“There’s got to be a better way to reach audiences who dig these movies,” filmmaker Edward Burns wondered aloud to me this morning over breakfast in Times Square. Indeed, it’s been increasingly difficult to catch Burns’ directing efforts on the big screen in recent years. “We could barely get anybody into the theaters on my last two films,” he admits. That won’t be a problem for his latest film, “Purple Violets,” starring Selma Blair, Patrick Wilson, and Debra Messing, alongside Burns himself. You won’t find it in any theaters. Instead the film debuted exclusively today on iTunes where you can download it for $14.99. It’s the first experiment of its kind with such a high profile project being released exclusively to the web giant.

Burns says the small screen debut wasn’t the intention for the film back when it debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year but today its unusual distribution strategy doesn’t bother him one bit. “This is the year that art house cinema died,” he says. Referring to the box office disappointments that have been “Rendition” and “Lions for Lambs,” Burns continued “If they’re not going to see Reese Witherspoon and Tom Cruise they’re not coming out to see me and Patrick Wilson. The audience isn’t there anymore.”

It’s been a long and sometimes bumpy trip for Burns, the one-time Sundance darling who had everybody talking twelve years ago with “The Brothers McMullen.” Though he’s never stopped churning out product as a director (”Purple Violets” is his eighth effort behind the camera), it’s become increasingly evident that his brand of relationship dramedy isn’t the flavor of the week it was in the mid-90s. It’s just a different world, Burns says. “‘The Squid and the Whale’ made six million dollars in 2005. That movie would have made fifteen million in the mid 90s!” he exclaims.

As for the film itself, “Purple Violets” treads in the same familiar thematic territory Burns has trafficked in all his professional life. Once again, it’s a New York tale of men and women, to reduce it to its simplest level. But to those who would criticize the filmmaker for recycling the same themes, he says that was always the plan, “I remember sitting at Sundance saying my goal is to make five or six movies just like this.”

In the new film though there’s a new wrinkle and that’s the vexing issues of career and path that the key players face. Wilson’s character in “Purple Violets,” a successful crime fiction novelist who strives to be taken seriously, faces the same questions Burns poses to himself. “Certainly those questions [the character] confronts like ‘what do I do as an artist when you want to change things up and you get beaten up for it?’ were questions that were going on in my head,” the 39 year-old actor recalls.

Curiously it sounds like “Purple Violets” may be a bookend for a time to the film that began his career. “I don’t think I’m going to make another small dialogue driven movie for a while,” he says.

Is “Purple Violets” the next step in film distribution or the death knell for independent film? How do you feel about Burns’ latest debuting on the oh so small screen?