Edward Burns – HuffPost 3.2.12

Mike Ragogna: Yeah, I’m with you. Let me get advice from you for new artists.

Edward Burns: I’ve been to film schools a long time and taught students and now it’s interesting. For kids who want to make movies, they’re in a similar place as to where musicians have been in the last ten years in that the barrier to entry has never been lower in that you can get pretty inexpensive recording equipment in the music business. You’re starting to see these indie bands and these indie musicians recording something and they’re putting it up on MySpace and later YouTube, and all of a sudden, it gets discovered and they’re playing Palooza and showing up on Saturday Night Live. In the film business, you needed half a million dollars to make a movie. Now you can make a movie with these digital cameras probably as inexpensively as kids can cut their basement recording. That said, just like there are all those songs that are up on YouTube by unknown artists, there are all those films that are up on YouTube by unknown filmmakers. So getting out there and trying to promote this stuff is the hardest part of the gig, and there is no easy answer. You just have to keep at it, you have to look at other people who had success with it and try to copycat their model. But even if you fail miserably and no one links on and you get no views on YouTube, that doesn’t mean you should stop doing what you’re doing… I love making movies and of course, you want to reach as wide an audience as you can, but I would never not do it. I’ve had plenty of movies that bombed, but I still loved those experiences. I know all of my musician friends love playing music. So my advice is do the thing you love to do, and if you’re lucky, you can make a living doing it. But don’t let that first defeat prevent you from pursuing dreams.

MR: Beautiful. And basically, the same points apply with both music and film, don’t they?

EB: Absolutely. In a weird way, even more so for musicians because, while it’s become inexpensive to make the first film, it’s not like it’s just picking up your acoustic guitar and being able to go to a place and sit on a stool and do your thing.