Filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick sat down with Metro for a wide-ranging interview at the Hotel Commonwealth last week. Here's some of what they had to say in the 45-minute chat that ranged from "Baseball" to the game itself to music and "The War."

Burns on the 1994 strike, which happened just as the original "Baseball" was coming to the screen: "For some, we represented their anger. But for most, it helped to mitigate and remind them why they love the game. I think, maybe, it softened for some people the horrific blow. But we hated it. It wasn't the game we had just covered. All of the lead-up to it, we detailed. We knew. It wasn't surprising that it happened. It was just devastating as a fan."

Burns on whether the Red Sox' championships were the impetus for the new "Tenth Inning," which airs Sept. 28 and 29 on WGBH: "Not really. For me, it made me sit up because we had followed the Red Sox and the Brooklyn Dodgers (and Los Angeles Dodgers) in all of the nine innings, knowing full well the Yankees, the most dominant team in baseball, would always get their full coverage. Brooklyn was the first to integrate, Boston was the last. One's an old American League team with a cherished ballpark, one's a National League team with a cherished ballpark. Both had star-struck histories and lots of stuff. For all those reasons, it worked out perfectly to do that.

"When one of those teams won so spectacularly, and it happens to be your own, you sit up and think 'Wow, maybe we should do this.' But it wasn't until the steroid scandal happened the following winter and early spring. When it broke full-bore, we said 'We have to do it.'"

Novick on getting sources to speak candidly about steroids: "There was a certain amount of mea culpa among the press. But from people in the game, I generally felt a door shutting. 'We're not going to go there,' or 'I didn't know anything,' or 'I didn't see much.' They just didn't want to, basically, rat out their friends, I think, or really reveal too much. What goes on in the clubhouse stays in the clubhouse. That's one of the cardinal rules of sports. I think it's difficult to have that kind of conversation in depth.

"On the other hand, they would say things that were sort of around the edges. You could take a lot away from that. I think the most compelling comment we got was from Joe Torre saying 'It's terrible, it shouldn't have happened.'"

Burns on not being able to speak to Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire for the new documentary: "I actually think it's stronger that way. Assume we had gotten all of those people. They would have equivocated and we probably would have left their feeble, superficial, guarded comments on the cutting-room floor. It would have been odd to have  them commenting on the strike or their childhood or how great it feels to hit a home run and all of a sudden not be present for the most important discussion of this new chapter, which is the steroids thing.

"I think in a way we were smart to pursue it the way we did. We were able to go back, in the case of Barry Bonds, and find within the archives -- the press conferences that he gave and the locker room discussions -- enough revealing material that doesn't speak to culpability with regard to steroids, but speaks to the larger, we feel, issues of character and personality that shape him, and beyond that the sort of tragic dimension of this story. Not just to him particularly -- he didn't need to do this; he was the greatest player there was -- but, by extension, all the other people that were caught up in the bad aspects of it. We tried not just to parrot, sort of, how we are in our media, but to give a kind of complexity, background, nuance and undertow that will help people make up their own minds about it. We're certainly not saying 'This is how you should feel.' We think it's very complicated. And, quite often, 'neither and both' is the answer."

Check back soon for more from Burns and Novick

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