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Jana Asenbrennerova / The Chronicle

Nash (left) and Joel Edgerton worked together on “The Square,” shown at the Mostly British festival.

On the strength of several award-winning shorts, stuntman-turned-filmmaker Nash Edgerton had the luxury of choice when it came time to make his first feature. Because of his success, he could opt to do any of a number of screenplays sent his way, or he could take a chance closer to home with a script written by his actor brother Joel with Matthew Dabner. The decision was an easy one.

“Because of what we’d done with our short films and stuff and I love my brother, I just thought it would be cool to make the first one something he wrote,” Nash explains on a recent trip to San Francisco where he and Joel screened that feature, “The Square,” at the city’s Mostly British Film Festival.

The Australian director could not have made a better call. Only now released in the United States, the film came out in Australia in 2008 and earned seven Australian Film Institute award nominations, including those for best film and best direction. Joel was nominated for best original screenplay and best supporting actor.

A taut neo-noir, “The Square” is the tale of a construction foreman whose plan to rob his mistress’ husband so that the couple can run away together goes horribly awry.

“Every choice drives him further and further to hell,” Joel says. “He’s blindly entering into this game of piсata where someone else is holding the stick.”

“The Square” marks just the latest collaboration between 37-year-old Nash and 35-year-old Joel. Work started as play when they were children growing up on 5 acres in Dural, a suburb of Sydney. When Nash was 10, the boys’ father brought home a video camera and the siblings commandeered it, turning their backyard into their first film set.

At 18, Nash abandoned his electrical engineering studies to follow his dream of becoming a stuntman, although he was so unsure how to go about it that he first looked up “Stunts” in the phone book. He began his apprenticeship after an agency that represents stunt people introduced him to some clients. At the same time, Joel began studying acting at Sydney’s Theatre Nepean.

By the late 1990s, the brothers were flourishing in their respective careers. While Nash became a sought-after stuntman and stunt coordinator, Joel’s star rose both at home, where he won a 2002 best actor award for his role in the TV series “The Secret Life of Us” and starred opposite Heath Ledger in 2003′s “Ned Kelly,” and abroad, where he played Owen Lars in Episodes II and III of “Star Wars” and a shoe manufacturer trying to save his failing company in 2005′s “Kinky Boots.” On occasion, their careers have brought the siblings together, and Nash has even been his brother’s stunt double, most notably in 2002′s “The Hard Word.”

Studying directors

Stunt work provided Nash Edgerton with an invaluable education. “I got to go on set and watch other directors do their thing and make mistakes and get things right,” he says. “You’re there when the shots are done and you can remember how it was done and you can see the end result when you go to the cinema.”

Nash’s filmmaking began with the show reels he and his friend Tony Lynch made to showcase their stunts. Instead of simply shooting stunts, the pair would shoot entire scenes. In 1996, Nash co-directed “Loaded,” his first short, with Joel’s acting school classmate Kieran Darcy-Smith. Starring both Edgertons, Darcy-Smith, and Lynch, it won a prize for Most Resourceful Production at the Flickerfest International Film Festival.

“Loaded” also marked the debut of Blue-Tongue Films – named, Joel jokes, for the amount of swearing in their earliest films and the lizards he and Nash made into pets when they were kids. A partnership between the Edgertons, Darcy-Smith, Lynch, David Michфd, Luke Doolan and Spencer Susser, it is a production company and, according to Joel, “a massive kind of clubhouse.”

“Blue-Tongue was a company only so that we could have bank accounts to bring our financing to make the projects we want,” he explains. “The other thing that it’s served is being a quality-control center. We’ll all write a script and share it with the group, and we’d agree that these films would be a Blue-Tongue Film project.”

“It’s kind of like this healthy competition thing,” adds Nash. “Everyone helps each other make his film as good as he can, and then the next person wants to make his film better than the last one. Everyone kind of pushes each other.”

Plus, he says, “It’s a lot easier, especially as Australians, because you don’t like to talk about yourself. It’s so much easier to talk about your friends.”

Partners took part

“The Square” was not just Nash’s inaugural feature, but also Blue-Tongue’s. Nearly all of the partners took part in the production, with Darcy-Smith taking a supporting role and shooting stills, Lynch acting as stunt coordinator, Michфd making a behind-the-scenes documentary, and Doolan editing with Nash and acting as an additional camera operator. But the most intense collaboration was between the brothers, as co-executive producers (along with co-writer Dabner), as well as actor and director. To their mutual relief, they discovered that even under the intense pressure of a feature film shoot, they work well together.

“We have a really good shorthand,” says Nash. “We both have the same idea of what the film should be.”

He laughs, “I thought if I could get through making a film with him, then our friendship’s pretty solid, you know, without having to get Mom into, like, mediate or anything like that.”

The partnership was such a success that they are already talking about their next feature. Joel is in Canada, where he is starring in “The Thing,” a prequel to the classic sci-fi horror thriller of the same name, but he is also writing a screenplay for Nash. What genre it is and what it is about is hush-hush.

“We’ve decided to keep it under wraps,” Joel says. “We just decided to be a little bit more confident in ourselves and just sit back and when it’s ready, kind of reveal it.”

“I think what works well with he and I is we have skills that kind of complement each other rather than compete with each other,” Nash suggests. “He’s a much better writer than I am. He can act. I can direct. I can edit. I’ve been his stunt double before. He’s since directed a short, which I think was really great and I’m sure he’ll direct again. Now I’m doing a bit of writing. So we kind of mix it up.” {sbox}

“The Square” (R) and Nash Edgerton’s short “Spider” open Friday at Bay Area theaters.

E-mail Pam Grady at pink letters@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page Q – 28 of the San Francisco Chronicle