After Nash Edgerton’s nerve-jolting 2007 short Spider screened at Sundance, a woman in the Q&A audience put up her hand.
“She said, ‘Is there something wrong with me? Because everyone was laughing but I found that really disturbing,’” Edgerton recalls. “I said, ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s something wrong with everybody else here.’”
Edgerton is an edgy Australian director who describes his long-running career as a stuntman – doubling for names including his brother Joel, Kevin Bacon and Ewan McGregor – as “my film school. It’s where I get to watch other people direct”.
And his latest production, the six-part comedy-drama Mr Inbetween, which premiered last week in the US, continues a core theme of his career: combining humour with intensely realistic violence.
The first sequence culminates with its hitman protagonist Ray (Scott Ryan) pushing a man off a steep precipice outside a Sydney train station. To capture the moment of impact Edgerton cuts to a long shot, reducing the intensity of the fall and evoking a silent film-style pratfall, with the performer occupying only a small portion of the frame. There is no suggestion as to how the audience should react, making the boundaries between drama and comedy indistinguishable. If “comedy equals tragedy plus time”, as the adage goes, Edgerton cuts out the time. Comedy is tragedy. Tragedy is comedy.
“I am not trying to point anyone in any particular direction,” he tells Guardian Australia. “It’s up to you how you take it. I know my stuff is not for everybody but this is my sense of humour.
“No matter how absurd the situations are in any of my films, I think they’re all feasible and believable. That might be what makes some of it uncomfortable for people.”
When it comes to placing audiences in situations of discomfort, that scene in Mr Inbetween is nothing compared with the 45-year-old auteur’s previous work. Among his terrific body of short films, which have made the rounds at various festivals over the years including Sundance, Cannes and Tropfest, is the aforementioned Spider and its sequel, Bear. Both star Edgerton as a prankster who plays a high price for tricks inflicted on his girlfriends, and both climax in visceral visual punchlines for which the term “black comedy” barely begins to cut it.
Edgerton’s latest feature is this year’s Gringo, a star-studded crime film with a cast including David Oyelowo, Charlize Theron, Thandie Newton and Amanda Seyfried. He describes Gringo as “in the same tone as anything else I’ve made” but acknowledges its limited success among critics. “I think people aren’t quite sure how to take that tone sometimes,” he says. “People who know me and know my work know what they are in for.”
Mr Inbetween is a sort-of sequel to the 2005 nano-budget Australian mockumentary The Magician. Produced by Edgerton, The Magician was written and directed by its star Scott Ryan – a naturally charismatic actor who returns to the screen in Mr Inbetween after years spent, according to Edgerton, “delivering pizza, driving cabs, things like that”.
Edgerton’s feature film directorial debut – 2008’s The Square – was, like The Magician, an obscure work that failed to make an impact at the box office. But it’s intensely gripping neo-noir that belongs to a pantheon of great Australian crime dramas made in the new millennium, including Chopper, Snowtown, Animal Kingdom and Boxing Day. Edgerton says he was disappointed by the lack of attention it received, “but people have continued to discover the film and I’m proud of [it]”.
Perhaps his crowning achievement so far has been his four music videos for Bob Dylan. Their collaboration began with the video for Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ – the throbbingly dark opening track from Dylan’s 2009 album Together Through Life. It is peak Nash Edgerton comedy: an altercation between two lovers so violent it’d be near impossible to consider funny were it not for a twist in the last 10 seconds that rearranges the context of the melee.
“The way those [collaborations] work is he’ll play me a song, then we’ll talk a bit about it, and I’ll go away and write up an idea based on what we talked about … Then he’ll throw other things at me,” Edgerton says. “It’s a real collaborations of ideas. Sometimes it will be an image or a sentence that I will then incorporate into the video.”
The music video for 2012’s Duquesne Whistle, the opening track of Dylan’s album Tempest, audaciously casts the Nobel laureate singer-songwriter as a gangster. It tells the story of a young man who steals a rose to present to a woman he fancies – only to discover he has accidentally angered the mafia and unsettled the pepper spray-armed woman.
Edgerton says it was inspired by moments in the “magical world” of old-time musicals “when a guy likes a girl and might walk past a florist and grab a flower to give her”.
“I thought what if you take this character and put him in the real world? Then, when he takes a flower the florist isn’t happy, and she feels like he is stalking her. That started the idea and the question: how far will this guy go, and what will happen to him if he keeps doing things like that?”
Unsurprisingly the results are a potent combination: violent but kind of romantic; shocking but sweet; funny but tragic. Once again viewers are unsure if or when they are supposed to laugh.
“That’s the plan,” Edgerton says. “It depends what side of the line your humour sits.”