Burns baby burns

In today’s world of vacuous celebrity and vapid stardom, you don’t really expect movie stars to be interesting: this is the world that made Jade Goodie a household name, after all. But then, Ed Burns isn’t your common-or-garden movie star.

Since the 30-something Irish-American New Yorker first shot to fame with the Sundance-winning The Brothers McMullen in 1995, he has steadfastly refused to play the Hollywood game, preferring to make his “small talkie movies” on his own terms.
Married to supermodel Christie Turlington, and able to name superstars like Bono and Bruce Springsteen as personal friends, you could justifiably expect this self-made man to be smug and self-obsessed, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. In town for the Jameson Dublin Film Festival, where his latest movie, The Groomsmen, was showing, the bearded Burns proves intelligent, insightful, friendly, witty, charming and refreshingly willing to laugh at himself.
There are more strings to Ed’s bow than simply directing films, however. A screenwriter of some note, he has also acted in one of the biggest blockbusters of all time, Saving Private Ryan, and somehow he also finds time to play guitar in a rock band, The Blue Jackets. Not bad for a guy who was flunking out of college when a film studies class changed the course of his life.
An English major, Burns was advised to take on Film Studies as a minor subject to guarantee easy A’s. All it required was to “watch old movies, write a paper.” What began as a means of staying in college, however, soon led to a lifetime obsession.
“My first film appreciation class was called ‘Four Hollywood Directors’ and it was on John Ford, Orson Welles, Hitchcock and Billy Wilder,” he recalls. “I didn’t go to the movies as a kid other than to see Rocky or Jaws, so I sat in that classroom, as a 19-year-old, and my life changed. I knew I wanted to be a writer but I didn’t know if I wanted to be a novelist or a journalist; the minute I saw those films, I thought I could write movies.”
The following year, Burns transferred to Hunter College in Manhattan, where he took every film class they had. Three years later, while working as a production assistant on hit TV show Entertainment Tonight, he made The Brothers McMullen, which he wrote, directed and starred in, and managed to get a rough cut of the film to Robert Redford, a guest on the show.
“At the time, I was a 25-year-old kid, shitting in my pants, terrified to approach Redford, let alone give him my spiel and hand him the tape, but somehow I did it,” Burns recalls. He heard nothing for about nine months, but then the head of the Sundance Festival called, asking if Burns had finished the movie and what changes he had made. He lied and said yes; the rest is history. The Brothers McMullen won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and Burns’ life changed instantly.
“That was the moment where I knew I didn’t have to go back to my old life,” he smiles. “It’s like the NBA Draft: I knew, now I’m in. Then it was a question of whether I was gonna be in the league for a year or have a long career.”
In the intervening 12 years, Burns has carved out a successful career, writing and directing his own films without selling his soul to the big Hollywood studios. Along the way, he has worked with some of the biggest stars on the planet, including Cameron Diaz, Elijah Wood, Jennifer Anniston and Heather Graham.
“I haven’t had to make a studio film yet,” he affirms. “I never surrender final cut. I use the music that I want to use and cast my friends, usually, in most of the parts. So it’s a formula that has allowed me to maintain my independence but it’s also a formula that I think has kinda prevented me from bigger box office success.”
The changing nature of cinema itself is something of which Burns is keenly aware. For every Little Miss Sunshine that breaks through to public consciousness and massive takings, there are thousands of other independent films that never reach the audience they deserve, despite critical acclaim.
“The kind of films that I make don’t really require the theatre experience, so I get the fact that people will wait three months until it comes out on DVD,” he sighs. “So that’s kind of why the old formula doesn’t work anymore: in ’95, people went to see those kind of movies in the theatre. 12 years later, they don’t.”
He points out that approximately 70% of a film’s box office takings are now made in its opening weekend, with that figure rising to 95% by the second week.
“What’s interesting is a film like Little Miss Sunshine, which is the crazy anomaly that just caught fire and kept going,” he muses. “I think I had a version of that back in ’95 with The Brothers McMullen. That movie did not deserve to make $35 million worldwide, but it just caught a little bit of fire and went. But this year, you have Half Nelson, which got great reviews and has a smart company behind it, and it only gets to $2.2 million. Little Children got phenomenal reviews: it has Kate Winslet and Jennifer Connolly in it, two fucking massive movie stars. The guy who directed it was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director two years ago: that movie is still, I think, at less than $6 million in domestic box office. Audiences are going to the theatre for very different reasons these days.”
Burns admits that he, and like-minded independent film-makers, are now primarily “making films for DVD releases. The theatrical release is simply a publicity stunt in order to generate some press and some reviews for the DVD.”
Modern technology is also changing the way we view films, according to Burns, with the ability to recreate the cinema experience at home.
“You make films ‘cos you went to a theatre as a kid and you fell in love with that experience,” he argues. “But if you’re a 19-year-old kid, I don’t think you view it the same way. They’re watching their shit on YouTube on a tiny screen or on an iPod or downloading movies, so I think they’re fine catching certain films on TV – and I don’t think they look on it as a lesser medium.”
With all of that as background, Burns’ next project is a massive departure for him. For the first time in his career, he is making a big budget studio blockbuster. A remake of the mid-’90s Japanese film, Rainy Dog, with the action relocated from contemporary Japan to 1895 New York, the budget is in the region of $100 million. Burns is adapting the screenplay and directing. It’s a challenge he’s hugely looking forward to.
“Not only am I antsy to play with the money and all the toys of computer generated effects that the film will require, after 12 years of making little movies, I now know where to put the camera,” he grins. “I now know how to work with actors. All that other stuff that I needed to learn, now I can do that with my eyes closed, so now let me deal with the big machine.”
In practically all of his films to date, Burns’ Irish-American roots have played a big role. It’s something he’s very conscious of.
“Both of my parents grew up in really hardcore Irish-American communities, my mom in the South Bronx, right near Yankee Stadium, and my dad in Queens,” he notes. “I was born in a very Irish-American community in Queens and then we moved to Long Island to an Irish-Italian neighbourhood. My dad was a cop, which is the stereotypical Irish-American civil servant job. Of my 10 best friends, six of them had parents that were off-the-boat Irish. And the houses that we hung out in, when we were listening to our Led Zeppelin records, Sean O’Rourke’s parents were listening to Irish music and his sisters were taking Irish dancing classes. So, it was this weird mix of the baseball, rock ‘n’ roll 1970s American experience, coupled with these parents who had only been in the country for 20 years.”
Indeed, throughout his career, Burns has often been described as the Irish-American Woody Allen. “That’s flattering to me but not to him,” he laughs. “But that said, Woody Allen is like Bob Dylan: there’s only going to be one Dylan, there’s only going to be one Woody Allen. But at least you’re aspiring to be like one of the greats. I’m the first to admit that I haven’t made a film that compares to those great Woody Allen films. Up until this point in my career, that’s all that I wanted to do. I like those films and no-one else is making those films. The problem I think I face is that, whereas there used to be more of an audience for those films, given the cinematic or movie-going landscape now, people don’t go to see those kinds of movies in theatres any more.”
It’s somewhat ironic that somebody who has made a career out of writing and directing low budget independent movies ended up starring in one of the biggest grossing blockbusters of all time, Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.
“That was lucky moment number two,” he chuckles. “I made my first two films. I was still green and I didn’t know anything about Hollywood or the business. I didn’t know any fucking famous people or didn’t know how the machine works. I certainly did not want to act in anyone’s movie ‘cos I’d only acted in my little films and didn’t consider myself an actor. But my agent was always sending me scripts, saying, ‘You should think about acting. You’ll make more money than with these little rinkydink movies’. So he sent me this script, and it’s a Stephen Spielberg movie, starring Tom Hanks, saying 'Oh my God, let me take a look at this.' So I read it and the part is this sarcastic guy from Brooklyn. I had no confidence in myself as an actor at the time, but I can do Brooklyn sarcasm with my eyes closed, so I tell my agent to put me up for this part. We don’t hear anything for about four weeks and then there’s a phone-call from Spielberg’s producer, saying, ‘Stephen just wanted you to know you’ve got the part’. I never met him, I didn’t audition. He saw Brothers McMullen and said, ‘Tell him to just bring that character to our set. That’s what we’re looking for’.”
He describes Spielberg as “the ultimate film maker. Forget about what they do with their craft, the best thing I got from that experience was how Stephen dealt with his crew, how he communicated to actors. How Tom Hanks, a massive star coming off his second Oscar, dealt with his director, how he dealt with the crew, how he dealt with this gang of young actors, some who were very arrogant, some who were very nervous, some who were very green and inexperienced.”
Burns admits that his experience on the set of Ryan changed the way he makes films. “The way he [Spielberg] deals with actors is the style that I stole or adopted: he doesn’t give a lot of direction. He has a lot of love and faith in actors. He doesn’t over-direct. He gives them plenty of opportunities to find it, encourages them to participate, isn’t in love with any line of dialogue, all shit that I was doing as a young film-maker because I didn’t know. I thought the director has to direct. I thought, I wrote it, that means it’s gospel. So the film was enlightening for those reasons.”
He was also impressed by the sheer size of the project: “Look at the fucking cranes. Look at the special effects. You’re doing a dialogue scene with five cameras going at once: I didn’t know that people made movies that way. I learned a lot about the business in those four months.”
But the movie business is only one half of what makes Ed Burns tick. He admits to being a “music junkie” for his whole life. “Even to this day, I’m a much bigger music fan than I am a movie buff,” he smiles.
He got his first two albums, when a kid who lived across the street from the Burns family in Long Island fell in love with disco around 1976 and decided to sell all his rock LPs. The young Ed bought Neil Young’s Live Rust and The Rolling Stones’ Hot Rocks for the princely sum of one dollar: “Those were the only two albums I had for about three or four years. Needless to say, I knew them inside and out.”
“I was a kid of the ‘70s and grew up with classic rock,” he admits. “I never got into the punk thing in a big way. I dug The Clash but I was never a Sex Pistols guy. I dug The Ramones ‘cos they were from two towns over from where I was from, but I was certainly more of a Zeppelin fanatic.
“Then I fell in love with Springsteen. For a long time Bruce was my god. Even what I tried to do as a film-maker, is to try to aspire to that honest story-telling about the place that you came from, dealing with real people, not given to too much exaggeration or hyperbole.” Indeed, Burns is now in the enviable position of counting The Boss as a personal friend: only recently, Bruce was showing him some footage from his last Dublin gig and eulogising the unique qualities of Irish audiences.
Burns’ teenage love affair with Springsteen’s music has carried on into his 30s, although he did get heavily into early hip-hop, being a basketball fanatic in high school, and when he was a freshman in college, he went down the familiar road that led to Bob Dylan and The Grateful Dead. “Now, given that kind of [musical] upbringing, I’m into everything and always searching out new bands,” he admits. Indeed, for half an hour after this interview, Burns questions me about what new music I’ve heard that’s worth buying.
The last few years have seen Burns move from merely listening to music to actively playing. Together with some old friends, including PT Walkley (who scores all Burns’ films), he formed a band, The Blue Jackets, who played a gig in Dublin’s Ambassador after the screening of The Groomsmen during the Jameson Dublin Film Festival.
“I’d been looking for my adult hobby – I’d tried everything from fly-fishing to tennis but I was looking for that thing to just shut my mind down for an hour,” he grins. “Since Christie and I started dating, we go to shows religiously: New York is great for catching bands before anybody knows about them. I know I can bang out barre chords but I wanted to learn how to play guitar, so for my 35th birthday, Christie got me a guitar and lessons and I have played two hours a day since, even to a period where, for a year, I didn’t sit down at my computer and write a script: I was fully committed to learn how to do this. Now I have two kids, so I don’t get to go out with the boys the way I used to. So it’s kind of like my one night a week with the boys.
“Is there anything better than just plugging into that amp and just hitting a big open E chord?” he asks. “Because I was a basketball junkie and I could dunk, I equate it to dunking. It is that good. It’s a very macho release,” he chuckles. “The band, for me, is just shutting this shit [points at his head] down for two hours, playing with my friends and having a few beers.”

While he enjoys playing with the band, and one of their songs, ‘Four Cheers’ features on the soundtrack to The Groomsmen, he doesn’t foresee it becoming particularly serious. “It’s great to get together and jam and if there’s a song there, we record it,” he says. “I don’t know that we are aspiring to do anything more than keeping it fun. I don’t think we want it to get real to the point where we might have expectations of it. It’d be like your intermural soccer team winning the local championship and saying ‘Fuck it, we’re gonna take on the big guys’.”
As well as being a successful movie director, actor and, now, guitarist in a rock band, Burns also happens to be married to one of the most beautiful and famous women in the world, in the shape of Christie Turlington. “She’s lucky she got me,” he chuckles. I wondered what if feels like to wake up every morning to realise that there’s probably about a hundred million men jealous of you.
“It’s a weird thing,” he muses. “When we were dating, that was a real thing. I would go to a bar and I would catch comments. I never really moved into the Hollywood thing in a big way, so I was still kind of hanging out in the same places I would’ve hung out if I was a cop. So I would get stuff like [adopts really strong Noo Yawk drawl] ‘Dude, you’re so fucking lucky. Do you know how lucky you are?’ or I would get shit. But it was worth it.”
For a bone fide celebrity couple, it seems like they’re dealing very well with the whole fame thing.
“Christie and I were talking about it recently,” he says. ”We’re so lucky that at our level of fame, a photograph of us doesn’t sell for a lot of money, so nobody bugs us. We can get a table in a restaurant any time we want. If we want to go to see a band, we can get to go backstage and say hello, but we don’t have to deal with any of the ugly shit. She probably had to deal with some of it when she was younger, during that whole moment that all those girls had. But my thing was just far enough below that, whatever that level is, so it’s just not my experience. And we live in New York, so you’re not a part of the machine when you’re in New York.”
In short, Ed Burns enjoys his life immensely.
“I got no complaints. I got two great kids. I’m still making movies. When you’re a writer, the whole thing is you think you have something to say, you love what you do, but there’s always the threat that they can take it away. How many bands were fucking great but the third record didn’t sell, the label dumped them and now they can’t sell out? So that’s the fear. But as long as they don’t take it away, I’ll be a very happy guy.”b