Ken Burns talks Leonardo da Vinci Doc at the Nantucket Film Festival

Ken Burns attended the 29th annual Nantucket Film Festival, which ends Sunday, to give audiences a glimpse of his latest PBS documentary “Leonardo da Vinci.” The two-part, four-hour doc – directed by Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns and son-in-law David McMahon – explores the life and work of the 15th-century polymath. “Leonardo da Vinci,” which begins airing in November, marks the first Burns-directed project set entirely outside the continental United States.

Although his work on “Leonardo da Vinci” is finished, Burns has projects planned until 2029. Currently, the director is working on several documentaries, including ones about Lyndon B. Johnson, the American Revolution and Barack Obama.

Variety spoke with Burns about creating a doc not based on American history, his views on directing films with contemporary themes and why history never repeats itself.

Why did you decide to make Leonardo da Vinci the subject of your first non-American documentary?

I was working a few years ago on a film about Benjamin Franklin, and among the people we interviewed for that film was Walter Isaacson. I was having dinner with Walter and all of a sudden, in the middle of dinner, he started pushing Leonardo, and I just went, “Come on.” He thought that Benjamin Franklin is undoubtedly the great American word artist of the 18th century and the greatest scientist of the era, and Leonardo was the greatest scientist of his era and perhaps the world’s greatest artist at that time. He kept pushing and pushing, and finally I said, “Come on, Walter. Just leave it alone.” So I left the restaurant and called my oldest daughter [Sarah Burns] and the groom [David McMahon]. At the time, we were in the middle of working on a big, massive four-part biography of Muhammad Ali, and I said, “Walter is pushing Leonardo on me,” and they said, “We’re going to do Leonardo.” So the next morning I called Walter and said, “We’re going to do it.”

Do you think your da Vinci film speaks to what is happening today?

Human nature does not change. People think history repeats itself. It never does. No event happened twice. Mark Twain is supposed to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Whenever we’ve worked on a film, we focus on the film and the story we’re trying to tell. There are a million problems that we have to overcome and solve. When we’re done, we look up and go, “Wow. It’s so contemporary.” If I told you I was making a film about the mass demonstrations taking place against the current administration across the country; for a White House in disarray and obsessed with leaks; about asymmetric warfare that confused the mighty American military; to large documents of stolen classified material and allegations that a political party reached out to a foreign power to influence a national election – you’d say we’re talking now. Trump. But all of this is true in 2006, when I decided to make The Vietnam War. So there has never been a movie where when it talks about human nature, it doesn’t talk about the present. This shows you what a powerful teacher story can be and what stories about the past can be, because they will always speak in a relatively unbiased way to everything that is happening now.

What do you think will be da Vinci’s greatest victory?

So Leonardo is this gay man born out of wedlock who is the greatest painter of all time in some people’s minds. He is undoubtedly the greatest scientist of his era. He saw no difference between them [art and science]. And when you say, “How many paintings does he have?” People go, “I don’t know. Hundreds?” There are less than 20 and half of them were unfinished. He also has thousands upon thousands of pages of notebooks predicting things that won’t be revealed for 450 years. His description of the heart and how the heart valve works, they did not discover [what da Vinci knew about the heart valve] until the 1970s. It’s just incredibly impressive. So like the United States, which I’ve been so focused on, however flawed, it creates aspiration. This guy was using 75% of his brain and we are using 10%. What would it take to use more? This question alone, if it enlivens you even for a second of the day for a day, is better than not saying, “How can I be better? How can I be smarter? What could I see more clearly?”

Do you plan to make more documentaries based outside the US?

I can’t say never again, but I’m full of projects that are in the works until the end of this decade. They are all US citizens. The film Leonardo is coming out this November and then next November is my film on the American Revolution, which is a very challenging project. There are no pictures or newsreels. It’s a bloody and really complicated subject.

You are working on a document about Barack Obama. Is this your first film covering contemporary Americans?

Well, no. With the Obama document, it just needs to marinate. It’s like summer. The story is like that. You realize that it’s better when you leave and have a perspective and it’s not just journalism anymore. The closest [contemporary doc] we ever did was “The Central Park Five.” But even this came out 23 years after the crime and 10 years after they were acquitted.