After screening at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York earlier this month, the family dramedy became available to rent or buy on digital platforms Friday.
1 of 3 | Left to right, Brian Muller, Edward Burns, Brian d’Arcy James and Erica Hernández star in the dramedy, “Finnegan’s Fouresome,” which was released on video-on-demand platforms Friday. Photo courtesy of Republic Pictures
Writer, director and actor Edward Burns says Finnegan’s Foursome isn’t autobiographical, but real conversations about family, loss and grief with people he knows helped him develop the dramedy.
“Anytime I come up with an early notion of what I want to explore as a writer, I will kind of do these informal interviews with friends of mine or from at a dinner party and one of the early ideas I had for the script was siblings or family members who have differing opinions on their parents,” Burns, 58, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.
“I wanted to make a film that looked at two brothers who had very different opinions on their dead father,” he said.
“We have a father who wasn’t around much, traveled all the time, and I loved exploring the idea that one brother would be completely OK with his father and how he was parented, and the other one is still suffering some wounds from what he thought was a negligent parent.”
After screening at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York earlier this month, the movie became available to rent or buy on digital platforms Friday.
It stars Burns and Brian d’Arcy James as Freddy and Teddy, golf-obsessed brothers from New York who go to Ireland while grieving the death of their father Jack (Ian McElhinney).
Erica Hernandez plays Teddy’s daughter Marie and Brian Muller plays Freddy’s son Frankie, while Owen Rowe plays Jack’s estranged brother Mike, who isn’t thrilled to see his family from the United States show up unannounced.
“I was a big fan of Ian’s from seeing him on Game of Thrones and I had never met him prior to casting him in the film,” Burns recalled.
“We just had such a good time when we all met and he had the perfect sort of personality to sort of butt heads with my character. So, he was just an absolute joy to work with and an incredible actor. We were so lucky to get him to play such a small part in our film.”
Burns credited the Dublin-based production company Wild Atlantic for helping him assemble an incredible crew and find stunning locations where the cast retraced highlights from Jack’s life, while carrying on a traditional family competition on the golf course.
“Most important for me as a storyteller was we needed to find that final golf course for all of the folks who love playing golf in Ireland,” Burns said.
“It needed to be sort of the show stopper and we found that course up in Belmullet, up in County Mayo,” he explained.
“The course is called Carne Golf Links and when we went there to scout it, we’re like, ‘OK, if we point the camera in any direction here, we’re going to have one of the most beautiful shots in the movie.’ We were just blessed. We were there for a week. We got gorgeous weather almost every day. It was just special. The golf gods were with us, as well as the movie gods.”
