Even if you are meant to be the one interviewing Ric and Ken Burns, it will inevitably end up as a back-and-forth between the two brothers.
Something Dante wrote reminds them of a passage from Ecclesiastes, and then come Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Eugene O'Neill, and the lyrics from a B-side Beatles track, at which point they have traversed about seven centuries and three continents away from the original question, whatever it was.
The referential well runs deep but it’s never without some self-analysis (“I wish I wasn’t so long-winded,” laments Ric with a kind laugh.) and the culmination to a greater point.
In this way, a conversation with the Burns brothers is not unlike their films, equal parts disarmingly rigorous and endlessly.
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