“You wake the dead.”
Ken Burns offered that succinct description of his filmmaking at the Edinburgh Intl. Film Festival on Friday, where the veteran documentarian dug into the craft behind bringing history to life and made a claim for the ensemble assembled for his latest epic, “The American Revolution.”
“I think this film is the best cast in cinema. Period,” Burns said with a smile, describing the six-part, 12-hour series, which draws on some 400 first-person accounts voiced by 61 actors, including Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Damian Lewis, Tobias Menzies and Matthew Rhys.
Hanks alone voices numerous historical figures in “The American Revolution,” while lesser-known performers sit alongside marquee names. The actors’ job is to make words left on the page feel dimensional again.
Burns traced that impulse back to a remark from his late father-in-law, a psychologist, who connected his filmmaking to the death of Burns’ mother when he was 11.
