Ken Burns made this film at the same time that he made "The Statue of Liberty" (1985). He said in an interview that it wasn't as difficult as people might assume, for two reasons. One, reason is that he enlisted the help of two others to co-produce the films (one for each film). The other reason is, according to Burns, that both films (all of his films, for that matter, he said) are asking the same question that he never answers definitively: "Who are we Americans?"
