Joel Edgerton doesn’t worry how his movies perform at the box office.
Joel Edgerton doesn’t obsess about box-office numbers
The 51-year-old actor is currently promoting Train Dreams, the Clint Bentley-directed drama movie which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and Joel loves that the project is still gaining momentum ten months after it premiered.
He explained to The Hollywood Reporter: “The movie’s so universal, and if people are patient enough to watch it or enough people tell them they should watch it, it’ll have an audience.
“I’d be the worst studio executive of all time because to me, it’s about the longevity of cinema for all time. One of my favourite stories in my life is Warrior, and I know that Lionsgate was probably annoyed at the time. It didn’t make any money. But now, more than any of my movies, when I’m at an airport travelling, people come up to me [for it] — that movie gets continually watched and passed around and is standing the test of time.
“If a movie holds up and lasts and continues to speak to people 10, 20, 30 years in the future, that’s the palette of movies that I want to look back on and go, ‘I was involved in that.’
“Whether they make money on opening weekend, unless some of that money’s going in my bank account, I really don’t care that much.”
Joel wants his projects to be watched by as many people as possible. However, he doesn’t care how long it takes for his films to gather momentum.
The actor explained: “I want as many people as possible to watch the movies that I do. If that’s in the first week, great. But if it’s over 15 years, then it’s almost more of a compliment to the movie than [the box office] just going bananas on the first weekend.”
Joel is also happy to appear in movies that operate on a “smaller budget”.
He said: “I feel like I’ve got something to provide on a smaller scale of filmmaking.
“I could definitely find my place and plug into a bigger scale movie, but maybe it’s my ego that says that I’ll get to participate more in the creative pursuit if I’m doing something at a smaller budget — whether I’m directing it or helping produce it or occupying the screen. But there’s another thing going on. I got to a certain age and I could look back on all the work I’ve done that I never thought I would ever get done — I’ve managed to work for a long time and on an array of different things.
“But when I wanted access to it all those years ago, I wished I had access to people to help me, teach me how to get there faster, help me get the movies I wanted made.”