularly with veterans because they are getting at the dynamic of combat and a war–the most exaggerated state that human beings get. Not something that’s distant, but something that’s present.
This is a guy who wakes up most every night from nightmares, from the Second World War, done for him for 60 years, with his hands in a palsy, in a shake because he’s remembering the time when he caught some Germans out in the open and was cutting human beings in half with his 50mm machine guns off his Thunderbolt [fighter plane].
He still has this. His wife always reads him as he comes into the kitchen, and will sometimes hand the cup of coffee to the other hand.
Sometimes I found with a veteran [Paul Fussell], a man who’s actually written about war, and is known as kind of a well-spoken and avuncular chronicler of the human experience of war–I found myself saying, ‘I’m not interested in that.’
I’m interested in you as a 19-year-old lieutenant on the line whose average life expectancy was 17 days, and you didn’t take a shower, or brush your teeth, or change your clothes in six months. And you outlived those odds until you were severely wounded, and they moved you to the head of the line, and patched you up for the invasion of Japan which fortunately did not happen otherwise you would’ve gone mad.
I just said to him at some point early on “you saw bad things.” And the chin, almost like a little boy, started to quake. The eyes started to crinkle up, and for the next several reels of film he gave us priceless access to that 19-year-old–who is as present in his own memories as he is today at 80-years-old.
That’s what we were after in the film. It required a kind of direct unmediated contact with people and their now recently expressed, or just expressed, memories.
[Part 2] [Part 3]
