A Conversation with the Filmmakers Behind 'Leonardo Da Vinci,' the Latest Ken Burns Documentary

Leonardo Da Vinci premieres on WTTW and the PBS app in two parts on Monday, November 18 and Tuesday, November 19 at 7:00 pm. 
Further explore the documentary and Da Vinci at wttw.com/davinci soon.

The term “Renaissance man” may as well have been coined to describe Leonardo Da Vinci. Best known today as a painter and artist who created some of the most famous images in Western culture – the Mona Lisa, the Vitruvian Man – he was also an insatiably curious thinker who studied human anatomy and optics, dreamt up machines for flying and war, delved into physics and biology and geology and more. All of this is on display in the thousands of pages of notebooks that he filled with drawings and writings in backwards mirror script.

The latest documentary from Ken Burns and his team tries to encompass Da Vinci’s multitudinous pursuits and put viewers “in between his ears,” as the filmmaker David McMahon says. We spoke to him and filmmaker Sarah Burns about Da Vinci, their approach to covering one of the most famous artists of all time, and what they took away from their time immersed in his work. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What’s your elevator pitch for how you describe Da Vinci?

David McMahon: You're asking us, the Ken Burns people to give you something short?

Sarah Burns: It feels so hard to describe him. There's something unique about him in how much he was across all of these different disciplines. It's curiosity that feels like the defining feature, if you had to pick one. That's what leads him to his interest in all of these different subjects. He wants to know everything about everything. He's just obsessively, incessantly curious.

Why did you decide to use split screens and include so much footage of nature?

Burns: We thought from the very beginning that this was going to be a way that we might demonstrate Leonardo's lateral thinking. This was someone who was making these connections across all the different disciplines that he was interested in, so it was a visual representation of the way that he was observing things and drawing things and thinking about things: for example, seeing spirals in nature and thinking about how they could be useful in a machine. It’s all towards the ultimate goal of how to get inside Leonardo's head.

Why did you want to include people like the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro or theater director Mary Zimmerman in addition to biographers and scholars?

McMahon: There are many ways into Leonardo, and these are people who found a distinct way in. So a heart surgeon from the UK, an engineer from Caltech, a filmmaker – all people who had suggested an interest in Leonardo and some inspiration. I think what you get from this range of voices is this incredible enthusiasm for Leonardo’s life and what he left behind.

Someone in the show says that Da Vinci is so varied that “each of us could find something different in him.” What do you find in him?

McMahon: I think his genius was in his ability to stay with something until he discovered the thing that he suspected was out there about it. What allowed him to do that was a colossal imagination that permitted him to think up things and ways of approaching stuff that no one had. He’s in a time when thinkers had been relying on wisdom that was 17, 18, 19 centuries old. They hadn’t challenged it. They hadn't tried to put their own spin on it. He is doing all of that challenging, and it's profound.

Burns: The powers of observation that he gets from his curiosity. I feel like we could all try to emulate Leonardo a little bit in our everyday lives, just in the noticing of things: stepping outside and studying the beating wings of a dragonfly, or how a bird flies. There's something in his curiosity that feels like a kind of awe about the natural world that I think is good.

What do you find to be his most remarkable achievement, or one that speaks to you the most?

McMahon: I could probably answer this differently any time, because there are a lot of works that I woke up to when somebody explained why they were profound to them. It felt revelatory when Monsignor Timothy Verdon explained what was happening in The Virgin of the Rocks. It helped me wake up to the idea that Leonardo was able to find other layers in stories from the Bible that many other painters had done. He was able to find the humanity in a character like Mary. He was able to find drama in a scene that had otherwise seemed sleepy. And that was because of what he would bring to the painting, which is, he wanted to understand how the human body responds to something dramatic. Why do we make the facial expressions we do? Why does our pulse quicken, and how does it show up in our bodies, and how do you paint that? He's looking for experiences that the characters in these well-told stories are having and trying to see them anew and apply all his understanding of science and nature to that.

Burns: The Mona Lisa was a little bit intimidating, because it's probably the most famous painting on earth. I think that it's easy to feel like, “I'm not sure I get what the big deal is.” But to hear Francesca Borgo in the film explain what makes this such a special painting was an amazing experience for me, to get to think anew about this most famous painting in the world. This is a culmination of Leonardo's work: the scientific inquiry to try to understand the human body and nature and how it's all connected, and then how to put that in a painting. It takes on a lot more meaning.