One phone call changed the course of Ric Burns' life and led to a journey in documentary films that started some 30 years ago and hasn't stopped.
Ric Burns documentaries come with a guarantee in the form of a note from his longtime editor, Li Shin Yu.
"She hereby certifies that she guarantees to me that everything will be OK, provided I shut up," Burns says. "'Cause I'll ask her 12 times a day, 'Is everything going to be OK?'"
It's been much better than OK ever since Burns ditched plans to become a teacher when his older brother Ken asked him to come work on the documentary series "The Civil War."
"Joseph Conrad once said he got up from breakfast one day and it was just, with the rapidity that a bird leaves a branch, his life changed and he became a writer. And I just like went, (makes sound effect), and that's what I did," Burns said.
"My brother led me into this career. I can't honestly look you in the eye and say I would've been doing it if it weren't for him."
Ric Burns and his company, Steeplechase Films, make documentaries on a wide variety of subjects. The city of New York. The ill-fated pioneer group The Donner Party. The Pilgrims.
Burns' love of history and its vestiges - a document, a comb, a piece of clothing - is visceral, even lyrical.
"Sometimes, it can feel like the ground has opened up and has almost a dizzying, vertiginous quality of like, you can feel the past really exists," Burns says.
In 2015, Burns directed and produced a documentary for PBS about the American Ballet Theater. There is one inherent problem with doing a film about ballet.
"It does not withstand recording," Burns says.
"The magic of it is that it's happening in real time and then over. So if you want to make a film of it, you're, by definition, trying to put something into a can. You're trying to bottle lightning."
To try to catch that lightning in a bottle, Burns shot the dancers up close and fast, then slowed down the footage.
"Every one of those 1,500 frames in a second is worth seeing because the precision and the expressiveness is so powerful," Burns says.
Ric Burns is perhaps best known for his opus, "New York: A Documentary Film." Four hundred years of New York history in eight episodes, almost 18 hours.
"The emergence of this extraordinary convergence of commercial capitalistic energy on one hand and human diversity on the other. BAM. It's like a nuclear reactor. And the city and its history comes seething out of it," Burns says. "And what happens when you put those forces together is, you create the most continuously transformative society the world's ever seen."
Documentary filmmaking is, by nature, a collaborative effort. Ric Burns and his brother Ken worked together for five years on "The Civil War" but haven't collaborated on a signature project since.
Mishkin: Are there phone calls about, "Hey, I'm working on a project?"
Burns: We never talk about work. We're way too competitive. The thing about 18 months apart, you're like those little dogs, where you can put them and they're like (makes sound of mock fighting).
Among the many lessons Ric says he learned from his brother was an unremitting focus and a respect for the interviewing process.
"You've invited them in. They're taking a risk. They're like, they're in your care," he says.
"You're asking people to do this funny thing, which is to forget enough about the artifice of the situation, to actually kind of be who they are in real time."
Ric Burns comes to his passion for history and storytelling naturally. He learned it at the feet of his father.
"When he got, like, his mojo going and he wanted to tell you about Iwo Jima, you wanted to hang out with him because it was really, he just had that kind of instinct for where the blood was running through it," he says.
But it was not an easy childhood. His mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when Burns was two. He was 10 when she died.
"Amazingly warm person," Burns says. "I can smell the smell of her lipstick. Very close to her kids, and just somehow had a spirit that was really, it might have been harder living with my dad then living through the death of my mom, to tell you the truth."
Burns went to Columbia and then Cambridge University and was planning on an academic life before the fortuitous phone call from his brother led to this long journey in documentary filmmaking.
One interesting line on his resume is an in-house industrial Burns did for the international financial services behemoth Goldman Sachs.
"I felt like an anthropologist from Mars going to Goldman Sachs," he says.
Burns rejects criticism he got in a Wall Street Journal article that he wasn't tougher on Goldman Sachs in light of the 2008 financial crisis.
"You can go out and make it a film about Goldman Sachs and call it The Vampire Squid, but you're not going to be able to sit there and talk in a textured way with three or four dozen people about what it is their job is, how does that really work," he says.
Burns says ultimately, he's not an expose guy doing gotcha journalism.
"If we accidentally along the way got you, we wouldn't use it. Because it would, in some sense, have violated the implicit contract that we were there under," he says.
"We're here to talk about something you know and feel about. Tell me what you know and feel. Take a risk."
Burns works with his wife, Bonnie Lafave. They have two teenage sons. He says he doesn't bring his film work home.
"If you don't have down time, you're going to strip the threads," he says.
But he does recognize that his passion for his profession comes with a price.
"When you're lucky enough to find a calling, many of the horses of your nature are harnessed up and all running down the road in the same way. That can be tough for the people on the road, sometimes for the person whose horses they are," he says.
Burns has been coming to the same office to make documentaries since he started Steeplechase Films in 1989, a process he calls rejuvenating.
"Like, I sometimes go, 'Is there something wrong with me?'" he says. " I'm not bored by this. I come down the same goddamn 40 blocks from 110th and Riverside to 73rd and Broadway. You know, not so far. Not even remotely. So you just go like, 'That's quite good fortune.'"