NEW YORK POST
September 8, 2002
_________________________________
How First-Time Filmmaker
Rounded Up an A-list Cast
By Anna DavidNot every first-time filmmaker gets to preside over a cast that includes Susan Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Kieran Culkin, Claire Danes, Amanda Peet and Ryan Phillippe.
Nor does every notice draw comparisons to indie-film darling Wes Anderson.
But nothing about Burr Steers, the 36-year-old writer and director of Igby Goes Down (out on Friday) is typical.
The high school dropout was born to a family steeped in the political and literary worlds – his uncle is novelist Gore Vidal, and his father is former Maryland senator and congressman Newton Steers.
The upper-crust native of Washington., D.C., led an early life remarkably similar to that of his young, wayward protagonist Igby (played by the latest Culkin on the scene, Kieran).
But it’s tough to imagine Steers – 6’2”, with model-dashing looks and a cultured baritone – experiencing the awkward adolescence he captured on film.
“I was kicked out [of Hotchkiss boarding school in Connecticut] for many reasons, but primarily because I got the lowest grades I think they’d ever seen,” he offered.
After a stint at a Midwestern military school and a summer on Martha’s Vineyard, the dyslexic but highly verbal Steers found his way to New York.
“I discovered theater in New York, but mostly I discovered clubs and screwing around and having fun, which was my M.O. for a while,” said the self-proclaimed late bloomer during a visit with a reporter to L.A.’s famed Forest Lawn Cemetary, the final resting place of such luminaries as Liberace and Telly Savalas.
Why he picked this spot for an interview was a mystery, though perhaps it was because death figures prominently as a theme in “Igby.”
“Is that Andy Gibb?” Steers asked while studying a map of the cemetery. “Why wouldn’t they have taken him back to Australia?”
Steers’ first career was as a bit-part actor – Van the doorman in 1988’s Last Days of Disco and the guy with the ‘80s haircut in Pulp Fiction. One of his acting teachers was Jeff Goldblum.
But it wasn’t until his older brother, Hugh, a painter, died of AIDS in 1996, at the age of 32, that Steers began to reconsider what he was doing with his life.
“It sounds glib to say, but [his death] really brought things into focus for me,” he said. “I’m just very aware of death and of having a limited amount of time.”
Steers claims that having Vidal as his uncle actually deters his writing.
“I knew what it took,” he said. “I know how disciplined Gore is – to this day, he gets up every morning and writes.”
Eventually, Steers ended up writing “Igby,” which he didn’t intend to be a movie script. “It was in the rewrite that I learned how to write a screenplay,” Steers said.
According to Steers, the quality of the writing, not his famous connections, attracted the film’s roster of A-list talent. Goldblum received the script through the standard manager route, not from his former student, Steers says.
During the nearly five years it took to make “Igby,” Steers undertook several high-profile writing assignments on the side – a rewrite on the currently-shooting How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, as well as projects with producers Mark Johnson (Rain Man, Donnie Brasco) and Jerry Zucker (Airplane!)
But for the moment, Steers, who recently married his longtime girlfriend, Jennifer Boss, is concentrating on “Igby.”
As the reviews come in, hailing Steers’ dark and unusual vision, he acknowledged the Wes Anderson similarities.
“’Igby’ takes place in a private school on the East Coast, and it’s sort of a Holden Caulfield character [like Rushmore],” he mused, then attempted to sum up the film’s message.
“I think it’s just about reaching the point in your life where you realize you’re responsible for your own happiness,” he said.
Email Anna David
..Gary
Dretzka
..Leonard
Klady
..David
Poland
..Ray
Pride
..Patricia
Vidal
