Hello!

I watched a fantastic documentary recently. One that I still think about daily in the weeks since I’ve seen it. It’s called Henry David Thoreau and — you guessed it — it’s about Thoreau’s life and learnings.

The doc premieres on PBS this Monday and has some big names behind it; it’s executive produced by Ken Burns and Don Henley, narrated by George Clooney, and has Jeff Goldblum voicing Thoreau, Ted Danson as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Meryl Streep as several women from the time.

The big names may draw you in, but it’s the visuals, the sound design, and Thoreau’s words that will stick with you. It’s rare to find something on television that makes you stop and question how you live your life. Who has the time?!

Henry David Thoreau will remind you that we all, indeed, have the time. That research on pneumatic tubes can wait.

“I’m hoping that people will realize that you do have an individual choice in the way you live,” Erik Ewers, who directed the documentary with his brother Christopher Loren Ewers, told me. “I'm sure there's circumstances that you can't control, but make the effort… that way you're going to live with more meaning and more purpose.”

I interviewed the Ewers at the Los Angeles premiere of Henry David Thoreau. Read on for our discussion.

This is such an interesting project because Thoreau’s message is to stop and think and look around yourself, which can be hard to do with television. How did you approach making the documentary something you watch, but also something that makes you stop and have deep thoughts about?

Erik Ewers: When we started we really weren't quite sure. We knew it would be a biographical, historical story, but as we got into it — and having worked on a youth mental health film about the contemporary world that we're living in — it was uncanny how much Thoreau’s experiences paralleled today's world.

We started seeing the parallels between what was going on in the country when it was only 40 years old and what he was witnessing as young man, fresh out of Harvard, and it just struck us that this is history — not repeating itself — but rhyming.

It was an opportunity to make a film that actually connected with people. And when you tell the story, if you don't try to force feed the brilliance and let the viewer learn as they go and experience it as Thoreau does, then it becomes relatable to the viewer. All we had to do is plant a couple seeds here and there that talked about the present, or referred to the present, and what you get is a recipe for people to stop and think about themselves in context of what's going on in our world based on what Thoreau is seeing going on in his world.

Christopher Loren Ewers: It was also important for us to create moments of pause, actually physically in the cut, with the visuals. For instance when he first moves into his house at Walden Pond in episode two, we draw out this sequence, giving long pauses where the viewer is just immersed in sound design — rain falling on leaves or the pond itself.

It’s broken up by a couple of lines from Thoreau's journal read incredibly by none other than Jeff Goldblum. These are moments that are built specifically to slow us down. The action will slow us down in the film, in the pace of the edit itself, in the hopes that Thoreau’s words are getting into us, almost by osmosis.

And the cuts to contemporary life aren’t banging you over the head, but they’re definitely there and subliminally set things up when sprinkled in the beginning of the doc.

EE: One of the things I learned as an editor, is if you introduce your visual concept at the very beginning and you say this this is the statement we want to make, then it's going to resonate through the whole film and the viewer's not going to go, “Wait, whoa! Why is this happening?”

Another thing I really appreciated about the doc was the photographs from Thoreau's time. A lot of them weren't people of note, they’re just everyday people. Can you talk about the decision to go that route and how you sourced those images?

CLE: It was difficult, particularly for the first episode because throughout his childhood is the era in which photography wasn’t used or popular. We made use of a lot of paintings, and we did cheat — we’re storytellers, we’re not necessarily historians — so we use some photographic materials that were from the late 19th century. But once we get into the second episode and certainly the third, there were excellent archives: images of downtown Concord, images of things that were specific to the place and time, and other things that were specific to the moment, for instance crowds gathered at under a tent for a lecture or a speech.

EE: One thing that we really try to emphasize is, if you're not bringing the viewer back in time to that place, then you're not doing your job as a storyteller. And one of the things that was really remarkable is that in the 1850s, when photography was first coming to light, there was a fascination with what's called stereograph cards. It's two photographs that are almost the same. They're in little windows, and you put them in a viewfinder. And when you look at it, it looks three-dimensional.

They’re very problematic for people like us to use because they're these big cards and they're two little photos. So we really spent a lot of time seeing if we could figure out how to utilize these, because they were the best visual representations of the time period that he was in. And they're everywhere — just go to an antique store.

So you had to do some work to make them screen ready?

EE: Yeah, there's a certain amount of cleaning up of the images, a little bit of sharpening tools. Nothing that takes away from the integrity of the image, but using the modern day tools and technology that we have to make them strong enough to appear in film. And even when Ken Burns watched a later edit, he was like, “There's so many images I've never seen before!” So it's like a little treasure trove for us.

One thing that struck me is how much Thoreau wrote. I think the intro of the doc says he wrote two million words in his journal. How did you decide what passages to use for the documentary and create the story using his words?

EE: It's as simple as blocking out his chronology from the day he was born to the day he dies. You outline it, and you see what the main backbone of the story is going to be. And then as you go, you start finding those pivotal moments that have resonance in his story. One of the decisions we made very early on — and it's something Ken has never done, to this degree — is the number of Jeff Goldblum’s readings of Thoreau, I think there's 126 appearances in the three episodes. That's unheard of. But we were like, “Thoreau should be telling his own story. He wrote two million words. Let's let him tell his story.” So for every moment in the story, we had a dozen or more quotes. And it was just a question of shuffling the pieces around to get the perfect balance.

Would you give Jeff like three options and just see how he said them? How did that work?

CLE: We were lucky enough to get Jeff because he we thought he would be perfect. He carries such a warmth and the way that he speaks is imbued with such character and such personality. And he's so ponderous. We did very little in terms of direction for Jack; we had a large book of quotes for him to read, and some of them were earmarked for very specific points in the story, and others were just incredible quotes.

EE: We'll hopefully find a use for the ones not used [in the documentary] somewhere else.

And then my last question, because I'm guessing you're going to get pulled away soon: What do you hope that people who watch this walk away feeling or thinking?

CLE: That’s the million dollar question. Thoreau invites us to imagine that life can be different, right? One of his simplest ideas is perhaps one of his most impactful, that things don't have to be this way. In in an age — his and ours — where so many of us are stuck, feeling lost, feeling stuck in systems that we didn't choose or affected by laws we find unjust. The invitation to change is powerful.

I think that if there's one takeaway, it's that we still have agency, that by simply changing our perspective, we can change our environment, we can change the world around us. There's so many lessons that can be learned from Thoreau, from environmental conservation to social justice, to how to carry yourself through life with integrity. In addition to all of that, we really hope that we can reintroduce the real Thoreau to the public. We were both taught that he was a prophetic hermit that lived his life in seclusion, and that he only wrote Walden and Civil Disobedience, when in fact that's a fraction of the man that he was.

EE: I agree with everything Chris said, but I would add that I think today — it's always been the case, even in his time — but today we've lost the truth. And Thoreau spent his entire life trying to pursue the truth of anything and everything. He was obsessed with finding it, and once he found it, he kept looking at whatever he found through different lenses, sometimes the opposite lens, to see if it still held up.

He was always trying to find truth, and I think that's one of the biggest issues we have as a society, honestly, especially in America. I’m hoping that people will realize that you do have an individual choice in the way you live. I'm sure there's circumstances that you can't control, but make the effort — don't just hear a headline and believe it. Make the effort. And that way you're going to live with more meaning and more purpose.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

The first two episodes of Henry David Thoreau premiere on PBS and the PBS app on March 30, 2026, at 9 p.m. ET, with the final episode releasing on March 31.

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