Ken Burns, creator of the popular television series on the Civil War and baseball, says documentary filmmaking has come a long way since he started making them in New York about 30 years ago.
"It's been a pretty amazing transformation, I think," Burns said. "I moved to New Hampshire 25 years ago because I knew that becoming a documentary filmmaker was taking a vow of anonymity and poverty.
"It didn't happen, I'm very happy to say, but that was the climate," he recalled.
Burns attended the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in Hot Springs, Ark., over the weekend for a screening of his latest film, "Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip." The film tells the story of Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson, who made the first drive across America in an automobile in 1903.
After meeting and talking with audience members, the 50-year-old sat for an interview with the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record and discussed how things have changed since he entered the documentary field.
"I think what people have begun to understand is that documentaries don't have to be those training-film, dreadfully boring things that they made you see in class, but something that could be equally as entertaining as a feature film," he said in Monday's editions. "There's no reason that entertainment and the truth can't go hand in hand."