Ric Burns on Making Oliver Sacks: His Own Life: Narrative is Therapy

Waxing euphoric, documentarian Ric Burns, exclaimed, “The story in 14,233 lines was an attempt to get to the bottom, to heal the world.” He was not speaking of Doctor Oliver Sacks and his biopic, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, of the noted neurologist and writer of Awakenings (1972) and The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1985), the subject that brought us together on the phone this week, but of a current project on Dante, the Italian Renaissance author of The Divine Comedy: “Now in 2020,” said Burns, “Everything needs healing.”

The theme of healing unites these films for Ric, the younger brother of Ken Burns, to whom he apprenticed himself for the mini-series The Civil War and other projects, before striking out on his own. Oliver Sacks: His Own Life was featured in last year’s New York Film Festival—he says of the prestigious festival: “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” but as he’s made the rounds, including the 2019 Hamptons International Film Festival, he’s found, “People really gravitate toward Oliver Sacks.”

“He blew my mind,” says Temple Grandin, “No one got me,” she says of her autism, one of many tributes to Sacks in the film. Sacks was fascinated by inner narratives, what’s going on inside each person, an “internal cinema.” Burns describes Sacks’ method of healing: “He storied his patients back into the world,” noting that “story collates the data of subjectivity,” and that, within this paradigm of empathy, “everyone becomes patient/ doctor/ reader.”

Burns’ film traces Sacks’ enormous compassion back to his orthodox Jewish family in England. Brilliant as his parents were, they could not deal with the schizophrenia of his brother Michael, and could not cope with Oliver’s homosexuality. His mother with whom he was especially close said, “You are an abomination to me.” This was like an axe striking his soul, with dire consequences for Sacks’ sex life. And while they remained close, they never spoke about it again. From the intense endeavor to heal himself, Sacks formed an encyclopedia of interiority.

With a theatrical release postponed because of the pandemic, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life will have a virtual theatrical release next week. Among Ric Burns’ many current projects, his epic on Dante will bring him back to Italy to further explore the poet’s love/ hate relationship with Florence, and his conviction that the world needed to be repaired. As to himself, Ric Burns says, “My work is the most normal part of my life.”