Salute Your Shorts: Nash Edgerton's Pulp Fictions

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

When Nash Edgerton’s The Square opened in theaters last Friday, viewers were shown not just the feature they came for but also a treat beforehand in the form of Edgerton’s short film “Spider.” The short has actually been around for a while, making its rounds in the festival circuit during 2008 and winning various awards, but that project and The Square came after more than a decade making shorts and music videos on the side while Edgerton was earning his living as a stunt man. Unsurprisingly, his films are primarily action oriented and even when they’re not, they’re usually populated by b-movie criminals and stock low-lifes, a tendency that both informs and inhibits nearly everything he’s touched.

Edgerton’s directorial debut was 1996’s “Loaded.” Already he was working with a lot of the other members of the Blue-Tongue Film Collective that he’s still part of today, though back then he was shooting in black-and-white video rather than 35mm film. “Loaded” centers around a few neighborhood thugs who get in a fight over pretty much nothing. No one’s particularly developed, but that isn’t the point; all Edgerton needed was a premise to make a cool action sequence. He explained this in an interview with Slant, saying, “In my aim to get more jobs as a stunt man, I had this idea that if I shot an action sequence from a movie and put it on my reel, that people would think I worked on a movie and then give me a job.” When his brother Joel finished studying at the Nepean Drama School in Sydney, the two soon began working together and “Loaded” was one of the earliest results from the pair’s need to create demo reels to attract work as both actors and stuntmen.

“Loaded” is not a great film, largely a result of its confusing story. But its frenetic chase sequence does show off some basic acting skills and an understanding of how to keep interest through action alone. Edgerton edited the piece himself and though the movie’s longer than it needs to be and fairly disorienting, the piece is still better than it really has any right to be. Particularly important is the handheld camera use, a necessity here, but something Edgerton has continued working with since then.

A year later, Edgerton directed “Deadline” for Tropfest (a short film competition held in Australia) that was a significant step up from “Loaded” and won him first prize at the event. In it, Edgerton himself stars as a man running a fairly stereotypical race against time. The route he takes is tailored to accentuate different stunts, such as falling down stairs, hitting people and even skateboarding. It’s like a sequence drawn from any action movie made starting in the late '80s, the twist being that the film is actually about Edgerton turning in a film for Tropfest, and not only that, but Edgerton got the date wrong. At three minutes long, the short doesn’t overstay the welcome of its clichéd running sequence. In general, Edgerton’s funnier films tend to be a lot more interesting because it makes the lack of depth in his characters less important. There’s little more to the film than some cool stunts and a quick laugh, but what’s not to like about that?

In contrast to this came 1998’s “Bloodlock,” which Edgerton once again directed with fellow Blue-Tongue member Kieran Darcy-Smith (who worked with Edgerton previous on "Loaded"). Twenty-six minutes long, the film focuses on the effects of a man being unable to pay back drug dealers and the fallout it causes has for his family and friends. Unfortunately, the short is kind of a mess. It’s a series of standard action movie tropes that’s more clichéd than something Luc Besson’s dumped out. The film’s relationships end up somewhat unclear, as do everyone’s motivations, but aside from that there’s the question of why it’s important anyway since nothing in the film hasn’t been shown on TV innumerable times before.

In a sense, my feelings about The Square, which is reviewed in an upcoming issue of Paste, are similar to mine for “Bloodlock,” though the feature is quite a bit more accomplished. If Quentin Tarantino is cursed (through his own choice) to spend the rest of his life twisting around B-movie tropes and using them in new ways, Edgerton seems for the most part interested in simply recreating them. The Square is a well-crafted noir, but we’ve seen those before and not much in it recommends the film above anything before it. “Bloodluck” is an action-filled drug story, but those are a dime a dozen and there’s not much of an original spin put on things. Edgerton likes pulp stories, but he’s a re-creator, not an innovator.

Edgerton’s 2001 follow-up, “The Pitch,” is both a joke about this sort of pulp devotion and an implicit commentary about the films Edgerton makes. In it, an actor is explaining to a producer why his film needs to be made in the hope of obtaining funding. This begins simply: “Ok, so there’s this guy and this girl. They’re being chased by this group of guys. Why? It doesn’t matter.” As the narrator gestures through the rest of the movie, Edgerton intercuts a series of ridiculous action sequences including chases, explosions, jumps and pretty much everything else you can think of. The joke of the piece is that this is all for a short film, but it’s hard to listen to the pitch without thinking about how the stock guy and girl being chased by whatever as an excuse for action is really all Edgerton’s ever been interested in. It’s not bad (everything shown in the film is exciting and it’s all pretty funny), but there’s quite obviously little else there.

Following “The Pitch,” Edgerton began working in music videos. He went in two directions with this medium, splitting between genre recreations similar to his shorts and relatively (read: very) bland and unmemorable works that look like music videos made by anyone else. In the first category are his videos for Shihad's "Comfort Me" and Eskimo Joe's "Liar." This has continued up through even his 2009 video for Bob Dylan “Beyond Here Lies Nothing.” These refined his skills but generally aren’t as good as his films. That being said, at least they’re recognizably Edgerton’s. His videos for Ben Lee and Missy Higgins seem like nothing more than work for hire and, while showing an increasingly strong grasp of his craft, don’t go anywhere special. Edgerton’s work in shorts would seems like it would cross over to music videos, but a Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze he is not. (Admittedly, not many are, but still.)

If I’ve been ragging a bit on Edgerton’s works so far, it’s because,  due to his interest in action rather than content and a lack of formal training, it took him a while to put out anything special. In 2003, though, Edgerton put out the first of his truly great shorts, “Fuel.” The biggest improvement “Fuel” shows over his earlier films is how well developed its characters are. With naturalistic acting, a couple drives lost into the woods and jabbers back and forth about nothing at all, giving off a feeling of closeness without being forced. When they run out of gas, they meet a woman at the side of the road who tells them a station is up ahead and the man heads over, leaving his pregnant wife at the car.

Upon returning to the car, the woman they met is gone and soon Edgerton’s love for pulp returns when through a plot twist his wife transforms into some sort of monster and attacks him, referencing some comments made earlier. The suddenness of this tonal shift is perfect, as is the short’s explanation of events. Edgerton’s take on horror here isn’t revolutionary but it is extremely polished and for the first time fully developed. It’s an almost classically told story that never loses focus, unlike the works Edgerton has directed based on scripts by his brother. Plus, it really made me jump out of my seat.

Two years later Edgerton released “Lucky,” which, as usual, is a take on a typical crime drama. Here, a man is tied up in the trunk of a car, which we soon learn is headed out without a driver. He escapes the trunk and manages to stop the car, but when he turns the key everything blows up. In a way, “Lucky” is less of a film than a sort of tech demo for what Edgerton could do as a stunt coordinator. That being said, what he can do is pretty damn impressive. The entire movie is a cliché of ridiculous proportions, but it’s also one of the most virtuosic bits of stunt work I’ve ever seen.

In his two most recent shorts, Edgerton has finally been edging away from pulp and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both were co-written by Edgerton and David Michod rather than Edgerton’s brother Joel, who unfortunately wrote The Square. The premise of “The IF Thing” is that “With 4 weeks and a budget of $5,000 IF Media approached filmmaker Nash Edgerton and Blue-Tongue Films to produce video insert material for the 2005 Lexus Inside Film Awards.” I’m really not sure how much, if any, of that is true, but it was a fertile idea for a faux-documentary. Edgerton, playing himself, decides to take the money in cash and just spend it on whatever the hell he feels like for the next few weeks while someone films him doing so. IF Media still has a guy around to check up on the inserts, but Blue-Tongue methodically keeps him away from knowing what their project is about and instead leads him on in thinking that they’re doing nothing at all. It’s the most original idea Edgerton has directed, not in filming the way he uses money (which has been done before), but in the film’s focus on an elaborate filmmaking practical joke. The film drifts towards standard crime movie towards the end when Blue-Tongue threatens the overseer with typical mob-style drowning, but even this feels earned as just one more part of this elaborate hoax. The short is 10-minutes of quality entertainment and definitely the funniest thing Edgerton has directed by far.

Most recently, Edgerton’s “Spider” won a pile of awards for its depiction of an arguing couple that turns tragic. Imbued with some dark slapstick humor, I’m not going to say much more about the film so I won’t give away what happens to those who do intend on checking out The Square in theaters. A particular oddity to this pairing is that “Spider” is significantly more enjoyable than the feature it’s accompanying. Like the films that came before it, “Spider” finally had truly well-written and acted characters without a reliance on murky plotting or pulp clichés, which end up keeping the otherwise well-directed The Square from becoming a great film. Edgerton is said to be working on developing his next film, but my hope is that he’ll put out a few more shorts of the quality he’s been producing since 2003 instead and continuing to turn away from his natural inclinations as a stunt man.