[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: You wrote an extensive 45-page outline for your first feature, Four Dogs, and then you wrote a 30-page outline for your second feature, Burt.
Can you teach us about your outlining process?
Joe Burke, Filmmaker/NYFA Instructor: My first two features, Four Dogs and Burt, were done very similarly.
It’s essentially me and my buddy Oliver Cooper, who I write and produce these movies with.
We’re dear friends growing up in Ohio and worked together a bunch.
We love this idea of incorporating real people mixed with professional actors and creating this personal world that we build and it’s always sort of inspired by the real person at first.
For example, Four Dogs, that was my first feature.
Oliver was living with his aunt. He just moved to LA a year prior and his aunt Becca, Rebecca Goldstein, and her four dogs in this house in Encino where she grew up.
We just had this epiphany of like there’s a movie here.
There’s a really beautiful, heartfelt movie to capture his real life aunt and their relationship at this moment in time.
Oliver had a big movie that he had shot for Warner Brothers called Project X.
Crazy story…his first audition in his life, books this lead role, first audition ever.
Books a lead role for a Warner Brothers movie.
They had shot it. Todd Phillips produced it. [It] had not come out yet.
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It was delayed one year to come out.
We had one year of basically this little window of time to capture Oliver before he maybe had a little bit of a skyrocket career.
I wanted to capture this innocence.
We had this idea to shoot this movie with him and his aunt Becca, but we didn’t want to overly script it.
We wanted to keep it loose in the sense that, Becca, his aunt was not an actress.
There were a lot of factors that we just let’s figure out the movie, but let’s keep it loose enough that we can kind of let it be its thing.
Burt very similarly, was a movie that this guy Burt Berger, singer, songwriter, I met at a restaurant in Malibu years ago, playing music table-to-table and fell in love with this guy over the years.
I got to know him and eventually I was me and Oliver were like we got to make a movie with this guy Burt.
His optimism, his beautiful soul, his music, everything about this guy.
We’re like this person is special.
He’s a rare type of person and…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
About:
Joe Burke is an indie filmmaker and actor best known for his new award-winning movie Burt, Four Dogs, Another Cancer Movie, House Sitting and more. As an actor, he has appeared in numerous national commercials and television shows, including Freeform’s Good Trouble, and the critically acclaimed Showtime series Ray Donovan, acting opposite Academy Award winner Jon Voight. Originally from Toledo, Ohio, Burke moved to Chicago after high school to study filmmaking and theater at Columbia College Chicago. He later relocated to Los Angeles, where he earned his MFA in Directing from the prestigious American Film Institute (AFI).
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About New York Film Academy:
Founded in 1992 by Jerry Sherlock, the New York Film Academy (NYFA) provides an accessible, hands-on education in filmmaking, media, and the performing arts. With a mission to make the film industry more accessible to all, NYFA empowers students from diverse backgrounds to tell powerful stories through a project-based, immersive curriculum. Students work closely with industry professionals, gaining invaluable mentorship and real-world experience while building creative, technical, and collaborative skills. NYFA’s global community includes students from over 160 countries, fostering a network of passionate storytellers. From day one, students dive into creating projects that refine their craft and prepare them for successful careers. With a focus on practical experience and individualized support, NYFA equips students with the tools and confidence to excel in the competitive world of filmmaking and the arts.
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Nyfa.edu/location/nyfa-los-angeles
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