Ric Burns doesn't seem like the ideal person to make a film about Andy Warhol. The fifty-one-year-old documentarian, best known for his epic-length, PBS-friendly studies of American history (most notably the remarkable eight-part, seventeen-hour New York: A Documentary Film) tends to favor grand, monumental subjects — "heroic" is a word that comes up often. So the idea of the guy who made the six-part The Way West making a movie about the guy who made Blow Job does seem a bit incongruous, at first.

Well, it turns out that Ric Burns is a man obsessed with Andy Warhol. And his latest, Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, running four hours long (a blink, in Burnsian terms), is a hauntingly expressive, thorough and loving film that makes a compelling case for Warhol as not just a brilliant art world innovator, but a genuinely — yes — heroic figure who redefined the very nature of postwar American reality. Plus, he was a great story. "Great artists forge enormous formal coherence," Burns says, "but the very greatest ones, through a kind of obsessiveness and genius and will, turn their lives into emblematic works of art in and of themselves." In that sense, Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, which opens at New York's Film Forum on September 1 and will air on PBS September 21 and 22, manages to both impart Burns's vision of Warhol's life, and to be a work of art in its own right. Nerve spoke to Ric Burns at his Upper West Side office in Manhattan. — Bilge Ebiri

How would you describe your own feelings about Warhol?
Obviously, everybody knows the name Andy Warhol — which is already an amazing achievement for a painter and filmmaker —but within this huge population, there is also this freemasonry of Warholians, a subset of people that he hits very, very deep. I've become a Warholian through the course of making this film. People have a willingness to believe that there's nothing behind the Warhol mask, instead of what the great art critic Dave Hickey once said: "Andy wore a costume, not a disguise." Warhol was probably the most candid person of his generation. I came to understand how much one can profitably think of Andy as the Walt Whitman of the twentieth century.

How so?
Every now and then, the culture will throw up someone of extraordinary magnitude and capacity — imaginatively, emotionally, perceptually, intellectually, and in Andy's case a graphic genius as well. Like Whitman, he took it all in. Andy showed us art was not only what you made from within, but what you were made of — by all those things outside you. He is so interested in the traffic of all the signs and forms and shapes of the real world and how they make us who we are.

It's such a wonderful parlor game: Is a Coke bottle a piece of art? Is a Campbell's soup can a piece of art? Is a twenty-five-hour film about the Empire State Building with a stationary camera and nothing happening a work of art? Take the films — Kiss, Eat, Blow Job, or whatever it turns out to be — and as long as you're seeing them as Andy meant for you to see those early black and white silent films, shot at twenty-four frames per second but projected at sixteen, you realize that by slowing down our perception, suddenly we see what's right before us the whole time.

Are you worried about getting criticized for making a traditional, narrative documentary about someone who was such an innovator, and such a darling of the avant-garde?
Like all great camp artifacts that speak in two tongues at the same time, Andy can be heard by one constituency or another constituency. But there is a dynamic emerging from the shape of his life. You can structure a narrative around it. I think a narrative account of Andy's life will be much more revealing than one that was stubbornly post-modern in its non-narrative strategies. The writer Steven Koch grasped this intuitively, and articulates it brilliantly: The odd paradox of Andy's life is that though he himself had no gift for narrative in the art he made, his entire life unfolds like a narrative. His life is the greatest Horatio Alger story imaginable. He's got everything going against him — literally from the wrong side of the tracks. He's so challenged physically, psychically, economically, class-wise, ethnically, sexually — but he has this extraordinary gift.

And he's completely beloved by his family. Here's this odd, quirky, winsome, small, frail afflicted little boy in their midst, in this hardscrabble, working class, immigrant family, especially in the hardest years of the Depression. And they're all unbelievably hard-working, which is where he got his work ethic. His mother, Julia Warhola, drew a magic circle around him and said, "Out there it's extremely dangerous. But in here, it's all yours, Andy." She enabled this extraordinarily imperious and labile inner life he had from an early age, and you couldn't take that away. And what does she do during the Depression? She makes flowered decorations, puts them around tin cans, and sells them door to door for twenty-five cents apiece. In one sense, Andy was doing that his whole life.

Watching the New York documentary again recently, I noticed that there was relatively little coverage of the arts in post-war New York, when the city took over Paris as the center of the art world. But that transformation is discussed in the beginning of the Andy Warhol documentary. I felt like I was watching the lost episode of New York.
There is a lot to that. Andy Warhol is kind of the lost episode to the New York documentary. I've taken three swings at postwar New York now. The first one saw it as the struggle between the automobile and the pedestrian — or, Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. The second one saw New York after WWII as the capital of a growing global empire that both did and paradoxically did not know it was the capital of a growing global empire — didn't even know it when it built two towers called the World Trade Center, and finally perhaps understood that it was unmistakably the capital of that empire on September 11, 2001.

And Andy Warhol is the third. Andy, though from Pittsburgh, is quintessentially a New Yorker. It's very poignant: He never went home. Once, his plane made an unscheduled landing at Pittsburgh, and he sat on the tarmac and did not look out the window. It's not that he didn't dearly love his family, or his brothers. Except for the first two years when he first arrived in New York, Andy lived with his mother all his life, until she had a stroke and went home to die in the early '70s. He was incredibly close to his family. But he was also a kind of strange creature that could survive only in one habitat, and that habitat was New York. He sensed it very early on — that there was a place where he could go and become whoever Andy Warhol was going to become. That place was New York.

And he, in turn, helped define New York.
Think of it like this: Pittsburgh was this industrial, robber-baron place. And Andy, when he comes to New York, he's going to get a factory himself, and he's going to get a house on top of a hill. But his factory is not going to be an Industrial Revolution factory, like the Frickes and the Mellons or the Carnegies; it's going to be a second industrial revolution factory, that has to do with image and desire and ideas of self, and all that software stuff. When did that float up? The 1920s and '30s. When was PR born as a machinery in American life? In the 1920s. It's all exactly contemporary with Andy. It's as if the sea began to rise — Noah's flood style — right around Andy Warhol, and that sea was mass culture, a mass secular culture, an increasingly democratic culture, an increasingly horizontal one, in which the power of all that stuff we swim in is becoming increasingly obvious.

It's a breathtaking and incredibly coherent artistic vision, worked out across an extraordinary career. As a painter, as a filmmaker, and then as a kind of real time performance artist in the Factory milieu, he created out of his life in the course of the 1960s — from the day he unlocked the Factory in January 1964 to the day Valerie Solanas walked in — he created three different but analogous kinds of art in three different media, each of which was heightening the intensity of how much reality you could take in. It was almost like a question he was posing.

Was Valerie Solanas the answer?
I think he knew in his bones that the greatest work of art he created was the moment Valerie walked in. Here was a person who took his message utterly seriously, who construed that message as a challenge: "If I can not redeem your promise, if I can not become you, or get what you've gotten, if you can't give me what you have, the only way I can survive is by taking your blood." It's the ultimate paradox of fame — as Wayne Koestenbaum says, "Fame giveth and fame taketh away."

What was it like meeting Andy's family?
His brother John Warhola is an extraordinary person — exceptionally wise, exceptionally loving. And he's got that incredible Mid-Atlantic Pittsburgh accent — y'know, "haas" for "house." There's a whole other film that could be made about John Warhola. He and Andy spoke every week — every Sunday, often for hours. There's a story that we didn't include in the film, because it was too painful: When John called on the morning of Sunday, February 22, he didn't know Andy had gone to the hospital — Andy had kept it a secret and only Vincent Fremont and Freddy Hughes and a few others knew he was there. Fred was already at the house with Ed Hayes. John called and said, "I want to speak to Andy." Fred said, "Who's this?" And John said, "It's his brother." And Fred said, "Andy died," and hung up.

It's like they didn't want to accept that Andy had a brother and a family, or that he had a past.
Exactly. It was a very complicated circle of people. In letting everybody in, one of the things that comes with that open territory, is that the geography of social life that clusters around you will be very jagged and complicated. Some of these people did not mean Andy well. Many of them didn't really understand Andy. But Bob Collacello and Vincent Fremont, and most of those guys from the '70s, got what Andy was about. People like Billy Name. I want to make a musical about Billy Name, called Billy!

I found it interesting that you have onscreen interviews with relatively few people in the film, especially given that so many people knew and hung out around Warhol.
The discipline of the film was to find people who could zero in on who Andy was as an artist, whether they knew him or not. Also, I didn't want to hear the sound of anyone grinding their own axe in the film. Andy was willful, and he had his own career, and his own aspirations, but he was extremely democratic and extremely open. It's like his famous saying about Coke: "The Queen of England and the bum on the street drink the same Coke." These experiences and realities we call artistic are not the preserve of class or individuals. He was literally the least snobbish person imaginable.

Is it difficult tackling such raunchy subject matter in a documentary that will air on PBS? I noticed for example that you never name the film Blow Job.
Yes. I chose not to wage that war. Andy's candidness was real. Blue Movie, originally titled Fuck, the last movie he undertook personally, is an astonishing film that is absolutely graphic and explicit. It's also whatever the opposite of porn is: You may or may not become aroused watching it, but it's not the business of the camera to become an unindicted co-conspirator in your arousal. The camera is doing what it always does in Andy's films: It's looking wide-eyed at reality, and there's a tremendous beautiful tonality to that film. None of this is available on public TV. No nipples, no genitals. No bare asses. No "fuck"s, no blowjobs. All gone.

But I would rather create a film that can successfully be out there on TV. Also, you can use your imagination. In a way I'm glad, because absent the frisson of the phrase Blow Job, your mind works a little bit harder. By not giving the title of the film, it turns out that you watch what's going on in real time. And Andy was all about putting yourself in the picture. But I can't pretend to you for a second that I didn't want to have a film that included the most explicit scenes from Couch, or had fantastic scenes of Blue Movie. But I accept it, and I'm happy to stand criticized for it.