Edward Burns On His New $25K Film and the 'Dogsh*t' Movies That Made It Possible

It's one thing to make The Brothers McMullen with no money; making Nice Guy Johnny after establishing a career for yourself, was it ever tempting to throw a little extra cash in here and there?

We set the goal; we didn't want to spend more than $25,000 on the shooting of the film. In post-production at times, we spent a little bit more to color time it and things like that. But again, not a lot.

Was it easy to get your cast to agree to work for very little with the assumption that the real money might not come until much later?

The cast, through the unions, had to get paid the low-budget agreement. So everybody got paid, but it was no money -- $150 a day, something like that. Getting them together was really very easy; some of them, the older actors, were friends of mine. I did a Web series a couple of years ago and some of them were in that. All the young kids, we went to my casting director. Over the years, the same thing kept happening to us: find an actor, really like him and want to cast him in the film, go to the financiers and they say no. That's a very frustrating process, given that on my first film I was able to cast all these unknowns and a lot of them went on to have careers. So we were determined to find the actors who kept losing out on the bigger parts because they're not a name yet. That's what I asked my casting director to find. We live in New York where there are a ton of great actors, we found these kids, signed them up, and they willingly jumped in.

With Nice Guy Johnny you've made the decision to skip a theatrical release and open on VOD. What convinced you to go the On Demand route?

Soderbergh used it twice; James Gray had Two Lovers, which did really well. So there's definitely money to be made on demand. There are certain movies, you used to say "I'll wait 'til video;" now you say, "I'll wait 'til on demand." And a lot of people are downloading films. I think the thing that filmmakers have to be realistic about is that it's not going to be Napoleon Dynamite-type success. You're looking at early '90s indie film success, when films like Slacker were considered an enormous hit when they made $800,000. When Metropolitan made a million.

Those kinds of numbers are what filmmakers have to be okay with, realistic about. Making $700,000 - that's real money! Who the hell wouldn't want that? The advantage that it gives you is that you retain the copyright, you own your film, so you also then have creative control in the marketing of the film. That was a major reason we wanted to do this. The other thing is, people want instant gratification. You see me or the other actors talking about the movie on radio or television and you don't live near an art house theater, you don't want to wait the nine months for the DVD to come out. So I do think it is the future for smaller indie personal films. It is not going to replace the theatrical experience, nor should it.

Looking back on some of your acting gigs, you've appeared in mainstream films that haven't exactly scored with critics - One Missed Call comes to mind, which earned a particularly low Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes.

How low did it score? Three percent?

More like zero percent -- it was the worst-reviewed film of the year. How do you look back on film roles like that, considering that they're often the ones that allow you to make the personal movies you really want to make?

In my acting career there have been a handful of jobs that I've taken for the love of the part and the opportunity to potentially do something special. You can probably count them on one hand. Any actor will tell you we experience the same thing the consumer experiences on a Friday, looking for a movie to watch. There's very little quality work out there, so you can imagine what it's like on the other side when you're reading 10 scripts trying to find one that you're like, "All right, I think I can do this."

I could care less; I look at my resume as an actor and it's nothing but dogsh*t movies. But the good thing is it beats me having to get a real job to help finance my passion, my true love, which is making my movies. That said, periodically another good one comes along and you get to do something fun and work with some interesting people. But a lot of other times you have a One Missed Call or a Sound of Thunder, or... I can probably rattle off one or two others.

[Top photo: Amy Sussman/Getty Images]

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