Al Weisel
Edward Burns: Third Degree Burns
By Al Weisel
Premiere, April 1998, pp. 54-55
When Edward Burns passes Lauren Holly a beer, it's the Long Island equivalent of Paul Henreid's handing Bette Davis her cigarette. In a dingy Far Rockaway, New York, laundromat with wood-paneled walls circa 1975, Holly takes the beer and gazes briefly into Burns's eyes, framed by mussed strands of brown hair, then quickly looks away, as if she might lose it. Flashing his cocky grin, Burns begins to woo her with mumbly, gravelly intonations that recall the sensitive tough-guy delivery of Brando and Dean. Then he flubs his line. "Cut!" he yells, exasperated.
It's not the first take he's ruined. Burns, nicknamed Steady Eddie by his crew, seems unusually nervous today on the set of his latest ode to the Gen-X working class, No Looking Back. Later he'll confess that he was "freaked out" by the presence of his agent and a journalist. With the exception of Burns's buddy Bruce Springsteen, who showed up to lend support to a mutual friend Burns had cast as a mechanic, just about everyone else on the set has worked with him before. "When I started to fuck up, I was aware it's not just the family," Bums explains.
The 30-year-old actor-writer-director may not be ready to stray from the comfort of the family nest, but even though No Looking Back is being shot near his home turf of Long Island, it's still something of a stretch for him. Unlike his first two films', the romantic comedies The Brothers McMullen and She's the One, his new effort is a drama. And instead of playing the hero, Burns has written himself a roguish character who tries to steal his ex-girlfriend (Holly) away from her live-in love, played by rocker turned actor Jon Bon Jovi. (Bon Jovi says the film echoes his own romantic life: "My buddy joined the Navy and I got his girl. She's still my wife.")
With moody montages of a rain-swept seaside town, the movie even looks different from Burns's other work. It was influenced, he says, by three films whose settings are about as alien to New York as Mars. "I have this trilogy of Texas films—The Last Picture Show, Hud, and Tender Mercies—that are just my favorite films." They appeal to Burns not because of their locales, but because of an ambivalence they all express: "The characters [in them] aren't necessarily good guys or bad guys.
Perhaps the biggest difference, however, is that No Looking Back is a woman's story. "It's definitely a departure from his other movies," says Connie Britten, a McMullen alum who plays Holly's sister. She was struck by the script's—though not always the screenwriter's—understanding of women. "I was giving my perception of this woman's experience, and Eddie's like, 'Yeah, she just gets mad at him.' Sometimes I think he doesn't even know where the stuff he writes comes from." Burns says he used the actresses as "bullshit detectors," telling them, "If one thing is false or dishonest, you gotta let me know. It can't feel like it's written by a man."
On a first meeting Burns can seem a bit brash, even arrogant. But this impression is soon tempered by a refreshing willingness to admit his shortcomings. "His character [in No Looking Back] has this sense of cockiness that Eddie doesn't have," Holly agrees. "I thought he did at first. What becomes apparent is he constantly strives to be better."
After the hype surrounding The Brothers McMullen and the seemingly inevitable sophomore backlash that greeted She's the One, Burns is tired of living up to others' expectations. "After McMullen I think people wanted something different from me and I'm like, Look, I'm taking baby steps here," Burns says. "You can't expect me to make Citizen Kane the first time out. I made a 16mm film and didn't know what I was doing and got lucky. I'm not so arrogant to think I'm a great filmmaker.
"The films I make are not going to make $100 million," he stresses. "I have no interest in that. You need more money to make them and when you need more money, they take control away."
The No Looking Back set sees Burns in full control, surrounded by supportive, familiar faces, but there's one face that's missing—that of his former girlfriend Maxine Bahns, the female lead in his first two films. Burns bristles when reminded of the flak he got for casting her. "You want me to say Lauren's a better actress than Max? Yeah, obviously. She's got years of experience on her. I do think Lauren in this film gives a great performance. As far as Max goes, I wouldn't change a thing. She and I got a bum rap."
Faced with his first romantic scene without Bahns, Burns was apprehensive. "Eddie had never kissed anyone on film before except his girlfriend," Holly recalls of the relatively tame sex scene they shot in the same Long Island hotel where Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco had their notorious rendezvous. "Eddie was terribly nervous about it and was like, 'We have to do this kiss. Do I have to use my tongue?' I was like, 'No, you can do a stage kiss.' 'What's a stage kiss?' We were rehearsing, and he would call cut before we got to the kiss. The first take, he gets to the kiss and he literally attacks me. I felt like a human salad bar."
Making love onscreen may have been difficult, but making war was worse. Right after he shot No Looking Back, Burns headed to England to play his first role in another director's film—Steven Spielberg's D-day epic, Saving Private Ryan. To prepare his cast for their roles, Spielberg put them through ten days of grueling training. "I don't know if I ever hated anyone as much as I hated this guy," Burns says of his instructor, the film's military technical adviser. "He was the toughest sonofabitch. It started raining the first day and never stopped. We were sleeping in tents, eating rations. There was always an invasion at about 4 o'clock in the morning, just as you were falling asleep under your wet blanket in your wet uniform."
To finish his own film on time Burns took his editor with him to England and cut at night. Working with Spielberg "was like going to the ultimate graduate film school," he says. He even got to screen No Looking Back twice for the maestro. "'You made a great film that takes its time,"' Burns says the Oscar winner told him. "'Don't let them tell you to speed it up. Just let it breathe."'
Nursing a beer in Manhattan's White Horse Tavern upon his return from shooting Ryan, Burns recalls how nervous he was when he started work on that film. "I had never spoken a word of dialogue I didn't write, so I was shitting in my pants." But according to Holly, who visited him on the set, the other actors were soon referring to him as the Close-up King."
If Burns has taken to being a star onscreen, offscreen is another matter. He remains unnerved by press reports linking him romantically to Holly. "At first he thought it was funny," Holly says, "and then he was like, 'I'm going to be the most hated man in America. I stole Ace Ventura Pet Detective's wife."' Both deny they were an item during filming. But they're more ambiguous about their post-production relationship. "We are just friends," Burns insists. "We became close when she was going through the divorce. Not girlfriend and boyfriend. I think we played with the idea, and I'll leave it at that." Then he adds: "I can guarantee there's no possibility of us getting married in the next ten years." Holly says she doesn't know what the future holds. "I think he's an incredible guy, and I think there's absolute potential there. The only thing that stops me is public perception, because it will look terrible."
Whatever their future together, Holly would like to work with Burns again. He has two projects on his slate: First up is a quick exercise in pseudo-documentary style influenced by Pasolini's Love Meetings, a film that another actor on Saving Private Ryan introduced him to. "I want to play with the narrative," Burns says. "There are flashbacks, interviews. As experimental as you're going to get from me. Avant-garde ain't my middle name." After that Burns, whose father was a policeman (as are several of his cousins), wants to make "a character study of a young cop's life" that would be an antidote to the cartoon violence in many films. "When that cop gets killed [in Fargo] they went for a laugh," he says. "I fail to see the humor in my old man getting shot."
Making a Spielberg film with a Jurassic-size budget has altered Burns somewhat. He's twenty pounds lighter from his training experience, and a scraggly beard covers his newly lean and hungry face. But something else about him is different as well. "I'm getting antsy to work with a bigger budget," he now says. "At a certain point you don't want to compromise the look of the film anymore."■
Al Weisel is the co-author, with Larry Frascella, of Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, being published in October 2005.