Edward Burns Interview on Public Morals TV Show | Q&A

public morals new show on TNT Tuesday nights at Burns hey guys so thank you very much congratulations thank you um there's something uh ironic about the fact that one of the most cinematic things you've ever done is on TV how do you feel about that you know I spent 20 years making low budget micro budget Independent films and if you make indie films then you know sort of uh the law of the land is compromise you never have enough money you never have enough time you're always being told every day on set you've got to make your day um so typically what ends up happening is it's about capturing a performance more so than trying to create your story visually a lot of times you have to put that on the back burner and wait for the opportunity to get a little more money this project was uh something I had been a version of this was something I've been dreaming about making for 18 years uh when we finally got the the Pilot Green lit I sat down with my Director of Photography guy named will rexer who shot all my movies uh my costume designer cat Thomas who's done by bunch of my films and Dina Goldman my production designer who have done a bunch of films with and we sat down and we looked at it like all right this is our shot you know we've all worked together making low budget movies now granted the budget for a TV show is considerably larger than an indie film it is not what you get to make a studio feature film um but we know how to not waste money and we know how to take what we're given and put it up on screen so we said all right let's let's go for it on this one um and that's what we tried to do so you get this idea you get this opportunity what is it about Muldoon that drove this story for you why him uh I was looking to create a character who would be sort of at the center of a couple of different universes that are existing and uh having a trouble sort of uh controlling all of them um he's the patriarch of his immediate family and he's dealing with a wife that wants to move out of the city and a son who's getting into trouble but he's also the patriarch of that extended family which includes his cousin who he's brought on into this plain closed division uh it also includes his father who's a retired cop who's got some uh wishes that Muldoon doesn't want to uh uh sort of hear or deal with he then is the patriarch within the office with the younger cops and the older senior cops and then he's also in a weird way the patriarch out on the street with um the the the the gangster element that this division um had to sort of work with so with that I tried to come up with this idea of well well who is the real Muldoon is the guy at home who's the family guy who is laying down a certain set of laws if anybody saw the pilot episode you know I'm sort of I'm trying to teach my son a lesson on how to behave and which way which path to take so is that the real Muldoon and then the guy on the street on the cops is that the performance or is the guy in the street the real Muldoon whose morality let's say is uh he plays within that gray area or is a little bit more suspect is that the real guy in the performances at home it's a very interesting piece I've had the chance to watch the first four episodes and um or get it on the iTunes TV page and buy the first floor even better yeah even better but what's what's what what I felt watching what I've seen so far is it's the show is is an examination of so many different things and one of them is what it means to be a man at that time of that culture in that family um we Define our roles and families and our gender roles and leader roles a bit differently now than we did in the 60s and and watching being we're I'm a little bit older than you but not much and I was I was struck by how so much of what I've seen so far of Muldoon is him trying to balance what it means to be a man because a good man a good Irish man Irish Catholic man tends to his family but he also takes care of his family by any means necessary even if he doesn't necessarily think it's the right thing yeah oh you know those are the kind of things that um you really don't think about when you're writing you know you you that that's more like a a thematic question and uh you know a lot of writers have said that you know you you can't sit down and think about theme when you're writing writing needs to reveal itself during the course of the writing process so you know the goal really is to sit down and tell an engaging entertaining story and I was pulling from a number of different um obsessions that I've had uh some lifelong obsessions you know we talked earlier today on the radio show about um you know my my love of New York City New York City history uh more specifically Hell's Kitchen and uh sort of the Irish immigrant experience and then the Irish American Experience in Hell's Kitchen as it related to not only the gangsters but also the NYPD going back to Tammany Hall all the way up until in our story takes place so um you know and then I'm drawing from my experiences of what it was like to grow up in cop culture when your dad is a cop your uncle's a cop first cousins are cops and every holiday you know is a cop event you know you go to the Holy Name communion breakfast you know St Patrick's Day is a very different kind of day and so all these things you know you're pulling into the story and you know for me I outline and and I have this epic Bible of all the different things that one day I would hope to put into this series and I draw from that and you kind of create the story and you tell the story and then at some point you know this theme that you've presented which I I quite honestly I that wasn't something I thought about as I was writing but it obviously revealed itself um so do you then find that the characters raise their hands and present themselves to you how do who are these people hi you know uh some of them are Composites of people that um I know you know I mean I'll uh you know I have a friend let's say who's got uh sort of a very sort of interesting specific personality maybe a way of speaking a funny way of delivering lines and I'll tap into a little bit of that and borrow that voice let's say for while Stevens's character latuchi and that's one version of it but then I show up and uh Wass has an idea of what to do with that character and he's bringing his experiences to it and I think the good filmmaker Embraces that collaboration and says okay well I kind of thought it was a little more of this and you think it's a little more that you know let's let's play and figure that thing out um so as much as uh I know these characters very well and I've created this world um I was lucky that I got to make a show in New York I get to hire these great well-known actors like Brian Dennehy and Michael Rapaport and Kevin Corrigan but all of these other great young hungry actors and I then hand the characters over to them and then they start to tell me who those characters are and then after you shoot two or three episodes I spent my time rewriting these scripts writing towards you know maybe what I thought were the actor's strengths but also what I got excited about watching them do there's an actor in this show called uh Duffy played by Keith knobs and Keith was a guy that came in and just every day he kind of added these little quirks to the character and the more I saw that I I found myself rewriting his dialogue playing into his delivery um uh you know there's I I may have told you earlier there's an actor also um a guy named Aaron Dean Eisenberg who shows up in episode three he came in to audition to play one of the cops we ended up not casting him but I just I I loved this kid's presence so I was like all right I got a tiny part of this gangster but this kid is special so I'm gonna flesh out that part um for him but you know again it was a small part and after maybe two or three episodes when I started to see what he could do that part just kept getting bigger and bigger and I started to write towards you know again what I what I not even his strengths what I enjoyed watching him do how do you do that let me let me let me uh in order to get to the point where you're casting these actors and you're having visions for who could do what and where they could land you have to be at least somewhat married to a vision to people to their words where do you find the flexibility after you have made such a commitment creatively again it comes from making Indie movies you know uh I can't tell you how many times when you're making a movie where you're you're not paying people or you're paying them very little you get the phone call late on a Tuesday night from an actor who's supposed to be working on Wednesday and they say look I can't make it you know I I got a better gig um and then all of a sudden you have to rethink the scenes you're going to shoot tomorrow and figure out all right I have to write this actor or this character out of a scene or write somebody else into a scene um so just being you know learning how to be nimble maybe uh served me and my entire crew well in making this that said on a television show like this you know when you sign up we've got you you can't take that other game you know um but you're still talking about if you're talking about rewrites and and such that's that's a flexibility but a lot of writers don't seem to have yeah and you don't rewrite sort of plot points right what you're doing is sort of all right I know and episode 3 we start here we end here and the audience needs to get these bits of information okay but in between there how I get from point A to B uh I can tell that story 20 different ways those two actors can you know I they you know she can walk into the room they start the fight and she walks out of the room and that relationship is over let's say this is a hundred different ways you could write that scene so depending on the scene the actors where we are in the production there might be moments where I was like all right given he does that really well and she let's say doesn't do that other thing as well let me rework this scene to suit their strengths as long as it's still serving the story that said there are definitely days where it's just like um you know you don't do that everything kind of lines up and um you know I'd say that's more the norm right then you're you know you're not I'm not on set rewriting incessantly um but when when you see some magic you want to try and capture it it's an interesting process because we've talked a number of times in the past and one of the things I I really respect about your work is Your Love of language your your sense of Rhythm you you write with the the mentality from my point of view of a musician Everything is Everything has a Tempo a Melody um and so just to follow this this uh thread a little bit longer what happens when you're completely blown away by something that you didn't anticipate you have spent a lot of time crafting The Melody of that character how hard is it to redraft that Melody because we're not just saying he walks to the street yeah if you watch the show public morals if you watch anything that Ed Burns is watching you watch it closely and you listen I always say sometimes you need to like close your eyes and listen it's very much like listening to a band at a gig especially this show it's like going to like a punk rock show it's crashing all over the place it's awesome what do you do well I think it's it's like let's say you know if you if you were in a band you're going to try and find those musicians that play your tunes well uh that's kind of the same thing I think you know you're trying to find the people that can you know sing those Melodies that you've written that said sometimes they don't you know uh not everything I write um let's say sinks so a lot of times you'll be on set and it you know you can hear it just isn't working it doesn't sound the way people speak or it just it doesn't have the right flow and nine times out of ten that is not the fault of the actor but it's the the fault of what I've written so that's the moment when you have to sit down with the actor and say all right like this isn't working what can we do here and you you play with it and you try and rewrite it and sometimes you know I come up with the solution but a lot of times um they come up with the solution so it's just a matter of again I think you just have to be open to collaborating with your team and and also also recognizing when it doesn't work they're there to help you it's also true from a production standpoint a lot of times you know you'll have the idea for that shot that you think would be oh this is going to be fantastic and you've you know you I'll discuss it with will the DP and and you know the the guys in the camera department and we'll try it and just it just isn't good something's amiss and you keep tweaking and you keep tweaking so that's you know that that's how film sets should work um I got lucky you know um the first film I act in that isn't one of my own movies is Saving Private Ryan and Stephen is one of the great collaborators great collaborator with his his crew and with his cast and I got to watch him and Hank's work out some things and I got to sort of sit on the sideline there and watch that and say oh yeah that's that's a better approach than you know what I thought I think I was doing as a young filmmaker where I thought oh I'm the director I'm just supposed to be giving directing a Direction all the time very interesting so we're kind of taking apart this uh the process of putting together public morals let's have a look at a scene from the show you can get an idea of where where it's all coming from in my mind just as we were watching that first of all what is it like to see an actor as accomplished as Brian Dennehy breathing your words yes what was that like that's one of the first scenes it's one of the first scenes we shot on Brian's first day um so I mean you get a sense of the power that he has incredible you kind of sit back behind the Monitor and you kind of can't believe it you can't believe that he agreed to do it you can't believe like bro I didn't have this idea that he was off the boat Irish and and speaking with the brogue Brian said hey I got this idea would you be okay with that and it's Brian Denny I'm like yeah you know it's like go with it let's run with it um and uh you know to the point of sort of Rhythm and collaboration Brian is really one of the few actors like because he has these epic sort of mini uh monologues within the show um and he kept uh you know Brian's obviously older than I am he knows that sort of that that older sort of um uh Irish American or Irish New York World more intimately than I do so he said would you mind if I change this word to gobsite and this and he threw in some of these old Gaelic phrases um I was like absolutely let's do it um so that that that's you know that's the the key is hire people um that is so good that they really don't need direction you know those those four actors in that scene um Neil and Fred uh uh and Ray who plays monk Brian Denny's bodyguard who he's called monk because he doesn't speak at all during the whole series until the finale he speaks in the finale he speaks in the finale we had a funny thing with that I'll tell you a story so and then I'll get to some of the other stuff so monk is Denny he's right hand man he's the Silent Assassin and he's he's with Dennehy all the way and then he talks to him and he never speaks and talking about having to change things you know after you've plotted out the world we're getting we're in pre-production for the finale and my producing partner Aaron Lewis says you know monk the Assassin uh it's kind of like Chekhov had said this thing you can't show the gun and not use the gun and he's like Monk Is the gun he's the Assassin and he hasn't killed anyone yet you know we've got to figure this out so uh there was a character who was going to survive season one and because monk needed to kill someone [Laughter] uh monk had to do what he does but the other thing about that that I want to add it's like I'm watching it you kind of you forget the you know it's it's now become its own thing and you forget the things that influenced it so two things that came to mind you know today we talked about like Oni Madden who is like this old time Hell's Kitchen Irish gangster sort of out of prohibition into the 50s and uh I think he was nicknamed like the last of the gentleman gangsters and so dennehy's whole thing just the idea of gentlemen gangsters I started to think about that character as a guy who fancied himself a little bit more of a businessman and no longer sort of the street dog and as then I started to think about that and how we were going to address him what his his apartment was going to look like then all of a sudden we start to think about Don Corleone and The Godfather so like oh okay well you know maybe we should be paying homage to The Godfather so that scene is litten lit very much in the same way that Gordon Willis lit the scenes of um you know of Brando in his library in his mansion out on Long Island and then there's a scene later on also in the finale where Denny he has the pow-wow with the other Irish Mobsters so of course we looked at the meeting of the five families and we did something where everything that's on the table in The Godfather the bowl of fruit the cigars that are presented we match that so like for the people the real cinephiles who want to look for the little tiny tiny details there's all sorts of little Easter eggs like that sprinkled throughout the show but you know what I love about that scene in particular we've also talked earlier on my radio show about your uh a native New York Irish Catholic boy I'm a native New York Italian Catholic boy and I'm an Arthur Avenue Italian you're you know from a Hell's Kitchen cop family the subtle differences between that Irish guy and the Italian guys that we've seen portrayed subtle but huge and to to find a way to illustrate the differences without like flashing a neon sign it's very very powerful very very nicely drawn what I want to ask you though that also came to mind as we were watching that scene is I was struck by the confidence of everybody including you in the way the scene was shot and staged nobody moves and to me that's Swagger because the the fear is that who wants to watch three dudes sitting on a couch talking yeah well you know I mean it's like like we were talking before about you know music and it being musical you know a film has a certain Rhythm you know so as you look at that script you know you you are you are playing with those rhythms um you know one of the things that we do in the show and you probably got a sense of it from the trailer is you know I talked about the influence of Coppola but Scorsese a big influence and you know we have that camera Dances all through this show but there are moments where you know that that can't be the visual language of the entire show you know you need to pick your spots to after one of those moments pick a spot for the thing to breathe not have it just be about hey take a look at how we recreated the 1960s or take a look at you know how great our Steadicam operator is and we can do a you know a three-minute scene and one continuous take you know there are times where you just have to say you know go more Sydney lament let's create a beautiful composition sit tight and let those compositions talk about the power Dynamic that's going on in that room um you know you talked before about the definitions of sort of uh manhood one of the themes early on that presented itself that I did Embrace and started to play with was the sense of father-son relationships you know the pilot I have that scene with my sons you know Muldoon my character has two sons uh you know Joe Patton is sitting here dressing down his middle-aged son very much in the same manner that an episode before you saw me dress down my 13 year old son and playing with those kind of you know let's say uh parallel stories and we do we do a bit of that throughout the series how do you how do you measure paying tribute to your influences and making sure that it doesn't become just a love letter that what we leave is the understanding that you've done your homework but this is all you that this is a this is your vision with the information of Scorsese Spielberg lumet and all the others I mean I think it's I I think because you know the the most important thing with any film or in this case television series is the writing um and you know the the writing comes from my obsessions my history my research um and you know the the writing uh I I don't want to say is like devoid of inspiration but it is uh it doesn't come from the same place I don't look at an old movie and so I want to write a scene like that you know the writing I started as a writer thought I wanted to be a novelist that's the thing that I I have the most confidence in myself that I know how to tell a story I know how to tell it authentically and I know it has a very uh specific and individual point of view um where let's say I don't have as much confidence it's probably in sort of visual storytelling and we talked before about being an indie filmmaker never really having the opportunity to do that um so like you know all filmmakers that have come before me you know you listen to Scorsese talk and he's constantly referencing you know the the films that um to this day still Inspire him and uh um and and uh influence you know his work and his visual style you know so that that's you know like we just looked at that as those things being passed on the fact that we're a television show and not a film we we did some other things that if this was a movie we absolutely would not have um recreated like we recreated some sets little minor touches from uh you know great old movie like The Hustle I told you earlier like we we recreated the ames's pool hall which used to exist in Times Square and we freeze we did freeze frames of uh that pool hall and we'd blow them up and look at the details behind Jackie Gleason you know the trophy case the water cooler the signage on the wall and we did those kind of little touches within the show as like this is a television show it's not a film but the films are the things that it that influenced us and made us want to tell stories in the first place so let's like pay homage to them in this different medium so we felt like we had a little bit more of a green light given it's a television show to have some fun with that I want to talk more about the the all of the visual aspects of the sets but I wanted to show all of you one more scene from public Memorial should we hit that good stuff y'all good good stuff so um I got to tell a story about that too please yeah so you pulled from your family's history yeah my father's father the Mr O the Tim Hutton character is Loosely based on him and that my grandfather was a total B piece of [ __ ] who beat the [ __ ] out of my grandmother and his kids and when he died when I'm a kid I still remember my father saying thank God he's gone and that was always something that my dad was always talking about like good riddance and if anybody knows you know the first scene in Brothers McMullen the brothers toast to that piece of [ __ ] father who beat the crap out of them and they pissed on his grave and all that so clearly that's a little part of my family's history that 20 years later now has worked itself into yet another tale and see that's what I wanted to ask you about which is because you have such um such a love for history for your family's history for the history of your people for lack of a better way to put it were you ever tempted to pull back because what I've seen pretty harsh even Muldoon is sometimes a dick yeah well you know I mean quite honestly there I've cited two examples that I pulled from my life and there aren't really too many more um but just the people in general you know there's some people who we are in such a PC World right now someone is bound to say you could have been nicer uh yeah yeah I think well that was part of the thing that attracted me to the idea of doing a period show that you got to play with sort of uh when folks were just a little different you know we didn't have to play by today's rules um and you know one of the things that was fun about creating the world was not only playing with sort of all this sort of New York City folklore but being able to play and have some fun with sort of these these these New York City let's say archetypes whether it's you know the the Hell's Kitchen roughneck gangsters or you know in episode uh 105 when we introduced the Italian Wise Guys um or you know the the wise ass cops and and those types of characters so um just it was just as a writer having fun with it but I never really uh I was never concerned with have I gone too far or do I need to pull back um this city has proven to be a major playground for you in making this show where did you find the most joy in in creating some of the scenes some of the set pieces a couple of days come to mind that um it just kind of blew me away you know like we would location scout and you know you'd find a street in the West Village or in Chelsea uh where you know the buildings hadn't been power washed they still had wooden doors wrought iron gates and we're like okay this is great we're going to use those four buildings on that side of the street make sure we don't see that new glass tower there and then on the other side of the street we'll use these five or six buildings in a row and you know you get out of the van in the morning and you you've spoken to everybody on the team about where we're going to shoot and what we want to do but there's nothing nothing like showing up on the set and there are 50 period cars on Jane Street and all of the modern signs have been pulled off and replaced to look like the early 1960s and you've got a hundred extras on the streets dressed in the period close and it's literally you step onto that street that you've walked down a thousand times in your life and now you are transported back in time I mean I always you know um living here for so long probably like a lot of people you know you walk down a street and you think oh man what was this what was this block like you know right after World War II you know or I used like I live in Tribeca and you see look up at the buildings and it says when they were built 1881 1885 and I think man what did it look like then and in some way that's been a lot of the fun of the show is to being able to sort of fulfill some of those fantasies about what did it look like them and it's also you know it's everything from gritty Hell's Kitchen to um shooting outside uh the Waldorf Astoria until we shot a hotel scene um on Central Park South and this is kind of like me as an indie filmmaker having to let's say uh unlearn is that right unlearned yeah okay uh some some things that I was used to like we had this scene where there was a walk and talk when me and my wife leave the Russian Tea Room and we I surprised her by taking her to a hotel on Central Park South and typically the way we would have shot that was you know it would be a we'd lay down some track and it would be a dolly shot and you'd see me and Elizabeth masucci who plays my wife you know walking and talking like that but you know we have Central Park South closed down we have cars all over the street from the 1960s and we have a Luma crane um and you know the the street is lit all the way from 7th Avenue all the way past the plaza to Fifth Avenue and my DP says well we got all the toys and we got all the lights like let's not do a simple walking talk let's show this off so we were you know and that that I had to learn because I'm used to gotta make the day gotta get the shot just get the scene get the performance and instead I had to slowly learn oh wait we have toys and we have time so let's really sell this thing and that was episode 103 and then from that moment on I can just see the visual language of the exterior scenes especially start to change and we start to pull that camera back and show a little bit more of old New York and then the other thing that was great was discovering how much you could erase digitally after the fact um uh so we're already you know we haven't been picked up for season two yet but we're already discussing how we really want to blow your mind in season two and taking you back onto the streets so we have with the time we have left we want to give you guys a chance to ask some questions of adverne so while you raise your hands and make yourselves known to our trusty folks here I want to ask you another question did you um ever bring your family down to set oh yeah all the time what were they like I'm thinking like your dad does he look around first of all did he give it the thumbs up oh yeah like when he came to the sets you know we had the old Squad room um you know him and some other uh cops who were friends of the show came by who were like the old-timers long since retired and you know like that old Squad room and the cigar smoke um they said it was immediately like going back in town spot on but then even just you know like in some of the old bars and restaurants like the old town and Walker is where we shot when we came in and and brought those back to the early 60s uh some folks you know that was that's their regular spot they came in and they did a weird like like Time Warp so that had to be it was fun awesome all right who has a question how you doing um thank you for being here um what inspires you every day to get up and write I mean it's it looks visually amazing but what what I mean some people read the artist's way and they go through that like you know every day spill out the diarrhea of your mind or whatever so what is what is going through your mind when you're writing wherever you write you know and uh think about those I have ideas you know I you know the my writing process has changed since I started with Brothers McMullen you know with McMullen I had a full-time job and I had to write at night or you know write uh just find the time on the weekends and um you know quite honestly it was tough to stay disciplined because you only had so many free hours and every week to get the work done um after that as a young guy before I had kids I could write any you know I used to like to write late at night um uh once I had my kids I had to become very disciplined because you don't have nearly as much time and you know so for the last 11 years I've been on a pretty strict schedule every day of uh you know by 10 o'clock I turned the Wi-Fi off I got a nice large cup of black coffee and I know from ten to one I am writing no matter what I don't care how terrible it is I just I will keep moving and I know from my my own history and from speaking to a lot of friends of mine who are writers and also going to film schools that what tends to happen is you get paralyzed because you think that scene needs to be perfect before you can move on you think you need that absolute right line to end the scene before you go and and I was that way and I don't remember where I got the advice but now I do it and I've equated it to uh someone maybe who let's say is a songwriter um you know you're gonna pick up your guitar and you get or the piano and you're going to Noodle around and play until you find anything you're not gonna stay stuck on that G chord because you don't know what chord to go to next you noodle and you play and you have your tape recorder going and then when you listen to it the next day you're like oh that was actually a good little melody in there let me expand on that I've done that now with the writing like I I absolutely outline so I have a little bit of a road map of where I'm going that said if I Stray off the road map and you know like that thing that happens when you get into the groove and your subconscious mind takes over you have to embrace that and go with that if you're writing a feature we only have 90 minutes or two hours to tell the story sometimes you know that detour is a disaster and you're like wait a second there's no way for me to get back to the story of my singular hero who's gonna go do whatever with a big Ensemble like this I didn't have to be as disciplined with that because I could go off you know like this scene we just saw between the adrenal Bannon that wasn't in my outline but I I went into that direction and I was like oh okay where am I going with these two and then I did not what I then did was I didn't write the next scene in the screenplay I wrote the next scene in their story and then the next scene in their story in the next scene in their story and then went back to what I had written for this episode and say all right I have four additional scenes that I didn't anticipate writing where can I work them into this episode so it's a little different the feature writing to the series writing but that's kind of how I do it and then the and then the other part is then I have lunch at one o'clock uh Walkers out of my corner um and then I go back upstairs and then I re-read what I wrote and uh you know it's and also think don't be so critical of your stuff like it's not supposed to be perfect the first time out and if it's complete dog [ __ ] who cares you don't have to show it to anyone but you'll be very surprised that it isn't and there's actually some good stuff in there and you're gonna say to yourself oh actually I'm a pretty good writer let me continue with this and that tends to happen more times than not hi Ed uh thanks for uh doing this show yeah I'm a fellow wood cider oh nice so I figure I come down on some support now that purity of history that you do the show in the mid 60s for the NYPD that's really really colorful is that going to be working a lot of that history going to be working its way into the storyline or you know we said that we we never identify what year the show takes place in we're saying sort of early 1960s um because Mad Men which is one of my favorite shows did such a great job at identifying exactly where you were you know they they really went event to event and we knew like all right we don't want to compete with that the other thought I had when I started to write the piece was there were moments where it started to feel like a western you know the west side of New York you know like I'm pulling from let's say uh a hundred years of New York City history uh you know West Side history NYPD history and just you know like great old gangster stories from prohibition era and I was just like all right that's that's a phenomenal true story how can I repurpose that I mentioned like Oni Madden like all right that that type of character didn't exist in Hell's Kitchen in the 60s but I'm not making a historical document here I'm this is pure fiction so let me take that guy and move him 20 years into the future but the some things started to play out and we were talking about the final scene of episode 103 that you just watched that's like a western so I started to think well all right if you think about westerns they never identify what year you know you're in the old west I mean sometimes you do but typically you're somewhere between 1840 and the turn of the century and we kind of embrace that and then that also kind of gave us the green light to as I said before like pulls from some New York City folklore and kind of move it to this era even though it didn't take place maybe in the 1960s but as an old retired cop told us hey it's New York City whatever you can imagine it happened or it's happening right now so just run with it um but it also kind of gave us a little freedom to get away with all right we found a car that's 1966 and we found a car from 1962. the car from 62 doesn't run the car from 66 runs all right we're using the car from 66 even though the show takes place before 1966. um so we gave ourselves a little bit of creatively way there uh to play with it hey Ed how are you good um you briefly answered my question earlier I was going to ask um when you talked about your father and the uh other ex-police officers what was their response to the authenticity and and looking back would they just take it back and thought it was just amazing and uh yeah right back to where they were at uh yeah I haven't gotten too much feedback yet you know um my dad definitely helped me with sort of the uh the vernacular and how the cops and quite honestly you know all the characters spoke then you know even stuff with um you know between me and my wife in the show my you know my parents would read the scripts my mother was like you are so full of [ __ ] she would never say this she would say like that I never let your father get away with that you know that kind of stuff um so so they did but then there was also stuff like you know I I and the pilot there's the scene where the young cop comes into the public morals Division and he first meets with uh the captain and then he meets with the lieutenant and then he goes out for the day with um with one of the guys and I I forget exactly what I had wrong but basically how the captain would talk to the kid uh my dad said would be very different than the sort of then how the lieutenant would talk to him you know and then even when the lieutenant and the captain would talk afterwards the dynamic would be more like this it wasn't like that so it's really trying to get some guidance with that kind of stuff and then the the other big thing that we heard from you know a lot of uh old cops that we talked to was just you know the show takes a look at the public morals dealt with um sort of non-violent crimes or what they call victimless or nuisance crimes gambling prostitution anything to do with the liquor laws um and you know we heard these stories and also just in some of the research of these old Memoirs that I read you know they would talk about like the difficulty of making an arrest with a prostitute in a job you know nobody wanted to lock up the prostitutes nobody wanted to lock up the johns but you know there was a certain quota that had to be filled so when you when did you make the call um and who would you let go uh talked about um like a fight in the bar all right two guys are going to get locked up for fighting in the bar and if they like if they ride up that the fight took place in the bar then the bar owner might lose his liquor license so the ballroom would you mind moving the fight outside into the street into your report all right well if I do that uh you know you're putting me in a tricky spot so we'd hear those kind of stories over these you know like someone said they they're not um crimes they're sins so how do you how do you make those calls so when I heard that I was like all right that's that's interesting and then I just started to kind of create these types of scenarios to put these cops in those situations where all right do I do I let this guy go for this minor thing or on this day do I have to take them um so that was yeah and it's interesting you mentioned that scene with the Newbie uh the plain clothes guy because I think that was one of my favorite scenes with uh Bob nepper and then he goes to uh Reuben Santiago Hudson and out on the street with you and uh wash Stevens and that whole sequence was so amazing and one thing I wanted to ask you was particularly I mean a great actors Bob nepper and going into uh the scene with Ruben the lieutenant did you write it in that rapid fire we worked from and then also with the guy who comes out with the prostitute on the stairwell where he has that stutter was it yeah but that way you wrote into it those actors bring that sort of uh Cadence to it no it's kind of like what we're talking about you know like Reuben he has um police manual from the 1950s and it it described the public morals division all those crimes that they have to do all kinds of Vice Reuben speeches um uh so I just kind of uh rewrote it but listing all that stuff and and it was a chunk and Reuben had this idea where he said hey you know so he asked me where'd you get this I said oh it's in this book it goes oh well let me use the book and he said well maybe I can do something where I like I pick it up as if I'm going to read it but then I close it and then I just roll with that thing and I was like I love it great um so that's what he did so yeah no it's I I again I said it before but you're always better off if you're a filmmaker to embrace your actors and you know give them room to do their thing because then what happens is they're happy to be there and then they just bring their A-game and that's you know across the board that's what we just kept getting hi hey huge fan um now that you had a taste for the toys as a filmmaker can you see yourself going back to the Indie world and or do you say to yourself I will love to shoot Brothers McMullen sequel on with all the toys there's a little bit of the Indie thing where I feel like been there done that um in a perfect world I get to do this for five or six seasons I mean this is really I had so much fun and all those people that you know like believed in me and worked for no money or very little money you know my my crew I was able to hire everybody back and everybody got paid and got paid for 10 episodes um uh and all of those actors over the years who have gone and done my little no budget movies as you watch this season you'll start to see you know some of those familiar faces um and next season I'm writing in even more of them um so that I mean this has been I had so much fun doing when you guys see the episodes you'll see like all right this guy clearly was loving life when he was making this show um so but at the end of The Run um I do want to one day I have this idea not for a sequel to Brothers McMullen but a prequel I had three ideas for feature films uh one was you know I wanted to do sort of a look at what it was like to go to high school in the 80s when I went to high school I want to do a movie about what it was like to be um an eighth grader in a strict Catholic School um and then you know what it was like to be you know the kid in college who's trying to figure out you know sort of like let's say a graduate style romantic comedy the guys just graduated from college so those I would say three movies I wanted to make and then I thought oh well why don't I just make put all that into the prequel for McMullen so the oldest brother is getting out of college and he meets Connie Britton the young you know we'll find the uh the next Connie Britton my character is the the um my high school story and McLoone's character Patrick is the kid dealing with Catholicism in the eighth grade in the Catholic school so I wrote probably half of that script um maybe five six years from now I'll finally finish it but the good thing is we won't I didn't want to do a sequel because we'll all be looking crazy and old it'd just be too bizarre well the show again is called public morals it's on TNT Tuesday nights watch it on iTunes thank you guys