By John Noonan
Having written last year’s Blinky Bill: The Movie, Fin Edquist is taking on directorial duties for the self-penned Bad Girl, a psychological thriller starring Sara West (Peter Allen: The Boy Next Door) as Amy, an adopted teenager who forms an intense relationship with her neighbour, Chloe (Samara Weaving). Fin had a candid chat to FilmInk about his film’s composer, Warren Ellis, putting yourself in the mindset of a teenage girl, and writing for Australia’s favourite koala.
Bad Girl has taken ten years to gestate, so it’s been on your books for a long time. “Yeah. Way back when in 2005, Steve Kearney [Bad Girl’s producer] approached me with a vague idea of making a revenge based thriller. We put our heads together and came up with the idea of a father whose family comes under attack from a girl, who was his wife’s surrogate child. That’s where it started. Over the proceeding drafts, the surrogate storyline got a bit complicated, so we simplified it. We thought that the themes of family, and nature versus nurture, applies equally to adoption. So we developed the script to a point where we were all happy with it but, having said that, we felt that we’d seen a film like this before. It felt familiar to sales agents and distributors too, because they were interested, but not enough to take it on. So to garner more interest, we thought we’d shoot a little teaser for Cannes. At the time, we had a couple of actors interested in playing the father; the mother role was minor, and then the girls were the periphery roles. It was really the father’s story. Anyway, we couldn’t get the father for the teaser, or the mother, but I realised that we could get some up and coming actors to play the girls, and we could shoot a few scenes specific to them. So I wrote a few scenes for Chloe and Amy [the main characters of Bad Girl] and we cast a couple of actors, one of whom was Sara West. As we were filming the girls, we realised – me, the producers, everyone – that this was the story, and this was the really interesting stuff. These two girls have their whole lives ahead of them, and the decisions that they make in this film will determine their lives. For the parents, they’ve made their decisions, and theirs is the backstory. For the girls, it’s all story! So, the teaser did really well at Cannes, and based on that and the revelation that we had, I reworked the script with the two girls at the centre of the story. It really elevated the material.”
Well, for a father, there’s always a deep-rooted desire to protect, whereas with teenagers, there’s an attitude of looking after yourself. “Yeah, with the father, and his wife, they have a role embedded in the family. With Amy, who is there through fortune or misfortune, she’s been adopted by her family. Her position in the family is tenuous at first. Her journey, which is far more interesting in my mind, is as somebody who wants to escape her family, but realises that this is her family, and it’s worth fighting for. And Chloe’s circumstances mirror Amy’s in a way. Perhaps the reverse even.”
Once you’d changed the direction of the film, how easy was it to put yourself in the mindset of a pair of teenage girls? “It was a challenge, but a good one. I’m a father in my mid-40s, and it’s harder to write and be honest with a character that’s also like that. There’s so much of your own life that you’re not fully cognisant of. When you have distance from the character, you can be more incisive. I gave over a lot of the language in the script to the actors to make it their own. Obviously the intention of the scene stays the same. I can write a character, but when it comes down to the intricacies of the language, you have to rely on your actor. In terms of the relationship that forms, I was directed by their attitudes. Basically, the emotional intensity of their situation was what I was interested in. When directing a film, the worst thing that you can get is what you want. The best moments in the film are when the actor gives you something that wasn’t there, or the cinematographer does, or the editor does. Working with all the actors, but particularly the two girls, was a real joy. It turned the film into something bigger and greater than I could hope for.”
Did you always envision that you were going to direct this? “Yeah, absolutely. Since I moved to Sydney six years ago, I’ve pretty much written consistently. But prior to that, I was directing short form things: commercials, music videos, and short films. I’d been to the VCA to do the director course. So, basically work dried up for me in Melbourne and I moved to Sydney on a writing gig and I haven’t looked back since. But directing was my first love, so it was great to finally do a longer form project. I had a couple of feature projects in development, and one of them got really close to being made in 2007. That ended up falling over, but I always thought that one would be the first film that I would make. Then I had a couple more projects that I thought would be the next film that I’d do. Bad Girl raced to the front from the back of the pack.”
And you got Warren Ellis on board for the music. “He knows one of the producers, Bruno Charlesworth, who gave him the script and he really liked it. Obviously it’s a different film for Warren. A lot of the stuff that he does – Far From Men and the Australian western that he did with Nick Cave [The Proposition] – are big canvas, intimate dramas. Of course, mine was a fairly intense thriller. He liked the material because he was interested in trying something different. It was a great collaborative effort. Warren doesn’t compose to locked off pictures. We’ll discuss a scene, and he’ll watch the scene. Then he’ll develop a theme for that scene, and then give you variations on that. It was quite a little set up that he had. It was just him in a little studio, with a Casio and a bass guitar that he had. He locked himself away for weeks on end over the summer in Melbourne, and every day, he would just hit me with five, ten, or fifteen tracks…all of which were fantastic! He has such a workload. He was working on the new Bad Seeds album, and scoring another film. But he just said, ‘From now until now, I’m just going to do it.’ We were like, ‘Okay, but only if you can.’ So I’d get these texts at three in the morning saying, ‘What do you think of this?’”
During the dream scenes, the film has a very European feel to it, like Suspiria. Were there any particular influences when making Bad Girl? “Suspiria is a really interesting reference. I haven’t seen that film since I was teenager, but I remember being horrified by it. [Laughs] I love David Lynch. I love his visuals and the way that he tells a story. I admire, more than I like, Michael Haneke. He needs a humour injection every so often, but he commits to a project! [Laughs] Then there are those ’80s thrillers. What I really like about ’80s thrillers is that they work on a level of thrillers but also satire, which I don’t think we do as well at the moment. What I like about my own film is that it’s a little flamboyant at times, but in a way that is fun. I want to entertain the audience.”
You’ve written lots of different things, like the children’s animations, Blinky Bill The Movie and Maya The Bee Movie, and TV series like House Husbands… “The hardest translation to make is the comedy. Some really great writers don’t have a particularly comedic sensibility. One of my strengths is writing comedy, so writing kids’ animation comes a lot easier than writing an arthouse drama. The process of creating a character that the audience cares about is the same, whether it be Blinky Bill or Samara Weaving in Bad Girl. It’s a cliché, but you have to find the truth in the character so the audience responds to it. With Blinky Bill, there was a long process. For a long time, Blinky Bill was a little shit. [Laughs] That was how I had written him. Then in the last couple of drafts, I concentrated on making him more accessible for the audience, and less a little wisearse cracker. It’s all about finding your way into the story, which is usually about finding your way into the characters. Obviously I want to direct another film, but I love writing as well. A big part of the creative process in TV and film is the writing, and I’ll always fly the flag for writers. Their contribution to the project is overlooked or underplayed.”
Bad Girl plays at The CinefestOZ Film Festival, which runs from August 24-28. To buy tickets to the Bad Girl premiere event, click here. For the follow-up screening, click here.
