Connie Britton and Edward Burns in Tribeca Film's The Fitzgerald Family Christmas - 2012
The writer-actor-director Ed Burns, who got his start with the independent film "The Brothers McMullen" (1995), returns to familiar ground with his holiday film, "The Fitzgerald Family Christmas." We asked him what inspired him to make a holiday film.
"I wanted to make a film about a big, Irish-American family," Burns says. "Two of my best friends come from very large families. I wondered what it was like to grow up in a house of that many siblings, how insane the holidays were as kids and as adults. The holidays are a great time for forgiveness and healing. There's plenty of dysfunction in this movie, a lot of wounds, things that have gone unsaid. Christmas is a great time for healing, but in order to heal you have to address the old wounds. If you can come out the other side, there's no better feeling."