Nick the writer

October 7, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/10/06/1128562927418.html



Nick Cave with director John Hillcoat.

Nick Cave has successfully channeled his creative energies onto the big screen - and it was easy, he tells Jim Schembri.

IT TOOK an intense three weeks for Nick Cave to write the screenplay for The Proposition - and there was a very pressing reason for that. "It took me one week to work out how to use the f---ing computer."

Who says Nick Cave can't crack a joke? Revelation One.

Actually, his speed at the PC was motivated by something even more prosaic.

"I didn't think the film would ever get made. Everyone knows there's billions of these f---ing scripts out there and, like, 1 per cent ever gets made, so I was determined not to waste half a year on it. 'All right, there's the script, now onto what I'm put on Earth to do!'"

Nick Cave was put on Earth to make music. At 48, he is best known as the narrow, black-clad singer-songwriter who fronted the Birthday Party in the 1980s and, later, the Bad Seeds, which is still a going concern.

Widely adored as the archetypal Goth singer, many of his songs, such as Where the Wild Roses Grow and Do You Love Me?, are regarded as Goth anthems that speak of Cave's dark, depressing view of a world where there is romance in murder, everything is miserable and the girl often ends up dead.

He hates all that. Revelation Two. Yes, he had a 1996 album called Murder Ballads - he even got Kylie Minogue on board for Roses - but he has done lots of non-Goth stuff as well. As for describing The Proposition as a Gothic western ...

"Well," he says, letting out an exasperated sigh, "it would be unfortunate because of the implications of that particular word - the G-word - which I've spent the last 25 years trying to avoid and live down. To start it all up again would be a pity."

And a tad unfair. The Proposition is certainly brutal, filled as it is with blood, violence, death and flies. But it also has tenderness, love, compassion and, ultimately, a morally positive outlook.

In the sun-scorched outback of 1880s Australia, policeman Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) cuts a deal with outlaw Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce). Stanley will spare the life of his mentally challenged younger brother Mikey (Richard Wilson) if he tracks down and kills his older brother Arthur (Danny Huston), who was responsible for killing an entire family.

The film's themes of violence, love, moral conflict and redemption are, Cave contends, a more rounded reflection of his artistic endeavours than the dank "Goth" tag would suggest.

deed, hearing Nick Cave speak as a screenwriter shows a side of him that runs so counter to the Nick Cave stereotype you have to remind yourself that he did, in fact, once write a song called Jack the Ripper. For instance, his remarks about Stanley and his wife Martha (Emily Watson) contain a note of genuine affection.

"The film is a heart with many chambers, and one of the main chambers to me is the relationship between Martha and Stanley," he says, drawing on a roll-your-own.

"To me that was pretty much the most exciting stuff to write, their relationship. Without that the film would be very, very different. Ray and Emily brought an enormous amount of tenderness and Ray had such vulnerability and pathos. With him, it was exciting to take a character who, at the start of the film, says 'I will civilise this country' and just slowly dismantle him.

"The redemptive nature of their relationship within a very brutal story and the fact that, at the end, he just wants to save his wife and protect her, I find very moving."

Revelation Three is that The Proposition is little short of brilliant. With only one other screenplay under his belt - the mordant 1988 prison drama Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead - Cave was given a heap of research material by director John Hillcoat. From that he fashioned an original story that instinctively took the conventions of the western - outlaws, isolation, taming the landscape - and refracted them through a uniquely Australian prism.

Though the film was a hugely collaborative effort, Hillcoat says most of what is on the screen was on the pages Cave provided. This includes some breakthrough moments for Australian cinema regarding the portrayal of Aborigines.

More concerned with historical accuracy than liberal sentiment, there is no mollifying political correctness in The Proposition. Aboriginal people are seen as servants, outlaws, murderers and collaborators. There is even black-on-black violence.

In one remarkable scene, an armed black police tracker, played by veteran David Gulpilil, stands before a line of Aboriginal prisoners in chains and neck-shackles as he translates their words for Stanley. It's one of many unflinching scenes commenting on the oxidising effect colonialism had on the indigenous population that have never been seen before in an Australian film.

It's news to Cave.

"Is it?" he says. "For some strange reason it almost ended up as a political film, which I feel is pretty unintentional on my behalf, but the film feels like we've done a shit on Australia's doorstep and stood back. Do you understand what I mean?"

Yes, though a slightly more accurate phrase would be that it's a wake-up call about the historical portrayal of Aborigines on film.

"I think the reason for a lot of that is I don't live here and I don't actually know how buried this stuff is," Cave muses.

"For me, I just thought everybody knows this stuff! Everybody knows that there were wholesale massacres of the Aboriginals.

"But I was reading the research and I was thinking, 'F-k! I was never told that they actually resisted, that they fought back, that they tried to protect their families.' There were extraordinarily moving accounts in the literature Johnny gave me about this kind of thing, and about the black-on-black violence."

Cave didn't study any screenwriting texts, but watches thousands of movies "indiscriminately", citing The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) and The Night of the Hunter (1955) as favourites.

As a narrative songwriter whose songs often feel like short stories set to music, Cave found the process of writing a screenplay immensely liberating.

"It was a very different thing, it's much easier. It's much easier for me to write a film script than it is to write a song because, basically, I've been given the theme on a platter. 'Write an Australian western.' All right, well, you just get a few Aussie characters and they go off and do their shit and everyone dies in the end! (He's making another joke.)

"Writing a song, you're just on your own. The most difficult thing and the most painful thing about writing a song is working out, `What am I going to write about? What's the theme of this song, which doesn't exist in any form?' You're just in a void.

"Whereas a script, you get one idea and you run with it, you live with it and it totally fills your mind. The great thing about a script is that you can just lie in bed at night and think about having these characters do whatever you want. That's really exciting."

The film reflects many of the themes in his music - violence, moral ambiguity, the all-consuming power of love - but he considers it a fuller expression of them.

"In a script you can expand your ideas about things. Song is the opposite. You've got to bury and compress your ideas. I find it, obviously, quite difficult to compress some of my ideas and they do tend to kind of rattle on!"

There are legions of Nick Cave fans around the world - solid, fiercely loyal and all probably wearing black. Will they pore over The Proposition looking for links with his music? "I don't think fans do that," he says. "I think critics do that."

id he bear his fans in mind at all when he wrote the film?

"Uh ... no." He pauses. "I don't bear them in mind any time." He chuckles. "I haven't said that before, but what I mean to say is, I'm not sitting down thinking, 'God, what do they want now?' I'm hoping that people like what I do because they know that I'm not doing that, so the music can develop and go wherever it wants to go."

Though Cave admits he has indulged the image of the aloof musician with an aversion to the media, making The Proposition has pushed him through the looking glass.

"Suddenly, you're drawn into this huge f---ing apparatus of selling the film and promoting it and turning up to festivals and all the sort of stuff that normally I can avoid with music.

"But you can't afford to say 'no' with a film. You've got to get out there and flog the shit out of it because there are so many other films out there and there are vast amounts of money spent on the whole thing. There's a whole different pressure to front up and stand behind it."

He makes his next point emphatically.

"With music you can ... there's a certain..." He pauses, to think.

"In some f---ed up kind of way it's almost beneficial to say, 'F---k off, no, I'm not going to do this interview or not turn up'. Within rock and roll that's kind of accepted and encouraged and applauded. But you can't do that in film, so I'm responsible in some way to be available."

As he nears his half century, Cave feels happy and quips about "avoiding mirrors a little more"

As he heads off for a quick toilet break he adds " this is something else I do more often as I slide into 50."

But he still recoils at the Nick Cave cliche of lore. Suggest, even jokingly, that rather than a western, some of his songs would have had him turning out a noir thriller or a slasher film and he bristles.

"Well, I can't measure how insulting that is," Cave says with a half smile, "because I try to sing and write a breadth of different sorts of songs."

Punching the point, Cave says the 1992 cover version of the classic What a Wonderful World he did with Shane McGowan of the Pogues was a moving rendition from the heart, not a sarcastic snarl from the bile duct.

"I have always loved that song. Shane loved it, we used to get pissed and sing it together as we would walk down the street. We used to trade off verses of it, and then one drunken evening we decided to record it, and there you go. But it's a lovely song."

So, no irony intended?

"No. Heck no. Of course it's a sincere rendition. I don't do insincere renditions of anything. To come back to the film, it is not an ironic film. The entire purpose of this film is to move people. The entire purpose of my songs is to move people, is to benefit people, to make people better, to make people feel better.

"It upsets me when people say that they listen to my music and feel depressed. The thought of that I find really upsetting."