It’s a total coincidence that Ken Burns and David Schmidt’s six-part documentary series “The American Revolution” was released by PBS in November 2025, less than a year ahead of the United States’ 250th anniversary.
“That wasn’t even on anyone’s horizon,” said Burns while talking with Variety’s Senior Artisans Editor Jazz Tangcay. “I didn’t realize then that it would be a 10-year labor, that we would explode all of the preconceptions that we have and that we would come out as we did.”
Burns and Schmidt, who produced and co-directed the series, joined Tangcay to discuss the decade-long journey of creating the PBS series for Variety’s For the Love of the Craft, diving into how the team assembled a team of expert researchers, recruited an all-star cast of actors and why they decided to tackle the “very complex narrative of the most consequential revolution in history.”
Looking back, Burns is surprised they completed the series given just how comprehensive they needed to be.
A key challenge for the filmmakers was the absence of photographs or newsreels, which required them to “recalibrate a good deal of how we approach the production of such a big mammoth story and to rely more on reenactments, not to reenact a particular battle, but to collect a critical mass of imagery that we treat in a more impressionistic way,” said Burns.
