Ken Burns’ new three-part documentary shows why it’s not too late for us to learn from the great naturalist
Henry David Thoreau is a new PBS documentary in three parts, each an hour long. The project comes with a voiceover cast of heavyweights, with narration from George Clooney, Jeff Goldblum playing the great essayist and additional voices from Ted Danson, Tate Donovan and Meryl Streep.
The project first began life as a short film by Don Henley, the Eagles frontman having long worked to preserve Walden Pond. Henley wanted to capture Thoreau’s time spent in the woodlands outside Concord, Massachusetts, between 1845 and 1847 and the great book that resulted: Walden; or, Life in the Woods. After enlisting Ken Burns, the legendary documentarian, as executive project, the pair entrusted the project to two collaborators, brothers Erik and Christopher Loren Ewers. Like the ferns and fiddleheads that carpet the forest floor at Walden, the film began to grow.
Christopher Ewers, younger brother, co-director and director of photography, said: “Over the production of that first 20-minute film, we were reintroduced to the Thoreau we were taught in high school. You know, that he was one thing, a prophet who wrote two books, Walden and Civil Disobedience” – 1849, against slavery, the product of a night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax – “and that’s basically it.”
