This history of Hollywood is riddled with jack-of-all-trade filmmakers, from Charlie Chaplin directing and doing his own stunts to Shane Carruth, who's self-distributing his new film Upstream Color, in which he also stars. One of our favorite do-it-yourself filmmakers out there right now is Nash Edgerton, an Australian stunt man and actor who's been making short films and features through his Blue Tongue Films. You last saw him as an actor in Zero Dark Thirty, as one of the SEAL team members alongside his brother Joel, but if you want to know what kind of stories emerge from the mind of a stuntman, we've got a treat for you.
Edgerton's short "Bear" played at the Sundance Film Festival last year, and now it's emerged online as the debut of a VICE Shorts series. You can watch the entire ten-minute film, which co-stars Warm Bodies star Teresa Palmer, embedded below.
Short films are such a perfect format for setting up a joke and then freaking the audience out, and Edgerton has become a genius at doing it-- you can see him at work in the similar "Spider," available to watch here. And Edgerton used his love for unsettling the audience in his feature-length The Square, a Coen Brothers-style drama about a life that unravels thanks to a bag of cash. Isn't it fun to realize that, inside the brain of one of those tough guys sent to assassinate Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty, there's this kind of twisted sense of humor?
