The Gift of directing: Joel Edgerton’s debut behind the camera

Joel Edgerton spent years wanting to get behind the camera. Now he looks to have a hit on his hands.

mX.Actor Joel Edgerton for his new movie FELONY. Picture:Andrew Tauber

It has taken Joel Edgerton 20 years to direct his first feature film. Anyone who knows him will tell you it should have happened much earlier. The Nepean Drama School graduate made his first film in Sydney when he was 21. It was a French-language short called Jac et Bill, and in the past decade he has made two more short films, The List and Monkeys, while contributing to offerings by his Blue-Tongue Films co-op members including David Michod (Edgerton co-wrote the story for The Rover) and brother Nash (for whom he co-wrote the feature The Square).

And all of this while building a daunting career as an actor in diverse offerings from The Secret Life of Us and The Night We Called It a Day to Warrior, Zero Dark Thirty and The Great Gatsby.

The release of The Gift, his first feature film as a director — he also stars and produces — has already ensured he will direct again very quickly. The US thriller starring Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall earned its $US5 million ($6.9m) production budget in its first 1½ days in release in the US, and it is still in the top 10 there, having earned more than $US30m before opening globally.

FILM REVIEW: What David Stratton thinks of The Gift

Edgerton says he feels like his “small movie” has hit a “bit of a perfect storm”.

“We were competing with Fantastic Four and other superhero movies and we were No 3 at the box office behind some $100m movies and then the critics loved us as well,” he says.

“It feels like a beautiful situation and we know we worked hard to do it.

“So, yeah, it feels good. And I know I’ll get the opportunity to make a second movie if I want. I’m just terrified I’ll get the second album blues,” he says, laughing.

That is unlikely. The 41-year-old was ready to make the transition the industry expected. He says he had been thinking about directing a movie “for a while” and had written this tale about an old school mate (his character Gordo) inveigling his way back into the life of a successful IT guy (Bateman’s Simon) and his trusting wife (Hall’s Robyn) in 2010. He and producing partner Rebecca Yeldham tossed around the notion of filming The Gift in Australia and taking advantage of the producer offset, even though the universal story was framed by the kind of American school traditions of yearbooks, student most likely to succeed, proms and class presidents.

“And every time we got close to financing it, someone would offer me a movie as an actor,” Edgerton says. “And to be honest, really honest, the fear of making the movie was the thing that made me go, ‘Maybe I’ll go over here and make this person’s movie (instead).’ ”

He admits subconsciously “tapping it further into the future” but when the US producer Jason Blum committed to funding the film “it became suddenly very real” and no longer an Australian project.

“We could have made it anywhere,” he says. “It just happened that the person who opened the chequebook was an American and wanted to shoot it in LA.”

Blum’s Blumhouse Productions is a popular Hollywood case study. He has specialised in small budget, mostly high-quality films that, by and large, make money. His high-turnover, low-cost model has earned millions through the horror series Paranormal Activity and Insidious, and The Gift only strengthens his legend.

Part of that is because it is a smart drama with a couple of big stars and it has been embraced by critics. It is some way removed from his sharp genre pieces.

Blum’s involvement meant Edgerton’s fears subsided in the rush. The star of Juno and Up in the Air, Bateman offered a window of time and suddenly, Edgerton says, “I had nothing to hide behind and I had to boldly step into it.”

Blum was on board in July, the film was in pre-production by November, shot in January and February, and out now. “It happened very quickly,” he says.

“And I was terrified. I felt like I was going to do an OK job, felt like I was going to maybe enjoy myself, but the responsibility of directing a movie compared to the relative ease with which an actor fits into the schematics of a movie was just another world.

“But I’d watched Nash do it, I’d watched (David) Michod do it, and that made me better equipped to do it and as equally terrified.”

Edgerton has also worked with a broad range of directors, including Ridley Scott, Baz Luhrmann, Kathryn Bigelow and George Lucas, who, whether deliberately or not, educated Edgerton.

The Gift’s influences are obvious to cinephiles, in the case of Alfred Hitchcock and a visual nod to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, among others, and Edgerton also consumed the “triangle thrillers” of the 1980s, including Fatal Attraction, Pacific Heights and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.

He also wanted to deliver in The Gift the kind of unseen menace he recalled from Michael Haneke’s Cache (Hidden).

The Gift’s mood is increasingly dark and creepy with a few surprises. It fits into the narrative model of Edgerton’s previous screenplays as a smart, moral dilemma drama.

“Moral dilemma is definitely something I’m grappling with in every one of the things I’ve written,” he says. “That idea of doing bad things and trying to get back to some kind of moral centre.”

He notes even when he reads other people’s screenplays or books he might adapt, that he is attracted to the theme of morality.

“Even if I directed someone else’s piece of writing, it would probably be a similar kind of dramatic strand,” he says. And why?

There’s the obvious dramatic intrigue and, well, he grew up within the Catholic fold where moral dilemma is a thing. And Edgerton himself will be a thing in coming months.

He will appear opposite Johnny Depp as real-life former FBI agent in Scott Cooper’s Black Mass; opposite Kirsten Dunst in Jeff Nichols’s sci-fi drama Midnight Special; in the new year comes the troubled western Jane Got a Gun, in which Edgerton stepped in with his Warrior director, Gavan O’Connor, after its original director, Lynne Ramsay, quit the film shortly before shooting, followed by stars Michael Fassbender and Jude Law. In the process, Edgerton’s role transformed from the movie’s villain to its hero.

“It feels like there’s a ton of movies I’ve done that are all going to come out at the same time (but) it’s not because I was working crazy too hard,” he says.

No, just working really well.

The Gift is open nationally.