Ken Burns Thinks Leonardo da Vinci Would Be a Filmmaker If He Were Alive Today

The legendary documentarian also described what was the biggest surprise in his journey to bring the Renaissance polymath's life to TV.

Ken Burns achieved a milestone this month with his two-part four-hour “Leonardo da Vinci” documentary: It’s the first time he’s ever made a film about a non-American subject.

In a new interview with NY1 show “The Rush Hour,” Burns talked a bit about how much of a kinship he feels with Leonardo. Despite the artist and scientist living 500 hundred years ago, he’s a startlingly contemporary figure. In fact, Burns thinks he and Leonardo would share a profession if Leonardo was alive and working today.

“The scary thing is, I think he’d be a filmmaker,” Burns said. “You look at the last supper, and you think it’s a frozen moment. It’s not. It’s a frozen six or seven moments. And there seems to be movement implicit in some of the paintings, including ‘The Mona Lisa’ and ‘The Virgin in the Rocks’ and ‘The Virgin and the Child with Saint Anne’ and all of that stuff. You feel there’s movement in it! I think he’d be a filmmakers, which means we’d all be out of business, because this guy would be fantastic.”

Burns’s daughter Sarah Burns co-directed the documentary alongside her father and David McMahon. On a recent IndieWire Toolkit podcast with Sarah Shachat, Sarah Burns said something very similar about Leonardo being a filmmaker if he were alive today.

“We definitely talked about this feeling like maybe if Leonardo lived today, would he be a filmmaker?” Sarah Burns told IndieWire. “There is something [in filmmaking] that feels like his interest in observation and in making connections between things, the way he integrated things visually. You could just see him loving the medium of film.” 

“Except he’d never deliver a film on time,” Ken Burns joked. 

In talking to NY1’s “The Rush Hour” and host Annika Pergament, Ken Burns elaborated a bit more on why he wanted to choose Leonardo as a subject.

“Walter Isaacson, a biographer of him, was trying to convince me to do it, and I said, ‘Walter, I don’t do non-American topics.’ Walked out of the dinner sort of perturbed that he’d pushed it all dinner, and told my daughter Sarah and my son-in-law David McMahon that Walter had been doing this, and they said, we can do it. And I realized we could.”

“Getting to know Leonardo is one of the greatest gifts I’ve had professionally, and I hope we’ve been able to share what’s so special about him. He was interested in what he said were the intentions of the mind. You see in his paintings what somebody’s thinking and feeling, as well as who they are in three dimensions. It’s a spectacular achievement. To be close to that is really exciting.”

As far as what surprised Burns the most, it was how little of a record Leonardo left about how he felt about his work. “He left 4,000 pages of manuscripts, but nothing in his diary,” Burns said. “It’s not, ‘How I feel about this.’ It’s all theories. Our job was to let go of the fact that we didn’t have a tabloid tick-tock and to get into what he believed and what he thought. And what he thought about were the big, essential questions: who are we, what’s the nature of the universe, what am I doing here, what’s my purpose?”

“Leonardo da Vinci” is available on demand on PBS now.