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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”).
Burke and Berger stayed in touch. They frequently hung out for hours, talking about Berger’s life and family, their Hollywood dreams and mulling ways to make a narrative film that could feature Berger’s open heart and big dreams. “I wanted it to be about Burt’s essence — his soul, his spirit and his music,” Burke says. “That was so important to me.”
When Burke brought up the idea of a whole film about him, Berger says he was stunned.
“I started to cry a little bit,” Berger, 71, says by phone, “because here I am, my dreams are slowly unfolding in front of me after all the years of pursuing them.”
In 1977, after college, Berger drove to Los Angeles in a van with his best friend to chase music stardom. “I’m stupid because I think I’m going to make it big and stubborn because I’m never going to give up,” he says.
The recognition from Burke was gratifying. “At first I couldn’t believe Joe sees that in me,” says Berger, “but then I realized I gotta trust this guy. He knows what he’s talking about.”
While Burke toiled to get other film projects off the ground, he continued working with Cooper and Berger on what would ultimately become “Burt,” the fictionalized story of Sammy (Cooper), who comes to L.A. looking for his estranged dad, Burt (Berger), thrilled to finally experience fatherhood. It soon becomes clear, though, that Sammy’s intentions aren’t entirely virtuous, as Burt shares he has money from an inheritance stashed away.
The final piece of the “Burt” puzzle was Steve Levy, Berger’s roommate of a decade. They planned to shoot the film at their house, Levy’s childhood home in Sun Valley, and a test shoot revealed Levy and Berger’s screen chemistry, with Levy bringing a singular delivery and sharp comedic edge of blunt skepticism that provides a foil to the sweetly trusting Burt.
While Cooper scraped together the tiny budget from his own money, with help from family, and finessed Levy’s cooperation, Burke promised him they could shoot the film in a week. He brought on his college pal Daniel Kenji Levin as cinematographer and called on their network of friends to fill supporting roles, including Cooper’s “Mindhunter” acting coach Catlin Adams, an Actors Studio alum who plays Sammy’s scheming aunt Sylvia.
It wasn’t just the financial constraints of indie filmmaking driving Burke’s urgency to get the film going but Berger’s Parkinson’s disease as well. He had been diagnosed during their years of friendship, and Burke noticed his friend’s tremor while they were hanging out. The disease hits close to home for Burke, whose father also has Parkinson’s; he was caring for him during the shoot. So as he was directing his father-son film, Burke was living a parallel version of the story himself.
The black-and-white “Burt” is an earnest, stripped-down dramedy, filled with sly humor and surprising twists that harks to classic indie films of the early ’90s in its raw, low-key elegance. Burt is simply a character living with Parkinson’s. The film is not about his disease, which is just a part of his reality.
However, in the two years since shooting, Berger has moved back to the East Coast to live with family as his disease has progressed. Burke knew he had to capture his star exactly at the right moment, when he was still able to play and sing and chase a dream. “I can’t play the guitar as well as I used to,” says Berger, “but I’m still not giving up.” (“Burt and I are both exactly the same in that way,” says Burke. “We never give up on dreams.”)
It’s a challenge to make a film like “Burt”— and quite another to bring such a handmade film to audiences. In 2024, Burke went 0 for 28 in film festival acceptances, which made him question if “Burt” might be the final chapter of his career instead of a launching pad. He even considered an offer from his mom to move back to Ohio.
But a word of encouragement (and a crucial co-sign) from one of Cooper’s mentors, filmmaker David Gordon Green, helped them press on. They sent the “All the Real Girls” indie veteran a screener, and he wrote back hours later, in the middle of the night, expressing his love for the movie. When they asked him via email to come on board as an executive producer, he replied with one word: “Duh.” (Green will also be moderating a Q&A with the filmmakers at the Saturday screening.)
This year, the film’s fortunes have changed on the festival circuit, winning jury awards at Cinequest, the Phoenix Film Festival and the Florida Film Festival.
“You really don’t need that much to make something great,” says Cooper of their DIY approach, now beginning to yield dividends if not quite a deal. “If you have the story, if you have the characters, that’s all that matters. We didn’t have anything for this and we were able to make something that’s moving.”
After their success at Cinequest, the duo decided to embrace self-distribution as well. “We realized this is a theater movie — the laughter together, the crying together,” says Burke. Inspired by “Hundreds of Beavers” as well “Anora” director Sean Baker’s impassioned awards-season speeches about seeing movies in theaters, they decided to pursue a theatrical run on their own, booking screenings in L.A., Toledo, Cincinnati and hopefully Denver and New York, renting theaters and selling tickets themselves.
In an industry that seems in dire straits, is there room for a small, heartfelt film featuring a classic L.A. character like Burt? For dreamers who still cling to hope in the City of Angels, there needs to be.
“I don’t know why I felt so compelled to make sure this guy was seen before it was too late,” Burke says. “I don’t know why the universe brought me into this guy’s life, but it did. Maybe the movie is why.”
Cooper adds, “We did something good for this guy, and I feel like my heart is fuller as a performer.”
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