How do you feel DVD technology is changing the way that documentaries are done, how history is recorded, and what kind of impact this is going to have in your future projects?

Well, I think it is obviously changing. The technology adds certain things that you can do, certain bells and whistles that can be added to it. But I think at the end of the day, we're going to make films that are going to tell stories, whether it's documentaries or feature films, in the same way. What you must have noticed by looking at the DVDs is that the content of the Civil War hasn't altered. It is - seems to be the tendency of a lot of directors to go in and tweak and add things that they couldn't put in before and alternative scenes, and I'm less interested in that. It would be sort of like asking a painter to go back into a blue period and change it to red. So the question becomes what kind of value added can you use with a DVD?

In the case of the Civil War, it was really clear. The film was made back in 1990. The technology was such that by the time we crudely transferred just to video, the film had lost several generations. And producing this DVD at this time allowed us to go back and literally frame by frame from the original negative make this film look and - because we also remixed it to stereo - sound better than it ever has - better than I had ever seen it, better than anything since the original moment of recording the image. So that's the principle advantage of that - is the quality and the clarity of the digital world has permitted us to do that. It also afforded us twelve years out to take a little time and provide extra, like the making of the restored version, to go back and gather the threads of the short history that has taken place since the Civil War came out, that is to say, the kind of response we had - interviews with Shelby Foote to see how it changed his life, interviews with critics like George Will and Stanley Crouch, who I think have been pretty keen observers, interviewers with thee musicians.

By the way, I feel compelled to add that none of that stuff I produced. I didn't want to have anything to do with soliciting compliments or criticisms from people, and so this was something that PBS did entirely on their own. We then also supervised the making of the quiz and biographical information, and added maps that combined to make, along with some commentary that I gave, and I hope in sparse ways or consciously sparse ways, the bells and whistles that I think make this thing attractive. But the headline is this looks and sounds better than it ever has.

Can you talk about what some of the technologies were that were used?

I wish I could. You are talking to - not so much the original Luddite, but someone who only reluctantly just gave up editing on analog - editing by hand and things like that. And I basically finish my mix and turn it over to the supervising editor, Paul Barnes, who works - and has for the last several years -with the Tape House in New York, and specifically an extraordinarily talented man, John Dowdell, who together supervised the transfer of the Civil War.

How do you view DVD? Do you look at it as the ability to add more information or do you look at it as just another way for a different form of audience to see your work?

I think it iss the latter. It is important, as I was saying earlier, to add some of these extra things because of the nature of the beast, and it is possible to do that. But I don't feel compelled because I have enjoyed this special relationship with public television, that the so-called directors cut that you see so many people presenting in their DVD version, I already had the great good fortune to make, finish and present my directors cut. So what you're seeing is what I do.

Is there anything you wish could have been on the DVD that didn't make it?

Oh, no. That's a good question. No, not at all. I got presented with an array of other options, like alternative scenes, things like that, and I essentially vetoed them in favor of focusing our attention on the quality of the imagery and the sound, and then providing what I think are not so much modest, but simple, fitting the series itself - simple additions to it. The maps are just the maps we used in the series brought out and isolated. The biographies are essentially extrapolations from the series and stand alone.

In one of the supplemental sections of BASEBALL - another of your documentaries - you discuss really trying to answer the question of who we are as Americans.

It is a huge question, and it really is impossible to answer. I think the more important thing is we know in our own personal lives. And if you're a parent, you certainly know it. If you're a lover, you know it. If you're engaged in life, it's there - that it's really the asking of the question. I woke up about three films into my professional life after Brooklyn Bridge, Shakers, Badge of Liberty, Huey Long. They're all diverse subjects, and I approached them differently. And they have some of the hallmarks of what has been called my style, but I felt that they were hugely different, one from the other. But I had my first kind of panic that I was making the same film over and over again, and then a sense of relief that I was, insofar as they were all animated by the same question - who are we? And I began to see my own professional work.

You have to understand that I'm not a historian, I'm a filmmaker. So history to me is like choosing watercolor or oil for a painter or a painting in landscapes and not still lifes. It's just a kind of choice, a place - a way to practice. So what I'm practicing is my filmmaking skills, and I'm asking at the same time this question - who are we? Who are those strange and complicated people that like to call themselves Americans. And while on the surface these films seem quite distinct, and certainly defined a through line between the Civil War, Baseball and Jazz - my so-called trilogy - may at first blush seem difficult. They are, nevertheless, united. And maybe it's less important to go through those things that we are, and what we are is freedom loving, improvisational people who have a - who find ourselves existing in a tension between Puritanism and excess, about community and the individual - all these different tensions.

But that the whole course of America's history, quite distinct from any other history, seems to be what has animated my work. And so I can find the through line of the Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz, and indeed connect it to the celibate religious sect, the Shakers, and to Huey Long, the powerful Southern demagogue. So I'm not really answering your question because while I don't answer the question who are we, I deepen the asking of it. And it's really up to everybody else to see like sonar what bounces back as I ask this question.

Since you consider yourself more of a filmmaker than necessarily a historian, what sort of I guess historical impact though do you think your filmmaking has?

Well, I think it has a pretty profound one, and I say that modestly. I think it's because it's on television, and so it tends to reach a lot of people. I think the films are well made, and I think that that helps increase the audience. But more to the point, these are sort of things that prime the pump. After, as we were just talking about to the question from Virginia, after the Civil War series, battlefield attendance went up at national park sites 200-300" in some cases. Shelby Foote called me on the phone and said, "Ken, you made me a millionaire." People were buying his 3,000 page, three volume, $105, beautiful narrative of the thing. It prompted study. It prompts investigation. And while I suppose the pessimist who sees the glass half empty can worry that what happens in an essentially superficial medium like film and television, when that's the only source that people get their information and what kind of responsibilities do you have to that.

Nonetheless, the history of these films have been that they've prompted so much additional reading, so much additional travel and investigation that I think it really undermines the worry. At the same time, when I make the film I don'tt have any kind of arrogance that I know what it's about. And so I surround myself with the foremost scholars and experts who guide us in interpretations, if we're going to make interpretations, we really do, and rather listen to all the influences and try to figure out the best way to tell the story.