How Peter Coyote became Ken Burns' go-to narrator

Vulture

Coyote has voiced many Burns documentaries since 1996's The West. "I’m attempting to be as transparent as possible," says Coyote. "I don’t want you to pay attention to the beautiful quality of my voice, or my articulation, or anything like that. I want to just be there to serve that film. Really, man, I’m a Jew with an animal name who reads good." Burns says he hired Coyote to sound like "God's stenographer." "I would ask him for every project except those that are subject-wise African-American," says Burns. "There’s a process: We would prefer that Peter not see the script and he prefers not to see the script. And we do not run the film while we’re recording. We get about 95 percent of the way through editing, and then we say, 'Time for Peter.' An episode might run an hour and 50 minutes. Peter reads it cold. And more often than you could possibly believe, that first take is often terrific. It’s usually two, three takes. I’m sure it now drives him insane. I always say, 'Perfect. One more for the insurance company.'" Coyote adds that Burns' films "really stand above and apart like a Ph.D. in the subject. The challenge of taking the reader through complex sentences, with lots of clauses and subclauses, is something I have an idiot savant’s talent to be able to do. I have a very wide peripheral vision. I can see when a comma is coming, I can see when a period is coming and I have to dismount. I understand what I’m reading — fully. Very often, we’ll stop and have discussions about something in the text, or I’ll tell him some little historical piece of relevance that I’ve uncovered."