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Ed Burns Reflects on Gen-X Stories, From ‘The Brothers McMullen’ to ‘Millers in Marriage’

Published Time: 09.09.2024 - 20:25:31 Modified Time: 09.09.2024 - 20:25:31

“In the nineties, there were hundreds of movies being made about Gen-Xers,” says Ed Burns

“In the nineties, there were hundreds of movies being made about Gen-Xers,” says Ed Burns. He should know: as the writer-director of “The Brothers McMullen,” “She’s the One” and “No Looking Back,” he was the one making them. After 30 years and a lot of growing up, he’s drawing a fresh pour from that well for his 14th film, “Millers in Marriage,” the story of three siblings navigating life and love — no longer as angst-filled, still unproven twentysomethings, but grown-ups now hovering on the precipice of middle age.

“The coming-of-age stories we made our way through our twenties and thirties were these character-driven looks at relationships and careers,” Burns tells Variety. “But now I’m in my mid-fifties, and I was thinking about that time as another coming-of-age moment.”

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In the film, which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival, Burns plays an artist embarking on a romance with one of his ex-wife’s (Morena Baccarin) former colleagues (Minnie Driver); Juliana Margulies plays one of his sisters, an author whose success has overshadowed her husband’s (Campbell Scott); and Gretchen Mol plays the other, a former singer-songwriter wrestling with a domineering, alcoholic partner (Patrick Wilson).

Burns insists that he seldom pulls too heavily from his own experiences for inspiration, but as much as it excited him to examine the larger, existential challenges of capital-A adulthood, he admits that some of the quandaries his characters faced hit closer to home than others. “I got excited that we haven’t had a movie about us as it relates to the ‘tininess’ of real life,” he remembers. “Do you have anything left to say? Will anyone care? Am I still relevant? Is it time for a new start or are you just kind of riding it out?”

For a filmmaker who has begged, borrowed and stole to get his movies made, one question loomed larger than the others: “Is there somebody out there who cares enough to finance the film?” Reuniting on the feature with his longtime producing partner, Aaron Lubin, Burns says he conceived “Millers” with the same model in mind that has brought the two of them success since his 2001 film “Sidewalks of New York.”

“Our goal was to make these modestly budgeted character-driven movies and try and do one every two to three years,” Burns says. “I’m coming up on the 30-year anniversary of ‘Brothers McMullen,’ and I’m still getting to do this, and I’m premiering this film with all these great actors at a huge venue at the Toronto Film Festival, so by our measures of success, we’re kicking ass.”

Burns further credits that success to a professional resourcefulness (“I don’t have two films that have either been financed the same way or distributed the same way”), but also to creative rigor. When in the past he occasionally felt like he didn’t deliver his best work, Burns rededicated himself to the principles that helped his earlier films succeed. “As I hit the early mid-aughts, I just kind of let the story take me on the journey — and quite honestly, those films lack a certain discipline,” he acknowledges. “So around 2010, I was like, ‘I need to go back to school’.”

Via Lubin, he also installed a backstop. “I think now I think do it instinctually,” he suggests, “but I’m lucky. Aaron is a taskmaster with me, asking the tough questions. That’s been enormously helpful.”

While the characters in “Millers in Marriage” offer a spiritual followup to the stories that Burns told in the early days of his career, he indicates that his next project will take that approach more literally. “I just recently finished the script for a sequel to ‘The Brothers McMullen’,” he reveals. Yet rather than allowing him to retrace former glories, Burns says that having a past — full of successes, and failures — is what has enabled him to move forward more confidently than ever.

“I think I’ve gotten better as a writer, and as a filmmaker — which I think just happens with experience.”

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