Square deal

Film noir is such a familiar mode—and such a common choice for first-time directors—that it’s rare to see an example as refreshing as The Square, an Australian debut feature that’s all the more surprising once you find out that the man behind the camera cut his teeth as a stuntman.

“I think a lot of people just expected that I’d make an action film rather than the kind of film that I made,” director Nash Edgerton says by phone, noting that he had made several shorts before he shot The Square. (One of them, the shockingly funny “Spider,” precedes the film.) But he does see certain affinities between stunt coordination and directing. “Filmmaking is all about thinking on your feet and being adaptable and problem solving,” he notes, “and that’s exactly what stunts is.”

Edgerton’s brother Joel, who costars, wrote the story, and on paper, The Square seems standard-issue: An adulterous contractor (David Roberts) is persuaded by his mistress (Claire van der Boom) to steal ill-gotten money from her husband. They think it’s a victimless crime, but their various attempts to cover their tracks spin wildly out of control.

If the plot won’t wow anyone with its originality, the film’s tension and pacing—not to mention Edgerton’s aptitude for staging violent standoffs—are uncommonly adroit. Speaking mainly in terms of the shape of the narrative, critics have compared the movie to the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, but it’s a testament to Edgerton’s skill (and sparer directorial style) that the material never feels overfamiliar.

“Because there have been so many film noir, and people are quite well versed in film language, people put their own expectations on what they think certain characters are going to do just from other films they’ve seen,” he says. “Because of that, you can work against the connections and have those expectations work in your favor.” One of those, he notes, was making sure that van der Boom’s character didn’t fit the mold of the usual femme fatale.

The Square also feels novel for the sense of detail it brings to its Australian setting. “I can’t remember seeing Christmas in the summertime in a film before,” Edgerton says. “A lot of it you just kind of do subconsciously because it’s what you know.” His childhood memories of local firemen dressing up as Santa Claus have surfaced as plot device.

But he also sees the movie as a sort of universal story. “I really wanted to set The Square in a contained town,” he says. “I wanted to try and create what that feeling in Jaws is with the town of Amity—it could kind of be anywhere, and it feels like it’s quite isolated.” He adds that the film he’s writing with his brother now is very different, closer to a road movie.

Out of all the films for which he’s worked on stunts, both as a double and a coordinator (his credits range from Moulin Rouge! to Sofia Coppola’s forthcoming Somewhere), Edgerton was in some ways most impressed by the deliberateness of the Wachowski brothers’ work on The Matrix and their determination to shoot precisely what they wanted on set, rather than sorting through excess footage in the editing room.

He tried to bring that approach to his direction on The Square, but he says the larger challenge was simply figuring out whether he could handle a feature film at all. “One, I didn’t know whether I could do it,” he says. “Two, I didn’t know whether it was something I’d want to continue doing.” The answer on both counts is yes, he adds, “but two weeks into shooting it, I never wanted to direct a movie again!”

The Square opens Friday.

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