New York City - In my opinion it can be stated without qualification that Ken Burns is American history's greatest film documentarian. I am often impressed, sometimes in awe, and occasionally nervous regarding the subjects of my profiles. In the case of this seminal American filmmaker, I was nothing short of honored to be in his company during our late November breakfast interview in Tribeca.

I arrived on time at Le Pain Quotidien on Grand Street, but Burns was already sitting at the back corner table sipping on a cup of coffee. With the exception of a sprinkling of gray in his beard, he is almost boyish in appearance and it is hard to believe that this youthful looking filmmaker is actually 56 years old. Although a chronicler of history, Burns seems to defy it as if success in one's chosen passion leads to agelessness.

The son of a cultural anthropologist, Burns was born in Brooklyn but never lived there as his mother had a job at Kings County Hospital at the time his father was in graduate school at Columbia University, "I think she got free maternity care while working at the hospital so that is how I ended up being born in Brooklyn." He spent his first three months of life on the Upper Westside before his family headed across the pond, "At three months old my family moved to France, to the highest village in the Alps." After 14 months the family returned to the states and settled in Delaware until 1963 when his father took a professorship in Ann Arbor, Michigan where Burns graduated from Pioneer High School in 1971.

Ken Burns has brought history to audiences for more than 25 years. Images courtesy of PBS

After high school Burns attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, founded in 1970 as an experiment in alternative education. "It was the 'hippie' college and I was there in only its second year, so I was part of the invention of it. It was a wonderful, vibrant place. Still is, I had a fantastic time." Although his education at Hampshire proved to be highly influential in terms of his craft, Burns had decided long before college that he wanted to be a filmmaker, albeit not yet a documentarian.

"My mom got sick with cancer in 1955, there was never a moment when I did not know there was something deeply wrong or that she was dying. My dad, who had a fairly strict curfew, would let me stay up on school nights to watch movies. I never saw him cry, he didn't cry when my mom died, but he cried at movies. I began to realize by the time I was 15 years old that there was this huge power there that I needed to know about."

Regarding his university training Burns said, "When I arrived at Hampshire I was convinced I was going to be the next John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks, but all my teachers just shrugged their shoulders. They were all social documentary still photographers, more interested in the decisive moment, more interested in what was and what is, rather than anything the human imagination can dream up. I had my molecules completely re-arranged by Hampshire. I walked out of that place in 1975 committed to making documentary films."

One might think that Burns filled his class schedule at Hampshire with history courses, however, nothing could be farther from the truth, "I am known as the history person, but the last time I took a history course was in high school. You know, when they held a gun to your head and made you take it in 11th grade." That is not to say that Burns did not have a passion for history, admitting that, "I was a kid that loved history. Everyone would read fiction, but I would read history, I would read encyclopedias. I knew stuff cold"

Admitting that his explanation might "sound like dime store psychology," Burns said, "Much, much later on when I was freshly divorced I told a friend who was a psychologist, 'It seems I am trying to keep my mother alive. I don't remember the day that she died; I am not present for it.' He said, 'Well what do you think it is you do for a living, you wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive, but who are you really trying to wake up?' I realized that is where the history comes from, just the sense of trying to wake the dead. It is the passion that I have."

I asked Burns if he was teaching himself history while he was making his films, "Always, and still am. What I came to realize is that what I have been engaged in is a form of emotional archeology. We don't admit this, but we want, all of us want, one and one to equal three. Our world tells us that one and one equals two but the things we pursue in art, in love, in sex, in the thrill of work, all of the things that the human species aspires to is looking for that desperate calculus when one and one equals three."

Burns continued, "I think that in some ways what I saw in the power of these stories was that. So that history that I am interested in is factually correct, but those dry dates and facts and events hold little meaning in regards to the emotional archeology that can be excavated. So rather than do films about things I know and I am just going to tell you about what I know, which is just a lecture, there is nothing more didactic. Rather than that, I want to share with you what I have discovered. That is why I am convinced that the films are successful, it is that emotional dimension and the idea that you are sharing discovery, rather than manifesting and executing an already arrived at end." Burns went on to say, "It may not be brain surgery, but maybe it is heart surgery."

Burns' single-minded intention to make documentary films can be reflected in the fact that immediately upon graduation from college he and two college friends formed their own production company, Florentine Films in New York City. "Hampshire armed us with the fervor of self-initiative. When I got out I didn't want to work for anybody else, I wanted to make documentary films" He supported himself and his company by doing freelance work and short documentaries. In 1978 he moved his company to New Hampshire, which remains his primary residence although he does maintain an apartment in Manhattan. "I moved to New Hampshire because I had to find a way to survive on $2,500 a year."

In 1981 Florentine Films released its first full-length documentary entitled "Brooklyn Bridge." A four year labor that garnered Burns an Academy Award nomination and when shown on PBS in 1982 proved to be the start of his long association with the not-for-profit, public broadcasting network. Burns described to me the moment he was notified of his Oscar nomination, "I came home to 14 messages on the answering machine when usually there would be one. I needed to go outside and get wood but I listened to the messages, 'Ken call me!' 'Ken this is the AP in Concord, please call us!' 'Ken, this is the Boston Globe, call us!' A friend in LA who was my distributor called me and finally I heard the message from the Academy. I call and get the news that I have been nominated. So I dance my way outside in my shirt sleeves and grab an arm full of wood, but then I slip on some ice and fall into a snow bank. My shirt pulls out of my pants and snow is dripping down my pants and I am thinking, 'How lucky am I to have this warning to not take myself too seriously?' I am the only nominee that has heard this great news and was immediately reminded that it really doesn't matter, to not take myself too seriously. I laughed out loud."

I too laughed out loud when Burns noted that in trying get financing for the making of "Brooklyn Bridge" he got hundreds of rejections from corporations and foundations. Admitting his youthful appearance, "Yeah, this child was trying to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge." The film was made for about $185,000 and after five years of work Burns estimates that he made about two cents an hour.

Referring back to his country digs and production headquarters Burns said, "The best decision I ever made was moving to New Hampshire. The second best decision was staying there." Burns now has a staff of 25 that lives in and works with him in New Hampshire, "As much as I would like to be in the society of my colleagues in New York or Los Angeles, a lot of what I do is labor intensive. I need to get a lot of work done and I get more work done than anyone I know. I get a lot work done in New Hampshire; it is nose to the grindstone."

The digital world has facilitated the work in New Hampshire, whereas the days of spending hours in libraries panning still photographs held to boards with magnets are no longer the only mandatory rigors of his craft. Yet, Burns admits to missing the archive days, "In the old days we would go out and shoot them, 163 archives for the "Civil War" for example. Now in the digital world even the movement occurs within the digital program. I miss going to an archive and setting up an easel, shooting the photographs and then asking the curator, 'What do you have that nobody asks for, what is your favorite thing?' In that way I have seen shots I would have never seen of Robert E. Lee. Furthermore, remember fully half of what I do is tangential to the subject; it is more than about the specific event, but about how people lived. Certainly you want to get Babe Ruth and the stadiums, but you also want to get how Boston and New York looked at that time. You are constantly looking for what will make the past come alive, what will wake the dead."

Two films after "Brooklyn Bridge" Burns received another Academy Award nomination for "The Statue of Liberty" in 1985. It reflected his ability to tell the back story, the emotional archeology of his subject. It was a documentary that not only detailed the history and architectural creation of this timeless symbol of American freedom, but the emotional connections of generations of immigrants who are indelibly connected to the promise of her profound iconography.

Three more documentaries followed and then Burns literally turned the medium of historical filmmaking on its ear with "The Civil War" in 1990. More than five and a half years of the filmmaker's life was devoted to the 11 hour, $3.5 million dollar project that premiered on PBS and was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the General Motors Corporation. (Remember that generous and historic corporate commitment to the arts the next time you go shopping for a new car!).

"The Civil War" catapulted Burns onto the international stage and crystallized his reputation as one of the world's most gifted historical documentarians and without a doubt as America's greatest. It garnered the largest viewership in the history of PBS, with the five consecutive nights of broadcasts drawing an average of over 14 million viewers per night, with 40 million viewers watching at least one of the episodes. Yes, America actually turned off the prime-time fluff and turned its attention to what may be the seminal event of their collective national history. As Burns later stated in our interview, defining the Civil War, "In order to be one, we tore ourselves in two."

Among the broad spectrum, rather than the many subject specific bio/docs like "Huey Long" (1985), "Frank Lloyd Wright" (1998) or "Mark Twain" (2001), that cemented Burns' reputation were "Baseball" (1994), "Jazz" (2001) and "The War" (2007). Profound and prolific, the filmmaker has produced 19 documentaries since founding Florentine Films in 1975, with the latest being "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" (2009). What other filmmakers might overlook, Burns immerses himself into with a personal passion and understanding that bleeds onto the screen. Describing the subject of his latest work he told me, "It is a leveler in the best possible way, it is a democratic leveler. For the first time in history it was not land set aside for kings or rich people, but for the common man. Nature never makes a mistake, people do. So now we [the American people] had access to incredible natural beauty that is preserved, will never be lost and is available to all of us forever. In one way you feel insignificant, but in another way it makes you feel bigger. It connects you to the land that is your country in the form of ownership."

I asked Burns to explain the specifics of his artistic style, "One's style is the authentic application of technique and I mean authentic in the best sense of the word. You walk into a gallery of Cezanne's paintings, you know it is Cezanne! He works with paint, so does every other artist. It is the authentic relationships to the subjects and the materials that make style. I work with dozens and dozens of techniques. I think over time, because of the way we relate to them, because I have been separated, because we work in public television and we haven't had commercial masters, we have been able to evolve something. 'We,' it is definitely collaborative! It is kind of an organic process. For simplicity's sake let me take those dozens and dozens of techniques down to eight. Four are oral and four are visual, the visual are obvious. We have the interviews. We have the live cinematography of the now quiet battlefields or the national parks. We have the archival footage, usually black and white, and we have the still photographs. Orally we have the third-person narrative, the traditional 'Voice of God.' That is complimented by a chorus of first-person voices reading the actual letters, diaries, journals and newspaper accounts that give a sense of flare for the time when you realize that the people are both different from us and very much the same. Then you have period music that is sometimes recorded with the original instruments. Then you add the complex sound effects."

Burns eloquently concluded, "When I look at that still photography, I don't want to cut it right away and get to footage as many of my MTV era colleagues might want to do. I want to get inside that photograph because it may be the closest thing to reality that exists. I want to look at it and find my role as a feature film director within it. To find my master shot, my long shot, my medium shot, my close-shot, my extreme close-shot, the tilt, the pan, all those things are possible within a still photograph. So I may take a still photograph and shoot it 10 different ways. I listen to it! Are those cannons firing, are the troops tramping, are the birds tweeting, are the woods rustling in retreat? If you add all that and you do it wholeheartedly and, I don't know any other corny word except honorably, if you do it wholeheartedly and honorably, then you have something. Then instead of having the usual PBS audience you go to six or seven times the PBS audience. Again, it is one and one equals three."

Burns is known for his long slow pans across his still photos, an effect that has been dubbed "The Ken Burns Effect" within the medium. He is also credited with having a subtle, understated use of music in the scoring of many of his films, such as the repeated, haunting violin melody of Jay Ungar's "Ashokan Farewell" in "The Civil War."

Burns has been a longtime supporter of the Democratic Party and was asked to create the moving tribute to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy shown at the 2008 Democratic convention that nominated the man who would become America's first mixed race president. I asked the filmmaker of "The Civil War" what the election of Barack Obama meant to him, "I thought it was the single most important event in my lifetime. I thought it was the beginning of the third act of our American history and hopefully there will be more acts as classic drama has five acts. The first act was Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence stating "All men are created equal," but he owned a hundred people. The second act was November 19th of 1863 when Lincoln traveled to the now quiet town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to say look we really do believe that all men are created equal and we can have a new birth of freedom if we re-dedicate ourselves to that cause. I think the third act occurred on January 20th of this year" [President Barak Obama's inauguration].

Technique and politics aside, when I asked Burns what was the main motivation for choosing the subject of his films he answered, "Story, story, story!" The stories he is presently working on and will bring to the screen in the next several years include "The Dust Bowl," "Prohibition," "The Vietnam War," a continuation of his "Baseball" series called "The Tenth Inning," "The Central Park Jogger Case" and "The Roosevelts," a six-part series that will include Franklin, Eleanor and Teddy. Each will undoubtedly, as has his previous 19 films, inspire, illuminate and engage the millions of Americans that are devotedly drawn to the serious, entertaining and noble work of this seminal artist and chronicler of our shared national experience.

The late historian Stephen Ambrose said of his films, "More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source." When I mentioned this to the filmmaker he humbly said, "If indeed true, it is both a compliment and a responsibility." It is hard to imagine a more qualified, talented or passionate individual to bear the weight of that responsibility than Ken Burns. He is not only one of America's greatest filmmakers; he is the greatest filmmaker of America herself.