(distant traffic rumbling) (siren wails) - It's true when you're on an island, with the exception of Manhattan where you forget all the time, by the sheer size of it.

But when you're on any island, say Governor's Island or Martha's Vineyard, you know you're on an island, and your consciousness is altered even when you don't see any water you're also aware that you're on an island.

And I think there's the bridge provides a kind of island for us.

(waves crashing) - You're not pushed to the margin, you're not on the side of traffic.

You are at the center of this, man walking.

Something that we've done eternally, cars may come and go is the thing that makes this bridge, sort of it's for people.

- It's for people.

(inspiring music) It's a, it's a hugely democratic ideal before we're really willing to actually understand what a democracy might mean.

(waves crashing) - Ken, it's a pleasure to be here.

I mean, look at that, it's just incredible, yeah.

- This is one of my favorite spots on Earth.

I remember David McCullough said in our film that it was like standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

And I think there are people who go, "Huh, what, Brooklyn Bridge?"

And yet when you think that that, those two towers were the tallest man-made objects in all of North America, that what it must have been like to live in a Manhattan and a Brooklyn of nothing more than four or five stories to suddenly having this thing soaring above you.

(inspiring music) Without the Civil War this doesn't get made because the Civil War helps promote the manufacture and the movement from iron to steel.

Steel permits this long span to happen.

So you have this beautiful gothic towers which represents sort of the old world and antiquity almost in a way, with the stone in compression.

And then the steel in tension, which is the future.

(inspiring music) I have the privilege when I'm in New York to usually walk over the bridge twice a day and you begin to recognize and nod at people the way you do your neighbors in the small town in New England that I live in.

- This is all approach in a certain sense.

Where you're essentially moving towards this thing which is the first tower.

So there is this sense of sequence and this is all sort of preamble.

- Yes, no, no.

This is the orchestra tuning up, right?

- That's right.

- And then when you hit the wooden walkway, it's when the overture begins, right?

- Right.

- The guy who designs it, John Roebling who's the best engineer of bridges, knows it's also going to be a work of art.

(waves crashing) If this was Gershwin "Rhapsody in Blue," we'd be hearing "da da da da."

Yeah, I mean, Roebling represents so much about America of that moment as well.

Right, the immigrant the sort of the dreamer, the inventor.

He had sort of spiritual beliefs that brought him here.

So there was something about him that was like the bridge a kind of emblem of America at that time.

(inspiring music) - This is the moment when the first radiating stays come out, this is what gives us stability but it's what also creates the music of this thing.

- He wanted to make sure that the bridge would be secure enough that it wouldn't move.

And so there is something that you, I think feel even if you don't know it.

That form was determined by factors that weren't just sort of pie in the sky.

They were there because Roebling was trying to do something new.

- I have tried in all of my walks, I think mostly successfully, to be present to myself at this moment now as we see this amazing thing unfold before us.

- To be in this moment, yeah.

- To be in this moment.

(inspiring music) - Ken, you were 24 years old when you started to make this film about the Brooklyn Bridge.

The bridge was celebrating it's centenary back then and we're at 140 now, and I, you know I'm a born and raised New Yorker, so I remember that period and how different New York was then.

And in the years coming up to that.

What did you think the bridge meant?

(gentle melancholic music) - The city seemed fragile.

And this had a kind of optimistic thing.

It was almost as if it was a lens through which you could go backwards in times of course, because of all the things that it represents architecturally and artistically and civically and in terms of engineering.

(gentle melancholic music) But it also represented a kind of constant that was a positive that you didn't have anywhere.

- You arrive at this moment.

It feels like you've reached sort of the door, the portal.

The doorway of a gothic cathedral, and what do you see?

You see this nave.

- And then you have this slight dip down.

This is the public square.

- There is still this way in which you go down you slow down a little bit, and you, and the things open up and you want to take a little time here, and that's sort of the middle movement.

- That's right, exactly right.

(gentle melancholic music) - I find that's such a beautiful thing that you're constantly moving towards the next thing on the bridge.

There's never a moment that captures the whole thing.

- You know, I'm a filmmaker and I determine how long a shot lasts, right?

- Right.

- In a gallery, you can stand in front of a painting all day if you wanted to, and so you're the director in essence.

Here you are submitting to someone else who also understands what your experience is through time.

But is offering you in a way, an extended motion picture.

(gentle melancholic music) - It's the greatest argument for the analog world.

This bridge, I think also represented New York in another way, which was that we can be more than we are.

We need to aspire to something greater.

And that's, I want to get back for a moment to this time when you did it because the bridge, as I said, has been cleaned recently.

The waterfronts are so different and the nature of the city is really changed.

And in some ways it's been cleaned up, it's less dangerous.

But the city has much less of a sense, I think, of optimism.

There was a kind of paradox to that.

- I agree.

- Time in the '70s and '80s, it was a low moment and yet people I think could still look up.

(gentle pensive music) And now things seem in some ways much better.

And yet people are much more pessimistic.

It would be almost impossible to imagine something like this bridge being built.

- Oh it couldn't be built at all for a variety of reasons.

But I think you're right.

This is still our lords though, you know?

I mean, 'cause maybe you come to be recharged, you know what is it that happens when you walk over the Brooklyn Bridge?

It's powerful and mysterious to me.

(gentle pensive music) You know, I have a funny story that really ended in a perfect way, which is I'd been hounding Arthur Miller to give us an interview.

And he was postponing and postponing.

And so he finally agreed to be interviewed at his Connecticut farm and he just basically says: - I mean, they could have built another Manhattan bridge couldn't they?

And he didn't.

He really aspired to do something gorgeous.

So it makes you feel that maybe, you too could add something that would last and be beautiful.

(gentle pensive music) - And that's the key to it.

So at a time when we are acquisitive and our transactional selves have sort of smothered the weeds of inappropriate and inattentive architecture have blotted out the beautiful, gorgeous flowers of our garden.

At a time when we don't feel a kind of confidence.

There is a place in the world in New York City, in the United States of America where you can go and maybe be opened to the possibility that you could do something that would last and be beautiful.

And I've tried my damnedest coming out of this bridge and what it does to do what Arthur said this is our possibility here.

(gentle pensive music) - And I love that the bridge did for you what Miller was talking about, as it does for so many people who may or may not know the history but just feel it somehow.

- You feel it.

- You feel it.