CThe border areas where it is good to stay alert. The border that separates childhood and adolescence It is a dark forest. Joel Edgerton, who just over a year ago told us “I like the idea of upsetting the audience for good reasons. I believe that human beings can represent the greatest strength for each other, but also the greatest danger “, in that territory it has entered the spirit of the anthropologist.
The only adult in a cast of thirteen -year -olds, rewinded the ribbon and tried to go back in time, as he did Charlie Polinger, the director of The plague (The plague), passed in the section A Certain Regard of the last Cannes Film Festival and fresh from Victory at the Deuville Festivalafter finding the diaries that brought him back to the summer of 2003 in a drawer of the parents’ house.
Ben, 12 years old, is new in the city. Arrived from Boston with mom, He enrolled in a water polo summer camp. To make friends. The “plague” of the title is that the dominant group of the kids of the campus attributes to one of the companions. That no one will have to touch, under penalty of “contagion”.
Joel Edgerton: “Act to get me noticed”
Edgerton, thick beard, suit and whistle is the team coach. His task of training young athletes and providing them with life lessons. “The task for which it is totally inadequate,” he explains. «The film stages i Three archetypes: the ostracized boy. Ben, the protagonist, who is taken in the middle. And the bully, the head of the gang. All three live within us. I remember very well the feeling of relief that I felt, at their age, when I felt that I had joined the flock of my peers. If the price to pay to stay safe inside was excluded the weakest, I was willing to do it. Children create a system of rules and relationships from which all the others are excluded and produce their mythology. We are all willing to embrace mythology in order to be part of the group. Even if we know that there is nothing true. We are willing to betray ourselves to be accepted ».
Joel Edgerton in the Plague. (Courtesy Press Office)
And mythology, with social media and the use and abuse of phones, ends up being amplified.
Kayo Martin, the group leader, the bully, in life is an influencer. He is 13 years old and is a celebrity on Instagram, an incredible skateboarder. He is such an intelligent boy that he can put anyone in the corner and isolation, including me that I was the only adult on the set. And he does not do it because he wants you badly, but to have fun, to win boredom. Children do not pose the problem of collateral damage they can cause. On the other hand they are very skilled to position themselves inside the flock. They understand the hierarchy on the fly. Ben soon understands that his generosity towards the most fragile person of the group puts him in danger.
Young males and rites of passage
The fact that the universe staged, with its rites of passage, is entirely male is not irrelevant.
I recently happened to listen to a vocal message from a child I know, son of friends, adorable. The message was so full of insults and vulgarity that I could not believe it was him. The boys are very different when we adults are not around. Having two four -year -old children I am very interested in the moment when we become responsible adults. It is through our experiences that we learn what the others around us feels good or bad, and how this awareness changes us and forgives us. In The plague there is something Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick’s film on a training field for soldiers departing for Vietnam, editor’s note ): Men trapped in a single place where someone must necessarily suffer. And of course The Lord of the flies (directed by Peter Brook in 1963 and taken from the 1954 William Golding novel, editor’s note ), all males too.
Joel Edgerton in Paul Schrader’s “The Maestro Giardiniere”. (Courtesy Press Office)
This film wanted to direct him.
I grew up looking at films that contained a mystery, they removed sleep. And when I made the decision to direct, I tried to remove sleep from others: Gifts from a stranger – The Giftmy first film (psychological thriller of 2015, with Rebecca Hall and Jason Bateman, editor’s note), it was so. When my agent sent me the script of The plague He said to me: “I know you will like it.” But whoever wrote the film also wanted to direct him and since they were his memories he had all the right. Then I asked to be involved in any other way and, since I am not 12 years old, they gave me the role of the coach. Then I enlarged to produce it.
Do you often help young filmmakers?
I am curious about what it boils in the next generation pot. And I have everything to earn.
Future Regie?
I will make a movie before the end of the year. It will be a film conceived during Covid …
The new film conceived during Covid
She became father during Covid.
And just then I began to ask myself about our mental health. It was the right time. On the true and imaginary masks we wear every day. On the fiction we put in place by telling that we are better than we are. And on the pressures we suffer in order not to share the pain when we try it, because we think it is not cool to do it. It will be the story of a family that disintegrates during a holiday when all masks fall.
It brings to mind the scene in which she tries to help well, with words of wisdom that prove to be absolutely useless.
We adults who have passed in the same hell of that boy when we become great we are no longer able to understand it.
Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga in “Loving – Love must be born free”. (Courtesy Press Office)
“I try to give my children the best”
Don’t you frighten you, as a father, the communication difficulties he could encounter with his children?
We all had to deal with someone who had just been left or with a child who had had a terrible disappointment. Usually we use expressions such as: “Everything will be fine, the weather will arrange everything”, and nonsense of the genre. But when you are in the middle of the mess they do not help. An incredible moment for children is when for the first time they understand that they are not immortal, that they will not live forever. I went there, I almost killed myself in a couple of occasions. And other times I risked doing a lot to someone. Even if I’m not so sure today, I think having raced those risks made me become a little kinder.
What models do children have today?
With reduced politics as I would say that we are proposing rather poor models. I try to give my children the best, but I cannot enter their secret language when they are with other human beings of their age. It is in those moments that, for example, they decide how women will deal with adults. I tell myself that I can give them the toolbox, but that they have to learn to use them. I was perpetually looking for strategies to get more attention from my parents. Then I started acting. It worked: I managed to get noticed.