It will have a world premiere at the short film festival Flickerfest, which runs at Sydney’s Bondi Pavilion from Friday to January 26.
“It’s unusual for someone who’s done as much as Nash to be making a short that’s at Flickerfest, but there’s a real nostalgia for us because we came up through that world,” Herriman says. “We spent so much time there in our twenties and thirties, either with our own shorts or shorts we worked on for other people.”
A two-time nominee at next month’s Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards for performances in How to Make Gravy and Better Man, Herriman says he often tells young actors the best way into the industry is by making short films with friends.
“You’re not only getting the experience, you’re getting something on tape that you can show people,” he says. “There’s no question that it leads to bigger and better things.”
Herriman found Zumi a naturally gifted actor.
“I was acting at nine,” he says. “I wasn’t as good as she is at nine.”
So how did Zumi find being directed by her dad?
“I thought it was really fun,” she says. “I really wanted to do a short film.”
And what are her acting ambitions?
“What does that mean?” Zumi asks her dad. When it’s explained, she says she wants to do “some stunts like Nash, but not fire ones, and I want to work with Jenna Ortega again”.
Zumi joined Taika Waititi’s daughters in background scenes in his new sci-fi drama Klara and the Sun, which stars Ortega.
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“She came home from that and asked if she could get an agent because she wanted to get scenes with lines,” Edgerton says. “She met this agent, and they said: ‘Actually an audition came in for a girl your age. Can you do an American accent?’ She was like, ‘I don’t even know what one is’.”
Obviously a quick learner, Zumi won a role in the TV series Good Cop/Bad Cop, which was shot in Queensland.
Is Edgerton planning to retire now to become a stage father?
“That’s what it seems like,” he says.
Flickerfest will screen more than 200 Australian and international shorts in a program that includes youth, kids, Indigenous, comedy, LGBTQI+, European Union and romance shorts as well as a new competition for films about organ donation.
Highlights will go on a national tour of more than 40 venues from next month until October, reaching Melbourne’s Kino Cinema in April.
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