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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axe Files, with your host David Axelrod.

I sat down this week with Ken Burns, the great documentarian whose latest work,

a four-part biography of Muhammad Ali premieres Sunday on PBS, from war to social upheaval,

baseball to jazz, no one has brought American history to the screen more powerfully or compellingly over the past four decades than Ken Burns.

In this conversation, we talked about stories, America's, and his own.

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Ken Burns, it's always so good to see you. Thank you for doing this.

And I don't have to explain anybody that you're one of America's great storytellers, and that's going to be reflected again in this four-part series on Muhammad Ali, that'll begin airing on the 19th on PBS.

And we'll talk a lot more about that later. But one of the things that you're so gifted at is drawing the through lines in people's lives,

and talking about the formative things that happened in their lives that led them to the destinations.

And so you got to help me out here because I want to find out about Ken Burns and your own journey.

And one of the things that struck me in just reading the research was that it wasn't that easy or I, that your early life was really filled with sadness and challenge. Tell me about your folks.

My mother was a cultural anthropologist who probably suffered from bipolar. My mother was a biology major and who developed cancer when I was two or three years old breast cancer, and it eventually killed her after a really valiant struggle in 1965 just a couple of months short of my 12th birthday when I was 11.

Is the defining moment of my life without a doubt and also my father's kind of inability in a direct way to parent or help we muddled along as best we could.

You and your brother. My brother, my younger brother Rick, who is also a superb documentary filmmaker.

My seminal experience is my dad was an amateur still photographer. My first memory is of him building a dark room in the basement of our track house in Newark, Delaware, where he was the only anthropologist in the entire state of Delaware at the university there.

And then we moved when I was 10 just before my mother's death to Ann Arbor, Michigan where he was one of 40 anthropologists and a department very celebrated anthropology department that had been the first the sponsors of the first teaching against the Vietnam War in March of 65.

And my mom died, my father had a pretty strict curfew for my for Rick and me and and yet he let me stay up late on nights watching old movies on TV with him or going out to the cinema guild part of the university's program or the campus theater, a sort of art house cinema and on a school night and you know I'd stay up to 1 a.m. sometimes with all the Pope,

and I watched my dad cry we were watching Sir Carol reads odd man out about the Irish.

Yeah, he's amazing any cry didn't cry one of my mom was sick didn't cry when she died didn't cry at the funeral something not lost on my friends who who by mentioning it implied a kind of thing and and I realized right then and there I needed to be a filmmaker that meant being offered Hitchcock that that film had provided him with a safe even you know

that's a great thing to do with him with an emotional a place where he felt emotionally safe and could express something and so I just thought I want to do that.

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