Sarah Burns and David McMahon on Leonardo da Vinci

How do you make a four-hour film about a man who left no footage, no photographs and no diary?

That was the puzzle Sarah Burns and David McMahon took on in LEONARDO da VINCI, the two-part PBS documentary they directed with Ken Burns. Their earlier films together were 20th century American history, with footage to spare. Leonardo left paintings, a few of them, and thousands of notebook pages. That's it. So they had to invent a new way to tell a story.

In Episode 239, Christian sits down with Sarah and David, who are married and have made films with Ken Burns from The Central Park Five to Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali. David tells how he got his start in documentary filmmaking, keeping an editor's workstation tidy on Ken Burns's Jazz, back when the series was still cut on film and two lost frames were a real problem. Sarah explains why Leonardo was nothing like the brooding genius we picture. He liked to sing and dance and play music, and he was someone you'd want to be around.

The film was about seven years from first idea to broadcast. Along the way came a year living in Italy, 18 months waiting for permission to film The Last Supper, and a night with the Mona Lisa in an empty Louvre. To show a man for whom, as David says, "art and science are just a blur," they changed how they work: split screens, animation, interviews in Italian and French, and a score by Caroline Shaw with the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth. As David puts it, Leonardo "seems to have one foot on Mars."

WATCH THE FILM: LEONARDO da VINCI streams on PBS. Purchase options are listed on kenburns.com.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• What cutting Jazz on film taught David about rhythm
• Why David calls Leonardo perhaps "the most curious human ever to live"
• Why Sarah says Leonardo was fun-loving, not a solitary, brooding artist
• What 6,000-plus notebook pages reveal about how he thought
• How split screens and animation filled in for missing footage
• Why they interviewed Guillermo del Toro, a heart surgeon and an engineer
• Why some interviews were kept in their original languages
• Whether there's a rule for how many talking heads a documentary should have
• How they got three hours alone with The Last Supper
• Why the team took a chance on a vocal ensemble in the score

CHAPTERS

0:00 Sarah Burns, David McMahon

8:18 Who Was Leonardo da Vinci?

17:35 Telling a Story Without Footage

23:01 Too Many Talking Heads?

28:42 Inventing a Visual Language

34:05 A Rule Breaker's Private Life

37:55 A Year Living in Italy

40:21 Filming The Last Supper

46:32 Caroline Shaw's Score and Narration

53:33 Mona Lisa After Hours

56:14 DocuView Deja View Picks

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

How did Ken Burns make a Leonardo da Vinci documentary with no footage?

Co-director Sarah Burns says there was no footage, no photographs and only a few paintings, so the team changed its style. Split screens put three things side by side: what Leonardo saw in nature, what he drew on the page and his other work. Co-director David McMahon adds that animation helped show what Leonardo was imagining, like his theory that swirling blood helps heart valves open and close, which took 450 years to prove.

Who directed the PBS Leonardo da Vinci documentary?

LEONARDO da VINCI was directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon. Sarah and David wrote it, and the three of them produced it with their colleague Tim McAleer. It aired on PBS November 18 and 19, 2024, in two parts and four hours. Sarah says she and David moved to Italy for a year for the filming, and the team worked out the story together in the edit room.

What do Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks reveal about him?

David McMahon says more than 6,000 pages of Leonardo's notebooks survive, and they are where you can get inside his head. He was not a diarist, so they say little about his feelings. Instead they hold his thinking: studies, proofs and even grocery lists. David thinks Leonardo meant them for publication, for young artists and future scientists, but none of it was published in his lifetime.

How long can you see The Last Supper?

About 15 minutes, in a small group. David McMahon describes the visit: you enter a chamber, the door closes behind you, and only then does the next door open into the old monastery dining hall where the painting is. Sarah Burns says her own 15-minute visit went by incredibly quickly. For the film, David says it took 18 months to get permission, and the crew had three hours to shoot it.

Who composed the music for Ken Burns's Leonardo da Vinci?

Caroline Shaw wrote the score. David McMahon says the team didn't want period music, and at first worried that the voices of the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth would fight the dialogue. Instead it made Leonardo feel more human. Shaw worked with a vocal band, a string quartet and a percussion ensemble, and scored the entire film.

DOCUVIEW DEJA VIEW PICKS

• When We Were Kings (1996), directed by Leon Gast. Sarah's pick, about the run-up to the 1974 fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. She and David watched it while making their Muhammad Ali film.
• How to Survive a Plague (2012), by David France. David's pick, about how ACT UP used civil disobedience to push for AIDS treatment, built from found footage and VHS tapes of meetings.

See every guest pick on the DocuView Deja View page.

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ABOUT THE GUESTS

Sarah Burns is the author of The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding (Knopf, 2011). With David McMahon and Ken Burns she produced, wrote and directed The Central Park Five, which premiered at Cannes in 2012, was named Best Non-Fiction Film of 2012 by the New York Film Critics Circle and won a 2013 Peabody Award. With David and Ken she also made Jackie Robinson (PBS, 2016; Emmy nomination for writing, WGA Award), East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story (2020), Muhammad Ali (PBS, 2021; WGA nomination) and LEONARDO da VINCI (PBS, 2024). She was raised in Walpole, New Hampshire, and graduated from Yale with a degree in American Studies. Sarah's bio

David McMahon first worked with Ken Burns in 1999, on Jazz, and is Sarah's co-director on every film above. Raised in Clarence, New York, he graduated from the University of Michigan. He and Sarah are married and live in Brooklyn with their children. David's bio

ABOUT DOCUMENTARY FIRST

Documentary First is a weekly podcast about the people behind documentaries and how the work changed them. Host Christian Taylor, director of the award-winning The Girl Who Wore Freedom, talks with filmmakers, distributors, entertainment lawyers, actors and more, from Ken Burns and PBS American Masters creator Susan Lacy to first-timers, across nearly 300 conversations. Each week brings one of two formats: a long-form conversation with the people behind films for HBO, Netflix, PBS and independent film, or The Deep Dive, where Christian takes one insight from a recent conversation and follows it wherever it leads. Listen Notes ranks the show in the top 5% of all podcasts worldwide. New episodes every week.