The white Goudy letters against a black background. The melancholic violin melody. The Peter Coyote narration. The slow panning over old photographs to give them a sense of movement.

Ken Burns is such a fixture of America’s cultural landscape that the tropes of his filmmaking style can be recognized by even the most casual PBS viewer.

His 2009 docuseries “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” led to a year-over-year attendance spike of 15 million visitors to the National Park System. His powerful 2017 “The Vietnam War” might offer as much closure as we’ll get to that divisive conflict. And his calling card, 1990’s 10-hour series “The Civil War,” averaged more than 14 million viewers each evening, making it the most watched program PBS has ever aired.

Next Sunday, the man dubbed “America’s storyteller” comes to the Altria Theater for a screening event and panel discussion for his next film, “The American Revolution,” co-directed by Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt. Nearly ten years in the making, this six-part, 12-hour film will engage the voice talents of Coyote, Morgan Freeman, Paul Giamatti, Laura Linney, David Oyelowo, Jeff Daniels, Wendell Pierce, Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep, among others.

Reached by phone from New York City last week, Burns says he once swore off examining our country’s armed conflicts with his films.

“After the Civil War series, which came out in 1990, I vowed never to do a war again,” he says. “It’s just too emotionally hard, looking at dead bodies, looking at injured people. It’s tough.”

His next war series, 2007’s “The War,” came about after learning in the late ’90s that roughly 1,000 World War II veterans were dying a day. That, and the idea that “a lot of kids thought we fought with the Germans against the Russians” during the war convinced him to tackle the project.

As much as the Civil War is said to have pitted “brother against brother,” Burns says the inter-family conflicts of the Revolutionary War were even more contentious.

“[The Civil War] was nothing compared to the fighting within and in between families and neighbors” in the Revolution, he says. “It’s our origin story. It’s how we came into being. It’s incredibly dramatic, and it’s something that people know very little about.”

To test his theory, Burns asks this reporter why the colonists dressed up as Native Americans for the Boston Tea Party. He says that my answer, that it was to disguise themselves as they committed a crime, is wrong.

“They dressed up because they were saying, ‘These are Native Americans. We are not British here,’” he explains. “It was a way of saying, ‘We are distinct from Britain.’”

Given the current political climate, it’s a curious time to reflect on our country’s founding 250 years ago. Burns—who has been a critic of President Donald Trump—says his films aren’t intended as a commentary on present-day politics.

“We too often, particularly with the past, want to make somebody all good or all bad, and nobody’s ever like that … The essence of what we all want to do, journalists, whatever, is to reduce something to a simple binary, but there’s nothing binary in nature. It just is complicated.”—Ken Burns

Going beyond rote recitations of facts, Burns’ films endeavor to imbue the American experiment with a bit of poetry. Has that task become more difficult under a bellicose presidency that’s listing into autocracy? No, says Burns, before referencing the Mark Twain-attributed line about history not repeating, but rhyming.

“We too often, particularly with the past, want to make somebody all good or all bad, and nobody’s ever like that,” Burns says, mentioning that he keeps a small neon sign in his editing room that reads “It’s complicated.” “The essence of what we all want to do, journalists, whatever, is to reduce something to a simple binary, but there’s nothing binary in nature. It just is complicated.”

And how have more recent interpretations of the Revolutionary period, such as the Tea Party or the 1619 Project or even “Hamilton,” factored into his new project? Burns says his film stands apart.

“We are just calling balls and strikes,” he says. “That’s all we’ve ever done, whether it’s the Civil War series or World War II or Vietnam. And the same is true in American history. You can’t be weighted by fashions of historiography or the license that fictional portrayals take. Obviously, ‘Hamilton’ is probably the greatest cultural juggernaut of this new century, and deservedly so. It’s a marvelous thing, but it’s apples and oranges.”

This is the first time Burns has dramatized an armed conflict that took place before the invention of photography, offering a challenge to his trademark practice of panning over photographs before cutting to stationary interviews with live subjects. His solution has involved including more maps, documents, letters and paintings than usual.

“It’s just been exhilarating and challenging and a great learning curve for me,” he says. “You just use the tools you have, and that’s the exhilarating part.”

Never one to sit still, Burns is currently working on other films about Henry David Thoreau, Lyndon B. Johnson, and African American history from emancipation through the Great Migration.

A documentary about Barack Obama is also underway. So far, Burns has conducted eight lengthy interviews with the former president: “There’s no rush. In fact, the longer that we wait, the better it is, because you get that historical perspective.”

Next week’s event, hosted by VPM*, will see Burns and co-director Sarah Botstein take part in a panel discussion with three historians from the film: Rick Atkinson, Christopher Brown and Jane Kamensky. Portions of the documentary will be shown.

Burns recently screened 40 minutes of the film for cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

“They were just blown away by it,” he says. “These are college kids, and to see their excitement and willingness to accept all of these various modes of communication was really exciting.”

* – Full disclosure: VPM owns Style Weekly.

VPM’s screening event and panel discussion for “The American Revolution” with directors Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein will take place 7 p.m. on Sunday, March 23 at the Altria Theater, 6 N. Laurel St. The documentary will begin airing on PBS on Nov. 16. For more information, visit vpm.org.