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Nash Edgerton looks nothing like one expects a director should look like. With his Van Halen t-shirt and black Converse high-top tennis shoes, he could be a graduate student wandering his way across campus. He shines with a youthful yet dark current, slightly uncomfortable being in front of the press. Nash is a former stuntman who is now a feature filmmaker, a man who has been on both sides of the camera, making short films for years. His debut big screen movie is the film noir The Square.
The Square is a stylish and modern take on greed, arson, blackmail and murder. Written by Joel Edgerton (Nash’s brother) and Mathew Dabner, the film is the story of Ray (David Roberts), a married building contractor who becomes involved with Clara (Claire van der Boom) a married woman. Clara’s crook husband Smithy (Anthony Hayes) has recently stashed a load of cash from their last job in the attic. Clara proposes to steal the money by burning down the house. Ray hires Billy (Joel Edgerton) to do the deed. A mistake turns the arson into something more sinister. Then the blackmail notes begin to arrive at Ray’s office.
Over the years, Nash has build a reputation in the cinema community in Australia. Starting in 1996 with the short film Loaded, the former stunt performer and actor began Blue-Tongue Films, a film collective that has produced short works that have appeared at Sundance and Tropfest. His unique style in making music videos has won Nash Australian Grammys, MTV Awards and a Director’s Guild Award. The Square was nominated for seven Australian Academy Awards.
The film that sealed his status as an up and coming director was Spider, the nine minute short that precedes The Square. Spider is the story of Jack and Jill, a fighting young couple, driving in a car. When they pull into a gas station, Jack buys Jill some flowers and a little rubber spider, the former as an apology and the latter as a prank. The prank goes horribly wrong and Jack gets his comeuppance.
Nash is really proud of his short film Spider. Of the film he said, “It’s fun to watch with a crowd. I’ve seen people spill coffee on themselves. I’ve had people write to me on-line that they needed a new keyboard because they spilled their drink or spat out the coffee on their laptop.”
Nash plays the role of Jack in Spider. He cast himself because of the needle effect at the end. To do the effect, he needed a head cast prosthetic that had to be made two months before the shoot. “The only person I could guarantee to be there on the day was myself,”said Nash. Then he added, “I might as well do it because I’m kinda that guy. Not that I’ve caused that much damage but I’ve prank-ed people before so I figured that I could pull it off.” To accomplish the effect, Nash did one of the oldest tricks in the cinema handbook. The shot was produced in reverse and ran the wrong way, making the event unfold in the exact opposite way it was filmed.
In The Square, Nash cast himself in a small role. He stated that he was comfortable doing acting but doesn’t consider himself an actor. “My brother is the actor,” said Nash, ”I’m the guy that can be himself on camera sometimes. If it seems right, I do it.”
Nash has worked with his brother Joel for years, both in front of and behind the camera. “Once we started making shorts,” he said, “it became evident that we were keen on making a bigger film. We were just learning as we went, making shorts. It felt like the right thing to do. I definitely wanted to make one film and I’ll see how I felt after that. I really enjoyed the process of making it and I really want to make more.”
Joel Edgerton and Nash Edgerton on the set of THE SQUARE
The Square was Joel’s idea and he wrote the first couple of drafts of the film. Though Nash is a fan of film noir, he hadn’t see many different flicks from the genre. “I didn’t take any visual references to those films because I hadn’t see them.” He readily admits his love for Blood Simple and Fargo, both made by the Coen Brothers. Nash said, “We get referenced to (the Coens) but I think that the only similarity is that we’re brothers and his name is Joel. It is very flattering but let us see were we are in ten years.”
Nash read The Square at the end of 2003 started working on the financing in 2005 “which took a couple of years.” He said, “It took time because I’m a first time filmmaker and it’s a gamble. I’ve done short films that have done well but that doesn’t mean that I know how to make a feature film. You do a lot of tap dancing to convince people that you can do that and that it is worth investing some money in you. The whole time I was trying to finance it, I was making short films. I shot Spider the day after I got money for The Square.”
According to Nash, Joel wrote The Square not as a vehicle for him but as something to write. “The moment I read it, I rang him and said, ‘This is what we should make, definitely.’” The reality was that Joel found it really hard to write a script with himself in mind. He wrote it separately. “At some point it became evident that he was the right guy to play Billy,” said Nash. “I thought that Billy was a complicated character. He could have easily been a goofy kind of bad guy but it is more complex than that. I thought that Joel was definitely the guy who could pull that off. He’s very easy to sympathize with on the screen, even if he is playing a darker kind of role. I didn’t cast him because my mum said I had to or because he’s my brother. He’s a very versatile actor.”
Nash did have some definite ideas on Ray, the protagonist of the work. He was keen to cast an unknown actor as Ray which took longer. “I felt that if I cast an unknown guy as that character, you would have no expectations on what he was going to do. He wouldn’t come with any baggage. It would feel like an ordinary guy who got himself in a bad situation.” Nash finished the thought by saying, “The more real I could make it, the more tense it would be.”
On finding the location for his drama to unfold, Nash said, “I had an idea of what I wanted it to be—a little town surrounded by hills and there is this river. I wanted it to feel like in Amity in Jaws, this kind of contained area where everyone knows each other. It could be anywhere off the main highway. If I could do that, it could be a bit more claustrophobic for Ray and it wasn’t that easy for him to escape.”
Being a stunt man on various film sets has been a kind of film school for Nash. “I don’t know if it is a logical progression but there are a lot of similarities. Being a stunt man you are always thinking on your feet, be adaptable. There is a lot of problem solving. Film-making is that to me but on a larger scale with a more responsibility and a lot more departments to deal with. Doing stunts is overcoming fear and being a director is very much as well.” He ended with the statement that directing was mentally taxing.
Nash Edgerton said that the biggest challenge on making a feature was battling with your insecurities about wither you could do it or not. “I had a good crew that I worked with on my shorts and as a stuntman. The cast I’d known It was a battle of time and money, weather and things going wrong. The challenge from doing short films was keeping the whole film in your head and shooting out of order because there were so many locations. It is all-consuming making a film, something that I wasn’t prepared for.. Next time I make something, I’ll have a better understanding of making a film. It was very much unknown and I pretty much eat, slept, drank the film all the time. It wasn’t until after I shot more of it, I had more room in my head. When you shoot there is so much to do and after you shoot, there is nothing you can do about that stuff, so you have more space to think. It was cool, I really enjoyed the process and would put myself through it again.”
