• Interview by
• Ed Rampell

As Donald Trump goes after Harvard, one of the university’s most famous alums is back in the limelight with a new documentary. Henry David Thoreau, which premieres March 30 on PBS, celebrates America’s apostle of environmentalism, antiwar activism, abolitionism, indigenous rights, and more, whose writings on civil disobedience influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Ewers Brothers Productions’ three-part nonfiction biopic explores how Thoreau, who returned to nature at Walden Pond from 1845 to 1847, interrupted by a fateful night in prison, perpetuated and contributed to the highest aspirations of the American Revolution.

Executive produced by Ken Burns and the Eagles’ Don Henley, Henry David Thoreau was codirected by longtime Burns collaborators brothers Christopher Loren Ewers and Emmy Award winner Erik Ewers. The cast who give voice to the film’s historical figures includes Jeff Goldblum, Meryl Streep, and Ted Danson, with George Clooney narrating. Erik was interviewed via Zoom in Keene, New Hampshire, and Christopher Loren in Connecticut.

Why did you make a film about Henry David Thoreau?

It really came out of nowhere. I’ve been an editor for Ken Burns for thirty-seven years now, and he called me and asked, “Are you and your brother willing to do a short film about Walden Pond for Don Henley of the Eagles?” You could have heard a pin drop. I was like, “Yes.” And Ken said, “Great, I already told him you would.”

We made that short film, started in 2015, and when it was done, it was very clear to Chris and I that to tell the story of Thoreau — to just tell the story of Walden was a disservice to everything else. So, we went back to Ken and Don and said we want to make a film about his entire life and all of his writings, or as many as we could fit into the film. They both enthusiastically endorsed the concept.

What was it about Thoreau that made you think there’s a lot more here than just a short about Walden Pond?

When we were first introduced to Thoreau in high school, let’s just say it was incomplete. I walked away from Henry knowing him as a prophetic hermit that lived his entire life in seclusion at some obscure pond, pondering his belly button and staring at the water. When we were reintroduced to Thoreau ten years ago, for the short film Walden, it was a revelation. We had enough life experience at that point, we got to know him as much more than just the author of Walden and “Civil Disobedience.” We read all of his essays and came to fully appreciate the fact that he had a life before, a life during, and a life after Walden.

He was essentially three different people. And his evolution through those three acts of his life was an epiphany. I learned the writer, sure, but we became familiar with the brother, the friend, the teacher, the surveyor, the scientist, the abolitionist, and on and on. I came to understand him as an onion. And the more I became familiar with him, the more he spoke to me and, more importantly, to our present moment. Thoreau is relevant to every generation anew. But it seems that he was particularly speaking to us now. So, between Ken, Don, Erik, and me, we realized we needed to make a definitive feature-length piece about the entirety of his experiences.

Ken Burns executive produced Henry David Thoreau. His last documentary was The American Revolution. Is Thoreau in a continuum of thought from the Revolution to his own time?

Absolutely. When he was born in 1817, the country was thirty-seven years old. Already it was struggling to live up to its own ideals. There was already corruption and divisiveness in the government, which was reflected in communities across the country. There were so many parallels that were coming to light in his time that are evident in ours. Democracy is an experiment. It was still trying to figure out what it was going to be. Maybe that’s the point of democracy — it’s always an experiment and always trying to figure out who and what it is supposed to be.

In light of all that, Thoreau was growing up in a world he was increasingly disappointed with. By the time he graduated from Harvard, he really questioned his own identity and how he wanted to operate within this society that was so filled with obligation and what he called “the mass of men [that] lead lives of quiet desperation.” Like any democracy, he recognized that either you can sit and do nothing, or you can start reacting to it. And his first step was writing about it.

He befriended Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became his mentor. Thoreau is Emerson’s protégé, and he chooses to start writing about the times that he’s living in. The first lecture that he did was an essay called “Society and Solitude”; he spelled out all the things he found troublesome. As you go through Henry’s life you see both him and the country struggling to understand everything: What does freedom mean? What is our role in connecting with nature and the way we use it as a commodity for consumerism? It was just an ongoing thing.

It’s no accident that he was the guy who finally penned “Resistance to Civil Government,” later called “Civil Disobedience,” because he realized the only way an individual could change, is to not just read but act. To step up to the plate. He willingly went to jail because he was not going to pay a tax that would support a state and federal government that still allowed slavery. And also the Mexican-American War, which was a land grab by the United States. He put his foot down, it was his little statement; a lot of people ridiculed him for it in town. Even people who had done something like that before him didn’t step up and support him. It just started him off on a path of individualism that he never left.

The Thoreau film, it’s a baton pass, from the Revolutionary War in Ken’s film. Here’s a guy forty years later who’s already watching this experiment fall back, and Thoreau mirrors democracy in the sense that he too wanted to experiment with his life and wanted to test things and search for the truth of things. All of that was helping him find a better path to the future. That’s part of democracy as well — as a team, collectively we have to find that path.

There’s a famous story that Ralph Waldo Emerson went to visit Thoreau in his Concord jail prison cell [in 1846] and asked: “Henry, what are you doing in there?” And Thoreau replied: “Waldo, the question is: what are you doing out there?” Why isn’t this in your film?

I actually never heard that story. It does speak conveniently, if true, to the fraying relationship between Henry and Ralph then. Fresh out of Harvard, eighteen-year-old Thoreau reads major [books] and discovers Emerson lives in Concord and arranges a meeting. He quickly becomes enamored with the man, as does Emerson with Thoreau, with Transcendentalism and the like. Through the course of the two years he spends at Walden, where he discovers his own approach to the majesty of nature and his spiritual relationship with it, this wonderment. He grows as a writer and starts to disagree with Emerson more and more and realizes that he’s no longer his mentee, but his equal.

So, I can see at this time if Emerson goes to visit him in jail as he is standing up in the public square for his abolitionist convictions, that he’d question Emerson in that manner. “Why wouldn’t you be in here?” Thoreau goes on to write that: “When laws are unjust, the truest place for a just man is also the prison.” If that did happen, it’s a wonderful representation of their relationship at the time.

To directly answer as a filmmaker why that isn’t in the film: If we made the film the way we wish we could have, bringing in every little story of Thoreau, it would have been ten hours long.

In other words, a Ken Burns film.

I do remember that story. Why it’s not in there . . . there’s no definitive moment where it was consciously taken out. We’re not Thoreau experts. We rely on our experts to give us the guidance of what are the true, big moments we should be focusing on. We think of the film as much more of an introduction to go and find out more about him, to read him.

Your film’s other executive producer is Don Henley of the Eagles. What is his interest in Thoreau?

Don discovered Henry through an English class in college and was deeply struck by his words, his experiences. He’s in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, watching TV, and hears that the woods nearby and a pond are going to be developed for an office park. He felt moved to attempt to intervene. Don created the Walden Woods Project, a nonprofit, whose mission initially was to protect the land, this historic and meaningful land in and around the pond and the woods. And was successfully able to thwart this development. From that point forward, he and Kathi Anderson, executive director of the Walden Woods Project, have been working tirelessly to this end, now encompassing education.

He contacted us through Ken more than ten years ago when the new visitor center was being built at Walden Pond and asked us if we, in the Ken Burns style, would create a twenty-minute film for the visitor center.

In your film there’s a cabin.

It’s a replica cabin they made. They built it modeled on all of the descriptions Thoreau wrote in his book on how he built his. It’s left of the parking lot, which is funny, because it’s the farthest experience you could have from Thoreau’s cabin experience; you’re looking out at Kias, Suburbans, and other cars right next to it, and they have this statue right out in front of it. But it is an entry for people who come to visit the pond and explore Thoreau’s legacy.

What do you believe Thoreau would do today regarding Donald Trump’s current unprovoked war against Iran, the unprovoked invasion of Venezuela, etc.?

It’s a very simple answer. It’s hard to even comprehend how he would feel today. I think he’d probably be angry and astonished, but he could also be like: “I told you so. I knew this was going to happen.” He’d see similarities with the Mexican-American War back then. Just like he’d see similarities between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and 1850s Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed slaveholders to come up from the South, reclaim freed black people in the North and take them back. The state of Massachusetts had to endorse and approve this law, and they did.

What he would say is: “Break the law. Let yourself be a counter-friction against the machine. Get out there and say something and do something. You’re an individual, and you’re only one voice, but you have a choice. Don’t just read about it: Act on it.” He’d probably walk around to every single person just going about their business on a street in Boston and say: “Hey, what are you doing about this?” That’s the whole point of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and a major force behind the abolitionist movement that he was participating in. He said, “What I began by reading I must finish by acting.”

Tell us about Thoreau’s opposition to slavery.

Henry was deeply influenced by the incredibly knowledgeable, intelligent, strong, powerful presence of women in his life. His mother, sisters, certainly the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society. He was hesitant to wade into that battle originally. He was trying to concentrate on his craft. But, almost by osmosis, the weight of this moral crisis, this issue, seeped into him. It was only after his night in jail that he decided to take action. He offered his cabin for an abolitionist meeting. Then found himself so moved that he began to take part, describing himself as an agent of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society. This only broadened with Emerson’s speech, which further propelled Henry into the conflict.

He was intricately involved in helping multiple fugitive slaves to freedom up North to Canada and beyond by way of the Underground Railroad in Concord. He met John Brown. Famously, he defended John Brown’s actions. To the point where he himself wrote with regards to the issue of slavery that he can now see an outcome where he has to give his own life or take one. Which prior to John Brown was almost inconceivable to him. As he gets older, Thoreau continues to evolve as a free spirit and freethinker, he takes up the mantle of abolitionism for the rest of his life.

Thoreau was, among other things, a naturalist. What is his relevancy in our age of climate crisis, of nature out of balance? In your film, historian Douglas Brinkley calls Thoreau’s essay “Walking” “the birth of modern environmental thinking.”

Absolutely. One thing we intended to do in the film was to include Thoreau’s relationship with nature as one of the many threads that make up the entire story. That thread of nature started when he was a boy, when his mother introduced him to nature and brought him on walking excursions with the whole family, exposing him to what nature was all about. This was at a time when nature was not considered a warm, welcoming thing for children. His early experiences helped him to acquire an appreciation of nature.

Over time, as he learned more and more about nature, before he went to Walden, he’d comment on it, but he wasn’t a big nature buff until his brother died. Then he found comfort and solace, and he could feel and sense his brother in nature, reminiscing on the days where he and his brother would endlessly play in the woods in Concord. When he went to Walden, nature just exploded, and so did his writing and thinking.

Nature became a friend of Henry David Thoreau — more than human friends. He was very serious, like the trees, weather, stars, and universe. He got very profound and philosophical; these were dear friends to him. He envisioned a relationship with nature that we have completely forgotten, that we are a part of nature. And that relationship turns into stewardship. If we understand how close we are, how closely we are connected, that we are relatives of nature, then we have an obligation to engage in a much more responsible relationship, where we’re not just taking, taking, taking, but we’ve got to give too. It’s really fascinating to see how that developed in him as he went through life.

He did give birth to modern environmental thinking because he got down to the roots — and I’ll include it as a pun — of what the relationship between human beings and nature means. And he never stopped thinking about that. If you love someone — imagine that person being an element of nature: Would you mistreat it deliberately? Just take it for granted? There’s lots to learn in his early thinking about stewardship, the land, and the environment.

The biggest passion I have about Thoreau is that he was a seeker of the truth throughout his life. That’s something our society, especially in America, has completely lost touch with and has a hard time finding. One of the enduring legacies of Thoreau is to remind us that it’s an effort — but it’s worth it, it’s part of living meaningfully and purposefully, if you seek the truth.