FACTS & ARGUMENTS

Ken Burns Answers His Critics Over Preferential Treatment from PBS

Earlier this year a group of documentary filmmakers signed a letter to public broadcaster PBS, suggesting it provides an unfair level of support to white creators like Ken Burns. PBS’s response: an additional $11 million USD in grants and funding for diversity inititaves.

Still, it was perhaps inevitable the issue would come up again In a conference call with TV critics this past week, as part of thepublic broadcaster’s efforts to promote its fall progreamming.

The issue is especially sensitive for some now because Burns’ latest film project, the four-night, eight-hour historIical biography Muhammad Ali, made with the blessing and cooperation of Ali’s daughter Rasheda Ali, premieres this fall on the public broadcaster.

Burns was asked how he felt about the criticism, given the optics of a white filmmaker been given public money to make a film about a Black icon like Ali.

Burns’ reply was measured, if a little brittle at first. It’s a question that raises a number of issues, he said, all them complicated.

Burns said the question is personal for him, though, as it speaks to the core of his being and how he has forged his career ever since he made his first film, Brooklyn Bridge, in 1981.

“All my life I have been interested in stories,” Burns said. “I have been telling stories of history for as long as I can remember. As a little boy I had a map of the United States, but it didn't have political borders. It had only the 300 tribes, the Native American tribes that lived within the political borders of the continental United States.

“I am in the business of history, and history includes everyone. Throughout my professional life I have tried to tell the story of this country in an inclusive way, and that means talking about race and trying to tell stories from multiple perspectives.

“We do that with teams of producers, editors and advisors who are diverse. The people in our films, as you have seen, are from all backgrounds. They are there to speak to their personal experiences and as experts.

“I would just point to the fact that in the case of Muhammad Ali, 40 percent of the nucleus of our crew, producers, editors, assistant editors, directors, writers are people of colour. Fifty-three  percent are women.

“We encourage others to tell their own stories, of course, and I celebrate that. But I do not accept that only people of a particular background can tell certain stories about our past, particularly in the United States of America.”

Burns insisted he does not take umbrage being branded by some as “the poster child for white privilege” in documentary filmmaking.

PBS is a public broadcaster, he noted, and it is doing a fine job — arguably the best in broadcasting — at providing a diversity of voices and opinions on a wide range of social issues. Documentary filmmaking is no different.

“There's no umbrage,” he said. “I didn't take it personally at all.

“The number of hours I’ve done this year, for example, is eight for Muhammad Ali, and six for Ernest Hemingway earlier in the spring. It will be less than that next year. There is more than 200 hours of cultural programming on PBS overall, including documentaries and things like that.

“I have been so fortunate that the films I have made, and the people who have worked on them, have been among the most popular programs on PBS. They are seen by many, so maybe I stick out like a sore thumb.

“As I said before, though — and it is really important to understand — we now all spend too much of our time, including me, fundraising. I get proportionately less from PBS than I used to. We get some funding from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting; our corporate sponsor, Bank of America; from The Better Angels Society, which is a nonprofit foundation that seeks to aggregate individuals of wealth to help us do that; and from various foundations, like the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Park Foundation, on and on and on.

“That takes a lot of time to assemble. I could walk in to a streaming service or a premium cable channel tomorrow and get everything I wanted in one pitch, but they want it in a year and a half or two years. 

They wouldn't give me 10 and a half years, as PBS has permitted me to do.

“We are not talking to the other places because they don't do it as well as we do it. We are a reflection of the United States, exceptional. And if you're exceptional, exceptional things have to be expected of you.

“So we will take this on and figure out how to make it right, and do a better job with diversity. I personally commit to that. I know my colleagues will commit to that. I know my network has already done that and put their money where their mouth is, with significant and important programs.

“This is a good way forward for a network that’s always represented, from the very beginning, for the last 50 years, represented and looked people's stories, always asking for a multiplicity of perspectives.

“How could you possibly take umbrage at the idea that there could be more empowerment, more representation, more stories told?

“I'm speaking for all the people in my crew. They all feel that. Three out of the four editors of this film are Black. Many of the producers and people involved in this and the many other projects we are working on are as committed as I am to making sure we are part of the solution and not part of the problem.

“Umbrage would just put this back in the same old dichotomy. It's just the same old tennis match.

“My films have been trying since the very beginning not to exclude, to not put African-American history in February, the coldest and shortest month, but to put it at the burning centre of American history, as it is, as it should be, born on the idea that all people were created equal, yet the guy who wrote that owned other human beings and didn't see the contradiction of the controversy.

“That's our work, and we look forward to all the stories that can be told in the future. And the only place that’s truly interested in a variety of perspectives and stories is PBS.

“They've already taken the steps — and I applaud them for it — to begin the progress forward, which is the only direction I plan to head in.”

Muhammad Ali will air on PBS from September 19-22 from 8E/7C to 10E/9C.

Hold the Presses: Might ‘The Crown’ Have Had It Right After All?

Strange days. The Crown, Netflix’s luxuriant, eye-filling morality play about the inner circle of Britain’s Royal Family during the present-day reign of Queen Elizabeth II, has been both lauded as cracking good entertainment and dismissed as tawdry fiction, about as accurate an account of recent history as filmmaker Oliver Stone was in JFK, his deliberately provocative potboiler about the Kennedy assassination.

And yet. There was Prince William’s statement a mere week ago, coming as did on the heels of a damning report into how former BBC correspondent Martin Bashir and BBC’s flagship news program Panorama landed the infamous 1995 interview with William’s mother, Princess Diana — an interview that touched off a media frenzy that many of those close to Diana’s family led indirectly to her death just two years later, in a late-night car crash in Paris.

“It brings indescribable sadness,” Prince William said in a statement, “to know that the BBC’s failures contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia and isolation that I remember from those final years with her.”

Prince William was 12 at the time.

Couple that with his younger brother Prince Harry’s boldy stating, in an appearance this past February with CBS late-night host James Corden, that he had less objection to The Crown’s version of events to those depicted in the London tabloids, and the fuse has been lit yet again on an age-old debate: Can fiction be more real than fact, and how can one tell the difference. You know you’re living in strange days when there are hints that a Netflix costume drama might be  more on point than credentialed news organizations whose job it is — in theory — is to report the facts without fear nor favour, to speak truth to power, comfort the afflicted, give voice to the voiceless, and to simply report the goddamn news.

The British-born screenwriter and playwright Peter Morgan has written more-or-less every word of The Crown, 40 episodes so far and counting, over a period of four years, this on the heels of writing the feature films The Queen (2006), Frost/Nixon (2008), The Damned United (2009), The Special Relationship (2009) and the 2013 stage play The Audience. Morgan is not a journalist, nor has he ever pretended to be, but there are growing suggestions that The Crown — tawdry, flamboyant and over-the-top though it is at times — might not be the outrageous fantasy it’s often accused of being.

“They don’t pretend to be news,” Harry told Corden. “It’s fictional. But it’s loosely based on the truth. It gives you a rough idea about what can come from that lifestyle, what the pressures of putting duty and service above everything else.

“I’m way more comfortable with The Crown than I am seeing the stories written about my family or my wife or myself,” he added. “That is obviously fiction. Take it how you will. But (what’s in the tabloids) is being reported as fact, because it’s supposedly news. I have a real issue with that.”

The Crown’s first season, in November 2016, encompassed the years of Elizabeth’s marriage to Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. The most recent season, The Crown’s fourth, spans the late ‘70s to the early ‘90s, and focuses on Prince Charles’ marriage to Lady Diana Spencer, played in The Crown by Emma Corrin. Both Corrin and O’Connor won Golden Globes for their performances; Emmy nominations will be announced in July, with the awards themselves to be revealed in September.

The fifth season, now in pre-production, will presumably focus on the dissolution of Charles and Diana royal marriage and quite possibly that fateful night in Paris. As with all things to do with popular entertainment, though, Morgan and The Crown’s braintrust are understandably vague on details.

Crew members are only now returning to Elstree Studios, north of London, where much of The Crown is filmed. The fifth season is expected in 2022.  The most recent season wrapped production in March 2020, just before the Covid pandemic shut down most film production worldwide.

The coming season was supposed to be The Crown’s last, but Morgan confirmed last month that there will be a sixth and final season. The sixth season will reportedly end in the early 2000s, with Queen Elizabeth in her 70s. The Crown will not follow events up to present day, tempting though recent controversies may be

Imelda Staunton will play Elizabeth in the final seasons, replacing Olivia Colman. It was decided early in the series’ production that new actors would play their royal counterparts as they aged, rather than take a chance on aging make-up. Claire Foy played Elizabeth II in the first two seasons; Colman followed in the subsequent two seasons.

The Crown has faced accusations of historical inaccuracy in any one of its four seasons to date, but it’s not surprising that the most recent season, with its focus on Diana and Charles, came under the tightest scrutiny. Royal historian Hugo Vickers argued that the fourth season is “more . . . divisive than earlier seasons,” with "pretty much every character" shown as dislikable . . . . Every member of the royal family comes out of it badly, except the Princess of Wales.”

Given the course of not-so-recent events, that can hardly come as a surprise. Meanwhile, Royal commentator — can there be a more smarmy job? — Emily Andrews has said “sources close to Prince Charles" described some of the scenes as “trolling on a Hollywood budget.”

The UK’s minister for culture and media, an Orwellian portfolio if ever there was one, took issue with The Crown’s depiction of historical figures.

“I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact,” Dowden said. “It’s a beautifully produced work of fiction” — as opposed to, say, the Mail on Sunday — “so as with other TV productions, Netflix should be very clear at the beginning it is just that.”

Of course, another way of looking at it is that viewers can and should be given credit for figuring that out by themselves. Some truths are self-evident, after all.

What happened in Paris on the night of Aug. 31, 1997 did not happen in a vacuum.

‘The Underground Railroad’ — The Grand Delusion Meets Grand Illusion

“And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes — believes with all its heart — that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.”

       ― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

Books are not a visual medium, and yet some of the early criticism of Barry Jenkins’ visually stunning and yet emotionally gruelling take on The Underground Railroad has revolved around exactly that.

More than a few admirers of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — though not the author himself, it’s worth mentioning —  have complained that The Underground Railroad is too pretty to look at, despite scenes of violence and brutality on a scale as harrowing as anything depicted on the small screen. One detractor even compared Oscar-winning director (for Moonlight) Jenkins’ approach to that of Terrence Malick.

That’s unfair, and not just because Malick is in a whole other league, visually speaking, but because the material in The Underground Railroad is from a whole other time, and serves a different purpose.

Comparing the two is a little like comparing Rembrandt with Andy Warhol.

Jenkins chose to take a highly stylized approach to material that itself was stylized to begin with: The underground railroad is depicted literally, both in Whitehead’s original novel and in Jenkins’ 10-part adaptation for Amazon Prime Video. Actual, physical trains chug underground through a network of tunnels and railroads built below ground, out of sight of the Man, ferrying desperate refugees out of harm’s way — a kind of reverse spin on the trains that carried Jewish and political refugees and their families to extermination camps throughout occupied Europe during the Second World War. The underground railroad of history was real — plantation slaves from the US South fled to freedom and the promise of a better life in the northern free states and Atlantic Canada, but they did not do so on actual trains. The underground railroad of history was a labyrinthine network of back roads, river boats, black churches, graveyards and safe houses.

That’s not the only liberty Jenkins takes with the historical record. His adaptation is full of waking dreams, surreal imaginings and harrowing hallucinations. It’s history as viewed through a dream state — the creative mind at work — and it’s riveting to watch.

In many ways, Jenkins’ Underground Railroad is more cinema than what we regard casually — and somewhat dismissively — as TV. There are long silences, rare on TV, as the camera takes its time to linger on people’s faces, in real time, as shock and horror and hope and redemption pass fleetingly by. The cinematography, by Jenkins’ longtime collaborator James Laxton (the two made Moonlight together), is of the first order: The Underground Railroad is lit and photographed the way Hieronymus Bosch might have illustrated Milton’s Paradise Lost.

The sounds, sights and all-seeing omnipotence of Nature play a vital role in Jenkins’ interpretation, especially in the early scenes on the cotton plantations of Georgia, a virtual symphony of cicadas, flying wrens and northern cardinals, and south winds stirring in tall trees. Nature is beautiful, but it can be a terrible beauty, too: In a heart-stopping moment toward the end of the first hour, the girl fugitive Cora (Thuso Mbedu) is paralyzed in fear, rooted to the spot in brackish, knee-deep swamp water as a deadly water moccasin swims past her feet, a dead rodent in its jaws.

Those who complain about Underground Railroad’s surface gloss and bright sheen have got it wrong. The surface gloss and bright sheen are merely a cover for the horrific attitudes and human actions that lie underneath, a romanticized idea of freedom played out against a backdrop of cruelty and savagery.

The history itself is remarkable. In Philadelphia alone, according to one estimate, nearly 9,000 fugitive slaves passed through between 1830 and 1860.

Jenkins, inspired by Whitehead’s literary material, has created a work of art, a work of art that shines a much-needed light on a history that many still don’t know.

“I wanted to convey a very beautiful relationship between our ancestors and the land,” Jenkins told The Atlantic in a recent interview.

The light at the end of the tunnel in The Underground Railroad is both figurative and real. That’s what true art does. 

COVID-19: PBS Frontline Examines Fact v. Fiction in ‘The Virus That Shook the World’

Two things jump out at one when tuning in to watch the two-night three-hour PBS Frontline documentary The Virus That Shook the World.

First is a headline from BBC World News’ international website over this past weekend, more than a year after the first appearance of the coronavirus 2019-nCoV.

India Covid surge: Hospitals send SOS as record deaths registered, the headline reads.

Hospitals in India say their patients are dying — in record numbers — because of a shortage of oxygen, as Covid case numbers and deaths set a new record for a third day running. India has recorded nearly a million infections in three days, with 346,786 new cases overnight into Saturday, BBC reported, citing figures from the Johns Hopkins University’s Covid health tracker, the global standard for case reporting since the Covid crisis began in earnest in February, 2020. Today, the World Health Organization (WHO) says the situation in India is a “devastating reminder” of what the coronavirus can do.

Second is a reminder, midway through The Virus That Shook the World’s first night, of a remark early in the crisis by Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro, a noted Covid denier.

Covid is for losers, Bolsonaro intimated. The fat, the lazy and the weak, the flotsam and jetsam of society, the undesirables, those who won’t help themselves, the layabouts, the takers, the weirdoes — socialists, journalists, tree huggers and enemies of the state.

“Because of my history as an athlete,” Bolsonaro told the world, through the miracle of live TV, “if I were infected by the virus I wouldn’t need to worry. At worst it would be like a little flu.”

A little flu. Yes!

That was then, this is now.

Ravaged by Covid, Brazil today faces a hunger epidemic, with tens of millions of Brazilians facing hunger and food insecurity as the country’s Covid-19 crisis drags on, claiming thousands of lives every day. 

Brazil’s ‘rapid and violent’ Covid variant is devastating the entire region of Latin America. Miguel Nicolelis, a Brazilian scientist who has become one of the most vocal critics of Bolsonaro’s denialist response, told The Guardian newspaper over the weekend that global leaders must not ignore Brazil, which is “brewing variants left, right and centre.”

Watching The Virus That Shook the World, then, is like bearing witness to a slow-moving global catastrophe from inside a time capsule. The four-hour film is the work of Once Upon a Time in Iraq filmmaker James Bluemel, and was filmed cinéma vérité style, with no narration, weepy voiceover or tacky, AI-generated background music.

The faces, voices and stories in the film unfold chronologically, over the course of a year, as Covid took its deadly hold over the world. The Virus That Shook the World was filmed in 21 countries, in dozens of towns and cities. Hundreds of ordinary, everyday people tell heartbreaking stories about how the disease affected them personally, from the community activist in Bogotá, Colombia who decided the only way to help the poor in a country ravaged by economic inequality is to deliver food packages to the needy with no expectation of personal reward or enrichment but because it’s the right thing to do, to the middle-aged woman in Iceland who has to say goodbye to her elderly mother in a care home via an iPad, because Covid restrictions bar her from seeing her dying mother in person. She’s heartbroken because her mother raised her and her sisters on her own, a single mother, with just a factory job to support her, through times of real hardship.The daughter is frustrated and angry: How could a virus spread all the way from China to Iceland, she demands to know. 

There are no satisfactory answers, of course, other than the fact that viruses spread because their sole purpose for being is to invade hosts by any means possible, in order to survive.

That’s what lies behind the growing number of variants, which have virologists and epidemiologists worried because so many of these new variants — originating in South Africa, Brazil, India and other countries — show varying degrees of resistance to vaccines that, remarkably, were discovered, produced and distributed in mere months, a speed which would have seemed inconceivable just a few short years ago.

The Virus That Shook the World is harrowing, but also compelling to watch, because it’s tight and compressed, even at four hours, and never loses sight of its main focus, which is how ordinary people become extraordinary when placed in extraordinary circumstances.

The film opens with New Year’s Eve celebrations on Dec. 31, 2019 at London’s London Eye, the Millennium Wheel, and New York’s Times Square. “It was going to be a brilliant year,” a reveller recalls now, 16 months later. “2019 was rough.”

The first night is titled “The Shock of the New,” and it sets the scene early, with a young couple in Wuhan, China deciding to get married (“We found a reliable fortune teller and picked this date,” they recall haltingly, in an on-camera interview, wearing masks while maintaining social distancing). They were aware of “an unidentified type of pneumonia,” from reports on the local TV news, but other than that they knew next to nothing of what was about to happen, and no one was telling them, least of all those in charge in government or on the state-controlled media. In scenes that would be repeated around the world, within four days of lockdown in Wuhan, the couple recall, masks and hand sanitizer were sold out and the food market was closed.

Welcome to 2020, the Year of the Rat, the first zodiac sign in the Chinese zodiac circle. 

We’re now living in the Year of the Ox. In the Chinese calendar, oxes are known for their diligence, dependability, strength and determination, and reflect traditional conservative values. That may be the way forward, as The Virus That Shook the World’s second night opens with the title card “Brave New World.”

“We didn’t think too much about it because it was in China, a long way from us,” a health worker in Warwickshire, England recalls in the program, around the time the young couple from Wuhan were deciding to get married.

It would only be a matter of time before health workers, working on the front lines of the Covid pandemic, would have to meet the coronavirus head-on. “Oh my God, it’s arrived,” the doctor recalls thinking to herself. “I don’t remember the exact date, but it was early on. . . We didn’t know how to deal with it. There was no research. A lot of what we tried to do was wrong, because we didn’t know. We just didn’t know.”

For that community activist in Bogotá, there was only one thing he could think to do.

“If we do this right,” he told his community colleagues in Colombia’s crowded capital with its marked socioeconomic divides between rich and poor, “3,200 families can go to bed tonight with food in their bellies.”

The idea was to support as many people as they could reach, or at least try, and in so doing, “a beautiful spirit of solidarity began to emerge.”

Covid’s reach was, and remains, far and wide. There are many names worth remembering in The Virus That Shook the World but here’s one in particular. Takuma Kuikuro, a member of the indigenous Amazon tribe the Kuikuro, lives in a village called Ipatse, some 100 miles of rainforest away from the nearest city, is angry at his government’s response to Covid. “Covid has arrived in the village,” he tells the filmmakers. “My wife is sick. Others are sick, too. This means danger. We are really frightened.” 

From Bogotá to Buenos Aires, Milan to Reykjavik, Paris to Barcelona, and Istanbul to Nairobi, the beat goes on, a slipstream of harrowing images and sad anecdotes. “Nobody should have to die alone,”a doctor says, with a mixture of anger and heartbreak. “That is not dignified, that is not humane. And yet that is what was happening every day.”

And then the world intruded — the murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn. last May that triggered Black Lives Matter mass marches, despite pandemic lockdowns, followed by a catastrophic explosion in Beirut, Lebanon that August, caused by careless storage of 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate — incredibly, captured on smartphone video at the exact moment the explosion occurred, shown on the program.

Entire societies were on edge, globally, around the world, and all of them linked directly or indirectly through SARS-CoV-2.

The Covid deniers still have their say, of course, from a certain world leader at the time who kept calling it “the China virus” and told anyone who’d listen, “It goes away, it’s going away,” to Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, shouting for the cameras at a pick-up hockey game in a park in Minsk, in mid-winter: “There are no viruses here! You haven’t noticed them flying around, have you!? . . . Stay in your foreign lands!”

Cue polka music, complete with dancing accordions.

The first night of The Virus That Shook the World ends with a line picked up on microphone over a sea of pensive faces at a wake, “We’re all in this together.”

The second night ends with a doctor, suffering Covid at home on New Year’s Eve, 2020, telling the camera, “Good riddance to 2020. Because, I’ll tell you what, 2021 cannot be any worse than 2020.”

Perhaps, for the first time in a long time, it may be possible to believe that’s true.

                                                               •

The Virus That Shook the World’s premieres Monday, April 26 on PBS at 9/8c and continues on Tuesday at 10/9c, and will stream after that on YouTube and at PBS.org.

'Hemingway' — The Man v. The Myth

Filmmakers Lynn Novick and Ken Burns Expose a Giant of American Literature Through a 21st-Century Lens

“No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.”

    — Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) in Midnight in Paris, 2011.

It’s on the third night of Hemingway, the new PBS documentary from co-filmmakers Lynn Novick and Ken Burns, that the man himself is laid bare and the life story of an American literary giant takes on an almost Shakespearean quality: a tale not so much an homage of an old man and the sea as a cautionary tragedy about death in the afternoon.

Hemingway’s reputation — as a man worth remembering, if not one of the generational stylists of 20th-century American fiction — had already taken a battering in the early years of the twenty-first century, as one English writer put it:  too white, too male and too privileged.

In a way,  this was bound to happen as the tumultuous events of the Spanish Civil War and Second World War receded in time, and those old enough to witness those years in person themselves passed away to history.

Even so, even Hemingway’s most ardent critics could not have foretold a day when the actor Jeff Daniels, who speaks Hemingway’s words and recites passages from his novels during the voiceover for the six-hour film, told reporters during a PBS press event to promote the program, somewhat caustically, “Lucky for him he could write.”

Hemingway’s failings as a father, husband and decent human being don’t affect Hemingway’s novels, at least not the great ones — For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Moveable Feast, The Sun Also Rises and, especially, A Farewell to Arms, of which it is said Hemingway rewrote the ending 47 times before sharing it with his publisher and editors. They shouldn’t, anyway, but we’re living in the Age of Celebrity, when anyone in the public eye is judged by who they are as much as for what they do, even if “who they are” is based on speculation, conjecture and other people’s personal, biased and in some cases mistaken perceptions.

Together, over the years and decades, Burns and Novick have assembled a body of work rooted in biographical detail and human frailties, and how the two are often inseparable, starting with Burns’ seminal, groundbreaking 1990s series The Civil War and from there working through Jazz, Baseball, The War (a chronological, seven-night, 14-hour account of America’s involvement in the Second World War, jumping back and forth between events in Europe and the Pacific as they happened, told through the eyes of the men and women who were there) and 2017’s The Vietnam War, 10 hours of recent history as it unfolded both in Southeast Asia and on the home front, as protests against the war became intertwined with the Civil Rights Movement and the tectonic cultural shifts of the times.

Hemingway is different, in that it is about one person, and yet also similar, in that it reflects the culture, mood and temper of the times. What it says about us today is another matter.

Daniels is not the only established actor to provide voiceover in Hemingway: Meryl Streep reads the words of Martha Gellhorn, herself one of the great war correspondents of the day and Hemingway’s third wife; Pauline Pfeiffer, Mary-Louise Parker and Keri Russell read the words of Hemingway’s other wives, Patricia Clarkson, Mary Welsh and Hadley Richardson.

“We were drawn to trying to get at a real Hemingway,” Burns said. “I think the persona of the wild man, the drunk, the bar guy, the big-game hunter, the big-sea fisherman is what we inherited, the baggage we carried with us as filmmakers.

“Fortunate for us, that became boring after a while. I don't think Hemingway would survive if that's all he was, that barroom guy. He had the great discipline to write every single da, and all these other things were competing under the surface.

“Everything we thought we knew beforehand, we lost the moment we began this project.”

For her part, Novick took pains to separate Hemingway the artist from Hemingway the man.

“It becomes exhausting, as someone says in the film, to be Hemingway after a while. 

“It was wonderful to discover him young, when he was a young man at the beginning of his life and his career, the kind of energy and discipline he had before he became this stereotype of an iconic figure. It became difficult, as he got older, to try to live up to the image he created for himself. That's where the trajectory of his life takes us.”

Burns argued that Hemingway’s macho persona, while not an act exactly, was a mask.

“He constructed a mask that was false,” Burns said. “But even with that mask in place, the mask of the big-game hunter et cetera, he was also looking for a kind of truth about things.  

“What's so good in the great novels, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, and for me particularly, the short stories, of which there are 10, 12, 15 masterpieces of great art, he is telling us essential things about how human beings are. He is confronting those demons, going into those dark places, but he is also coming back with news for us.

“As we confronted the negative failings of his character, it became important to us that his art transcended that and basically didn't excuse it. And we do not excuse him. We hold his feet to the fire in dozens of ways. We found that, as we often find with great artists, there is this terrible price to pay for those who are closest to that person and, of course, most notably to one's self.” 

“In some ways this is the most adult film I’ve made. I said this to Lynn all the way through the process of making this film — how complicated it is to be able to tolerate contradiction, to be able to tolerate undertow, to understand that he could be one thing and the opposite of that thing at the same time.”

Novick admitted she had preconceptions about Hemingway the man, at the outset of a project that consumed nearly 10 years of her life, but the more she learned, the more she began to see the contradictions.

“When we started the project, I wasn't sure how I was going to feel, and what it would feel like to spend six hours with him as a viewer. He was unkind and hurtful to people, and self-centred. He had a lot of character flaws that made it difficult to be around him, and that was especially true of those closest to him, in his family, the women who were married to him, or those people who helped him along the way. He was terrible to so many of the great friends he had. He had a talent for becoming alienated from people who cared about him, and hurting people in the way he betrayed them in his work.

“And yet at the end, having spent the time we did, to try to get under his skin, I felt t more compassion for him and his struggles with his demons.

“Maybe it was thinking about the mental illness in the family, and the burden of being this hyper-masculine man in the world he made for himself, and what that was to have to live up to. There's something really sad there. I felt more compassion and concern for him, especially towards the end.We certainly don't let him off the hook, though.”

“And then there's the work. It became more important to me, seeing the different drafts, seeing the manuscript pages, seeing how hard he worked, seeing how seriously he took it, all the way through, even when he wasn't always creating good work. Not every word he wrote is pure genius, but when it is, there's nothing better.

“So, for me in the end, it was like coming full circle, learning to appreciate his humanity.”

For his part, Daniels — never fond of Hemingway the man — found it intriguing, compelling even, as a voice actor to try and get under Hemingway’s skin through his spoken words.

“He's not the first artist to battle demons. It is pretty common. He had a lot going on inside him, though. And for that once-in-a-lifetime art to come out of him, from underneath or through or around all those inner battles that he fought — I find that interesting. Because he could just as easily have quit and stopped writing, and become a drunk. But he didn't. He didn't. That I find interesting.”

Despite his experience as a filmmaker, Burns admitted that, even for him, Hemingway presented a unique challenge.

“There's a short distance between terrifying and exhilarating. That's where you have to live,” Burns said. “Every project has its own kind of inner problems to solve. Some problems are the same, but many of them are different. On the one, what kept us awake at night was the terror of knowing that he was he's an artist, whose art is words. We are filmmakers, and what we do is put pictures on the screen with words and music and everything else. You can't just always look at the words. We have to be showing something. And if it doesn't work, if it’s false, the whole thing falls apart.

“We imagine ourselves reading these books, what we think that looks like, and then there are pictures of the real things Hemingway saw himself representing in his work, but he's making things up, too. The constant pressure of deciding what to show, when we’re talking about works of fiction, was a bigger challenge than what I hope shows in the final film.”

The grace and spirit of Hemingway’s early writing survives, even as his reputation as a man is diminished, as reflected in a flashback to Paris in the 1920s, in Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris, in which Hemingway (played by Corey Stoll) says, “It was a good book because it was an honest book, and that’s what war does to men. There’s nothing fine and noble about dying in the mud unless you die gracefully. And then it’s not only noble but brave.”

In the end, perhaps the one unassailable truth about Ernest Hemingway is that he’s gone out of fashion on occasion, but never out of print.