Burns' father, uncle, and four cousins were officers, and three childhood friends joined the force. The director and star of "Sidewalks of New York," and star of the new "Life or Something Like It," said his father took him on tours of the rough neighborhoods where he worked.

"Another time, he put me in a jail cell saying 'You want to be a tough guy and do drugs? This is where you'll end up.' Believe me, experiencing this stuff as a kid changes the way you look at the world," Burns told Parade magazine in Sunday's editions.

Burns, 34, never considered becoming a police officer. Instead, he majored in English at college and worked as a production assistant on the TV show Entertainment Tonight.

He scraped together $25,000 to make "The Brothers McMullen," a film about three Irish Catholic brothers. It won the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury prize, and Burns never looked back.

"When you go from making $18,000 a year, getting people coffee, to winning an award like that, I knew from that day on, it would never be the same," he said.