Joel Edgerton to shoot debut feature in California

Sydney-based actor/writer Joel Edgerton and Australian-born US-based producer Rebecca Yeldham are planning to make Edgerton’s directorial debut Weirdo in California next year.

“It’s about a guy who is forced to face the past when it comes back in the form of an old school friend,” Edgerton, who also wrote the script, told Screen. “But he continually lies about it (the past) and it haunts him in a bad bad way.”

“Weirdo is a very contained film: five or six locations and six characters,” he said, explaining why it is an ideal first feature for him as director. “We have people interested in financing subject to casting and we’re playing that game now … I’ll play a supporting role and I will bring the post home.”

Edgerton was talking on the eve of the Toronto International Film Festival, which tomorrow hosts the world premiere of the new Australian thriller Felony, which he wrote for director Matt Saville. Edgerton also plays the lead role of Malcolm, a police officer in hot water, and has a producer credit alongside Rosemary Blight of Goalpost Pictures and Michael Benaroya.

Edgerton’s first produced feature script was The Square, directed by his brother Nash Edgerton, and he and David Michôd “together wrote the skeleton of the story” for The Rover, which is now in post and is Michôd’s follow-up to Animal Kingdom. Edgerton had major roles in Warrior and The Great Gatsby but it was his appearance in Animal Kingdom that opened the most doors for him, he said.

The Edgerton brothers, Michôd, Kieran Darcy-Smith, Luke Doolan, Spencer Susser and Mirrah Foulkes make up a filmmaking collective known as Blue-Tongue Films.

Yeldham produced On The Road, The Kite Runner, The Motorcycle Diaries and a film that Edgerton describes as one of his favourite documentaries, Anvil: The Story of Anvil.