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"Steve Burton is a damn good director" says Maurice Benard of his buddy on and off camera. "I keep busting his head saying, 'Do it! Just do it'. I think he should go down that route. He's that good."
As a contributing director to GH NIGHT SHIFT, Burton has not only taken the directing ball and run with it, he's carried it over the goal line!
Burton has wanted to direct and be behind the camera for as long as he can remember. Although he has shown his creative vision in a few short films, when the chance to direct SHIFT came along, he knew it was an opportunity he couldn't pass up.
It's an experiment that could go really well, or it could go bad and you're done," Burton tells SID. "When they approached me about directing I said that I'd love to do it if I could, maybe get my feet wet a little bit with just a segment or two. They were like "Yeah, sure." He has since gone on to direct a few scenes in the last six episodes of SHIFT's first run. The network wasn't offering the gig purely based on the hope that Burton could get the job done well - they had already seen what he was capable of. "Jill Farren Phelps, Bob Guza and all the other directors on GH had seen my short film, Laws of Gambling, so I think they knew I was capable of putting the pictures together," says Burton. "It's just learning how to do it on a soap opera," he adds. "Once you sit in the chair, you learn. The directors and the people in the booth, the technical director, the assistant director, the producers, took care of me. You have to have collaboration or you're dead. "The crew and the camera people are the unsung heroes who make me look good, so I have to say thank you to them."
Just like a lot of actors in Hollywood who hope to create projects that speak to them, Burton started a production company a few years back with some buddies, including PORT CHARLES Brian Presley and GH's renowned acting coach, John Hanna. But since then, the reality of the biz set in, and they broke up the group.
"People can have production companies all day long, but if they don't have the money to find projects, it really doesn't matter," admits Burton, who now works solely with a writing partner. "Hopefully, we can get some stuff produced. But it's so chaotic, at this point, I can't even think about directing something outside of SHIFT right now. If it's picked up for 13 more episodes, I don't know what my directing duties would be then - if I'm going to do more segments or end up getting a full show one day. I'd still love to do other directing projects, but it's not my priority at this point. I've got family, kids and my job."
Still, if a directing opportunity presents itself the way SHIFT did, Burton will once again embrace it. "Even though two weeks before directing the first episode, I felt like not doing it because I was so tired and burnt out from the other shows, I would have been an absolute fool not to take it," says Burton, who admits that the workload has been exhausting for him. "People don't realize that it takes three days to get one of those shows going. It's crazy. It opened my eyes to how much work really goes into putting one show on the air. I have whole other job on top of SHIFT and GH. I don't necessarily "feel" like doing it, but I got the opportunity, so I had to do it. There was no way I could not do it."
And as his colleagues and viewers will attest, he did it tremendously well.
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