Ken Burns and His ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ Co-Directors on Why They Broke Their Rules for PBS’ Portrait of the Renaissance Icon

More than 500 years after his death, the works of Leonardo da Vinci have never been more ubiquitous. “Mona Lisa” just got her own Lego set, and recently played a central role in Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.” A controversial allusion to his famed “The Last Supper” during this summer’s Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony reacquainted the masses with the iconic image’s origins, and his “Vitruvian Man” is still a staple on the walls of anatomy classrooms across the globe.

The Italian Renaissance painter and intellectual, who produced only around 20 paintings in his lifetime, was the epitome of a man ahead of his time. He also happens to be exactly the kind of posthumously appreciated figure about which Ken Burns has spent his career making seminal documentary films. Yet, more so than any of his previous subjects, the Emmy-winning filmmaker thinks da Vinci could have mastered the modern day.

“Of all the historical characters I have ever gotten involved with, he would be the least disturbed to be dropped into the present,” Burns tells Variety. “He would be curious how we figured out this or that. He would see we went to the moon and ask, ‘How did you handle the gravity thing?’”

In a new two-part documentary film for PBS on da Vinci’s life, co-directed and written by Ken Burns’ daughter Sarah Burns and his son-in-law David McMahon, the trio of filmmakers leave their comfort zone of the American history canon for the first time to focus on a subject who lived before the United States was even a germ of an idea. (For ease of identification, this story will refer to Ken and Sarah Burns by their first names from here.)

“It was a wonderful liberation that this restless, curious human being gave us,” Ken says. “We get distracted by the wizard, the old man with the beard, the Gandalf of Leonardo. But that distracts us from the joyful thing about him. He’s not a tortured artist like Michelangelo. He is just this incredible presence to be around, who never ever relents from questioning everything.”

But Ken initially refused the mere suggestion of a documentary on da Vinci, first brought to him by historian and biographer Walter Isaacson, on the grounds that it simply wasn’t his area of focus. Yet, in talking with Sarah and McMahon, they convinced him there was no harm in broadening one’s artistic horizons –– a philosophy da Vinci would have likely cosigned. “Oh right, this old dog can learn a new trick,” Ken says of his change of heart.

In the film, now streaming on PBS.org and local PBS affiliates, they make the case that da Vinci is the greatest painter ever to have lived, an argument that would find few dissenters considering his landmark works are among the most recognized and replicated pieces of art in history. But more than just his talents with a brush, the film’s Greek chorus of experts from artistic and theological corners of the world reinforce the belief that da Vinci was also one of mankind’s greatest thinkers with an insatiable thirst for knowledge. From early renderings of flying machines to anatomical drawings of the circulatory system, da Vinci never stopped learning, even if the world wasn’t quite ready for his observations.

“To me, the epitome of his story is that the things he spent his time on had no meaning in his lifetime,” Ken says. “He figured out how the human heart worked. He built a model based on ox hearts and human dissections. Because of him, there were no longer two chambers of the heart like the Greek physician Galen had sent down 1,300 years before. There are four, and he knew how the valves worked. He had no purpose for that knowledge. No one was doing heart surgery [in 16th century Italy]. The idea of cardiology didn’t exist yet. But he knew about these things without a microscope or telescope centuries before we knew them. I love that.”

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, one of the documentary’s interview subjects, notes in the second episode that da Vinci “carries with him all the questions of the world.” But they didn’t die with him in 1519 at the age of 67. He wrote down these questions in thousands of pages of notebooks, where he also pondered the answers through profoundly detailed sketches. In the absence of photographs and archival footage of his life, which have long defined the Burns family’s documentary style, the notebooks served as the filmmakers’ pole star, as McMahon calls it, to understanding an enigmatic man.

“We are reflecting Leonardo back,” Sarah says. “The question becomes: how can we represent him? Because we are using the notebooks to get inside his head, we plunge into his eye at the very beginning of the film, so it really feels like we are in his brain and thinking about what he is seeing and questioning, and making these extraordinary connections across disciplines and nature.”

To reanimate the world as da Vinci would have seen it, the filmmakers use split screen as a means of visually interpreting his notes. Juxtaposing footage of natural wonders like flowing streams and the flapping of a bird’s wings with his sketches, they illustrate the intricate concepts of movement and gravity that plagued da Vinci’s mind. He often tinkered with sketches of inventions he would never actually make, but when looked at through a modern lens, they are strikingly familiar. For example, he was obsessed with flying, and conjured up designs that would have challenged the Wright Brothers in their day.

“His mind was sort of prefiguring all of this,” Ken says. “He is asking us, in some ways, to dream, and we have taken the dreams of Leonardo and made them real.”

Across the four-hour documentary, his paintings also tell the story of a man on an artistic journey of discovery. Working with Big Star Animation, the filmmakers digitally recreated the process by which da Vinci devised some of his greatest works. The first episode closes out with a step-by-step rendering of “The Last Supper,” the foundation of which was geometric lines used to create symmetrical drama among the disciples at Christ’s dinner table. To da Vinci, math was art.

“We had the problem of not wanting to show the painting at the beginning of a story that was about making that painting, and the years it would take to do it,” McMahon says. “We wanted to have a big reveal at the end of that story, so that animated sequence does a few things. Specifically, it helps us pass time. They did a really cool thing where you see sunlight pass across the space, you see an echo of the scaffolding going up, and the various coats of paint being slapped onto the wall.”

As for interpreting the paintings, they leave that to their expert panel of art historians, painters, theater directors, filmmakers, engineers, writers and even heart surgeons who interrogate the da Vinci immortalized in each brush stroke.

Monsignor Timothy Verdon takes the viewer through a theological reckoning with “The Virgin of the Rocks.” Artist Carmen Bambach narrates the unfolding artistry of “The Last Supper.” Art historian Francesa Borga dissects “The Mona Lisa” as more than just this mysterious smirking woman, but rather as a late-in-life culmination of all everything da Vinci had taught himself.

“Suddenly, it is not like you are listening through those little earphones at the art museum as you are walking through the gallery,” Ken says. “You are being held and cradled and imparted stuff that our own inattentiveness often misses.”

Like da Vinci, the filmmakers don’t encourage passive engagement either. For this film, they present English, Italian and French subjects all speaking in their native languages with subtitles. Actor Adriano Giannini also reads da Vinci’s words in both Italian and English. They require audiences to lean into the material. “We wanted to hear all these languages and understand how incredibly universal all of these strivings are,” Ken says.

The first voice heard though, besides da Vinci’s own words, is del Toro, a somewhat unexpected presence chosen specifically because Sarah had read that he was inspired by da Vinci to keep notebooks filled with sketches of his cinematic creature creations. Ken says his “joyful playfulness about questioning the universe” in his gothic films like “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Shape of Water” is an undeniable echo of da Vinci’s own embrace of the entanglement threads of knowledge and imagination.

“They are not opposite things,” he says. “They are bound to one another, and you have in Leonardo somebody who, I would argue, is the person of the last millennium to understand that. The Brits have an argument for William Shakespeare, and the Germans have Mozart and Bach. Maybe we can offer a flawed Thomas Jefferson as somebody who distilled a century of Enlightenment thinking into this remarkable Declaration of Independence. But you know, Leonardo was all of those things.”

Yet, even he comes with his surprises. Some viewers may be shocked to learn da Vinci had a notorious habit of not finishing some of his greatest works. Whether something else stole his attention away or he feared what finishing a masterpiece truly meant, wrestling with those questions, Sarah Burns says, is what fueled their storytelling.

“Why didn’t he finish things?” she asks. “Even if we weren’t going to get the bottom of that, it felt like something interesting to explore. What is motivating this intense seeking and curiosity that he is applying to everything. To me, it is the thing that sets him apart.”

McMahon jokes they considered turning the documentary in to PBS unfinished at one point. “We could make the argument that it would have been a truer reflection of Leonardo’s artistic experience. Maybe we just end it with a message: ‘The filmmakers have found out everything they wanted to about this subject, and have moved on. Thank you for tuning in.’”

But of course, that’s not how they ended his story. The second episode builds, with almost pulse-quickening anticipation, to the 13-year process of painting “Mona Lisa,” a commissioned piece he never turned in and instead carried with him for his final years. The film luxuriates in her story, stripping away the painting’s pop culture ubiquity to expose what it meant to da Vinci’s oeuvre. Poured into the photorealistic portrait of noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo are every one of his skills as a painter, inventor, botanist and unmatched expert on water dynamics, gravity, anatomy and philosophy. But even now, Ken admonishes himself for trying to silo da Vinci’s expertise into such restrictive disciplines.

“The categories seem useless,” he says. “He didn’t recognize them. He flowed freely between them all the time. Which makes the ‘Mona Lisa’ a great work of science, and some of those anatomies in his notebooks great works of art. Even now, I can hear his voice in my head chastising me for needing to distinguish between the two. He didn’t distinguish between them, as nature doesn’t. And that was his great, all-encompassing teacher.”

Having dipped their toe in the wider world of biographical subjects, Ken, Sarah and McMahon differ on whether they might return to document international figures in the future.

Sarah and McMahon moved their family to Florence for a year during production, immersing themselves in the remnants of da Vinci’s world. From that experience, they are open to focusing on another artist or something overseas. McMahon says they are also eager to use more original scores, having worked with composer Caroline Shaw to create something wholly original that complemented da Vinci’s work and mind instead of using music from his time.

Ken, however, doesn’t have an immediate desire to commit to anything else outside the U.S. for the time being. He has his next films planned out through the end of the decade, one of which will be “Emancipation to Exodus,” about the Black experience in the aftermath of the Civil War, which he is currently co-directing with Sarah and McMahon.

For the past several years, his next solo project has also kept him closer to home: “The American Revolution.” According to Ken, the series, which includes six two-hour episodes, will debut next November (timed to the forthcoming 250th anniversary of the war) and is among the toughest films he’s ever made.

“We look at the Civil War and we permit it to be violent,” he says. “The same with World War I and World War II and Vietnam, of course. But we don’t allow that with our interest in the Revolution. We want to protect it, guard it and make it just seem like it was a bunch of guys thinking great thoughts –– and that is a big part of it. But the story is much more complicated than that.”

Nevertheless, it is a documentary that puts him squarely back in his comfort zone. But even during his da Vinci detour, he always had at least one tether back to the familiar. Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer for whom the North and South American continents are now named, was an acquaintance of da Vinci in the late 1400s. In that respect, he might have predated America, but da Vinci wasn’t that far removed from its origins after all.

“The thing I know best is our story,” Ken says. “But it doesn’t mean we couldn’t get up to speed on somebody else’s.”