Why 'Bad Girls' Is "Such A Bastard Of A Movie"

Like any budding filmmaker, Fin Edquist spent years gathering ideas, writing scripts and pitching concepts for his debut film, many of them, at times, feeling like they were going to be 'the one'. But the movie that ultimately became the 43-year-old's debut directorial feature was, to the filmmaker, a surprising one.

"I figured Bad Girl would be the last one that'd get made," Edquist says. "It's a genre piece. It's a mix of thriller, relationship drama, there's almost elements of horror. There's a flamboyance to it that I really like. It's not like the kind of traditional arthouse movie that [Australian] funding bodies tend to make. It always felt like a bit of a telemovie, to me... Now, I love Bad Girl. There's a rawness, this emotional unwieldiness to it. It's such a bastard of a movie."

"I love Bad Girl. There's a rawness, this emotional unwieldiness to it. It's such a bastard of a movie."

Befitting its title, said "bastard of a movie" charts the obsessive friendship between a pair of rebellious teenage girls, played by Sara West and Samara Weaving. It was conceived of as a psychological thriller about adoption, but came to life when Edquist tilted the script away from the parents (Felicity Price, Benjamin Winspear) towards the kids. After Bad Girl had sat on the backburner for years, he "completely rewrote the film" while going through upheaval — divorce, custody — in his personal life. "When your family breaks down, your identity breaks down," Edquist says. "You have to strive to reconstitute the idea of a family, to reconstruct your identity. The yearning for family — for this thing that's bigger than yourself — is what unites the two girls in the film."

Edquist grew up in a "tightknit family" in Sassafras, up in Melbourne's Dandenong Ranges. "Dad had come from a troubled family background, so he'd set out, Mosquito Coast-style, to make a better life up in the hills," Edquist recounts; his childhood a "semi-hippyish upbringing without a TV". He went to Melbourne Uni to study physics, then ended up in the VCA film school. He cut his teeth making music videos (1200 Techniques, Jessica Mauboy, Ricki-Lee), before moving to Sydney to work in TV (his writing credits include episodes of McLeod's Daughters and Home And Away). His previous feature film work involved penning the scripts for the animated family films Maya The Bee Movie and Blinky Bill The Movie, which now seems amusing, in hindsight, with Bad Girl summoning far darker cinematic works.

"We looked at a lot of [Michael] Haneke's films, like Funny Games or Cache, that austerity of his visual approach, that sense of dread, with these outbursts of violence," Edquist says. "We looked at that film Martha Marcy May Marlene, which is so brilliantly shot on such a low budget — the way that space is delineated in the film, the depth that is created through the use of shadow and defocused foregrounds."

Bad Girl was shot in Western Australia; at a "severe, minimalist, gigantic, modernist house" in the Swan Valley, and in the hills around Kalamunda. "I'd never been to Perth, before pre-production. It was a lot greener, a lot colder, than what I was expecting," offers Edquist. "That informed so much of how the film looks. Shooting in a house with such huge windows, our biggest visual influence was whatever was happening in the sky."