By Travis Johnson
A troubled, rebellious teen Amy (Sara West) is on her last chance with her adoptive parents. With the family having relocated to the country, Amy is bored out of her mind, until she strikes up a friendship with the clean-cut Chloe (Samara Weaving). But Chloe has secrets of her own, and it isn’t long before friendship turns into obsession and things take a turn for the dangerous.
That’s the precis for Bad Girl, the first feature film from Fin Edquist, a Sydney-based filmmaker who cut his teeth as a script editor before turning his hand to writing and directing. Only one of a number of irons Edquist had in the fire, Bad Girl was never meant to be his debut feature, but a combination of fortune and circumstance dictated otherwise.
Of all the projects you’ve been working on, what made Bad Girl stand out as a potential first film?
Well, Bad Girl was actually the dark horse. I had a number of projects that were a lot closer to being funded – in fact I had one greenlit under the old Film Finance Corporation, which then became Screen Australia, and it fell over. And I had another project that had been developed through Screen Australia. Bad Girl I always thought would be the last of the group to be made, but due largely to my producers whipping me I made a teaser. The teaser did really well and garnered a lot of interest and these things pick up momentum. Bad Girl developed a life of its own and kind of became an unstoppable force, and we ended up making that first.
As to what interested me about the project? For a first time film it was ideal because it was a relatively low budget, two million dollar film, it’s got a small cast, strong central performances. The key cast are five, there’s one main location and few other ancillary locations. There were enough moving parts to make it a challenge, but there weren’t so many to make it impossible. I’ve been working on this for a long time – I first started writing the screenplay 10 years ago. Even though I thought it was the least likely of my films to be made, when it happened I wasn’t unprepared – I’d been living with it, I knew it intimately.
When you’re dealing with a thriller like this, with its requisite twists and turns, what comes first for you – character or plot?
Every project’s different. The other projects I mentioned are very character driven and very arthouse, I suppose. This one, initially, I was approached by one of the producers and the brief was to write a revenge-based thriller. Now, there were many twists and turns in the development process, one of which was shifting the focus from the father to the two girls. Once I did that it unlocked something in me and the reader, and that’s when it developed a momentum.
I really got engaged with this film, but to be honest for the first couple of years developing the script it was a technical exercise – it was very plot-driven and the enjoyment for me was in subverting people’s expectations in regards to the plot. But when I re-focused it around the girls, I suddenly emotionally became attached to it and those characters. What I really like about this film is it transcends its genre in large part due to the performances of those two central characters.
Bad Girl is, I think, a good example of a film that is both plot-driven and character-driven. The characters inform the plot – what they want and what they desire is driving the plot at pretty much all times. If you can get that kind of synchronicity or causality happening, I think you’ve got a really good film.
How did the casting process go? Was it difficult to find actors to fill the shoes of Amy and Chloe?
[As I said] the film initially was focused around the father and nobody was really interested in it and, to be honest, I’d lost my initial inspiration for the project. But we thought we’d make a teaser, we’d take it to Cannes and see who was interested. And we couldn’t get a name actor to be in the teaser – we had a couple who were maybe interested in being in the film, but they weren’t gonna do a teaser for no money. So I thought, who’s gonna do a teaser for no money? I know, the girls, who at that time were peripheral characters in the film, they’ll do it. Some up and coming actors will do it. I wrote a couple of scenes specifically for those girls, and as we filmed the teaser we realised that this was the story, this was a really great part of the story, and that’s why we re-focused it. But one of the main reasons was that Sara West was one of the girls in the teaser. So she was there from the start – we shot that scene five years ago, and actually I was worried that she’d end up too old by the time we made the film to play a teenager.
So we knew we had one character, and then we cast for the Chloe character. It took a while, but we always had Sara there as the sounding board, because whoever was cast as Chloe would have to work against her. And Samara, it was one of those moments – when she came into the audition, the producer who was there and myself were like, ‘This is our Chloe. We’ve got her.’ But she took a bit longer to find.
How did you come to be shooting in Western Australia?
It was largely luck. Two of my producers, Steve Kearney, who’s based in Melbourne, and Tenille Kennedy, who’s based in WA, met in a KFC in Melbourne. It must have been during the Melbourne Film Festival or something like that. They got talking and Steve mentioned this project called Bad Girl that he had, and Tenille said, ‘Well, that sounds like something I might be interested in – send me a script.’ And she really liked it. Tenille is well-regarded in WA.
The film was initially set in the Dandenongs outside of Melbourne, but that’s a location, not a story. When Tenille said that Screenwest was interested, would I consider shooting it in WA? Yes, absolutely. I had never been to Perth and I thought that it would be very dry and dusty and hot, unlike the Dandenongs, and I thought I would have to do a fair bit of rewriting, but when I got over there it was cold and wet and grey – the weather was really fantastic. All the streams in the Perth hills were running – it was great.
We ended up shooting there because of the money. Screenwest have, still I think, quite a lot of money relative to the other state funding bodies, and also I think WA is really actively trying to grow its film culture. We really loved filming there. I’m from Melbourne and I now live in Sydney, and particularly in Sydney funding a film is just fraught – finding a location, the cost of everything is really high. But in WA, the crew was really fantastic. We had trouble securing our crew because there were so many productions on at one time over there, but the crew we got were really great, Screenwest were really fantastic to deal with, and I’ve got another film in the pipeline I want to film over there, in large part because of the experience I had on Bad Girl.
Bad Girl is in cinemas now. Read our review here.
