The Land That Allowed Ken Burns to ‘Raise the Dead’
The award-winning filmmaker has slept in the same bedroom for over four decades. He credits his home with allowing him to make the films everyone said he couldn’t.
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Rukmini Callimachi spent half a day interviewing Ken Burns at his home in Walpole, N.H., and interviewed one of his daughters, his brother, film historians and some of his closest collaborators.
Ken Burns has slept in the same bedroom for the past 45 years.
While numerous additions have been made to the original house, he proudly points out that the bedroom, where his first and second daughters were born 42 and 38 years ago, hasn’t changed. (Immediately, he corrects himself to mention that the mattress has changed.)
The white colonial and a barn are flanked by an apple orchard in the electric green hills of New Hampshire in a town called Walpole.
It’s this house and this piece of land that gave him the financial freedom to make the films of his choosing.
He moved here out of necessity: In 1979, Mr. Burns’s landlord raised the rent on his fifth-floor, walk-up apartment in Manhattan from $275 to $325 — a sum now so quaint that it’s hard to imagine how consequential it was for the beginning filmmaker. The increase meant that he would need to get a day job, and he had a vision of himself decades later, returning haggard from the office, the reels of his unfinished documentary atop the refrigerator.
In a move that seemed rash then and remains unconventional now, he rented the white colonial, then heated by a wood-burning stove, and bought it a few years later for $94,000.
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