When legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns set out to tell the origin story of America, Colonial Williamsburg native David Schmidt joined a trio tasked with capturing the nation's founding on film.
Story by Cara Clark
Trust the process. Few phrases echo through filmmaking more often — or prove more difficult to do than when distilling years of world-altering history into fleeting scenes on a screen. With a project as monumental as the six-episode, twelve-hour PBS documentary, The American Revolution, that trust is essential. It is eight years of patience, uncertainty, and faith — rewarded in ways that stretch far beyond a finished film. For David Schmidt, the process became something deeper: an enduring act of belief.
“I know I’m working with really talented people,” says the Virginia native. “I know the story’s going to be great. I just had to trust the process of taking one step after another and getting a grasp on what this was going to be.”
A childhood in Colonial Williamsburg became a life devoted to shaping history into narrative form. For the story of this nation’s independence, he did so alongside the best documentary filmmaker of all time, Ken Burns, sharing that honor with Sarah Botstein.
History entered David’s life not only as an academic subject but as an atmosphere. It arrived before interpretation, analysis, and filmmaking. He describes it less as a conscious fascination than as a condition of growing up, something woven so deeply into the fabric of childhood that it became difficult to separate daily life from historical performance.
“From age seven, I was a costumed interpreter at Colonial Williamsburg, wearing stockings and knee breeches and leather shoes with buckles and tri-cornered hats and all that,” David recalls. “And then, when I was 10, I started doing the Fife and Drum Corps, where we would march through the historic area twice a week. Saturday morning was, I think, three hours of practice together and then an hour out in public, and then you go in and enjoy your weekend like a normal kid.”
Childhood existed in two registers at once. There was the ordinary life of school and weekends and adolescence, and layered over it was the constant inhabiting of the eighteenth century. The boundary between reenactment and reality blurred until history felt distant no more. It became environmental, living in the architecture, the cadence of marching drums, and the humid Virginia air.
“You're just immersed in history everywhere you look,” David says. “I was fortunate enough to have it on display, feel it, see it, smell it, and certainly hear it. But it's everywhere. If anybody is curious enough to look, they can understand that people have lived and died and suffered and thrived anywhere, pretty much, on the globe.”
The emotional center of that observation lies in the word “suffered,” because once the conversation turns to the documentary about the American Revolution, the struggle becomes inseparable from the story. David does not describe the Revolution as a triumphant sequence of inevitable victories moving cleanly toward national birth. He describes it instead as prolonged human endurance. The filmmakers behind the project became increasingly interested not in the mythology Americans inherit about the war, but in the exhausting material reality that people experienced.
“There’s actually not that much that surprised me,” David says. “But there's a ton I didn't know that once you know, makes things make more sense. And that story of John Greenwood (a 15-year-old fifer who joined the Continental Army and later became George Washington’s dentist) … I actually did take up his story. You realize all these individual lives don’t fit neatly into the version of the Revolution most people carry around.”
That accumulation of lives gradually reshaped the filmmakers’ understanding of the war. The Revolution wasn't a singular narrative but a complex network of overlapping experiences. Soldiers marched through the war with bayonets differently than printers did with pamphlets and news. Farmers experienced the challenges differently from politicians. Entire regions understood the conflict through radically different emotional and material realities. The longer the filmmakers worked, the more human the Revolution became.
“It’s suffering, and it's also just putting one foot in front of the other,” David says. “Every bullet has to be melted down. Somebody has to make the uniforms. Somebody has to carry supplies. Somebody has to build camps. We get to see that process, and I think that changes the way you understand the war itself.”
That attention to labor becomes one of the documentary’s defining emotional currents. The Revolution ceases to feel inevitable once it is understood how fragile and improvised so much of it actually was. Nations, the film suggests, are not born in a single moment of revelation. They are assembled slowly by exhausted people who are rarely certain what exactly they are building.
The same idea extends into military strategy. Historical memory often compresses strategic decisions into the appearance of brilliance, but David returns to the fact that Revolutionary leaders actually possessed very little information while events were unfolding.
“It’s hard to wrap your head around having that kind of strategy and more with so few resources,” David says. “They knew stuff generally, what might be out there, but they had to do so much on faith. Communication is slow. Maps are incomplete. Weather changes everything. You’re trying to make decisions that affect thousands of lives without anything close to modern systems of knowledge.”
The Indomitable Spirit
What emerges from his description is a Revolution shaped not by certainty, but by improvisation. Faith, in this context, becomes logistical rather than spiritual. Faith means believing a river crossing will still be passable after a storm. It means trusting that an army held together by hunger and exhaustion can continue functioning long enough to survive another winter.
The refusal to oversimplify extends to the film’s treatment of iconic figures. David seems especially interested in the strange distance between historical myth and actual human complexity.
“George Washington is the most famous American ever,” David says. “I would be hard-pressed to repeat to you any quote that he actually said. There’s just something fascinating about that. He’s everywhere in American memory, but in some ways, he’s also incredibly difficult to access as a human being.”
He also describes Washington as one of the richest men in America, who continually put his life and fortune on the line.
“That's impressive,” David says. “And he's there for years, eight years with the army, doesn't go home, except for once on the way back to Yorktown.”
In the mechanics of mythology, historical figures become flattened precisely because they survive so successfully in public imagination. Their contradictions grow harder to hold. Their humanity becomes obscured beneath symbolic weight. Even someone as vilified as Benedict Arnold can be seen not as a caricature of betrayal but as someone shaped by pressures beyond himself.
“I understand them calling him Lucifer,” David says. “And I also think that there's an argument that he really reenergized the Patriot cause with that betrayal. There were people exhausted by the war. And then suddenly Arnold’s betrayal creates this emotional clarity again.”
The point is not absolution. It is a story of immense complexity. David resists moral neatness because neatness itself feels historically dishonest. The Revolution, as he describes it, was full of contradiction, contingency, and emotional instability. It unfolded over years in ways that rarely felt coherent to the people living through it. That understanding shaped the filmmakers’ methodology from the beginning. They became increasingly interested in reconstruction as a way of recovering physical empathy with the past.
“We decided pretty early on that we feel comfortable working with reenactors on this,” David says. “We actually need to feel the human effort of this war. Otherwise, everything risks becoming abstract.”
The reenactments, therefore, avoid grandeur whenever possible. Cold mornings remain cold. Marches feel slow. Clothing looks heavy. The filmmakers are less interested in cinematic heroism than in the bodily experience of endurance. History, in this framework, is not abstract information. It is physical strain carried through time by ordinary people.
The fight was perilous and miserable, with both early Americans and their British counterparts enduring heat and cold. Though the film crew and cast didn’t, perhaps, suffer the louse infestations, they felt some aspects of that misery.
“We're filming in a snowstorm, and it's hard,” David explains. “You're cold, and it’s unpleasant, but we had cars and Gore-Tex. What was it like for them?”
The making of the documentary began to mirror the subject it was depicting. The production itself stretched across years of uncertainty and incremental progress. There were periods when the scale of the material threatened to overwhelm any sense of narrative cohesion.
“You wonder, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’” David says. “But then you start to see it come together, and we are so blessed to see the product of our labor. That’s rare. A lot of times you’re just inside the work for years without knowing exactly what shape it’s taking.”
That uncertainty forms one of the parallels between the filmmakers and the historical figures they study. Documentary filmmaking is arduous work that accumulates over years: in archive boxes lifted off shelves, in interviews that wander for hours before yielding a single usable sentence, in edits that collapse months of labor into moments brief enough to disappear between cuts. Entire histories are gathered only to be abandoned later. Whole emotional narratives end up on the cutting-room floor so another thread can survive. What remains in the finished film is only a fraction of what was lived during its making.
Actor Peter Coyote is the primary narrator of the story that encompasses years of tumult — a star among a vast cast of celebrity voices from the first words of Thomas Paine, voiced by actor Matthew Rhys: “From a small spark kindled in America, a flame has arisen, not to be extinguished.”
It is a testament to Ken Burns’s reputation as a filmmaker that actors open their schedules to participate in a project. The cast members embrace the roles of historical figures — famous, infamous, unknown — bringing them to life with nuanced voices. Paul Giamatti reprises his role as John Adams from the film of that name. Morgan Freeman brings James Forten to life.
“It’s incredible to see these people at work,” David says. “These are the biggest names in the industry, and I think Ken Burns’s name opens doors. People know that they’re doing something worthwhile. There are so many more voices in this project than in any of the others. They’re so generous with their time and with their talent. It’s so helpful that you get somebody like Tom Hanks or Meryl Streep involved. I am a pretty big fan of movies and TV, and I can’t think of anything where the cast rivals this. We are so blessed.”
Steeped in the stories
David’s early experience in Colonial Williamsburg turned out to be preparation for documentary storytelling. He had spent years learning how to inhabit historical worlds emotionally rather than observing them from a distance. By the time he reached Dartmouth College, where he studied history, that instinctive approach had begun to crystallize into ambition.
“I was beginning to think, what would I like to do? Well, I want to tell American history,” David recalls. “It would be really cool to do a documentary.”
As a college senior, the opportunity of a lifetime was suddenly before him — an internship at Ken Burns’s Florentine Films. There, the documentary production ceased being an abstraction and became manual, repetitive, physical work. He spent long hours gathering fragments from archives and helping transform them into a narrative structure.
“I was driving back and forth to the library and grabbing political cartoons off the shelf and scanning them for the Roosevelt documentary,” he says. “I was ready to prove myself.”
What sounds small in retrospect was actually foundational. Those years taught him the grammar of documentary construction: how stories emerge through accumulation, how archives become emotional rather than merely informational, how pacing and juxtaposition can transform static material into living narrative.
“It was really great,” David says. “I got to cut a few scenes, which is really special. That’s when you begin understanding how editing creates meaning.”
From there, the scope of responsibility gradually expanded. He moved to New York. He worked on larger productions — projects with timelines spanning years, including the Vietnam War documentary.
Documentary filmmaking, as David describes it, is less a profession than a prolonged act of devotion. Time gradually disappears into it until entire eras of your life are attached to projects that may not emerge for years. Then came the call that altered the trajectory of his career.
“Ken gave me a call, and he said, ‘I want to produce movies with you,’” David says. “That was a good call to get.”
That invitation led to a Benjamin Franklin documentary and eventually to the Revolutionary War project itself, which expanded steadily as the filmmakers realized the scale of what they were attempting.
“We did the Benjamin Franklin film together,” David says. “And I convinced him that I would also like to do the Revolution. There’s obviously so much overlap.”
But the overlap was not only thematic. It was structural. Franklin could be shaped around a single life. The Revolution resisted containment entirely.
“One is a biography of an individual,” David says. “You know his birth and death dates. The other is literally millions of people.”
Perhaps that is ultimately what makes both the film and David’s own story feel so resonant. Neither is it about singular genius or singular moments, but about accumulation and years of labor. He shares Ken’s analogy of the hours, days, years of footage and storytelling, and what actually survives to become a matter of history itself: “To get one gallon of syrup, you need 40 gallons of sap.”
The boy marching through Colonial Williamsburg in buckled shoes becomes the producer assembling centuries into narrative form. The Revolution becomes something larger than a founding story. It becomes an argument about endurance: about the difficulty of holding together meaning across years of uncertainty, exhaustion, contradiction, and hope. It is America’s story.
Watch THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION streaming free across all PBS platforms through July 12. All six episodes are available on PBS.org and the PBS App. The series will also air in special primetime broadcasts on PBS stations nationwide, culminating in Independence Day programming and a live special from Colonial Williamsburg.
