Nick Cave
By Daniel Robert Epstein
Apr 19, 2006

Even casual music fans recognize the name Nick Cave and realize how important he was and is to the music. His influence has reached the point where new bands may not even realize how much of an influence on them. Though even hardcore Cave fans may not remember the movie Ghosts... of the Civil Dead which he wrote. Well now discover him again for the first time because he’s written another screenplay for director John Hillcoat. This time it’s an Australian western starring Guy Pearce, Danny Huston, Ray Winstone and Emily Watson. Pearce and Huston are brothers who are vicious killers in the late 19th century and are being hunted by Ray Winstone’s character. He captures Pearce and promises him his freedom if he agrees to turn on his brother.

Check out the official website for The Proposition
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Daniel Robert Epstein: How did The Proposition come about?

Cave:I've known [director] John [Hillcoat] for about 20 years and for about 18 of them he's been talking about this Australian western that he was going to make and that I would do the music for. I've continued to work with him through that 18 years and eventually he commissioned a script that was basically an American western dumped in Australia. We both thought that that was not the thing that he was trying to do. Then he went, “Well, fuck it. You write it then.” So I did and I wrote it in about three weeks. I didn’t want to take any longer than that because I refused to invest any more time in something that I knew would never get made. After many unbelievably difficult years of trying to get the film made John actually made it happen.

DRE:Both Guy Pearce and Danny Huston just looked evil, was that written in the script?

NC:Well, in the script Danny Huston is always looking through a curtain of greasy hair. For the Charlie Burns character, who is essentially the central character in the film, the first actor we really wanted was Guy. I was actually thinking of him when I was writing this character. I just felt that it needed to be Guy, and Johnny felt the same because so much goes on in his face and he's so tightly wound as an actor. He was just brilliant in LA Confidential and Rules of Engagement.

DRE:How influenced were you by American westerns for this?

NC:I think that John is heavily influenced by the anti-westerns and the revisionist westerns of the 70's like McCabe and Mrs. Miller and [Sam] Peckinpah's stuff. But I think that we felt that the average Australian has a different view of their history then the average American. I don't think that we see things so much in black and white or good guys and bad guys or villains and heroes. We have a much more conflicting, ambiguous, shame based view of our history. I think we basically see it as a history of failure and incompetence.

What inspired me was a lot of stories of these bushrangers like Ned Kelly and stuff like that. The antics that they got up to are hilarious with how foolish and doomed they are. Our heroes are very much murky characters. We really wanted to write a story where you can sympathize with someone and then another who's the one that you want to see get their comeuppance at the end. But you get confused about which one is which. Sometimes you feel aligned to one character and then you shift your allegiance to someone else and then in the end they are a band of people in a place that they should never be, being slowly dismantled by their own folly.

DRE:Could you talk more about Australia’s perception of their history?

NC:Well, if you've seen those photographs of the lynchings of black people in America where the people are standing there and they brought the kids along as if this was entertainment. I don't think that that necessarily means that there's no hope for these people. But at the heart of this film it's a group of people in a place that they shouldn’t be. Maybe there are places on this earth that don't really need to be populated. I think that that fascination with violence or even that bored fascination with violence that's on that little girl's face, who is watching the whipping, is intrinsic in our nature. It's in your nature. It's in my nature. I think that genocide, racial hatred, murder are all fundamental parts of being human. I think that we feel that the more we progress we make the less we do these sorts of things, but I think that it's actually that we do more of these sorts of things. The more technology that we have at our fingertips shows me that we're just learning how to destroy people at a faster, more efficient rate. I think that this is fundamental in our character as human beings and that might sound bleak, but the evidence seems to suggest that that's the way it is. That's the end of the lesson [laughs].

DRE:Why didn’t you have a role in this?NC:That was John's decision [laughs].DRE:Was there a role you wanted to play?

NC:No, I didn't really want to be in this one. I've written another one for him and apparently I have a part in that one.

DRE:What’s that?

NC:It's an English seaside drama starring Ray Winstone. It's very different.

DRE:Was your writing process different for the new one?

NC:Yeah, totally. I got Final Draft on the computer and it makes things easier. You just press the button and there it is. I got that and I was able to write this new one in two weeks.

DRE:What are your influences as a screenwriter?

NC:I watch an unbelievable amount of films because I don't have a particular interest in films. I don't have an interest in films the same way that I have an interest in music or I have an interest in literature in the sense that when I listen to a song I'm always listening to it analytically and I'm always asking that song questions about how it arrived at that place or how the lyrics got to be like that. I never just listen to music in the way that I think a normal person probably does and I read books in the same way. I'm really interested in language and how it's used. With films I watch them indiscriminately. I go to the DVD shop, get four DVDs, go home and sit there. I don't have to use my brain. I can just get sucked into a story which is the great thing about films. You just turn it on and you get swallowed in whether you like it or not. Now I have an enormous library of really bad, mediocre and great films in my head. They all have some influence. I often watch a film and think, “Why didn't they do that? That would have been much more interesting.”

DRE:Did you write the music for The Proposition while you were writing the screenplay?

NC:Yeah. The script has all the musical cues in it. So I'm writing that as I'm writing the script. I think that the script is very musical.

DRE:Did you feel that any of the characters were your voice?

NC:Not really. But I pretty much wanted to be able to sympathize with them all in some way or another. The real villain to me is the guy who owns the town and orders the whipping.

DRE:The record executive type guy?

NC:Yeah, exactly [laughs]. I wanted the other characters to be sympathetic in one way or another no matter how evil they were. The only way that you feel sympathetic to someone is if they mirror something in yourself. I guess they all mirror something in me and in all of us.

DRE:Did you go on location at all?

NC:No. But I was on location a week prior to filming it where I rehearsed with the actors and rewrote anything that they felt uncomfortable with.

DRE:It looked so hot there.

NC:It was hot. It was in the mid-50’s Celsius. It's inhumanly hot. A lot of the stuff was indoors where it gets even hotter and the set is made up in the desert. The equipment would be breaking down because it was too hot for some reason. I don't know the details but it was fucking hot anyway.

DRE:The western genre is quite malleable, did you always know that all these elements would be in the script?

NC:No. We didn't know what was going to happen actually. Basically John was in the studio and I was mixing No More Shall We Part, a record we made. He brought the script in for this Australian western that he had written and I read it in there and neither of us thought that it was appropriate. Then while we were in there mixing the record we'd go, “What about having three brothers?” So basically when we left the studio I had the premise for the story. I just started writing it and we just knew that it wasn't going to end happily.

DRE:There is a lot of violent imagery in The Proposition, was that your or John’s idea?

NC:John is very interested in violence. His first and second films are violent. I think that he's certainly interested in the aftermath of violence and where violence takes you. When John does violence he does it fast and brutal and then you deal with the ramifications of that. People talk about this film being a violent film which I find slightly irritating because so much stuff that comes out of Hollywood has these great ballets of violence. Scripts are being written for the express purpose of just having a whole lot of violence, like Tarantino films which I find pretty unwatchable most of the time. So when John deals with violence I think he deals with it in a realistic way. It's a fundamental part of the story especially since it was a violent time.

DRE:Did doing the score take longer than the script?

NC:Yeah. To write a song and see it through to the end is really hard. It's really hard work. It's not building a house or bricklaying or anything like that. But for me it's a really difficult process and the hardest part of it is when you're trying to start off a song and I’m just sitting alone in my office and trying to think about what I want to write about. I get exhausted by my own tiresome opinions about things and all of this bullshit that I have in my head. It's very difficult to get through that and cull together song. Whereas when I'm writing a script I'm just sitting there and someone says, “Write an Australian western.” I don't have to worry about the way I feel about anything. All I have to do is sit there and create a few characters and get them to do whatever and off the story goes.

DRE:Are you going to be touring this year?NC:We're touring a little bit with my solo band in a couple of weeks actually around England.DRE:What’s the difference when you tour with your solo band?

NC:There are a lot less of us [laughs]. The Bad Seed is, I don't know how many people. The little band is four people and it's something that I can just take out on the road with a minimum of fuss. We can tour and play whenever we like and we don't have to do it on the back of a record so we can do completely different renditions of the songs.

DRE:Are you planning on writing any more novels?

NC:No.

DRE:How come?

NC:I think that once you've written a couple of film scripts you can never write a novel again. Also I just never had any desire to write another one. It's just not something that I've wanted to do. Writing one in the first place was just this perverse idea at the time. Someone said I should write a novel and I went, “Oh, okay.” It was that type of thing and I wrote one and I don't have any ambitions to be an author really. For me I just really want to be a songwriter. That's what I'm primarily interested in.

DRE:Do you listen to much new music?

NC:To me it's new, but I listen to all sorts of music. Not a lot of contemporary music though.

DRE:You’ve been on the same high level in the music industry for a long time

NC:Yeah, it's absolutely a luxury. I've felt coddled by this relationship where I can pretty much do exactly the music that I want to do. The record company encourages that. I see a lot of other bands that do fall from their labels and get onto other ones and it's fucking tragic. I'm unbelievably grateful that we're on Mute Records. They support us.

DRE:Is it harder to get people to buy your records now?

NC:Well, we sold more of the last record than any of the previous records. We had a slump in sales with the record before that, but I think that was because of the record wasn't that good. So we're surviving the internet crisis all right so far. I know that for myself I use a computer and I listen to music from the internet and stuff. I have an iPod and I find myself listening to more music. It's totally opened up the music that I listen to and the accessibility of things. I find that I'm listening to a far greater range of music than I was six months ago before I had this equipment.

DRE:I see that the Road to God Knows Where/Live at the Paradiso is coming out on DVD this year.

NC:Possibly, yeah.

DRE:Did you have to look over those shows?

NC:No. I never look at my stuff.DRE:Why not?NC:Because it just puts me off of my game. I'd rather live in a fantasy world that what I do is brilliant and I don't want to ever really want to see it for what maybe it really is. So I never listen to my music. I never watch myself on the TV, especially footage of myself live.

by Daniel Robert Epstein
(suicidegirls.com)