Joel Edgerton was two weeks into his first gig as a director on the Hollywood thriller The Gift (which he also wrote) when he had the sort of moment no first-time director wants.
"I thought I'd made a mistake," says the 41-year-old Australian. "But by then it was too late."
This crisis of faith wasn't brought about by his move behind the camera, as you might expect. Rather, it was triggered by his move back in front of it, as Edgerton the actor tried to perform for Edgerton the director the lines, penned by Edgerton the writer.
It was a case of one hat too many.
"The enjoyment I'd had in those first two weeks when I was only directing suddenly disappeared," he says. "I was stressed. I thought, 'F---, I shouldn't have done this'. But it was too late then; you can't just call someone in the middle of a shoot and say 'Hey, are you free? Do you want to come and weird out in my movie?'"
Did you sense that the crew shared that feeling?
"Yeah, I actually did. I didn't feel like they'd lost faith in me and they were going to walk or anything, but it definitely felt like they could see the stress on me and they preferred the directing me better, rather than the guy who was sweating and running around going 'Aaargh'."
Edgerton wrote the character of Gordo, a loner who crosses paths with the guy who tormented him at high school 25 years earlier, with the express intention of playing him. When he decided to direct it as well, he toyed with casting someone else – Edward Norton was top of his list – "but I just couldn't let it go".
The world seems to think he made the right call. Produced for just $4.7 million by schlockmeister Jason Blum (whose normal stock-in-trade is the "buckets of blood" genre typified by the Saw, Sinister and Insidious franchises), Edgerton's film has scored well with the critics and taken more than $US31 million in three weeks in the States.
It's a domestic thriller – Jason Bateman as the nice guy with a shady past and Rebecca Hall as his nervy wife provide the other two points of a tense triangle – that harks back to the genre's 1990s heyday (think Pacific Heights, Sleeping With the Enemy, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle et al).
But though Edgerton cites Fatal Attraction and Cape Fear as other key influences, he was determined to take his own path – which means, among other things, that the supposed villain of the piece is somebody you feel a certain empathy with, while the alleged hero, well, not so much.
"It's about the terrifying possibility that one day, years out from high school, you might get a tap on the shoulder from someone saying, 'Hey do you remember me?', and if you hadn't been a good person, what happens next?," Edgerton says by way of summarising his modern morality tale.
Gordo is a character whose life went off the rails, and never really got back on them, because of schoolyard bullying. So, which side of that equation were you on, Joel?
"Both," he says without hesitation. "I think cruelty was definitely in me at high school, the pack mentality, needing to feel included, and that fear that creates the ability for you to exclude other kids. I was cruel, and I also understood what it was like to have people be cruel to me."
The film is not, he insists, an act of atonement in any sense, but it is a continuation of the themes he explored in The Square (directed by his brother Nash) and Matthew Saville's Felony.
"The three movies I've written are all kind of the same movie: they're all about a guy who f---s up and then he doesn't quite do the right thing in the aftermath. It just so happens that in this one there's 25 years between incident and accountability.
"I'm fascinated by how much effort it takes to change, how unwilling some of us are to acknowledge wrongdoing," he says. "It's a big subject for me."
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