Burns baby burns
Award-winning director and actor Ed Burns talks about enjoying success on your own terms, his lifelong music obsession and the fact that he’s about to make his first big-budget Hollywood movie.
John Walshe, 18 Apr 2007
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.”
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