As actor, writer, director and producer, Andrew Heckler has participated in all aspects of the entertainment industry. Heckler directed the feature film Burden, starring Forest Whitaker, Garrett Hedlund, Usher Raymond, Andrea Riseborough and Tom Wilkinson, which is in theaters from February 28 through 101 Studios. Burden received the Audience Award at both the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and Nantucket Film Festival, where Heckler was presented with the Visionary Award for screenwriting. Heckler also founded the Tribeca-based Workhouse Theater in 1992, where he produced, directed and acted in over 35 plays over the course of six years.
I was lucky enough to spend lots of time with Billy Bob Thornton in 1996 as Sling Blade was rising to Oscar-winning status. We met at Telluride and kept running into each other so often through all the award shows and wins that he thought I was his good luck charm. After that, we had the pleasure of working on Armageddon together. We talked a lot about Sling Blade and the specificity of his writing and directing and how the movie felt incredibly authentic. He told me the reason Hollywood movies feel fake is that most writers sit in their offices in Burbank and imagine the world of their movies. In order to get the truth, you have to get the fuck out of the office and see it.
This has served as my mantra in all of my writing and directing – maybe too much. In all of my work, I have not only gotten out of the office, I have immersed myself in the worlds I wanted to write about. I know no other way. In Iced, a true story about a rogue cop investigating a Vietnamese crime boss, I drove down to Westminster, California, several times over the course of a couple months, simply getting to know the city and the surrounding area. I rode with the actual officer on his beats and even went with him to criminal-infested nightclubs. Once, he took me to the worst neighborhood in his area, put a gun on the dashboard and left me in his truck. He told me, “Use it if you need it.” It was eye opening. Thankfully, he came back before any trouble started. But it gave me a real sense of the danger in the inner cities of Southern California.
For my new film, Burden, I went even further, living in the small town of Laurens, South Carolina, for weeks on end. Burden is the story of a Klansman who after opening a KKK museum in a small Southern town, falls in love with a single mom who slowly but surely wrenches him out of the Klan and, with nowhere else to turn, into the arms of an African-American minister who previously was his sworn enemy. It is a true story of a man steeped in hatred and bigotry who finds a way out through the love of a woman and the faith of a minister. These people are true heroes. I knew when I read about this story that in order to write and direct it, I had to experience it firsthand – to live it.
I loved my time in Laurens. I will never forget cooking their own homegrown recipe, South Carolina Slitcha Mo, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink meal, in the church kitchen with the women of the congregation. I was struck by how much fun, how much laughter and how much joy they all had with very little material means. Or driving around the area with Clarence Simpson, a deacon at the church, listening to him tell endless stories about life in rural South Carolina and providing me with a wealth of information about the rich, poor, black and white communities in the area. He told me stories about the area that I could have never imagined from New York or Los Angeles. I was shocked one day as we were driving when he said of the Klan, “I feel sorry for those boys.” I almost fell out of the car. He explained further, “Southern, male, poor, black – supposed to be. Southern, male, poor, white – ain’t supposed to be.” I will never forget that line, so it made its way into the script. These are the kind of golden nuggets that can only be gotten from showing up and getting into it.
Equally, I knew that if I was to tell the genuine true story about a Klan member, I had to get an understanding of a real Klansman – what it was like to be in that group, why someone would join and how it felt. I had to somehow comprehend that for myself. So, I ended up posing as a white supremacist from Colorado and got the opportunity to visit the Klan at the Redneck Shop and KKK museum for a day. I got to talk with the guys and to get a firsthand look at the “evil” men who ran it. To my surprise, these “monsters” turned out to just be people. Needless to say, people who were totally misguided and hijacked by hatred and bigotry, but flesh and blood, all the same. In order to tell an authentic story that was not about the Klan but about a Klansman, I had to know these men. They valued a lot of the same things that all people do: family, friends, trying to make a living. Most of them were susceptible to being indoctrinated into this family of sorts because they had no true family of their own and had no means to support themselves. They not only had little love in their lives, but most had also been victims of severe abuse. To them, the Klan may have felt like a family, but families built on hatred are only skin deep; real families built on love go all the way through to the heart.
I abhor racism and all that it stands for, so to tell a story that had the potential to show a path out of this, which could change hearts and minds, I had to know the hearts and minds I was trying to change in order to make a movie that could be effective.
On my two upcoming projects, I have also got the fuck out of the office and landed smack in the middle of the subjects I’m writing about. One led to me spending 72 hours posing as a drug trader and drug addict in the hollers of West Virginia. It was crazy, dangerous, exhilarating, but most of all … informative.
I love approaching filmmaking like an investigative reporter. That kind of firsthand, in-person research is where you get the meat of the story, the good stuff that drives me and inspires me. I create bonds and relationships with all my real-life characters and feel an intense obligation to them to get their stories out there. That is why I never gave up on Mike Burden, Judy Burden and the Reverend David Kennedy – even after 20 years of struggling to get Burden made – and now their story is finally getting out there to audiences, where it hopefully will have meaning and impact. It is this taste of reality, this connection to the people and the material that gives me the passion and the drive to get these projects out there and not let any obstacles stand in my way. With the state of independent cinema today, you better have a deep passion for the projects you are working on or I guarantee that they will never make it to the screen and to audiences.
