It’s His Story--And He’ll Tell It His Way

Edward Burns’ 1995 directorial debut, “The Brothers McMullen,” will be remembered as the little indie film that could.

Written while Burns was holding down a full-time job as a production assistant at “Entertainment Tonight,” shot largely in his parents’ house, and starring Burns and his then-girlfriend Maxine Bahns, the film was made for $25,000 (final overall cost was $118,000) and took in more than $10 million at the box office.

Hollywood comes courting when your film reaps that kind of profit, and before Burns could say let’s do lunch, Robert Redford had taken him under his wing, Steven Spielberg cast him opposite Tom Hanks in “Saving Private Ryan,” a film slated for release this summer, and the funding for Burns’ next two movies had fallen into place.

Burns’ newest film, “No Looking Back,” which opened Friday, is an ensemble piece starring Lauren Holly, Jon Bon Jovi, Blythe Danner and Burns. A study of a circle of working-class people in a north eastern beach town of decidedly limited opportunity, the story centers on Claudia, a waitress engaged to be married who realizes she wants more out of life.

Like “The Brothers McMullen” and Burns’ second film, “She’s the One,” “No Looking Back” is essentially an exploration of conflicts particular to middle-class Americans.

“Some people criticized ‘She’s the One’ for dealing with the same themes ‘Brothers McMullen’ addressed, but I know where I want to go as a filmmaker and I’m in no hurry,” says the 30-year-old Burns during an interview at a West Hollywood hotel. “I made a tiny film. Nobody, including me, expected ‘McMullen’ to do what it did. I’m not so egotistical as to think I’m ready to compete with Martin Scorsese, but I have set different challenges for myself with each of the films.

“This is a story about dreams, particularly the dreams of people who grow up in small towns, and is the story of a woman who looks at the lives of the people around her and knows she wants something more. I’d never written a story from a woman’s point of view, so that was one of the challenges here. And, although I touched on dramatic elements in the previous films, I’d never done a drama.

“My first film was dialogue heavy and talky, and so was the second one,” says Burns of “She’s the One,” which was made for $3.5 million, co-starred Burns, Bahns, Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Aniston, and was released in 1996.

“With this one I wanted to use images more effectively in telling the story. The production design on ‘Brothers McMullen’ basically amounted to getting enough light on the actors so we could capture an image, but this time I had enough of a budget that I could try to create a unified mood. There’s nothing more depressing than a beach town in winter, so we wanted a bleak, dead-end feel, and the color temperature of the film reflects that.”

Burns says he had specific reasons for casting Bon Jovi and Holly in two of the lead roles.

“The story is set in a fictional beach town on the East Coast, where the cadence of the speech is quite specific to the region [the film was actually shot in Rockaway Beach, Queens]. Jon Bon Jovi is from a blue-collar town in New Jersey, so he grew up with people like this.”

For the character of Claudia, Burns wanted “an actress the audience would find believable in the role of a small-town girl, but who also had a quality of ‘otherness’ that tells you she doesn’t belong there. Lauren’s from Geneva, a one-horse town in upstate New York, so she knew exactly what I was after.”

As for the rumor that Burns and Holly have been romantically involved, both stars say no way.

“Liz Smith said Lauren and I are getting married, but that’s absolutely untrue,” says Burns.

“The rumor that Eddie and I are dating is just tabloid stuff,” adds Holly. “When Liz Smith ran that item, Eddie and I were 5,000 miles apart laughing over the phone.”

Initially, Holly says, Burns wasn’t interested in having her read for the part because he thought she was was “some hoity-toity city girl.

“In fact, I grew up in a town with a population of 18,000. The biggest difference between Claudia and I is that I didn’t want to leave Geneva, and would probably still be there if my parents hadn’t pushed me out of the nest with college.”

Burns’ actors give him high marks for his ability to shape their performances--a fact he finds surprising, in that he considers himself first a writer.

“I tend not to work with actors who want to try 14 different ways to walk in the door,” Burns confesses. “Occasionally an actor comes up with something magic, but when you spend a year and a half working on a script, you don’t want an actor thinking they can improve it on the spur of the moment.”

Holly summarizes Burns’ methodology on the set as “a process based on creating an atmosphere of confidence. He does that by letting his actors try anything they want and always telling them it’s wonderful. He knows exactly what he wants from every scene, of course, and in retrospect I can see he occasionally shot things he had no intention of using just to keep us happy.”

“Eddie really is a great actor’s director,” concurs Bahns, who starred in Burns’ first two films, and recently played the lead in John Asher’s “Chick Flick,” an independent road film. “He gets what he wants, but is very gentle in how he goes about it.

“Although my part in ‘Brothers McMullen’ was written with me in mind, it wasn’t written for me, and Eddie gave me the part out of sheer desperation,” continues Bahns, who’d been dating Burns since 1989 and was working on a master’s degree in the classics when she was recruited for the film.

“I’d never acted before so it was hard for me to leave our relationship behind on the set--it seemed ridiculous pretending we were having our first kiss when we’d been going out for eight years, and I remember thinking, ‘So this is acting. This is difficult!’

“I think we’ll work together again, and when we do, I’d like to return having learned something, because I started out as a rather empty vessel,” adds Bahns, who broke up with Burns last March and is now working toward an advanced degree in French cinema.

Born and raised in a working-class neighborhood of Long Island, Burns has an older sister, Mary Catherine, and a younger brother, Brian, who’s his partner in Irish Twins Productions, which has a two-year development deal with Fox Television.

“My dad was a cop in New York for 28 years and I have four cousins who are cops, but I never considered becoming one, partly because it’s a scary job. My dad worked in a rough precinct [Precinct 2-5 in East Harlem], and when he left for work, there was no guarantee we’d see him again,” says Burns.

“Another reason I never considered being a cop is that my dad always encouraged me as a writer.” In fact, Burns says, he won a poetry contest when he was in the sixth grade, to the delight of his father.

Filmmaking had yet to cast its spell on Burns by the time he graduated high school, however, and he enrolled in New York’s Oneonta College as an English major with an eye toward sportswriting. He passed through two more colleges before ending up studying film at Hunter College, where he wrote his first script.

“It was a high school basketball drama called ‘Apple Pie’ that fortunately nobody would make,” Burns says with a laugh. “There is a story there, though, and I plan to rework that script.”

Burns spent the early ‘90s turning out scripts and being repeatedly thwarted in his attempts to get any of them in production. Finally his father loaned him $20,000 to make “The Brothers McMullen.” The film was a favorite at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, and Redford called Burns to offer his assistance.

Having worked on “Saving Private Ryan,” Burns now has a few more friends in high places. A World War II drama slated for July release, the film stars Hanks and Burns as members of a squad of soldiers on a mission to find a lost soldier played by Matt Damon. Burns is Reiben, a brash GI from Brooklyn who resents the mission and isn’t afraid to say so.

“When I saw ‘The Brothers McMullen’ I immediately saw Ed as Reiben,” says Spielberg. “Ed has a dry, Brooklyn quality and he knows how to get a laugh without milking it. He just seems real.”

Relinquishing the control he normally has on a film set (thus far, he’s only worked on his own projects) wasn’t a problem for Burns. “To only have to be responsible for 10 lines of dialogue a day was a huge relief.

“And, as a director, getting to spend 3 1/2 months looking over Steven’s shoulder was like going to the ultimate film school. The most valuable thing I learned from him is how little I know technically. Watching him work is an amazing thing. Camera angles, blocking, watching how he watches a scene go down--he knows what he wants and doesn’t quit until he gets it exactly right. I was cutting ‘No Looking Back’ at night while we were shooting, so I was able to screen the film for him a few times. I got notes from Steven Spielberg!

“The first day of shooting, we did a big scene and it went great,” Burns recalls. “The second day included a long dolly shot of me and Hanks walking along. We did six takes that went well, then suddenly Steven changes the lens and wants to redo it. It’s a long, three-minute scene that has to be done in one take and I flub my line at the 2:59 mark. Then I flub it a second time, and somebody says, ‘It’s getting dark and we’re running out of light’ and all of a sudden it hits me. I look over and I’m acting opposite Tom Hanks, Spielberg is directing and I’m screwing up. Tom and Steven were both being patient with me, but I had to ask myself: What am I doing with these two giants?”

Hanks is surprised when he hears this anecdote.

“Eddie’s one of the most unflappable people I’ve ever met,” says Hanks. “He’s extremely confident, he was never afraid to speak honestly about the day’s work, and he sort of took the lead on the set. He’d say, ‘I’m gonna go take a nap,’ and the rest of us would say, ‘Eddie’s taking a nap? I think I’ll take a nap too.’

“I think his confidence has to do with the fact that he grew in a close, clannish family. One day on the set, Eddie commented that he wouldn’t change one moment of his childhood for anything, and the rest of us just looked at him in amazement. I think that solid grounding is what’s allowed him to make such personal, revealing films.”

One of the challenges Burns faces at this stage of his career is that starring in a Spielberg film is light years away from the working-class world of Long Island.

“There will probably be a few more films inspired by that milieu, but I don’t want to write about that world forever,” Burn says. “I’m having new experiences, and I just wrote a script set in Manhattan that looks at my new life. For whatever reason, my heart wasn’t in it yet, and I threw it in the back of a drawer.

“I usually have about four scripts I’m working on at a time,” he continues. “At the moment I’m working on an Irish-American NYPD story that I guess you could say is an ode to my family, and I’m developing what you could call the Long Island childhood film--it’s my attempt at ‘The 400 Blows.’

“And, there are two novels I’m considering adapting,” says Burns, who also manages to shoehorn lots of golf and a weekly basketball game into his schedule.

“When I was growing up, my fantasy of the life of a famous person was more decadent than it’s proven to be,” he reflects. “I thought it was all cocaine, girls, limos and parties. The only perks of success that interested me were courtside Knicks tickets, which I now have, having a facility where you could edit and cast--which I recently acquired--and, most importantly, having time to write.

“I finished five screenplays while holding down a full-time job and I’m well aware of what a luxury it is to be able to spend an entire day writing.”