NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns, whose documentaries have covered all things American — from baseball to country music to the Vietnam War, is now turning his attention to the iconic literary figure, Ernest Hemingway.
Burns and longtime collaborator Lynn Novick have teamed up again to provide an intimate look into Hemingway’s life and work, his influence on literature, and to uncover the man behind the myth in a three-part, six-hour series which premieres Monday at 8 p.m. ET on PBS.
Burns told WCBS 880’s Steve Scott that the thought of doing a series on Hemingway first emerged in the 1980s and finally started coming to life in 2014 when they filmed their first interview with Patrick Hemingway, the writer’s surviving son.
The documentarian said they were anxious to get beyond the mythology of Hemingway as “the macho, deep sea fisherman, big game hunter, bullfighter aficionado, outdoorsmen, brawler, bon vivant, and womanizer” to get to the core of a deeply complex, flawed and tragic figure.
“He helped construct an elaborate myth to protect himself — he thought — it actually squeezed him down to nothing,” Burns said. “It doesn't excuse any of the impossibilities of his behavior, it's still intolerable, but also you begin to understand it and understand the sort of huge pile of pathologies that build up in the course of his life that contribute to his early death. It becomes a kind of tragedy of a Shakespearean proportion, which is so interesting because of his influence on our literature.”
The documentary dives into the real-life events that influenced his most famous works, including witnessing his father perform complicated surgeries, which inspired the short story “Indian Camp,” and his wartime experience that shaped “A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
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It also explores his interest in gender fluidity, which Burns notes started when Hemingway was a child.
“His mother ‘twinned' him and his sisters, a Victorian-era custom of which she dressed them as boys and she dressed them as girls and all his life he exhibited this curiosity, we'd call it gender fluidity,” Burns said.
“He wanted his wives to cut their hair short and look like boys, he wanted to grow his long… So there's a very interesting other thing going on in the midst of this kind of macho guy.”
The film also looks at Hemingway’s four marriages and complicated relationships with women, along with the struggles during his final years.
“We discovered at least nine major brain traumas, concussions that could have caused CTE, his history of family mental illness, his father was a suicide, he had suicidal ideations before that, he had PTSD from nearly being killed as an 18-year-old in World War I as an ambulance driver, he's an alcoholic, he's self-medicating to keep going as an alcoholic, and those concussions are piling up over the course of his life and so by the end there's a kind of very complicated toxic brew of stuff,” Burns said.
Hemingway died by suicide in 1961 at age 61.
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The documentary features Jeff Daniels, who voices Hemingway, as well as Meryl Streep, Keri Russell, Mary-Louise Parker and Patricia Clarkson, who voice his four wives.
The late Sen. John McCain also provides moving commentary to demonstrate Hemingway's enduring influence.
“In our film, you meet John McCain, who believes that the hero of his great novel ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls" — Robert Jordan — is him,” Burns said. “He discovered it as a little boy and read it back to back and spends his life in a kind of relationship with a fictional character, who is deeply flawed and fighting for a deeply-flawed cause, but trying to do it honorably. And it's an amazing commentary on the book and on John McCain, who was a friend of mine, and it was one of the last interviews that he gave so we felt this was a beautiful posthumous gift that he's given us all in his incredibly candid comments about that particular novel and Hemingway in general.”
Fans of Burns can look forward to a slew of new works that are in the pipeline.
By September, he expects to release a four-part, eight-hour biography of Muhammad Ali.
A two-part biography of Benjamin Franklin is also in the editing room.
Other projects include a history of the U.S. and the Holocaust, a look at the American Revolution, a study of Lyndon B. Johnson and the Great Society, and the story of the American Buffalo.
Click here to learn more about "Hemingway," which will be available to stream for free on all station-branded PBS platforms, including PBS.org and the PBS Video App, available on iOS, Android, Roku streaming devices, Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung Smart TV and Chromecast.
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