“I don’t think it’s necessarily the most talented person that gets the longest career,” Edward Burns tells me. “It’s the most tireless person. I just work. You know what I mean?”
His implied modesty does him credit. The New Yorker’s CV confirms an admirable versatility both behind and in front of the camera. But, yes, he certainly works. It is close to 30 years since he broke through with the indie smash The Brothers McMullen. He directs. He writes. He still acts a bit.
We meet on an uncharacteristically warm day in Dublin’s Ballsbridge to discuss, mainly, his first novel, the unapologetically autobiographical A Kid from Marlboro Road. But he is also directing a film in Ireland and preparing to premiere another at the Toronto International Film Festival. The current production is called Finnegan’s Fortune. Do I have that right?
“It’s the story of two Irish-American brothers – myself and Brian d’Arcy James – and our father was an Irish-born golf pro who came to the States in the fifties to play on the tour for about 10 years and then became a teaching pro.”
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So it seems the old man has a heart attack when his grandson hits a hole in one.
“He dies. We get his will. He wants his ashes brought back to Ireland to be distributed at his family home where he grew up – the beach where he proposed to our mother.”
Well, that sounds heart-warming. When the current shoot is tidied away, Burns heads to Canada for the launch of Millers in Marriage. He directs Minnie Driver, Patrick Wilson, Julianna Marguiles and Gretchen Moll in another tale of family shenanigans.
“It’s about three siblings – Julianna Marguiles, Gretchen Moll and myself. We are all in our mid-50s. The movie explores that chapter in your life when you become an empty nester. You’re forced to re-evaluate everything.”
Let us set those aside and use A Kid from Marlboro Road as a map of Burns’s journey to this place and time. The novel reads very much like a memoir. The author and his publisher do nothing to dispel that confusion by including snaps from Burns’s upbringing. He was born in Queens and raised in Long Island as the son of an Irish-American police officer and a mother who worked for the Federal Aviation Administration at Kennedy Airport. The hero of the novel has a similar background. Both become the first in their families to go to college. Both have black sheep among their ancestors (then again, don’t we all?).
My dad asked the same question: did you think your mom was that unhappy? I think my mom probably suffered from some form of depression
I interpreted one incident as a joke about the closeness of the story to the author’s life. The young narrator, newly interested in reading, is handed several suitable volumes. One is Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. For a century readers have blurred the protagonist of that vast novel with its author. Was Burns tempted to just write a memoir?
“Much of it, quite honestly, is fiction,” he says. “I had no interest in writing a memoir. I just don’t find my journey that interesting. I did a book 10 years ago about my journey through the film business as sort of a ‘how to’ for young filmmakers. But I love writing fiction. I love being a storyteller. If I had to try and be truthful this would be a far less interesting book.”
He does not, however, deny that his own life provides the frame.
“It was a lot more fun to embellish a lot of the stories from my past,” he says. “It was a lot more fun to take the germ of a real event and have some fun with it. Was my grandfather a horrible human being and alcoholic who beat the sh*t out of my grandmother and my father and my aunt and uncle? Yes. Unfortunately, he wasn’t killed outside of a bar in Hell’s Kitchen. He died a slow death of cirrhosis.”
His mother, to whom he talked at great length when preparing the novel, died of Covid and never got to read the final text. The narrator is not the child of an entirely happy marriage. I wonder if he would have been concerned had his mom laid eyes on those parts of the saga.
“Probably a little bit,” he admits. “I told my dad: this isn’t you guys.”
Nonetheless certain aspects did rankle with his father.
“My dad asked the same question: did you think your mom was that unhappy? I think my mom probably suffered from some form of depression. Not crippling in any way. But she carried a weight with her all the time.”
The book is great on Irish-America. One grandfather – both the narrator’s and Burns’s – lost his wife young and, incredibly to a contemporary reader, went back to Ireland to find another spouse while leaving his daughter, in real life Edward’s mom, at an orphanage. In a city which then had a population of more than seven million, he still felt he could find a partner only in the old country. Different times.
“Those are the kind of stories she didn’t love to talk about,” Burns says.
Three months later the Sundance people called to say we got into the festival
A Kid from Marlboro Road is also good on the changing demography of New York City. Families begin in Manhattan – in the Burnses’ case Hell’s Kitchen – then move to an outer borough and eventually outside the city proper to Long Island. Many then retire to Florida. Then someone of Burns’s generation, leaving school in the 1980s, returns to the happening corners of Manhattan.
“The minute I turned 21 I got right back 20 blocks from where my grandparents lived,” he says, laughing. “But it didn’t cost a million dollars then.”
Square-jawed in the same handsome Irish-American fashion as the Baldwin brothers, Burns has a charm that seems not in any way forced. He just talks like a human being. He smiles patiently when I bring up the subject of his still legendary debut film. The budget for The Brothers McMullen, a tale of Irish-American life on Long Island, has long been argued over. One estimate suggests as little as $25,000 was spent before its Sundance premiere in 1995. In proportional terms, it was comfortably the most profitable film of the year.
“I was a kid, just out of film school, working as a production assistant in television,” he remembers. “I was writing my script, sending it out to Hollywood and was unable to break in that way.”
He had made one short film, but decided there was no upside to making another. So he elected to hustle together the money for a feature.
“I never thought that I would sell it,” he says. “I thought it would be the calling card. I can get an agent and then go make another movie. You know the story. We shot 12 days over the course of eight months. We’d raise a little bit of money, shoot some more scenes.”
After The Brothers McMullen was finished, he was working on a TV show that had Robert Redford in for an interview. He passed the star (and driving force of the Sundance Film Festival) a VHS of the movie and stepped back.
“I could tell he was annoyed,” Burns says. “He was like: it’s another one of these guys. He handed it to the woman that works with him. Three months later the Sundance people called to say we got into the festival.”
Burns’s success remains an inspiration for no-budget film-makers to this day. His subsequent career has been steady. Barely a year goes by without him directing a feature or TV series. Just three years after McMullen, he found himself wading through the Wexford surf on Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.
“That’s the first movie I ever acted in where I spoke dialogue I didn’t write,” Burns says. “So for me to get Spielberg and Tom Hanks as two mentors was amazing. As a film-maker it was like going to graduate film school – watching Spielberg and shadowing him. And then, with Tom, not only do you learn how to behave as a professional on set, but also how to approach the work. And how to respect your co-workers from Steven all the way down to a PA.”
Along the way to his current status, Burns became half of a proper power couple. In 2003, he married Christy Turlington, one of the original “supermodels”, and they now have two children. I sense he doesn’t much warm to my suggestions that they were the personification of post-millennial glamour.
“I think our level of celebrity was in a sane and manageable place,” he says. “We’re not so big that it ever interfered with our having a very normal family life. We both were committed to staying in New York, and making sure that, if we did have to travel for work, we were never travelling at the same time.”
He shrugs in a convincingly ordinary-guy fashion.
“We’re both pretty grounded,” he says. “It helps when you’re on the same page with those big life decisions.”
A Kid from Marlboro Road is published by Seven Stories Press
