An interview with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, producers of Ken Burns’ The American Revolution

The PBS documentary The American Revolution, produced by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, premiers on November 16, 2025. Producers Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt took time out of their busy schedules to talk to JAR about their experiences working on this landmark film, and some of the things they learned about the people and the time period.

Give us a quick recap of your background, and how you got involved with the PBS American Revolution documentary.

David: I’ve worked with Ken since I graduated college sixteen years ago, and I got to work with him and our other colleagues at Florentine Films on The Roosevelts, The Vietnam War, Benjamin Franklin, and now The American Revolution. I came into my work with Ken with a huge interest in history. I grew up in Virginia on the Virginia Peninsula, worked in Colonial Williamsburg, and was minutes from both Jamestown, where the British Empire in North America began, and Yorktown Battlefield, where the British Empire lost the United States. So, this history was always part of me and something I was really interested in, and it was wonderful to be able to bring together my experience working with Ken and Sarah on previous films to a subject that was really important to me personally.

Sarah: I have worked with Ken Burns at Florentine Films since 1997, and this is the third big series about a war that I’ve worked on. And I feel very fortunate that I got to work on The War, The Vietnam War, and then The American Revolution, in that order. It might not seem obvious why, but just the challenges and experiences of trying to understand those wars in that order, I think, makes some sense to me. I first was able to work with David on the Vietnam series. I would not have been able to produce that film without him, and it’s been an extraordinary privilege to work with him, and obviously Geoff Ward, Ken Burns, and our incredible team on the Revolution film. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that I was going to work on the Revolution; I came to the project later than Ken, David, and Geoff, and I’m really, really glad that it worked out for me to work on this film.

We understand that this production has been ten years in the making. Can you give us a quick walkthrough of the stages of development of a documentary like this?

Sarah: Audiences tend to really like to hear that regardless of the subject, our process is remarkably the same, and that might not seem obvious. So, whether we’re making a film about the American Revolution, the Vietnam War, the writer Ernest Hemingway, the era when Prohibition was passed and then repealed, Muhammad Ali, or the Roosevelts, the process is the same. We decide we’re going to make the film and we begin to raise money for that project. We get on public television’s schedule. We have a sense that it’s going to be multi-episodic. Our films are usually longer than what we originally believe they will be, but occasionally they are shorter. And then the first phase is Geoff Ward overwhelming himself with books and articles as he starts to read. We, too, overwhelm ourselves with books and start to read. We really spend a lot of time trying to identify who’s going to help us on camera, and each film and subject is so different this way. For the Revolution, we were looking at scholars from different disciplines and different backgrounds, different generations of scholars. We did some interviews back in 2018 when Ken and David were filming for Ben Franklin; those were some of the first interviews that we did because those historians were older. Then we filmed the majority of interviews in 2021-2022.

We do a lot of research thinking about the project, getting our heads around the stories we might tell. And then we start shooting. For a film like this, live cinematography was an enormous part of the project. Since we were making this film during Covid we took advantage of the fact that we could film outside and be safe and social distance and use that time where we couldn’t do a lot of the other work. After this initial phase of research, writing the script, shooting interviews, shooting live, and mastering some of the stories, the producers and researchers really dive into the archives. Meanwhile, Geoff delivers the first drafts of scripts. We work on those scripts and meet with advisors. We start editing as the visual research and the music research is coming together and then, for a film like this—while we’re editing—we record the extraordinary cast of voiceover work. This goes on for a year and half or so. After a two and a half year edit schedule we move into post-production and we back ourselves out from when we broadcast; so we kind of do the schedule backwards.

David: I won’t have as much to say because Sarah covered almost everything, but I would just say that we’re always churning up new information, new visuals, new music. We’re always developing what will be in the final product, even while we’re editing. A difference between this film and the Vietnam War film is an obvious one—there were living witnesses to the Vietnam War that we could interview. So that was a whole other thing that Sarah and Lynn did with people from Vietnam, the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. With this film, we obviously didn’t have that, but there are an awful lot of written records from people who experienced the period, whether they were writing it contemporaneously in letters to their family and in their diaries, whether they recorded it afterwards in memoirs, or, in the case of Mercy Otis Warren, in a book of history; she wrote one of the first histories of the Revolution. So we use that information to develop an incredibly rich cast of characters. So many different people experienced this war in different ways, and a lot of them are really good writers, and we were able to take their words and have them read by a really, really wonderful cast for this film. And of course, another difference is that there is no archival footage or photography, so we did a lot of research into archival paintings, newspapers, prints, drawings, and etchings, and in a dozen or so cases, we commissioned some new watercolors to capture a moment that hadn’t previously been depicted. And then we also used maps. Maps are all over this film; we commissioned some maps in the Vietnam War, but there is an order of magnitude more maps in this film. For a continent that has changed so much in 250 years, they’re absolutely essential. We have a lot of great people working with us—Mike Welt, Grace Bartosh, Molly Schwartz—who have made those maps possible.

Sarah: Making the Revolution was the opposite of Vietnam in every single way. It’s the opposite visually and musically, there are also no historians on camera in the Vietnam series; they’re all behind the camera. Here, the historians are on camera and the witnesses are the extraordinary third person voices read by such an incredible cast. And so it’s upside-down visually and content-wise, but the process stays the same. And I think one of the things that Ken really inspires everyone to do is to always look for a better piece of music, a better painting, a better sound bite, a better everything, so we’re always working on the film creatively, even right now, even though the film has actually been delivered. We try to make it better until the very last second.

Has the American Revolution era always been of interest to you, or was this a totally new era for you to work with?

David: It’s always been of interest to me, just because of where I grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, but I learned so much making this film that I like to joke that I thought I knew a thing or two about the Revolution, and I did, but it was really only a thing or two. There’s just such a wealth of information here that I’m really grateful to people like the Journal of American Revolution, for instance, for making it popularly known.

Sarah: I was born in 1972. I have very impressionistic memories of 1976, but I am a student of the 20th century. I was an American Studies major in college. I studied the post-war period, so 1945 onwards. Most of the films I’ve worked on have been in the 20th century, with the exception of Prohibition, which has a little bit of its roots in the 19th century. And so, I was really learning so much anew, as well as unlearning the four or five simple myths that I vaguely remember from grade school and high school in a Colonial America class that I took in college. But I have yet to make a film about a subject that I actually know very much about, and I’m really glad that’s the case. Even the subjects that I sort of know about, once I start working on the film, I realize I really know very, very little. And the best part of our job is that every few years, we change what we think about and get to know all the people who’ve spent their lives thinking about that subject and are very generous teachers to us.

Did making a documentary about this time period introduce any challenges, compared to other documentary projects you’ve worked on?

Sarah: We’ve been saying this a lot: what seemed like a problem—because the film takes place before the creation of still photography and moving footage, the traditional documentary evidence that we’re so famous for using in our films—ended up to be an opportunity. So we use a lot more live cinematography, paintings, all kinds of maps, pamphlets, graphics. And although it was a challenge, it was also really inspiring and exciting.

David: There’s a creative challenge in it. Working on The Vietnam War, I worked with archival footage. And there’s so much that we could probably still be digging things up. So there’s a tyranny of choice, as much as there’s a tyranny of not choice. And for the Revolution, there might be so little in some cases, we had to ask ourselves, what are we going to show? It became a creative challenge where we worked together to figure out what it was going to be that we saw on screen. And sometimes it was a really great idea that we never would have thought of if we didn’t have that obstacle.

Tell us a little bit about the educational tie-ins with the film—what is PBS doing besides airing the series?

Sarah: One of the reasons that we work in the public television world—and there are many—is that our films live on in the classroom. So while we were making the film, we were actually thinking about what the educational materials might look like. The American Revolution and the Semiquincentennial inspired us to begin educational material simultaneously to making the film. We are creating lots of lesson plans and other materials mostly geared to middle and high schools, although there will be some for elementary schools and college students. Working with teachers from across the country, PBS stations, libraries, and historians who are in the film, as well as other historians, we create educational materials that are teacher-curated and teacher-researched for students. The film airs in November of 2025, and then the educational materials will accompany them in the following school years: 2025, 2026, 2027, and so on. Teachers can use the film, clips of the film, subjects in the film, and themes in the film to help get at why the American Revolution is so important and worth studying. It’s a band of ten to fifteen teachers, four or five of our advisors, six or seven institutions, the National Constitution Center, Colonial Williamsburg, Mount Vernon, Monticello, iCivics, Smithsonian, National Archives, Library of Congress. Everybody’s doing stuff around the 250th Anniversary, and we’re trying to partner with as many people as possible and have our own lesson plans that are directly connected to the documentary.

David: Sarah’s the real expert on this. I’ll just say anecdotally that I watched The Civil War in high school, and it made a huge impression on me. In college, we watched parts of The Civil War, parts of Lewis and Clark, parts of Jazz, so I can say for sure that people have been teaching these films in the classroom for at least 25 years. I’m excited to have my work make it to classrooms, too.

There’s a lot of original footage in the series, including historic sites and reenactors. How did you go about finding the locations and the people?

Sarah: We owe a great deal of gratitude to Megan Ruffe, our co-producer, for doing the lion’s share of that work. It’s extremely important to call her out, and to call out Shyala Jayasinghe as well, who’s one of our amazing Associate Producers. I think while Ken, David, Geoff and I were figuring out the stories we were going to tell, the battles we were going to cover, the places we were going to go, Megan was simultaneously trying to figure out places that have been preserved, historically important places throughout the Thirteen Colonies. The landscape and the weather are major characters that mattered to the war. And then we worked closely with the National Parks, the local historic sites, the local historians, the local institutions to make this film; the whole world of reenactors and researchers became really good friends of the project and of our team, and we got to know them, and we worked with them without cameras and with cameras over a five or six year period of time. So I think we can’t be grateful enough to them. And we were trying to film the big, fancy, famous live reenactments that tend to correspond to big anniversaries that happen annually, and then we got to know smaller groups so we could do more impressionistic, more intimate shooting. And we worked with our editors and with Ken along the way to figure out how to film, and we often didn’t know how we were going to use stuff. We were just filming the life of soldiers, what the continent felt like and might have looked like, and tried to make something that was both beautiful and informative.

David: I just think that we, as filmmakers, owe an enormous debt of gratitude, not just to the people working today in this sphere, but to people who, over the last 250 years, have preserved our history. That’s the National Park Service, Monticello, Mount Vernon, Colonial Williamsburg, Old Sturbridge Village, Historic Deerfield, the American Battlefields Trust. There’s a lot of people who have given themselves—their lives, really—to make sure that our history stays where it was, on the ground, and preserve it and curate it. And we are really grateful to them. And they were really easy to work with. They do a lot of great work.

The series is twelve hours long. How much footage did you gather to result in that twelve hours? Was there anything that you really wanted to keep that just couldn’t be included?

David: We film hours-long interviews with many, many people, and there are a lot of good answers that are on the cutting room floor. We felt like this was the film that we needed to make, so there’s no real regret in what isn’t in the film. We think it’s representative of people’s experiences who lived through the American Revolution. But there’s obviously more story than you can tell in just 12 hours. The American Revolution involved millions of people. It lasted eight years, and we’re still feeling its reverberations today.

What can you tell us about the process of selecting which footage to use?

Sarah: We owe a huge debt of gratitude to our extraordinary editors, Tricia Reidy, Maya Mumma, Chase Horton, and Craig Mellish, and their incredible assistants and apprentices. We hand over ten-to-one, twenty-to-one, the amount of material that we’re going to end up using, whether it’s paintings, lithographs, maps. And then, as David was just saying, our interviews are wildly long, and we use the best of the best of that stuff. And same with live cinematography. And then there tend to be 50 shots that everybody loves and everyone argues over in a really fun, collaborative way. But we over-deliver; we give the editors as much as we possibly can for them to work with. And then these films are made in the editing room with Ken, and we wrestle all this stuff to the ground and try to make it visually compelling, historically accurate, and fun for the viewer.

A lot goes into producing a documentary that doesn’t just impart information, but fosters an emotional response to the material. Tell us about the aspects of the production besides the visual footage.

Sarah: The archival characters, the people that you’ve heard of before—Abigail and John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, George Washington—finding the right quotes and what they wrote down and how they wrote it, where they wrote it, why they wrote it, was an incredible job that David did on the production, and then bringing those people to life and having the audiences care about them. We love to figure that out, so we’re always recording more voices than we use, thinking about ways for our audience to emotionally connect to the characters they’ve heard of and learn things about them they didn’t know before, and then fall in love with characters like Betsy Ambler, Phillis Wheatley, Dragging Canoe, John Greenwood, Joseph Plumb Martin, these lesser-known characters. And so it’s really a matter of which quotes we use and how Geoff brings them to life as archival characters, then who reads them. And then, of course, music is always a great way to guide the viewer to a feeling, either to bring them along, tell them how to feel, hope they’ll feel a certain way, or create some suspense that indicates you’re not sure how you’re going to feel or how things are going to turn out. Ken always says good history is having the viewer think the story might not turn out the way that you know it does. And I would add that good filmmaking and good history are making the audience fall in love with the characters that they’re trying to get to know. These people who’ve come down to us in textbooks kind of seem unknowable, so the more complicated, human, interesting they are, the better. Think about Sullivan Ballou and The Civil War, for example. We try to bring the archival characters, both the ones you’ve heard of and the ones you’re not familiar with, to life and make you care about them. That’s at the heart of what we do.

David: Even the better-known characters, if we know their likeness at all, it’s from a painting they posed for that they sat for a few hours, and really intentionally put out what they wanted to look like. Often, they’re wearing wigs. Often, they look stately and they’re frozen in a moment in time. So we only know portraits for a very, very small set of the people who lived through this time period. And there’s some major characters that Sarah just mentioned who we do not have portraits for. So how do you see their presence? And one way that we did that was to see their handwriting. Seeing the literal mark they made, where their thoughts leave the brain and move by hand to paper, really proves that they were here.

Sarah: And I think our editors were a little resistant to that at the beginning. We kept saying, use their handwriting, use their names. That goes a long way . . . or seeing someone’s name on a muster roll.

David: In some cases, we had print transcripts of somebody’s memoir, so it took us a little while to find the handwritten first edition. But when we did, you get to see John Greenwood’s handwriting, you get to see unpolished colloquialisms, his drawing of a flag that says, “Join or Die” on it. That’s really special. There are no candid photographs. It’s just a different time. So how do you feel these people’s presence? It’s things like handwriting.
Roger Lamb is a character who we know about because of Don Hagist’s work. Roger Lamb was an incredible witness to this war. He was captured twice at Saratoga and Yorktown, and he managed to be in many of the major campaigns of the war from Quebec to South Carolina. He really saw a lot of the continent. After the war, he wrote down his memories, and he was published twice. But he also kept a commonplace book that Don Hagist surfaced, which has these wonderful watercolors that maybe he did, or maybe he commissioned that bring to life his memories of his time in North America. And we used six or seven of them in our series.

Sarah: There’s this one of the brothers hugging. That’s one of the most emotional scenes in the film because you get used to the beautiful reading of Domhnall Gleeson, and so his reading is stunningly beautiful. He’s an incredible reader. And then there’s a scene in the film where two brothers are on opposite sides of the water, and they see each other, and they embrace. They had no idea until that moment that they had been fighting for opposite sides in the Battle of Saratoga. And Roger Lamb happened to be there and there’s his beautiful watercolor that makes me cry every time.

It’s early, but have you gotten any surprising feedback from the promotional screenings?

Sarah: So far, I don’t think we’ve gotten any especially surprising feedback. People seem really interested, really excited. I think the general sense is everybody wants to know what really happened in the war, because we have a national mythology around the Revolution that people are just excited to understand both the American Revolutionary War, which was a brutal, terrible, awful, scary eighteenth-century war, a civil war, a bloody war, a dangerous war, and then the American Revolution, the great war of ideas that can still inspire all of us about what it means to have a republic belonging to the people and a working democracy. People are just excited; we’re excited.

David: People are really curious. The people I’ve talked to are coming into the series with the same big question that we had while making it: why don’t I know more about this? They want to know more, and they’ll get more from our film.

Do you have a favorite scene or portion of the series?

David: I like the moments when we’re away from the battlefield and away from the politics, and just seeing how people who were not in Philadelphia at Independence Hall and not at the Battle of Saratoga were also impacted by this war, whether it be from disease—I don’t like that, but I’m interested in it—or depreciation of currency, or living as refugees, or supplying the war effort. I find myself drawn to those sorts of things that are totally new to me and help explain how everything fits together.

Is there a person from the American Revolution era featured in the show who surprised or inspired you?

David: I didn’t know this story, and it didn’t surprise me that people did this sort of thing, but it definitely inspired me. There’s a character named James Forten. He’s a free born Black Philadelphian. He grew up blocks from Independence Hall and was there in the State House yard a few days after July 4th, when the Declaration of Independence was first read out loud to the public. He was nine years old at the time. When he was 14, he volunteered to serve in the Pennsylvania State Navy, where he could have been captured at sea and sold into slavery according to British military policy. But he went to war anyway. He fought for his country and its independence. He was captured, wasn’t enslaved thankfully, but ended up as a prisoner of war and spent seven months on a prison ship in the East River. After his release, he walked all the way home from Brooklyn. When he got to his mother’s home in Philadelphia, she didn’t even recognize him. And then in the years after the war, he became one of the wealthiest men in Philadelphia and used his fortune to help fund the abolitionist movement. He completely bought into the values of the American Revolution, the equality that it promised. And he was just a kid when he fought this war, but it lived with him through the rest of his life.

Sarah: I think my initial answer to this question is two women at the end of the film that we learn about, one is Elizabeth Freeman, and the other is Judith Jackson. And Elizabeth Freeman—the Mumbet story—I think it is such a brave, important story about the Revolution and what that meant for women in particular, and also the story of Judith Jackson, who is my age, trying to find her daughter and has to leave at the end of the war without her. Both Judith Jackson and Elizabeth Freeman were escaping slavery. But while Elizabeth Freeman sued for her freedom and won, Judith Jackson had to leave the United States to do so, and she lost her daughter in the process. So one story is inspirational, while the other is totally devastating. And I think for me, whenever we’re making a film about war, the voices of the women and the children always surface as an important counterbalance to the military, more male-dominant narrative. Elizabeth Freeman and Judith Jackson at the end of the film, in terms of the stakes, the inspiration, the history, what happens, the lesser-known stories, those are both very important to me.
The other thing I would add is the dynamics between Mercy Otis Warren and Abigail Adams, and the fact that they were friends, and they both wrote so terrifically during the war about similar and different things. And I’d never heard of Mercy Otis Warren before working on this project myself, and she is a great character, and I’m glad I got to know her working on the film, as well as Abigail Adams.

How did your own understanding of the American Revolution change when you first saw the script, and how has it evolved as you’ve worked on the project?

Sarah: It’s sort of an odd question for us to answer, since you were so involved in actually writing the script, David, and getting the script together, and we’re so involved in how it gets made. I guess I might answer it by saying in the first draft of the script, it is a very strictly-military narrative. A lot of the other characters and cultural moments aren’t always in the first draft of the script, so it’s exciting to learn and figure out the chronology of the actual war, but then we spend a lot of time between the first and second drafts of the script adding in all of the other varied voices and then, of course, all of the historians.

David: So, a film script is an incredibly valuable tool, but it is not the final product. And also, our film script has evolved over the course of production, but the biggest changes to the film, not surprisingly, since we saw the script on paper several years ago, are that we have a lot more to look at now. There’s all sorts of interviews that supplement the narration. There’s lots and lots of first-person voices from 18th-century characters, and then there’s an awful lot to look at and to hear. So we’re hearing sound effects, and we’re hearing music, and we’re looking at either artwork from the period or depicting the period, maps from the era that tell you what mapmakers thought of North America. We’re seeing the maps that we created that helped us to better understand where people were when, and we’re seeing an awful lot of live cinematography. We went as a team to many of the important places that were mentioned in the script, but we hadn’t been to many of them when we first read it. So I will say that walking the ground changes your perspective. To be at the place where people lost their lives, you start to feel something more. I think Sarah can speak to that experience on previous projects—at the beaches of Normandy or along the DMZ in Vietnam—but I can say that being at Lexington and Concord, or Yorktown, you felt the weight of history while you were there.

What was your biggest revelation or surprise?

David: It’s hard to say because I’m not very good at remembering what I used to not know, but I think I can generally say . . . there’s also a lot of things where you’re like, well, I should have known that. But in the case of the American Revolution, because it’s something that its outcome is drilled into you from the moment you’re conscious to really come to grips with how much contingency there was . . . I mean, to recognize that the people who fought in the Revolution didn’t know how it was going to end. I can also see now how easily it could have gone another way, how desperate George Washington was at various moments in the war, up to 1781, the year of Yorktown. That was all new to me, and it shouldn’t have been surprising, but it was to a degree. The historian Maya Jasanoff says seven words in our film that should be self-evident—”the United States came out of violence.” And that’s obvious, right? If it’s a war that created a country, then of course the United States came out of violence. But the popular story of the Revolution is so often about the big ideas—which are unquestionably, incredibly important—that you sometimes forget that people suffered and died. This is a war, and so it’s not exactly surprising, but when you really flip that switch in your understanding of the Revolution, you recognize internally how much it cost to create our country.

Based on your experience with this and other time periods, what guidance would you offer to those who want to undertake a film project dealing with this era?

David: I would say trust the storytellers of the time. There’s a lot of really good writers who saw and did a lot of really wild stuff, and if you just stick to their narratives, you can tell a really compelling story. You could follow so many characters—Joseph Plumb Martin, Betsy Ambler, John Greenwood. They could each be a miniseries. James Forten, too. But they’re not the only ones. There’s a lot of soldier narratives that people wrote, both at the time in their diaries or afterwards just to get their pension, and all of them could be really compelling stories to tell. And then I would say, trust the people who spend their time telling the history of this period. That’s the people at the living history museums or the archives, reenactors, historians, the people at the Journal of the American Revolution, all of them are eager to get this story out and to get it right. And they’re really smart, thoughtful, talented people who definitely helped us make this film what it is. You should look to them to get your story right, too.

Sarah: I think it’s an excellent question to think about how to tell a story visually, before the photograph and before newsreels, when so few people are represented, and people don’t have a record of their own writings or signatures or any leftovers from so many different parts of the population. So you have to constantly remind yourself to think about who might be living where, or what life might have felt like, and to make sure to tell the stories that aren’t often told, in addition to the famous names and portraits that we’re used to seeing. And that’s an incredibly interesting and creative challenge.
I think working in the period before photography obviously poses lots of challenges when you’re thinking about documentary work, but it also opens up enormous opportunities. So, thinking about and considering what kind of contemporaneous art was made, what writings were done, whose stories are told, whose stories are left out, how to creatively figure out a way to show and explore the lives of the many varied voices and the people who are living in particularly the thirteen colonies but also from the around the world who were also involved in the American Revolution was obviously a challenge, but also exciting. And I guess my advice is to take your time and to immerse yourself with experts and the incredible work that has already been done. But don’t rush and don’t get discouraged.

We always have to ask the standard question: if you could interview one participant, who would it be? And just to make it more interesting, is this answer different than it would’ve been before you started the research?

David: I think the easy answer is George Washington because he’s the most important person, but I also have come to understand he’s pretty cagey, so I’m not sure you’d get a very good interview from him. He kept his cards close to his vest. There’s not really any one person, but if I was going to say somebody, I think I’d be most interested talking to Hendrick Aupaumut who is from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, part of the Stockbridge Indian Militia who was an important diplomat after the war. The Stockbridge Indian community sent their militia to fight with George Washington’s army before it was even George Washington’s army. They were in Cambridge before he was, fighting for the side that became the United States. They were in battle after battle at the Siege of Boston, Ticonderoga, at Saratoga. Not a battle, but they were at Valley Forge, and a lot of them were killed north of New York City in what is now the Bronx in the summer of 1778. Then after the war, they weren’t able to stay in Stockbridge. Hendrick Aupaumut was somebody who wrote a lot about this and petitioned for help from the state of Massachusetts and his other former allies in the war. The Stockbridge community ended up moving to New York, and then further west. They now reside in Wisconsin. I would love to talk to Hendrick Aupaumut. After the war, he said, “since the British and Americans lay down their hatchets, then my nation was forgotten… Perhaps I am too small to be regarded. My friendship however is strong; my friendship I do not forget.” What else would he have to say?

Sarah: My answer is definitely different than what it would’ve been eight years ago when I first started to think seriously about this time period, and I feel like, to be truthful, my answer kind of needs to be two-pronged. My first answer is a famous, bold-faced name that I would’ve known before, and then my second answer is a name of somebody I didn’t know before. And so, I might want to have dinner with someone like Thomas Paine and actually get to know him and try to understand more about him. I think he is a great character of a bold-face name, and he was hugely important to the American Revolution, and it would be really fun to get to know him in a very real way. And then I think some of the lesser known characters also come to mind. I think it would be very fun to talk to Mercy Otis Warren. I didn’t know her before, but she was a great writer, and she was a satirist, which is always a fun way to think about the world, in satire. She was also a good friend of Abigail Adams, so she would have led some insights into all of that. But then as we have been talking about, sitting next to someone like Elizabeth Freeman would be incredible. John Greenwood’s mother would be interesting to get to know as well. So it’s a hard question to answer, and I’m kind of cheating by not saying one name, but in a film like this, you have to answer the question with both a famous and a lesser-known person.

Do you have any plans for further work dealing with the American Revolution?

David: No plans, but I know that this period of history will call to me again. It has throughout my life, and I now know an awful lot about it. I think I’ll take a little break in the 20th century for a while, but I’ll probably go back to it later.

Sarah: Actually, no, I’m going right back to the 20th century and picking up where the Vietnam War film left off by jumping into Lyndon B. Johnson and his presidency and the legacy of the Great Society.