On Movies: Director gets warm feeling from screams

'It makes me feel warm inside when people scream and cover their eyes and gasp," says Nash Edgerton, happily approving the response from audiences on the festival circuit to his short, Spider, and his feature directing debut, The Square.

"There's some sick part of me that really enjoys making people squirm," adds the Australian stuntman-turned-moviemaker. "I overheard my mother talking to a friend after she first saw Spider," and she said, '. . . as a child he was always trying to scare people, and now he's worked out how to do it en masse.' "

Spider and The Square opened at the Ritz at the Bourse on Friday. The former, shot in 2007, is a nasty nine minutes about a couple's reconciliation gone terribly awry. To say that it's jolting is an understatement. Edgerton stars as the boyfriend trying to make amends. Mirrah Foulkes is the girl. Their names are Jack and Jill.

The whole thing is preceded by a telling epigram credited to Edgerton's mum: "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye."

As for The Square, which Edgerton directed from a script cowritten by his brother, Joel, it has all the elements of a classic noir. A guy (David Roberts) is cheating on his wife. The girl he's seeing (Claire van der Boom) is married to a low-life criminal who comes home one day with a big bag of money. There's blackmail involved, too, and bodies start to accumulate.

The protagonist, a construction contractor, thinks he's got it all under control, but "he's like a chess player who can only plan one move ahead," Edgerton observes. "He's in trouble."

In town a couple of weeks ago for the Philadelphia Film Festival Spring Preview screening of his merrily twisted double bill, Edgerton, 37, is no stranger to the filmmaking process. The Sydney native has seven previous shorts to his credit, but also a lengthy resumé of stunt work - a vocation he still pursues if the project sounds interesting enough. Most recently: "Car chases and shootouts" in the June 25 Tom Cruise / Cameron Diaz actioner, Knight and Day.

Edgerton's first stunt job was on a Down Under police series. "I played a dead body, halfway down a waterfall in the middle of winter at night - it wasn't fun."

His first Hollywood movie was Street Fighter, in 1994, with Jean-Claude Van Damme.

"My first lead doubling job was on The Island of Dr. Moreau, the John Frankenheimer film," he says. "I was 21 or 22, doubling for David Thewlis."

Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer were on that one, too.

"It was a crazy shoot," he recalls. "The original director was fired four days in, and then Frankenheimer came on with no preparation. I think I've still got the script somewhere - it has more colored pages" - indicating rewrites - "than any script I've ever seen in my life."

Edgerton has been a stuntman and stunt double on films by an "eclectic band of directors," including the Wachowski Brothers (all three Matrices), John Woo (Mission: Impossible II), Bryan Singer (Superman Returns), Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line), and George Lucas (Star Wars Episodes II and III).

"Being a stuntman on film sets became my film school," he says. And although The Square isn't exactly jam-packed with car chases and shootouts, there are a couple of deftly choreographed scenes in which the action takes on special import.

Still, like the vintage noirs it evokes, The Square is more about character, and people who lack it, than it is about burning rubber and blazing guns. Edgerton says it's a genre that people keep returning to - and that writers and directors want to explore - because it "sets up an expectation and then delivers. Noir films are so much about setting up, about letting the audience know that something is going to go bad - you just know it's going to go bad.

"And people love watching things go bad to other people. I don't know if it makes people feel better about themselves, or if it's the same thing as the way people like looking at car crashes or train wrecks. It's that enjoyment of watching someone else's demise. I think everyone has a little bit of desire for that.

"I know I do."

Short subjects. Howl, about Beat Generation icon Allen Ginsberg, will hit theaters in late September as an Oscilloscope Laboratories release. James Franco stars as the controversial poet, who stood trial on obscenity charges after his epic poem was published. (The prosecuting attorney described "Howl" as "filthy, vulgar, obscene, and disgusting.") The film, written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, also stars David Strathairn, Jon Hamm, Bob Balaban, Alessandro Nivola, Treat Williams, Mary-Louise Parker, and Jeff Daniels. . . . Production Weekly reports that Sam Mendes is planning to direct Robert Downey Jr. in Oz: the Great and Powerful, an origins tale about the famous Man Behind the Curtain of L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz. Mendes, of Revolutionary Road and Road to Perdition (for consistency's sake, he could change Oz's title to The Yellow Brick Road), is also the man in charge of the untitled 23d James Bond picture. But MGM recently announced it was putting the 007 project on hold, awaiting the outcome of sales bids for the financially troubled studio.

Submit! Submit! The 2010 Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival has announced that it's now accepting submissions for its fall run. Work can be entered in narrative fiction, documentary, short films, and Philadelphia short films. For entry info and details: www.phillyasianfilmfest.org.