AN INTERVIEW WITH “WARRIOR” STAR JOEL EDGERTON

Actor, writer, and director Joel Edgerton (pictured) has a lot on his plate. He stars in Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior, which opens today, and in Baz Lurhmann’s The Great Gatsby, which is currently in production in Australia. Edgerton is also managing to develop a new film that he has written and is set to direct. He sat down with me to talk about Blue Tongue Films, the production company that he formed with his brother, Nash Edgerton, and four other mates, and how they all manage to keep the process fun.

Filmmaker: How did you and your brother get started in stunt doubling and acting, respectively?

Edgerton: Nash and I grew up in a town called Dural. It was a semi-rural town, we didn’t really know much about the film business. As it turned out the year I left high school, I went off to audition for a drama school and Nash had done a year of University and was quitting because he met a guy who was a stunt man. And when Nash heard the word ‘stunt man’, it was like a revelation to him. Because he thought that stunt people were like circus people, like you had to be born into the business. So he sort of secretly started the plans to quit college and become a stunt man at the same year I was shipping off to do drama school. It completely took all the pressure off me from our parents. They were less worried about me being an actor than him dying from falling off a building.

Filmmaker: When did the two of you decide to create your own projects and form a collective?

Edgerton: Cut to three years later, I left drama school and Nash was still rigging and carrying equipment and he couldn’t get the jobs that he wanted and I had only been trying to work on the stage. Both of us wanted to be in the movies. I had been to drama school with a guy named Kieran Darcy-Smith, and we had moved into a house together. I asked him … Read the rest

DAVID MICHOD, “ANIMAL KINGDOM”

Originally posted online on August 11, 2010. Animal Kingdom is nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Jacki Weaver).

Like his stunning short films Netherland Dwarf and Crossbow, David Michod’s terrific and terrifying feature debut, the 2010 Sundance World Dramatic Competition winner Animal Kingdom, is a smoothly photographed, moodily scored tale of a trapped, dim and docile young man who suffers at the hands of a careless and, in this case, criminal family. As in his previous work, Michod relies on an insistent voiceover to provide biting interiority while the unrelentingly grim working-class Melbourne milieu is strikingly depicted in slow-motion shots and even slower push-ins. James Frecheville is stoic and sullen as the lead, who we first glimpse as he’s watching a rancid television gameshow next to an unconscious woman who turns out to be his just recently heroin OD’d mother. Brought into the fold of his criminal clan of uncles by his complicit grandmother, he quickly becomes their errand boy and accomplice in the brutal revenge murder of a pair of policemen.

Michod, co-star Joel Edgerton and editor Luke Doolan, who are just a few of the members of a promising bevy of Australian filmmakers working under the Blue Tongue Films moniker, specialize in unforgiving worlds. In Animal Kingdom, like Mr. Michod’s previous work and Mr. Doolan’s Academy Award-nominated short Miracle Fish, they bathe both us and their characters in a constant atmosphere of dread. Here, these characters are well drawn by a strong ensemble cast of actors that, save Guy Pearce as a detective, is made up of performers who, while well known in Australia, are scantly recognizable on this side of the Pacific. Jacki Weaver as the grandmother and Ben Mendelsohn as the most sadistic and yet emotionally needy of the brothers Brown turn in a pair of near-perfect performances. This is as impressive a debut as you’re likely to see all year. Sony Pictures Classics begins rolling the film out on Friday.

Filmmaker: You’ve been working in collaboration with a tight-knit group of Australian filmmakers for some time now. How has that collaborative network … Read the rest