cover story - EDWARD BURNS

Last Call

The phone rings, you pick it up and hear your future self at the moment of your death. Did you just get spooked? Then Edward Burns’ thriller One Missed Call is for you

Edward Burns has always been a bit of a puzzle. Cute and talented enough to have been a leading man, the New York native instead skimmed along the surface of the movie industry, appearing in the odd studio movie while trying to get his own films made.

It’s been 13 years since the talky drama The Brothers McMullen — about three Catholic brothers — started his career off with a bang. He wrote, directed and starred in that movie. But despite directing another half-dozen films (including She’s the One and Sidewalks of New York) and appearing in one or two movies most years (Saving Private Ryan, The Holiday), Burns has rarely grabbed headlines. Which is surprising since he’s married to model Christy Turlington, with whom he has two small children.

Perhaps Burns — who turns 40 this month — is so good at staying out of the spotlight because his first job in showbiz was as a production assistant for TV’s Entertainment Tonight.

“I was able to see what stardom and fame could do to people...so I’ve always been able to put everything into perspective and not let any of it go to my head,” says the Long Island-raised New Yorker. “Luckily, by the time I started getting attention, I had gotten all my wild ways out of me. I had already done my thing.”

This month, Burns appears in two films —  as Katherine Heigl’s crush in the romantic-comedy 27 Dresses, and as a cop in One Missed Call, a remake of a Japanese horror film.

French filmmaker Eric Valette directs the latter based on 2003’s Chakushin Ari. The story binds a seemingly random group of people, all of whom receive cellphone messages documenting the final locations, times and moments of their lives.

Shannyn Sossamon (A Knight’s Tale) plays Beth, a grad student who witnesses the gruesome deaths of two friends, Leann (Azura Skye) and Taylor (Ana Claudia Talancón), just days apart. But what disturbs Beth most is that both of her friends received phone messages foretelling their last breaths just days before.

While most people think Beth’s claims  are crazy, Detective Jack Andrews (Burns) isn’t so sure, since his own sister was killed in a similar freak accident.

How close is this version to the original?
“There’s a lot of things different than the Japanese version. The director didn’t want us to see [the original] until after we saw his finished film. Now that I have seen the Japanese version, One Missed Call is more of an intense thriller. It still has the blood and gore of the first one, but there is so much more suspense.”

So more tension than gore?
“Yeah, it’s funny. Even though it had a lot of gore in it, Eric decided to go with a PG-13 rating instead of an R. So we shot a lot of gore that isn’t in the version of the film that I saw. But I think they’re going to do a director’s cut or a collector’s DVD filled with more blood, guts and gore.”

Is this your first horror?
“I wish, but it isn’t. The first sci-fi-horror movie I did was one of the worst films ever made. It was called A Sound of Thunder.”

Yes, I almost forgot about that time-travelling monster movie.
“I’m so thankful you pretty much forgot about it. I hope everyone else who made the mistake of seeing it blocks it out.”

It was based on a Ray Bradbury story and you had such a great cast, including Ben Kingsley. What happened?
“It was one of those periods in my career where I was like, ‘I don’t want to be a filmmaker anymore. I just want to act.’ I show up [on set] in Prague, and on the first day I go to the big set that is supposed to be our spaceship. Immediately, I’m looking at the set and I’m like, ‘Oh oh, this looks like my high school play. I think we got some problems here.’ They are reporting to have an $80-million budget, but I think we’re making this for probably $30-million. And basically that was the deal with the movie…. I didn’t even see the whole film. I watched about 20 minutes of it.”

How do you get through a shoot when you know you’re making a bad movie?
“A lot of drinking. I did a lot of drinking in Prague [laughs].... No, you have no choice but to convince the people backing it to make it better. You spend two weeks trying to convince the producers and the directors to fix it. You know that that’s not going to happen, so you and the other actors kind of like get together and try to laugh it off. The little part of the movie I did see, I didn’t like. There’s a scene where I say, ‘I know what’s going through my head there.’ For months before it came out, I kept thinking, ‘God, I hope they cut that scene out of the film.’ Of course, it was still in there. That’s when I was like, ‘I’m out of here.’”

It’s refreshing to hear an actor talk so honestly about a horrible movie they made.
“You have to be honest…. I think everyone’s hearts were in the right place.”

How do you decide when you’re going to act in a project as opposed to just direct it?
“It’s such a crazy business. It’s so hard. For me, as a filmmaker, it’s like I go into these dramatic shifts where I’m like, ‘I’m a filmmaker now.’ And I go and I take three years off from acting, and I just do my little movies. Then after that I’m like, ‘I want to do that again. I want to go and act in a couple of movies.’ A lot of times you’re forced to take what’s available at the time. You try and find the best project. I’ve always tried to find interesting people to work with, that I can learn from.”

Does it bother you when the tabloids delve into your personal life with Christy Turlington?
“Luckily, I worked as a production assistant at Entertainment Tonight for four years, and I think that maybe it gave me more of a realistic outlook on that whole side of the business. It’s a pain, and it’s never fun to have to deal with, but when you get into this business, you quickly learn that’s a part of the deal.”

Earl Dittman is a Houston-based writer.