Before Ed Burns became a hot indie filmmaker, he dreamed of playing for the Knicks. But these days, he’s more likely to be setting up camera shots than working on his jump shot.
“I’m a little out of practice — I have to confess, I’ve been busy,” he says with a distinct Long Island accent.
He’s been promoting his new film, “No Looking Back,” a drama about a waitress stuck in an uninspiring relationship and facing a dead-end future. Lauren Holly plays Claudia and Jon Bon Jovi plays her steady boyfriend; Burns is the ex who drifts back into town to spice up her life. The film was shot on location in New York’s Rockaway Beach.
The New York-based writer-director-actor achieved critical acclaim three years ago with “The Brothers McMullen,” a bittersweet comedy about three Irish-American brothers struggling to come to terms with each other. The independent flick was made for $25,000, which Burns borrowed from his father, a retired NYPD cop. It was shot while Burns was a production assistant for “Entertainment Tonight.” “Brothers” won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995 and went on to gross more than $10 million. He followed it up with the romantic comedy “She’s the One.”
“This is the most personal film I’ve made,” he says about his latest effort. “When I sat down to do it, I went back and looked at the films that got me excited about wanting to be a filmmaker — `Five Easy Pieces,’ `The Last Picture Show,’ `Hud,’ `Tender Mercies’ — films that didn’t give us obvious good guys and bad guys.”
Burns says he fell in love with movies after taking a film appreciation class at State University of New York in Albany. “If you were an English major you could become a film studies minor, and they said it was like the guaranteed easy `A,’ so, of course I jumped at the chance and started studying films.”
In his new book, “Three Screenplays by Edward Burns” (Hyperion), he also talks about his evolving outlook: “Prior to this course, my idea of a great film was any movie that included full frontal nudity.” But his taste has matured, and now his best-picture picks are such films as “L.A. Confidential” and “Good Will Hunting.”
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With “No Looking Back,” Burns moves away from romantic comedy, producing a serious drama about a woman trying to come to terms with her past and make some serious choices about her future. “I just turned 30 in January,” Burns says, “and I know my friends who didn’t go to college and stayed home were all sort of looking at their lives and saying, `What’s next? If I don’t do something soon I might get stuck in this place forever.’ “
In addition to his own film projects, Burns will star with Tom Hanks and Matt Damon this summer in Steven Spielberg’s World War II film “Saving Private Ryan.” “One of the greatest experiences of my life was to spend 3 1/2 months looking over Spielberg’s shoulder,” the young filmmaker says. “I learned so much.
“For me, to just be acting in a movie and getting a chance to work with someone like Tom Hanks. . . . I did things as an actor and took chances I would never have taken on my own film. I know I’m a better actor because of it.”