Maverick

Nick Cave, brilliant musician, lauded screenwriter and very bad actor. on his great new Western.

by Bilge Ebiri

May 5, 2006

t should come as no surprise to anyone that Nick Cave has finally written a Western. The cult Australian rocker (and occasional novelist) has not only been heavily influenced by folk and country, he's also been exploring the classic themes of the Western genre — loneliness, revenge, violence — for more than two decades in his haunting music, mostly with his chief collaborators, The Bad Seeds. What may come as a surprise to some is that the film Cave has written, The Proposition is startlingly cinematic. It's a stark, expressive story about a repentant outlaw (Guy Pearce) seeking to capture his fugitive older brother (Danny Huston) and bargain for the life of his naïve younger sibling, who's being held by a brutal lawman (Ray Winstone). With shades of Sam Peckinpah and Nicolas Roeg, it's a film that confidently juggles a surprising number of elements, without ever letting any of them overwhelm the story. "Nick's songs are so narrative, with very vivid characters," says director and longtime Cave collaborator John Hillcoat. "I realized that he could get some really basic conflicts going with the issues we were interested in and had researched — the conflicts with the landscape, the conflicts between the characters, the British and Irish class war, the conflict with the Aboriginals."
As a musician, Cave has a long history with film. He appeared in Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire (his songs have been featured in a number of Wenders films) as well as Tom DiCillo's early Brad Pitt opus Johnny Suede. He's also recorded soundtracks to Hillcoat's previous films, Ghosts . . . of the Civil Dead and To Have and to Hold. Not to mention the fact that his song "Red Right Hand" seems to pop up in every other movie (most notably the Scream films). Nerve caught up with Nick Cave at the Sundance Film Festival, where he was preparing to present The Proposition to U.S. audiences for the first time. — Bilge Ebiri

You and John Hillcoat have worked together a lot in the past. Had you always planned to write a script for him?
John and I had collaborated on his first film, an intense movie all about the high security prison system. I was involved a bit early on in the writing stage of that one, and I did a cameo in it, as well as the music.

He says you were very critical of his next film, To Have and to Hold.
I had a lot of criticisms of that film — but in a playful way, mainly about the script. I'd mention to John that as a story, it was kind of unfocused. John is the kind of guy that gets hold of an idea, and has a million things he wants to explore. And I think that film lost focus traveling around.

Nick Cave

Was that why he asked you to write the script for the next one?
He did begin to get the idea I could write. But originally, he got someone else to write the script for The Proposition. It was a good script, by a good writer, but it had all the American Western things, dumped into Australia. John wanted to make an Australian Western, but the writer had never been to Australia. We both thought it was the wrong story. So then John said to me, "Why don't you write it?"

What was the hardest part of writing a script?
It wasn't. [Laughs.] I say that flippantly, but it kind of rolled off. It was a real joy to write the thing. Ordinarily, writing songs is very hard for me. This felt different. The way I look at it is, I really came in at the start, and then again at the end. The script and the music were the fun parts, and the two years in between — when John had to get the money and all that — seemed to me to be pure fucking agony. I was just watching from the sidelines for that part. John was really dogged about it. We had the actors, and then they fell away. Then we had the money, and that fell away. I guess it's par for the course in making a film. I'm glad I stayed out of that. As for the music, the film was just there by that point. I did it really quickly, in, like, three weeks.

I was impressed with the film's combination of hard-edged violence and a dreamlike tone, which doesn't seem all that different from your work as a musician. Was that in the script initially?
The script itself had musical cues all the way through it. I've always thought of the Australian landscape as something very melancholic, but also brutal and dangerous. So we wanted to have these longer moments of melancholy disrupted by hard, fast, brutal violence. I suppose in that sense, it did feel like I was writing a song.

Your other work — be it music or fiction — tends to be very subjective — it's usually told in the first-person. Here, I felt like the characters were held at a bit of a remove.
I was tired of watching films, especially violent films, where violence was something that just grips you and makes you watch the screen. They dispense with character. It's just bad guys doing bad things and good guys trying to stop them. I wanted to have an ensemble of characters I related to in some way. They all reflected certain parts of myself, so I feel very close to them. We're creating an evil character while at the same time dispensing with notions of good and evil. We have Arthur Burns [Danny Huston's outlaw character] having a real understanding of beauty and poetry and nature. I guess I do feel a remove in the sense that I was writing a film script, and I was writing it for somebody else. I do struggle a lot with songs. They really take an enormous amount of time to get out. They're coming from another place. To a degree, writing The Proposition was an academic exercise. That's what screenplays should be, I think.

Were you ever tempted to be in the film? I kept thinking of Bob Dylan showing up in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.
I don't really like acting, and I don't feel I can act at all well. And I think John feels pretty much the same way!

But you have acted, and you continue to act.
I just had a role in the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. I'm a singing cowboy in that. I had one line of dialogue, and after I said it, everyone agreed I shouldn't ever say anything again. So I may just stick to writing. I've also written another screenplay for John. It's nothing like The Proposition. It's contemporary, and it's set in London, by the seaside.

Finally, what's with the mustache?
I did a gig with the band Dirty Three. They asked me if I could do a gig with them in a month's time. But I had to grow some facial hair for it. Now it's kind of here to stay, I think. n°