St. Louis has gone movie mad in recent weeks. After years without any major productions based here, actors including William H. Macy and John Corbett have been in the Gateway City for a production based on On Fire, the inspirational bestseller by John O’Leary.
O’Leary made his career as a motivational speaker by telling the story of how he nearly died as a nine-year-old. Playing with matches and gasoline in his family’s garage in St. Louis, he caused an explosion that left him badly burned. But with the help of Jack Buck (who Macy portrays in the film), he found healing and hope.
The production kicked off filming on November 6, and thanks to Missouri’s new Motion Media Production Tax Credit Program, has been on location at Busch Stadium; Maplewood’s Saratoga Lanes; the campus of O’Leary’s alma mater, Saint Louis University; and more for its five weeks of filming. O’Leary recently joined us to share his thoughts on the production, what it’s like palling around with Hollywood stars and more.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The film based on your memoir is being credited with single-handedly reviving Missouri’s film industry. How does that make you feel?
The whole thing is surreal — from having a book about my life to having it turned into a movie to having it filmed in my own backyard. Utterly surreal. But what has been most surprising is how many people are coming up saying, “Thank you for doing this work in St. Louis.” And it's not just St. Louisans who are proud of our community. The people primarily thanking me are the guys who are pulling the wire and driving the trucks and serving the food and doing the work. And so although we got into this hoping we get to film On Fire in St. Louis because it was true to the story, one of the coolest things that has come out of this is the fact that it is now super good for our entire community. Like, this whole niche industry that was robustly alive a decade ago is now beginning to come back.
What's the weirdest part about revisiting your childhood as they're staging the St. Louis of today to look like the St. Louis you grew up with?
They filmed at the house where I was burned, which is the house where my parents still live. So they redid the floors in the front hall. They redid the garage to look just like it was in 1987. They redid the walls to look like what it looked like when I was a little guy growing up. So to walk into my parents’ house after the crew had been out there for three weeks and open the door — which, by the way, they changed out the front door because they wanted the front door to match the old front door — to open up the old front door and see my old house as it was is amazing.
But then to be on set behind the cameras on the days where they filmed the fire scene and to see actors portraying the actual individuals who are part of that experience — both the little boy who burned himself, but also my brother Jim, who saved my life, and my sisters, who were in the front yard, and the paramedics who arrived and the firefighters who fought the flames. That is utterly surreal.
And then they take lunch, come back and film the scene of when that little boy comes home from the hospital. To see both the utter low point of my childhood and the high points of my childhood wrapped up, tied together between lunch was — you know, I cried out of sadness and anguish for my family before lunch and then cried out of celebration for my family after lunch.
Has it been hard to see that little kid playing the young version of yourself suffering the way you did?
There were more than 800 actors who read for this part. And we picked this little guy named James McCracken. He's a beautiful little actor, but he portrays goofiness and feistiness and mischief so perfectly. And yeah, it's beautiful to see the way he interacts with his mom and dad and his siblings and the dog before he gets burned. But then the manner in which he explores that day and gets burned and the agony he experiences and then the little siblings who are there for him. … What's so hard for me is to see these kids portraying the real events so well. It is exactly what took place.
So you’ve got some big names — William H. Macy, John Corbett who played Aidan on Sex and the City. I assume he plays the adult you.
Oh, the guy who plays me as an adult is Joel Courtney.
Not as big a hunk.
Well, it depends on who you ask. You ask your girlfriends and your parents, of course everyone's going to choose Corbett or Macy. But if you ask your daughter or middle-school girls or college-aged kids, Joel Courtney is like, beloved, man. He has 6 million followers on Instagram! Every time he and I go out for a meal in St. Louis, people walk right past me and they're like, “Oh my gosh, Mr. Courtney, can I get a picture with you?”
You're hanging out with these Hollywood stars, just lunching around town?
They’ve become my friends. What was important to me on the front side is that the actors who participated in this were doing so because they understood the real mission that we're after. And it's not ego, and it's not hardware to put up on their shelf and it's not a paycheck, although all those things might happen. What they're really doing is they're portraying a story of a brokenness being redeemed by individuals who showed up to make a difference for the one in front of them. And so whether they're a nurse, or they're a firefighter or their parents, or they're a famous announcer or they're a janitor, what they recognize is they say yes to this project is they're saying yes to something bigger than themselves.
So that's all context. The type of individual who would say yes to that is also the kind of individual who wants to hang out at St. Louis Bread Company and have lunch, have a beer with me after work, hang out with my family on the weekend. We're fortunate to work with really quality people who also are quality actors.
Are they enjoying their time in St. Louis?
They're loving it. Sean McNamara is the director; he wants to film more shows here. Already some of the actors have brought their families in town — spouses, children have come in town to explore St. Louis. So we have St. Louis doing what it does best, which is that they love to celebrate their community. They love to celebrate the cool things we do well, and it turns out we not only have good sports, but we've got great concerts, we've got great venues, we've got incredible museums, we've got phenomenal parks, great food and incredible people. So that is what has moved these Hollywood celebrities, but it's also what has moved them to bring their family into our community.
You didn't just write the source material for this but you were also involved in raising money for the film. Is your next career going to be putting together these deals for other inspirational projects?
I can tell you I've aged 11 years in the past seven months. For me, it's very hard to promote myself, and even harder to ask for help in telling a story about myself. And the only thing that has allowed me to do those two things is to realize this is not about me. This really is about a story. It is about humanity. It is about a film that we know can go out there and impact lives for good, but it's also about pouring into this community that has given so much to me and to my family.
So the scenes that are taking place at the hospital, for instance. Mercy gave us their system to film in. The university that gave me not only my diploma but introduced me to my wife, which led eventually to four kids, has allowed us to film in their quad, in their dorms, in their classrooms, in their labs, which is amazing. The organization that allowed a little boy to have John O’Leary Day at the ballpark, and then 30 years later, let him throw out the first pitch and have a second John O’Leary Day at the ballpark is allowing us to use the stadium. So it's just this cool collection of not only investors financially, but investors like shareholders, who recognize, “Man we're doing something together bigger than ourselves, and we should say yes to that.”
People are so excited about this movie. I haven't seen St. Louis feel good about itself for a while now, and it feels like this is something you've given us.
And it's something they gave me first. You talk about a bad day. When a little boy gets burned on 100 percent of his body and is expected to die, that is a bad day for that little boy, his family and anybody who loved him. What we learned 36 years ago is there was a lot more people who loved him than we knew. And we didn't know their names yet. I'd never met the nurses and the doctors and Jack Buck and all the others who showed up for me. But when struggles arose, they participated. They showed up, they engaged and they helped fix this problem that was otherwise insurmountable.
Now, decades later, we get to celebrate their work. And I think that's something that excites the people who participated, but it also excites a city that too often gets a black eye, too often seems to celebrate and almost promote the worst of itself. Whether that's inequality, racism, poverty, crime, fires, we do a phenomenal job telling the world about how bad we are. This movie, on the other side of the spectrum, tells the story of what is right about our community. And there's an awful lot right.
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