Independent Ed: Inside a Career of Big Dreams, Little Movies, and the Twelve Best Days of My Life by Edward Burns & Todd Gold

Author:Edward Burns & Todd Gold [Burns, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2015-01-28T22:00:00+00:00

GOING DIGITAL

I wanted to make a New York movie and I wanted to write something Adam Goldberg and I could do together. We had talked about making a movie since becoming friends on Saving Private Ryan. I had made a number of movies that explored the relationships between fathers and sons, and I also wanted to tackle the relationship between mothers and their sons.

With that in mind, I came up with Mothers and Sons, the story of two successful New York women who were best friends, and their adult sons who, unlike their mothers, never really liked each other but have always found themselves forced together by their overbearing moms.

As everyone knows, the quality roles for women over the age of forty are few and far between in Hollywood films, let alone for women in their late fifties. We made offers to two legends, Mia Farrow and Sally Field, who both signed on immediately. The great thing about casting two fantastic actresses like Mia and Sally is that they attracted other terrific actors. We soon added Griffin Dunne, Sam Elliott, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Christina Ricci to our ensemble.

We budgeted Mothers and Sons at $6 million and took it out.

We immediately got a bite from Fox Searchlight. I spoke with Peter Rice, the company’s president, on a Thursday. He said he was halfway through the script and loving it.

“We’ll let you know on Monday,” he said.

I was ecstatic. It seemed like I would be back at the studio where I began my career.

On Monday, my agents called. Fox Searchlight passed.

Eventually, Lionsgate offered $2 million for the domestic rights. Though they liked the script and our cast, they didn’t think domestic was worth more. Our agents at William Morris then tried to raise the rest of the budget through foreign sales, with no luck.

Having learned my lessons from Ash Wednesday, I wasn’t going to try and make this film on a lower budget. And so another script went into the drawer.

By then, the summer was almost over and I didn’t have anything lined up. Nor had I done anything since finishing A Sound of Thunder nearly a year earlier. I feared I had been put in director’s jail after going eight years without equaling the success of my first movie. My acting career seemed to have deposited me in a kind of exile, too.

I was nervous. I was going to be thirty-five years old, and my first child was due in October. I was no longer the young kid in the business, and for the first time in my career, I didn’t have a plan.

Then one day while riding the 1 train uptown, I saw a guy wearing an official crew sweatshirt for the movie Jungle Fever. On the sleeve was a patch that read FIVE IN FIVE, FIVE FILMS IN FIVE YEARS. I liked that. That had always been my dream, to make one movie a year like Woody Allen has done for the last forty years. I decided then that, like Spike and Woody, I was going to try and make a movie a year as a filmmaker.

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