Anything Goes : They shot their movie in 7 days for $7,000. They're bringing it to theaters themselves by Mark Deuce

When filmmaker Joe Burke talks about his microbudget indie film “Burt,” he can’t stop saying the word “magic.” He seems to chase that magic, perhaps rooted in his days as a teenage magician working at Outback Steakhouse in his hometown of Toledo, Ohio.

“I want to make people laugh, I want to make people cry,” says Burke, 41, who used to perform tableside card tricks. “I love entertaining, and if I'm not doing it, I don't feel satisfied.”

“Burt,” his second feature, was shot over seven days for $7,000, though the project had been gestating for seven years by the time cameras rolled. The movie, which he made with longtime friend and collaborator Oliver Cooper, was borne of a lot of heart and DIY resourcefulness, but they like working that way.

“Everything is so alive,” Burke says of their no-budget process, “the electricity of getting in there and finding these magical moments,” ones that remind them of their origins, making movies in the backyard.

“Burt” has its Los Angeles premiere on Saturday at the Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills. For now, this is the only L.A. screening “Burt” might have — it doesn’t have distribution yet. But Burke and Cooper have realized that it’s up to them to forge the path for it.

Burke is jovial and chatty, passionately delivering the story of “Burt” over coffee in West Hollywood, while Cooper, 35, is a bit more laid-back, though the duo have an easy rapport thanks to their decades of friendship and collaboration. They became creative partners when Cooper’s mother hired Burke to direct a video for her son’s bar mitzvah. Years later, Burke set out for the American Film Institute while Cooper, pursuing his acting dream, moved to Los Angeles at 19, quickly landing a role in the 2012 party movie “Project X” on his first audition. Since then, he’s acted in the Prime Video series “Red Oaks” and he played David Berkowitz in David Fincher’s “Mindhunter.”

But despite pursuing their own career paths, Burke and Cooper are still each other’s favorite collaborators. In 2011, they shot their first feature, “Four Dogs,” directed by Burke, starring Cooper as Oliver (yes, we’re in the realm of autofiction), an aimless aspiring actor who lives with his aunt and spends his days with an older friend from acting class (Dan Bakkedahl, later of “Veep”). Ever the resourceful indie filmmakers inspired by real life, they cast Cooper’s aunt, Rebecca Goldstein, who had never acted before, as Oliver’s aunt, and shot the film in her Encino home, where Cooper, a struggling young actor himself, was living at the time.

Both Burke and Cooper are inspired by real people — their lives, their dramas, their homes — and seek to capture that authenticity in their films.

“I just love characters,” says Cooper. “All the characters we’ve explored are people that are kind of forgotten, on the outskirts.”

Burke believes that his own interest in these people, often played by nonprofessional actors in his work, can translate to audiences. “If they're onscreen, people are going to be entertained by this person,” he insists.

It had been more than a decade since “Four Dogs,” and Burke was itching to make a second film, sustaining himself by teaching at the New York Film Academy campus in Burbank and making Instagram sketches and short films with Cooper.

There was one person who had caught Burke’s attention: Burt Berger, a late-60s-ish musician he’d seen playing guitar table-to-table at the Old Place restaurant in Malibu. Burke was a brunch regular there, and he was taken with Berger’s folksy tunes and warm, quirky presence. Coincidentally, Cooper also had met Berger separately at an open mic at the Cahuenga General Store.

It became obvious they’d happened upon a real Los Angeles character in Berger, and they wanted to cast him in something. While shooting a short in 2016, the duo thought of Berger to play a small part. They drove to the Old Place the next day, asked him if he had any acting experience (just a few commercial auditions) and cast him. He was a standout, and they even used one of his songs, “Improvin’ On,” for the end of the film (he also performs the song in “Burt”).

Link:

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