Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a little chat I did with Joel Edgerton, one of the stars of THE SQUARE, a fine little slice of Aussie noir, and part of the Blue Tongue Films movement out of Australia that is kicking all sorts of ass right now. From that group we’ve seen the great shorts SPIDER and I LOVE SARAH JANE and some fantastic festival features including two of my favorite from Sundance this year: HESHER and ANIMAL KINGDOM. They do it old school down under and I love the feel of their work so far. The interview opportunity came in a little bit last minute as the film is was already out on the coasts (NY/LA), but slowly expanding. I jumped at the chance to talk to Joel, though, because not only does he play a big part in the Aussie film boom, but he’s also starring in the upcoming remake/prequel of John Carpenter’s THE THING (itself a remake of Howard Hawks’ THE THING, which was an adaptation of John W. Campbell’s WHO GOES THERE? and my brain just imploded). So, the final bit of the interview is all about THE THING, talking practical vs. CG and the approach of the filmmakers. Enjoy the chat!
Quint: Hey, Joel.
Joel Edgerton: Hey, Eric.
Quint: Hey, how’s it going man?
Joel Edgerton: Really good. How are you?
Quint: I’m doing fantastic. Congratulations to you guys on the release of the movie finally. I got to see it last year at SXSW and I’m glad that it’s finally getting out there.
Joel Edgerton: Yeah, we are thrilled.
Quint: It’s really interesting to me, over the last year and a half or so I have seen this community, which obviously you are a big part of, coming out of Australia… All of the Blue Tongue Films people. I saw HESHER at Sundance and that was fantastic. I have loved the shorts that have come out, like SPIDER. THE LOVED ONES is great...
Joel Edgerton: Yeah, it’s been great. And ANIMAL KINGDOM!
Quint: Of course. ANIMAL KINGDON is fantastic. I saw that at Sundance, too.
Joel Edgerton: It just sort of felt like the beginning of this year it sort of all came together at the same time, but it’s great that all of those years of hard work are finally getting out there. There were a lot of really great things going on at the same time.
Quint: How did you guys all get together? I mean, I assume that many of you are family, many of you were friends, but have you guys been aiming to break into the business for a while or were you guys slowly drawn together?
Joel Edgerton: Well, its sort of happened in different ways, like Kieran [Dancy-Smith] and Nash and I… We all met back in 91’. Kieran and I were at drama school together and Nash and Tony Lynch were stunt drivers. We were both training as stunt drivers together. Then you know ten years later, we all got this project. We were renting an office right above David Michod who was editing a magazine called “Inside Film,” which was an independent film magazine. So we came into contact with him just geographically, and then Nash and him started getting along and sharing ideas and Luke Doolan came to us as a teenager who knew a lot about film and was really keen to get involved with editing. So, Nash had Luke with him for many years and he practically learned his skills from hanging out in the Blue Tongue offices and ended up cutting THE SQUARE and ended up cutting ANIMAL KINGDOM. Then, at some point he, me, and Drew Bailey wanted to make short films for a long time. He eventually got together to make this short. (Laughs) A couple of years later he was nominated for an Oscar for it. So it’s just sort of a weird ragtag bunch of people and Spencer and Nash and I all met doing STAR WARS together in 2000, when Spencer was making his documentary THE MAKING OF STAR WARS.
Quint: I think it’s really interesting that you guys all seem to fall together on this giant production that kind of came through your backyard essentially, that you guys were obviously drawn to it. I don’t know what your childhood was like, but I can absolutely tell you mine was dominated by STAR WARS.
Joel Edgerton: Oh, totally. It was a big part of our childhood.
Quint: I love the tone of the work that you guys have been putting out. You look at something like THE SQUARE and ANIMAL KINGDOM, they both have very distinct genre tones that we don’t really get much these days in that they both feel like something you could see out of a certain period. THE SQUARE feels almost like a 70’s version of a noir and ANIMAL KINGDOM is just like an updated crime story, like a GODFATHER type crime story. You just don’t have movies that seem to work like that being made. The group that you guys have together, that kind of core creative team that seems to keep intermingling with each other, I think is one of the most exciting things out there in the film world right now.
Joel Edgerton: I’m glad.
Quint: So, let’s talk a little bit about THE SQUARE then. How you guys got it off of the ground and what your approach was to the character, because your character is somebody that could be… He’s a heavy of the story, but you know where he’s coming from. He’s not a one dimensional character and I have to imagine that was important to you approaching it as an actor, that he had motivations and that we understood where he was coming from even as the guy that the audience is supposed to be a little scared of.
Joel Edgerton: You know, I think this covers both my writing and my acting. I initially got my start in the film business as a lot of people do playing small parts and I always felt like there was a responsibility of the actor to bring extra dimensions to supporting characters when they are sometimes a little bit lacking in the script. I once played a villain… well, supposedly the villain who is like a traitor in this film called NED KELLY with Orlando [Bloom] and I was supposed to be the guy that ratted out the gang. As an actor I want the audience to empathize with my character as well. I don’t want to just be some two dimensional, spineless guy. I’m always trying to find the right dimensions for a character, so that it’s a better experience for the audience and for myself and so when I started writing, I did the same thing. Each character needs to be able to see it from other people’s point of view and your own point of view and therefore have an empathy.
Quint: Yeah.
Joel Edgerton: For me, when I played Billy in THE SQUARE, it was partly in the writing and partly in the performance. I don’t want to see him as a bad guy, I want to see him as a guy who is a low level criminal who actually is genuinely upset and scared when he realizes there may have been two big things that come up. That, therefore makes it feel like hopefully Ray is going to be in more danger as a result.
Quint: That’s the trick and I think you hit that quite well, because it came across when you said you approached him as the guy who is himself genuinely scared of the situation and scared of his position in life. It’s like that comes across very much in the character and I think that that’s an automatic empathy with the audience.
Joel Edgerton: Yeah. It also depends on what the movie is doing. I could be doing a morally black and white action movie… I would approach playing the villain in one of those movies (differently). Still, I would search for some kind of understanding from the audience because if the villain has a greater motivation than the hero, then you’ve got a good battle as opposed to a villain who is a mustache-twirling idiot. (laughs)
Quint: I’m sure that would be fun to play as well, to play somebody who is scene chewing, a Nicolas Cage type character, you know.
Joel Edgerton: Yeah. Oh that’d be fun. When I saw M:I3 way back when, I remember being so excited that Philip Seymour Hoffman was going to play a villain because I thought exactly that same thing. I thought “He’s such a great actor and he’s going to bring a dimension to it that is going to make it more frightening and more understanding.”
Quint: Those trailers are great, where it was just essentially that scene with him and Cruise in the chair and Hoffman was telling him what he was going to do to him.
Joel Edgerton: Oh man, yeah!
Quint: Okay, so what’s the release plan on the movie?
Joel Edgerton: So it’s done LA and New York. It was so awesome because we got a better per-screen average than DATE NIGHT which was the number one movie of the week. Unfortunately, we didn’t make $27 million…
Joel Edgerton: So we are going out on a few more screens, so we are expanding to Orange County. I think we’ve got more screens in New York, but this week we are releasing in four more cities and then we are releasing in another five the following week.
Quint: So it’s really a platform release, a slow expansion.
Joel Edgerton: Yeah.
Quint: Alright, well I would be remise and I’ve been trying to work out how to ask you any questions about THE THING because there’s always all of these double entendres. I keep writing it down going “Oh, how is your THING going to compare with John Carpenter’s or Kurt Russell’s?” It’s like “Oh wait, I can’t put it that way… He’s going to think I’m talking about his dick.”
Joel Edgerton: (laughs)
Quint: But yeah… I’m a massive fan of the original movie. I’m doing this interview with you in a room that has a framed original THE THING one sheet on the wall, so I have to bring it up. From my understanding you are playing kind of a heroic character in this one, right? So it’s a little bit of a change of pace from the recent run of THE SQUARE and ANIMAL KINGDOM and all of this stuff.
Joel Edgerton: Yeah. Well basically what I like to do is mix it up. God, I feel like I’m the luckiest guy in the world to be starring in a remake of THE THING and I’ve got just as much kind of nerves for approaching the part as you guys could imagine and you guys would, because I’m such a huge fan of the original movie, or Carpenter’s film. I haven’t seen the other film.
I think what’s going on here is a really cool take and I think what Matthijs [Van Heijningen Jr.] and the guys who scripted it and Universal has done is a really cool idea; rather than doing a remake to do a prequel of sorts that is going to tell the story of what happened to the Norwegian base. The story is pretty original and I think what I can tell you that the design is really kind of true to the original.
In the production offices here at Toronto they brought some on set photos, behind the scenes photos from the Carpenter film because… I don’t know if you know that when they shot the original, they had the American base built and then they built off the back of it the Norwegian base.
Quint: Oh yeah?
Joel Edgerton: You never saw the back of the American base in the film. So they actually built the two sets back to back. I think what’s going to be cool for the fans of the original film is that you are going to see the pieces of the puzzle come together that simply created the mystery in Carpenter’s film, you know, like the action and gore and the guy who slit his own throat with the cutthroat razor and all of that stuff. This film will stand-alone as it’s own entity, but it will also be a cool thing for anyone who loved the Carpenter film. “Oh, that’s how that happened!” and “That’s how that happened!”
Quint: Yeah, I love the idea of being able to pepper that stuff in and as long as it’s not too winky at the camera. If you look at INDIANA JONES 4, which I just recently re-watched to see if it got any better and it hasn’t, but I love the idea of being able to actually see an action set piece in the warehouse from RAIDERS and all of that stuff, but it went too far, maybe, lingering on the Ark. What’s really important to us and I’m speaking for me obviously, but also as a fan of Carpenter’s film is that it’s just a movie that feels in the same universe. It just has to feel authentic and if they are reverential of the original, but still wanting to tell their own story, I think that’s probably the best of both worlds.
Joel Edgerton: Yeah, and I think that’s what these guys are aiming for. They are certainly not treating it lightly, but at the same time they are moving forward with their own vision and their own take on it and I think what hopefully will be the result is the best of both worlds. I don’t know, just a tribute to what’s gone and a real excellent incorporation of where movies has come to in terms of technology.
Quint: Is there still a lot of practical effects work or is it going to be mostly CG?
Joel Edgerton: It’s going to be a combination of the two, but as for the balance I’m not really sure.
Quint: Well, I’m definitely open to it. Honestly, the fact that they cast you gives me a lot of hope in the project. When I heard the casting, I thought, not to kiss your ass, but I thought that was a pretty inspired bit to have you lead a new THING tale. They made a really interesting choice and they didn’t go… It’s not like “Oh and Zac Efron stars in THE THING prequel!” You know what I mean?
Joel Edgerton: Yeah, yeah.
Quint: I guess a lot of my confidence comes from you, so no pressure or anything.
Joel Edgerton: (Laughs) Thanks.
Quint: All right cool, man. I wish you guys luck with the continual release and hopefully we will be taking again whenever the big push for the next movie comes out.
Joel Edgerton: Yeah, we’ve got our film WARRIOR coming out at the end of the year, so I’d love to talk again around September.
Quint: Sure thing.
Joel Edgerton: All right cool man.
Quint: Cool. Thanks. Have a good day.
Joel Edgerton: Take it easy. Have a great day!
Quint: All right, bye.
There you go. Curious/scared/cautiously optimistic on THE THING. Mighty, mighty, mighty big shoes to fill on that one.
Hope you guys enjoyed the chat!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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