Edward Burns at City Winery

Highlights from Edward Burns's Q&A at his film & wine pairing event at City Winery on October 17th:

• He didn't set out to be an actor and doesn't think he's very good at it still. He did it in the beginning more out of necessity and lack of money to hire other actors for his films.  

• He doesn't really direct himself.  He maps out the scenes in which he really needs to act, and then has his Assistant Director take over for him on the days they are shooting those scenes.

• He made Brothers McMullen with $18k, shooting for 12 days over an 8 month period when he could gut a camera, sound guy, and actors all together on one day, using his parents house and central park as locations, then editing it after-hours at his day job of being  production assistant on Entertainment Tonight. Burns worked on the film from when he was 23 to when he was 27.

• For the Brothers McMullen soundtrack he used music he didn't actually have the rights to at the beginning, but the artist agreed to let him use the music for free, and Sarah McLaughlin ended up writing lyrics to one of the instrumental pieces, so the artist ended up getting compensation through that.

• He wrote She's The One as a more commercial/funny version of McMullen, thinking McMullen would never get picked up by a studio.  

• He is a writer first and foremost -- he was an English major who minored in film to help improve his GPA. He still counts writing as his favorite part of the process, spending much of his time of outlining and getting all the little details sorted before he allows himself to start writing the screen play.

• He feels that the way he writes has always been from an actor's perspective, so he covers a lot of detail relating to character in his scripts.  He has gotten more comfortable with actors's improvising as his career has gone along, though how much improvisation he allows depends on the actor and the scene.

• On Tom Petty doing the soundtrack for She's The One: Petty was between albums and looking to put a song on a soundtrack, so they got hooked up, and he went over to Petty's house, where he found that Petty had been working on three songs, not just one, after seeing a rough cut of the film. They started out with those songs and then extrapolated their motifs into the rest of the film's soundtrack, similar to the way Simon and Garfunkel's music was used in The Graduate, which is one of Burns's top 5 favorite movies.

• On acting in Saving Private Ryan and being directed by Spielberg: he learned a lot about directing, because before that experience he thought he needed to give his actors notes after every scene and/or take, but Spielberg didn't do that; he would let everybody have a minimum of 3 takes, believing that especially with an ensemble cast, it takes time for everyone to gel. Just like a coach of a sports team can't teach his team to gel, a director can't tell his actors how to learn to work together. It was several days into shooting before Spielberg gave anybody any notes on a scene.  When asked why, he said it was because that was the first day that nobody knew what they were doing.

• On releasing his new film: Nice Guy Johnny is being released via iTunes, On Demand, and DVD on the same day (Octobr 26th) because it is more cost efficient from a producer's stand-point, many of his fans never got to see his films in their towns or cities due to limited theatrical releases, and he feels that as film becomes more digital, it will start to follow a more DIY model, similar to that music is beginning to follow.

• He made Johnny in a similar way to McMullen: with a small budget, hyper-local locations, unknown actors, minimal crew (this time taking advantage of digital tools: shooting on a Red 1 camera and editing the film on his own souped-up Mac).