As well as playing the central role of Detective Malcolm Toohey, Egerton also wrote the script. Essentially about a celebrated police officer being involved in a serious traffic accident and covering up his culpability, the idea arose when Edgerton became fascinated by a question of moral fibre.
“I like to think I am a decent person and have moral integrity,” he says. “But I never have been truly tested. So the question of if I was sitting in the car and the situation happened to me, as it happened to my character – then to involve the audience in that feeling, too. What would you do? Would you handle it with integrity or would you save your own bacon? Mal’s a human being. By that I mean he is trying to be a good person, thinks he is a good person, is trying to do good things and has a major slip up and finds himself in the aftermath. He’s an otherwise good man that finds himself in a moral dilemma.
“A lot of this film is about empathy. You can’t judge a person unless you walk in their shoes. When you’re with Jai (Courtney – playing the newly promoted Detective Jim Melic) you empathise with him, when you are with Mal you empathise with him.”
However, there are no pure heroes in Felony and all the characters are portrayed in nuanced shades of grey. “Jai has almost too straight a moral line, but even he has something going on there, this weird attraction to grief. He has a crusading mentality, but even he crosses the line. He starts to enter the grey zone. Malcolm is behaving from a place of fear, of what that act will dismantle in his life. My favourite stories are always the ones where someone is trying to dig their way out of trouble. I feel like that’s the story of my life.”
Director Matthew Saville has some previous form with this subject. His debut film, Noise, also was a study of the police force, but looked at it from the perspective of a uniformed officer. “The constabulary and detectives are almost a two tier society. It’s a different world. Felony is a companion piece, but different in a lot of ways. There’s some thematic similarities, as they are not police procedurals, but rather character studies. Yet the two protagonists couldn’t be more diametrically opposed. I couldn’t see them getting along too well at all. They are both staring at a moral compass and no one has true north.”
A lot of the extensive research Saville performed for Noise was able to carry over into this film. Augmented by consultations with detectives on set, he was able to create an incredible sense of veracity, down to the tiny details (like the four digit extensions above each desk in the LAC). Felony truly immerses its audience in that world while it plays out its moral dilemma.
BY DAVID O’CONNELL
