Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has created his first film to feature a non-American subject: Leonardo da Vinci.
“If you’re going to do something that’s not American, he’s about great as you can get,” Burns said. "We might be using 10 percent of our brain, and he's using 75 percent. I want to know about that person."
Burns granted News 5 an interview during a recent visit to the Rocky Mountain PBS Studios in Denver ahead of the Telluride Film Festival.
He joined his daughter Sarah Burns and son-in-law David McMahon to create the two-part, four-hour documentary debuting later this fall.
"It makes me want to be smarter; it makes me want to know more. It makes me want to ask better questions," Burns said.
Community leaders in Pueblo want to harness the extraordinary power that da Vinci inspires as a force for the good of the community.
"The Leonardo da Vinci Museum in Pueblo, not New York, not Miami, not Chicago, not Los Angeles, but Pueblo, Colorado, the first one ever in North America, could be the spark that lights the imagination of young people from all over the world that would come to the museum to see it," said Craig Eliot Cisney, a board member for the Southern Colorado Science Center.
The Center will become a new cultural attraction in Pueblo, encouraging kids and adults alike to rediscover a love of learning.
"Our vision is to have a museum that is part Leonardo DaVinci, but then also STEAM works museum (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) and then in the long-term future of the museum would be a third pillar which will be the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium," Cisney said.
The museum will be a permanent home for displaying interactive exhibits created by the Artisans of Florence. Tom Rizzo, the Director of Traveling Exhibitions with the Artisans, described how three generations of the Niccolai Family have studied da Vinci's codices and brought his ideas and inventions to life.
"There are no original da Vinci machines in the world, but that's really exciting for us," Rizzo said. "That means that we get to construct them, many of them for the first time, test them, allow visitors to come to our exhibitions and test them, and my goodness, they work! It's fantastic."
The Artisans have created more than 200 of da Vinci's machines and brought them to museums and galleries around the globe. They have permanent museums in Italy, France, Australia, Brazil, and South Korea.
Rizzo said the public is encouraged to interact with the exhibits.
“It’s a bit different than the normal kinds of learning that take place because it’s fun, and you don’t even realize that it’s happening. You’re in there, excited, doing your activities," he said.
Having studied da Vinci in depth for the film, Burns was thrilled to learn about the plans for the museum in Pueblo.
"It's so exciting that for the first time in the United States, in Pueblo, Colorado, of all places, there's going to be a museum that's going to have a lot of these machines that were just ideas for him, fanciful for a day or two, a week, an obsession that went on for a while, but all of a sudden, there's the machine."
The Southern Colorado Science Center is currently working with the City of Pueblo in hopes of securing a location along the Riverwalk.
The Burns family's Leonardo da Vinci airs on November 18 and 19 on PBS stations nationwide.
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