It's his love for personal filmmaking that led Burns to write and direct his latest film, Nice Guy Johnny, in which he also plays the rascally, womanizing uncle of a young man (Adventureland's Matt Bush) at a crossroads in life, stuck between pursuing his dreams and selling out. Like his young protagonist, Burns had spent a weekend pondering whether or not to take a director-for-hire gig on an unnamed mainstream rom-com; the indie spirit won out, and he and producing partner Aaron Lubin went on to produce Nice Guy Johnny with a cast of unknowns and a bare-minimum budget of $25,000. (They also opted to partner with Cinetic's FilmBuff to distribute Nice Guy Johnny as a multi-platform digital release; it's available now on iTunes, Amazon.com, VOD and DVD.)
Movieline caught up with Burns in Savannah, where Nice Guy Johnny screened as part of the Savannah Film Festival, to discuss why Burns revisited his Brothers McMullen production model on purpose, how independent filmmakers must be realistic about profits in the digital age, and why he doesn't mind having a few "dogsh*t" movies on his resume if it means he gets to keep making his films his way.
You're known to write screenplays constantly; what was it about Nice Guy Johnny that made you want to produce it next?
Sometimes when you're writing a script you kind of know in the middle of the process that it's going to be a long haul. You're still determined to finish it. Everything I write I think I'm going to eventually make into a film. Sometimes even in the middle you realize well, I'm not going to crack this one anytime soon, I'll see this screenplay through a couple of drafts but I know it might go up on the shelf. This was one that flowed out of me so quickly, given what it's about and given the experience that inspired the writing of it, that the minute it was done my producing partner and I decided that this was the film we wanted to make next.
So we went back into the screenplay and thought, how do we want to go about this? What size film do we want to make? Do we want to try and attract a couple of well-known actors and get them attached, then go out to the financiers? That's how we've made all of our films. We got into this conversation about The Brothers McMullen. Do we really want to go through that painful process again, which might take a year to get your film off the ground with no guarantee that you'll get the film made? When I made McMullen I had no money, had no connections, didn't know how to make movies, had no equipment... and somehow I got that thing done and went on to make a nice bit of money. So I said, "Why don't we just try that again? Is it crazy to think we can recreate the model?"
And now...?
One advantage now is that I have an editing system and my own camera, but we still sat down and said we're going to go with $25,000, shoot in 12 days, unknown actors who do all their own hair and makeup, wear their own clothes, no production designer, no location scouts, none of that stuff. Three guys and that is it. Once we dove into that, then we knew we were making a movie because there was nothing to stop us.
What was the real life incident that led to you writing Nice Guy Johnny?
Two years ago I had a conversation with my agents, and they asked if would be willing at all to look at an open directing assignment. Studios have these projects and there was some interest in [me] directing a romantic comedy. I said no; they said, "You're not going to believe how much money you'd make if you were to rethink that." They told me; I said, "Send the scripts." I spent six months reading a ton of screenplays -- not all of them were dogsh*t. There were some very funny, well-written scripts. One in particular I thought, OK. If I'm going to do it, it should be a hit. I thought that I could lend my voice to this. I think I can make it my own, it won't just feel like selling my soul for a paycheck. I said, "Yes, let's take the meeting." My agent said, "Great! We'll fly you out to L.A. next week." And I said, "Let me just take one more weekend; I want to read the script one more time."
And that weekend turned out to be the soul-searching weekend when my producing partner and I had a lot of conversations: "What's more important right now, taking the paycheck or sticking to the path we've been on -- pursuing the dream?" We love making these tiny, personal films. It's harder to get them made and much harder for them to reach an audience, but we prefer those to what we see at the multiplex. In the end we decided to pass on the easy money and follow the dream. [My partner] said, "You've got to write a screenplay about this; we've got to come up with a story that explores that." We had a lot of friends who at different places in their lives were kind of wrestling with the same thing. And that's how the script was born.
How does that really compare to how you got The Brothers McMullen made?
The first film was even tougher. We didn't have the money; it was a matter of raising $10,000, shooting a couple of days, trying to raise another $5,000, shooting another couple days, sneaking into the editing facility of the television show I was working on at the time at night, cutting the movie at night without them knowing...
You snuck into the Entertainment Tonight facility to edit Brothers McMullen?
Yeah. That was a much tougher feat to pull off. This one, if you embrace the compromises of that $25,000 that you know you're going to have -- people are going to do their own hair and makeup, you're going to shoot with mostly available light, you're not going to have a Steadicam, you're not going to have a track, you're going to have to beg and borrow for every location, you're going to have to rewrite your script if you can't get a location... Once we knew how to make movies, making those compromises was much easier. You realize you know you don't need as much as you think you do.
What are the benefits of making a film like that, under such limiting self-imposed constraints?
Total creative control. You don't have to make a single creative compromise. You don't have to change a line of dialogue, cast someone you don't want to cast, pick a piece of music that you don't want, lose a scene in the editing room, change the title of a movie. Sometimes when you're dealing with more famous or well-established actors there are things that go along with that, and that is not a part of the conversation.
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]