Millers Weds Director Edward Burns on Creating an Adult Film in the ’50s and the MacMullan Brothers Sequel [TIFF]

Edward Burns’ new film, Miller in marriagePremiering at the Toronto International Film Festival on Wednesday, September 11. Viewers are transported to some of their most pivotal life moments, highlighting how the characters’ slow evolutions impact their romantic relationships over the years.

In addition to being the writer and director, Burns stars in the film alongside Morena Baccarin, Benjamin Bratt, Minnie Driver, Brian d’Arcy James, Julianna Margulies, Gretchen Mol, Campbell Scott and Patrick Wilson. He has worked on projects such as Saving Private Ryan, She is the oneAnd Bridge and tunnelServed in several different roles. Burns says that, as an experienced creative in his mid-fifties, he asked if he could still find an audience. However, the writer-director chose to tell a story that resonated with him above all else.

Screen Rant Interviewed Edward Burns During the Toronto International Film Festival about the inspiration behind Miller in marriageNavigating the movie’s multiple time jumps, and his upcoming projects.

Burns was excited to write about his own age in Millers at Marriage

“I’m 56, so I started looking around and doing, let’s say, a little investigative work into what was on the minds of my friends and my peers.”

Screen Rant: I read that you wanted to make a film for adults in their fifties to relate to, but how did you come up with the concept specifically?

Edward Burns: Usually, screenplays come from a bunch of different ideas that are floating around, and then they kind of coalesce, and you’re like, “Oh, wait, I think I’m on to something.” My producing partner, this was years ago, had just rewatched Kramer vs. Kramer, and he suggested, “We should really think about making a mature film like Hollywood used to make, like a Kramer vs. Kramer.” And I loved the idea. I came from a TV show I did called Bridge and Tunnel that dealt with a bunch of kids in their twenties, so I was confident about writing about people my age.

I’m 56, so I started looking around and doing, let’s say, a little investigative work into what was on the minds of my friends and my peers. And there are two things that came to me. One is, on the professional side, all my friends in the business and my other friends in the arts, when you hit the middle of the fifties, there was a fear of “Do I still have something to say? I It’s been a while. If I have something to say, can I still find an audience? There were some people who felt a little apathetic, like, “I’ve been doing this for so long.”

I really don’t care if I meet an audience. I just want to do this work for me. So a number of these conversations work their way into the screenplay and into the opinions of some of the characters. The bigger thing, though, that I was much more interested in exploring was – I’m an empty nester lately. Many of my friends, who are a few years older, have moved into that chapter, and there are many conversations about “how do you define yourself when you are no longer parents in the same way? When your life does not revolve around parents and Everything that goes along with that?”

And then there were also a number of questions about, “Why do I stay home with the kids, and you got to work?” Or, “Why did we leave New York and move to LA?” Or the bigger life questions. People looked back on the last 25 years of their lives and questioned some of the choices they made. So I just thought, with those two things, it’s ripe for a screenplay.

There are so many different dynamics between the characters. What was the casting process like when it came to finding the right combination of actors to portray the right relationships?

Edward Burns: It’s interesting how it came to be, because originally, I thought I was going to play the Campbell Scott part, and then we had someone who was attached to play the part that I played, Andy, and he dropped out. The part that Campbell played, I thought it was a pretty strong part, and I thought I could get a really good actor for it, so I was like, “Why don’t you play Andy, and we’ll release this one. ?” When Campbell and I had our first conversation about the script, I just loved everything he had to say about the character, so after that, it was a no-brainer.

It was just like, “Please do this part.” The blessing I received as a filmmaker was when Gretchen Mol and Juliana Margulies signed on for their respective parts. I always saw these two characters as the leads. The movie doesn’t work if they don’t work. And Gretchen, I think, was so perfectly cast in the part, and she brought a vulnerability to the part that I don’t know I had on the page. And the beautiful thing about Julianna was that she brought a toughness and a courage to play an ice queen which, again, I don’t know if that was necessarily on the page, but things develop when you start talking to your Actors.

I’ve always said, once you’re cast, the character is yours. I have so many other things that I’m focused on in the course of making the film – the color of the walls and the look of the film. Every actor cast will know their character more intimately than I can. So please, if there’s something you see there that I don’t, let’s explore it. And in both cases, it’s a better film, and the characters are richer because of the things they brought to it.

Another aspect I found fascinating about the film was the Miller siblings and how they all have different outlooks on life, despite having the same parents. What story do you want to tell with the siblings specifically?

Edward Burns: I like the idea of ​​how three kids can all have a very different opinion about their parents and their upbringing. That’s why I started with this. My character, I think, is probably the most resentful, and again, we don’t go deep on that, but it was good information to have how I shaped the characters and how it affected the kinds of relationships they got into. And I saw that my character, Andy, was the one who got married late, and it didn’t work.

He is the one who voices the most displeasure with his parents. My thought was that it was a fear of marriage based on what he saw with his men. As far as Julianna, we played with her character being the eldest child and had to be the adult in the house, the adult. And again, there is one line in the script at that dinner party where her parents are never around. So she basically has the responsibility of having to raise her two younger siblings.

And with that, you can see how it shapes her attitudes toward marriage. She’s a little bit tougher when it comes to, let’s say, responsibility. And then Gretchen, I saw as the romantic – the baby of the bunch who fell into a relationship that was probably something similar to a relationship, and again, we didn’t go into it, but as I imagine the relationship that she parents Have with one of them abusing or drugs or alcohol.

Burns wrote a sequel to his 1995 film, The MacMallan Brothers

“I’m still doing a little bit of work on it, but that will be, hopefully, the next thing we do.”

You jump between a lot of life events and relationships. How do you help the actors and yourself stay in the right headspace when filming the scenes at different times?

Edward Burns: That’s probably the biggest challenge because, again, it’s an independent film with a lower budget, so we shot the movie in 20 days, which is an insanely accelerated schedule, which you can only do with great professionals like this cast. . Who show up every day, ready to work, eager to work, know their lines. I typically don’t do a lot of takes, so when you have actors that show up and are ready to go, you can move through the day with great efficiency.

That said, because we might be shooting four scenes in one day, we have to constantly sit down and regroup and be like, “Okay, when exactly is this flashback coming? Is it the day before?” Because we have flashbacks that are the night before, a year before, a week before, so we really have to chart that. But luckily, like I said, I’m very fortunate that they’ve been a great group to collaborate with. There were times, quite honestly, I didn’t have the answer to exactly when that flashback might have happened. So we would either rewrite to try to address this or figure it out together.

I love the score in the film and the classical piano sound. Why did you and the composer feel it fit the tone of the story?

Edward Burns: Music can be tricky. Sometimes you have an idea for what you think will work, and you throw it against the image, and it just doesn’t work. And then, sometimes, your editor will have a suggestion, and I’ll think, “Oh my God, that’s a terrible idea.” You throw it against the picture, and it’s beautiful. Andrea’s Music – My wife, Christy, actually heard some of his music.

She played it in the kitchen in the early days of my editing. And I said, “Oh my God, that’s beautiful music, what is it?” We looked it up, I just took a song from iTunes, sent it to my editor, and said, let’s try this against a particular scene. And it just worked beautifully. So we reached out to him, and we ended up using all his music in the film. So, again, sometimes you get lucky with the marriages between image and sound.

You wanted audiences to relate to these characters, but whose story resonated with you the most?

Edward Burns: I’ve been doing this for 30 years now, and the indie film scene is very tough. It’s just hard to sit down and write a screenplay, but it’s always much harder to raise the money to get it made, and after it’s made, to sell it. So I think the parts of Nick, Julianne’s character, Maggie, Gretchen’s character, and my character—every conversation that these characters have about the creative process is a conversation I’ve had with a friend of mine, or with my wife, or with my wife. My producing partner, Aaron.

So the struggles that every creative person deals with, whether it’s, let’s say, the uncertainty of whether your work is good or not – do you still have something to say? Can you find an audience? I think Juliana says at one point, “Sometimes you just have to do the work.” Those were the things I was really most excited to explore as a writer.

Now that Miller in marriage came out, what’s next for you? Do you have anything else in the pipeline?

Edward Burns: The biggest thing I have in the pipeline is I just finished the screenplay for the sequel to The Brothers MacMullan. So I’m very excited to go out with this in the next couple of months. I’m still doing a little work on it, but that will be, hopefully, the next thing we do. And then, in addition, I wrote a novel, and today the novel is published. It’s called “A Kid from Marlboro Road.”

About Edward Burns’ Millers in Marriage

“A complete director of actors, Burns focuses on character development and tracking emotional memory.”

Writer-director-actor Edward Burns’ follow-up to TIFF ’19’s Beneath the Blue Suburban Skies surveys the torn emotional lives of three siblings adrift in middle age. An ensemble drama with a stunning cast and a bold approach to storytelling, Millers in Marriage takes a sobering look at the vagaries of long-term love while championing the possibilities for personal change.

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Miller in marriage Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11.