The duo had no way of knowing when they began the project that their documentary would be released during the presidency of Donald Trump, whose short, controversial tenure has been compared to that of Richard Nixon, accused of escalating the Vietnam War, which lasted from 1955 to 1975. As Burns tells Newsweek, “What if I told you I’d been working on a film about mass demonstrations against the political administration occurring across the country, about a White House in disarray, about a president convinced that the press is lying and out to get him, about document drops of classified material, about an asymmetrical war and accusations that a political campaign reached out to a foreign power at the time of a national election?”
I'd say, sounds familiar. And then ask them some questions.
I'm 30 and, like a lot of my generation, don't know much about the Vietnam War. Why should I care?
BURNS: So much of what we're experiencing today—the hyperpartisanship, the divisions between each other, the inability to have a conversation—is the result of seeds planted during the Vietnam War period.
NOVICK: People ask us what anyone under 50 knows about this war, and the answer is, not much. It's shocking how little it's taught in school. It's also contested history, so there's no one book you can go to to bring out the story you're trying to tell. When we make a film, we're trying to tell a good story. In a case like this, it's hard to do. It required a lot of triangulation of multiple sources for us to put together a narrative that makes sense.
How would you characterize your understanding of Vietnam before you embarked on it 10 years ago and now?
BURNS: I don't recognize the person who started this project. I lived through the 1960s as a kid and a teenager, up to being draft-eligible by 1971. You think you know [about it]. You possess the conventional wisdom. [Researching this], almost everything I presumed was turned upside down. Because the war didn't turn out so well for the United States, we tend to ignore it. It's a very contentious topic, which makes it safer not to talk about it. It's no accident that the first English you hear in the film is from a Marine who describes being friends with another couple, and the two wives, after 12 years as friends, learn that their husbands had been Marines in Vietnam, and they hadn't said a word about it. The Marine said it's like living in a family that had an alcoholic father. Shhh—you don't talk about that.