STACK Jan 123

44 / 68

DVD&BD
JANUARY 2015 JB Hi-Fi
FEATURE
044
visit
WICKED CLAIM
In FELONY, Matthew Saville and Joel Edgerton have created the stunning story of a
celebrated cop who commits an accidental crime, and decides to cover it up.
But it’s more about the relationship with the self than the police
procedural genre, as the two explained to Zoë Radas.
right to forgive you. I felt like it was such
rich material. ‘Cause I love thrillers, but
oftentimes they end with a big shootout, and
I wanted for it to be a shootout of ideas that
still felt tense.”
“It’s not a whodunnit...” Saville interjects.
“Whydunnit!” Edgerton exclaims. “You’ve
just defined a new genre. It’s a whydunnit.”
Saville and Edgerton clearly have a
marvellous working partnership as well as
a personal one. Saville says directing
Edgerton was a blast, but the rest of the cast –
including Jai Courtney as a suspicious rookie
cop, Melissa George as Mal’s wife Julie, and
the revered Tom Wilkinson as Detective Carl
Summer, the man who encourages Mal to
keep his secret hidden – elevated Edgerton’s
script into something amazing.
“A lot of the stuff on the page you
could just read in very binary, forward
fashion; that this is the moment where they’re
behaving badly, or this is the moment where
they’re behaving admirably,” Saville says.
“That all of the cast put so much breath and
colour into the characters, that everything’s
sort of happening at the same time in this
sort of strange dance... for me, watching the
film, I’m trying to look at it objectively now. I
find my allegiance has shifted.”
One of the great joys of Felony is
Saville’s rich visual style, which bears many
metaphors of shape to convey the story.
Saville and Edgerton mention several shots
– Mal enclosed in the darkness of a garage
as the roller door descends; an overhead
shot of the young boy being loaded into an
ambulance, whose elements come together
to resemble a crucifix; a shot of Mal angled
within his car so as to suggest a cell – which
are their favourites. “Sometimes I think
they’re super planned, and sometimes
Matthew will just see them in the moment,”
Edgerton says. “I think you have to trust the
performance as well,” Saville adds. “I think
there is a style of directing which is footage
gathering, where you just get every angle
you can and you create everything in
the edit. But, I’d much rather be
there on the floor and make
that commitment with the
actor.”
I n Dostoyevsky’s seminal novel Crime
and Punishment (1866), the crime to
which the title refers is committed
very early on, and the rest of the narrative is
how the punishment plays out – how the
murderer punishes himself in his own mind,
aside from the legal affiliations the word
holds. Matthew Saville and Joel Edgerton lay
out a similar idea in their brilliant new crime
drama Felony, which Saville directed and for
which Edgerton wrote the screenplay, as well
as playing the lead role.
“It was very important to me, you know:
the situation of the story comes first – this
character who commits a crime – and the
real crime is the second thing he does, which
is to lie about the initial accident,” Edgerton
says. “And the journey back to join the human
race... I believe that when you do bad things,
time sort of stops for you for a second,
because you’re not really engaged in life, and
you don’t really belong in life, and there’s this
question of punishment and forgiveness.”
The accident Edgerton speaks of involves
his character, officer Mal Toohey, driving
home from a drunken celebration. As he
approaches his street, he side-swipes and
injures a young boy, and conceals the fact
from police who attend the scene. Mal’s
guilt then proceeds to seep into all facets of
his life.
“[One character] says in the film, ‘prison is
for people who don’t have their punishment
up here in their head’,” Edgerton says.
“The film is a thriller and it’s
entertainment, but within that
are these different characters’
opinions and shifting
points of view on what
punishment fits what
crime, and who has the