BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — One night in the early 1990s Nash Edgerton, about 20 years old and struggling as an electrical-engineering student, awoke with an inspiration.
Shorts From Blue-Tongue Films
“I should be a stunt man,” Mr. Edgerton recalled thinking.
It was the beginning of Blue-Tongue Films, one of the unlikelier phenomena in the unpredictable world of independent film.
Blue-Tongue, a loose-jointed Australian moviemaking collective, is now flooding American festivals, the awards circuit and those who look for Hollywood’s next big thing with its rough-and-tumble fare, and can now add an Oscar nomination to its résumé.
In pursuit of a stunt career, Mr. Edgerton, a lawyer’s son from outside Sydney, drove to the set of “Reckless Kelly,” a comic romp then being shot in Australia by Yahoo Serious. He was not hired.
But he eventually had the idea of teaming up with his younger brother Joel, an aspiring actor, and a few friends, to make a nine-minute action film, “Loaded.” It was supposed to show how good he was at spinning cars and such.
Nash Edgerton did stunt work for Australian television and movies like “The Matrix” and “Moulin Rouge!” Along the way he also became a filmmaker and a central player in a group that was named Blue-Tongue, in memory of the Edgertons’ pet lizard.
“None of us could get into film school; I tried,” said Luke Doolan, a Blue-Tongue regular who joined Nash Edgerton over espresso, ginger ale and three baskets of fries at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel here on Monday. (Joel Edgerton attended drama school, as did Kieran Darcy-Smith, another associate.)
Mr. Doolan had just come from an annual luncheon for Oscar nominees.
“Miracle Fish,” which he directed, wrote and edited, was nominated this year as best live-action short. It tells the story of a boy who wakes to find he has successfully wished everyone away. And it includes a performance by Mr. Darcy-Smith, who also appears in Nash Edgerton’s film “The Square,” because, among the Blue-Tongue crowd, everyone connects to everyone else.
“The Square,” a noir thriller set for theatrical release in the United States by Apparition on April 9, credits Mr. Doolan as an editor, and includes Joel Edgerton among its stars and writers.
Joel Edgerton, in turn, though known more widely for his roles in “Smokin’ Aces” and the two latest “Star Wars” films, also appears in “Animal Kingdom,” a crime drama that was written and directed by David Michôd. Mr. Michôd is yet another of the Blue-Tongue group, and his picture won the world cinema jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival last month.
In the film business mutual support is at least as old as United Artists, formed by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith and Mary Pickford, as an artist-owned venture back in 1919.
In the 1970s filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma and Paul Schrader lived, loved and shared creative impulses together. Later Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell became a close-knit group, while more than a few studio comedies in the last decade were made by an interlocking set of filmmakers and actors that included Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Adam McKay and Judd Apatow.
“When you have one of these movements, there’s usually a lot of idealism, and an attempt to break through the ways of corporate Hollywood to help each other,” said Peter Biskind, a film historian. Mr. Biskind wrote about the ’70s interconnections in his book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” and more recently chronicled the life of Warren Beatty in “Star.”
Blue-Tongue Films is unusual in that it has a name — Mr. Edgerton said he got around to registering the trademark a while ago — but is not really a company, with shared profits, nor a true cinematic movement, like Dogme 95 in Denmark.
Rather it is an agglomeration of filmmakers who helped one another into the business and have simply stuck together in jobs that vary from film to film. That includes the stunt work.
Tony Lynch, who worked on Nash Edgerton’s first short, was the stunt coordinator of, and a featured actor in, “The Square.” And Nash Edgerton is credited as stunt coordinator and a stunt double on “Hesher,” a drama that was picked up at Sundance for distribution by Newmarket Films. That film was directed by Spencer Susser, also a Blue-Tongue associate, and includes Natalie Portman, Rainn Wilson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt among its stars.
“I think the longer we have been around, we have all understood the value of moving in packs: the strength of support, the pooling of ideas and equipment and the kudos of associating with each other,” Joel Edgerton wrote in an e-mail message on Tuesday.
Mr. Michôd, a former film journalist who spent a year in a graduate film program at Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne, said he depends on his peers for advice on matters like action shots, while they turn to him for expertise when it comes to writing.
Mr. Michôd said he met Nash Edgerton about nine years ago while working as an editor for a film magazine that had offices in the same building as Blue-Tongue.
“Our acquaintance came from arguing over car spaces in back of the building,” said Mr. Michôd, who spoke by phone on Tuesday.
Nash Edgerton said the Blue-Tongue members have no shared aesthetic, nor even a goal, beyond getting pictures on the screen. But Joel, in his e-mail message, said “the output so far has a real urban-noir aggressiveness to it, a violence coupled with a humor.”
If Nash Edgerton in some ways has been a leader, it is largely because he insists that each of the players keep his own pictures moving. “David sometimes calls me the film bully,” Mr. Edgerton said. He is forceful enough to have once talked a film festival director not only into accepting his unmade short, but also into starring in it.
That film, “Deadline,” won first prize at Australia’s Tropfest in 1997.
Over the fries on Monday, Mr. Edgerton and Mr. Doolan said they had been reading scripts and attending Hollywood meetings set up by their respective agents.
So far neither had lined up a studio project.
But, they said, more than a few interns and young executives have asked how the Blue-Tongue gang had managed to build filmmaking careers out of little more than shared grit.
“We run into people carrying $120,000 debt from film school,” Mr. Doolan said. “And all they want to know is how we did it.”
