Edward Burns' new film, Millers in Marriage, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Wednesday, September 11. The ensemble drama follows three siblings, who all end up on very different paths, despite their shared upbringing. 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's the One, and Bridge and Tunnel, serving in several different roles. Burns shares that, as an experienced creative in his mid-fifties, he questioned whether he could still find an audience. However, the writer-director opted 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 Millers in Marriage, navigating the movie's multiple time jumps, and his projects.

Burns Was Excited To Write About Characters His Own Age In Millers In Marriage

"I'm 56, so I started to just look around and do, 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 create a film for adults in their fifties to relate to, but how did you come up with this 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 onto something." My producing partner, this is years ago, had just rewatched Kramer vs. Kramer, and he suggested, "We should really think about making a grownup film the way that Hollywood used to make, like a Kramer vs. Kramer." And I kind of loved that idea. I was coming off of a television show that I had done called Bridge and Tunnel that dealt with a bunch of kids in their twenties, so I was definitely antsy to write about people my age.

I'm 56, so I started to just look around and do, 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 this business and my other friends in the arts, as you hit your mid-fifties, there was a fear of, "Do I have anything left to say? I've been doing this a while. If I do have anything left to say, can I still find an audience? Does anyone care?" There were some folks who felt a little apathetic, like, "I've been doing this for so long."

I don't really care if I find an audience. I just want to do this work for me. So a number of those conversations work themselves into the screenplay and into the opinions of some of the characters. The bigger thing, though, that I was much more curious to explore was—I'm recently an empty nester. A lot of my friends, who are a couple of years older, have moved into that chapter, and there are a lot of conversations about, "How do you define yourself when you are no longer a parent in the same way? When your life doesn't revolve around parenting and everything that goes along with that?"

And then there were also a number of questions about, "Why did I stay home with the kids, and you got to work?" or, "Why did we leave New York and move to LA?" or those bigger life questions. People were sort of looking back at the last 25 years of their life and questioning some of the choices they made. So I just thought, with those two things, it was 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 would play the Campbell Scott part, and then we had someone who was attached to play the part that I played, Andy, and he fell out. The part that Campbell played, I thought that was a pretty strong part, and I thought I could get a really good actor for that, so I was like, "Why don't I play Andy, and we'll free that one up?" When Campbell and I had our first conversation about the script, I just loved everything he had to say about that character, so after that, it was a no-brainer.

It was just like, "Please do this part." The blessing that I got as a filmmaker was when Gretchen Mol and Julianna Margulies signed on for their respective parts. I always saw those two characters as the leads. The movie doesn't work if they don't work. And Gretchen, I think, was so perfectly cast in this part, and she brought a vulnerability to the part that I don't know that I had on the page. And the beautiful thing about Julianna was she brought a toughness and a courageousness to play an ice queen that, again, I don't know if that was necessarily on the page, but these things evolve as you start to talk 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 during the course of making the film—the color of the walls and the look of the film. Any actor cast is going to know their character more intimately than I can. So please, if there's something you are seeing there that I don't see, let's explore that. And in both of those cases, it is a better film, and those are richer characters because of the things they brought to it.

Another aspect that 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 did you want to tell with the siblings specifically?

Edward Burns: I like the idea of how three kids could all have a very different opinion about their parents and their upbringing. So that's where I started with that. 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 as I shaped the characters and how it affected the kinds of relationships they got into. And I saw my character, Andy, being the one who married late, and it didn't work.

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

And with that, you can see how that shapes her attitudes towards marriage. She's a little icier, as it relates to, let's say, responsibility. And then Gretchen, I kind of saw as the romantic—the baby of the bunch who fell into a relationship that was probably somewhat similar to a relationship, and again, we didn't go into it, but as I imagine the relationship that her parents had with one of them abusing either drugs or alcohol.

Burns Has Written A Sequel To His 1995 Film, The Brothers McMullen

"I'm still doing a little work on it, but that'll 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 you're filming these scenes over different periods of time?

Edward Burns: That was probably the biggest challenge because, again, this is an independent film with a lower budget, so we shot this 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, knowing their lines. I typically don't do a lot of takes, so when you have actors who 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're constantly having to do a sit down and regroup and be like, "Okay, when exactly does this flashback come? Was this the day before?" because we have flashbacks that are the night before, a year before, a week before, so we were really having to chart that. But fortunately, like I said, I'm very lucky in that they were a great group to collaborate with. There were times, quite honestly, I didn't have the answer to exactly when that flashback might've happened. So we would either rewrite to try and address that or figure it out together.

I love the score in this film and the classical piano sound. Why did you and the composer feel it matched 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 picture, and it just doesn't work. And then, sometimes, your editor will have a suggestion, and I would think, "Oh my God, that's a terrible idea." You throw it against picture, and it's beautiful. Andrea's music—my wife, Christy, actually heard a piece of his music.

She played it in the kitchen in the early days of when I was editing. And I said, "Oh my God, that's a beautiful piece of music. What is it?" We looked it up, I just took a song off of 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 of his music in the film. So, again, sometimes you get lucky with those marriages between picture and sound.

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

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

So the struggles that any creative person deals with, whether it's, let's say, the insecurities as to whether or not your work is any good—do you still have anything left to say? Can you find an audience? I think Juliana says at one point, "Sometimes you just have to do the work." These were the things that I was really most excited to explore as a writer.

Now that Millers in Marriage has come 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 to the sequel to The Brothers McMullen. So I'm very excited to go out with that in the next couple of months. I'm still doing a little work on it, but that'll be, hopefully, the next thing we do. And then, in addition to that, I wrote a novel, and today, that novel came out. It's called "A Kid From Marlboro Road."

About Edward Burns’ Millers In Marriage

"A consummate 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 thorny 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.

Check out our other TIFF 2024 interviews here:

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• Caitriona Balfe, John Turturro & More (The Cut)
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• Chris Sanders (The Wild Robot)
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• Lily McInerny, Claes Bang, & Aliocha Schneider (Bonjour Tristesse)
• Brandon Routh, Malina Weissman, Mena Suvari, and Joseph Kahn (Ick)
• Annalise Basso (The Life of Chuck)

Millers in Marriage premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11.