“I wake, I write, I eat, I watch TV, this
is my 20,000th day on Earth.” 20,000
Days on Earth (2014) is the
closest thing to a full portrait of Nick Cave that I can imagine. This is a
film that intertwines myth with the banal to create a delicate of image of what
being a rock star is. The directors
(Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth) work in harmony with Nick Cave to create a
flowing narrative that works both as a screenshot and collection of
transformative moments and events that make the man.
Whether this film is a documentary is up
for debate, 20,000 Days on Earth exists
more in the form of an autobiography, a detailed account of who Nick Cave by Nick
Cave. Documentaries are meant to lift the veil, this one wraps itself up in it.
This one wants us to see the Nick Cave he created.
The filmmakers described their process for
the documentary as having “no interest in fly on the wall documentaries, we had
a script to get us from the start to the finish like you would for a fiction
film, we didn’t have dialogue, everything that happened, happened organically...
All voice over was written by Nick, written without contact from us.” They
wanted to provide the structure for Cave to build around.
“At the end of the Twentieth century,
I ceased to be a human being.”
Cave wants you to be able to see him as he
now is, in his pressed suit and slicked-back, obsidian hair, he wants you to
hear his voice when you read his words, he’s fluffing his feathers and puffing
out his chest for us. 20’000 Days on
Earth represents this perfectly, as the filmmakers dedicate large sections
of the film to the mysticism that creates the character.
Having come into existence before a 24 hour
news cycle and paparazzi rummaging through garbage, Cave is a classic rock star
one who follows in the footsteps left for him by icons such as Elvis and Dylan.
Ethereal figures whose idealised images appear before you as soon as they’re
mentioned. Co-director Jane Pollard so eloquently states that these icons “Are
not famous for celebrity’s sake in that instant sort of way, they’re
constructed, thought about, worked on, individual, remarkable creations.”
A vital and I feel, understated, aspect of this film is the educational aspect of it, Nick Cave wants you to realise this, he wants you to know that the image you see when you think of him wasn’t one that was constructed on accident, he wants you to know how he and his forefathers have constructed themselves. He describes aspects of his creative process to reinforce this throughout “Song writing is about counterpoint, counterpoint is the key, putting two disparate images beside each other and seeing which way the sparks fly. Like letting a small child in the same room as, I dunno, a Mongolian psychopath or something and just sitting back and seeing what happens.” He wants those who’ll follow in his footsteps to learn from this. He wants them to discover who they are, how they work, and most importantly he wants them to learn from him.
The directors recognised the importance of
the mysticism in Cave’s work, for example they kept his wife out of frame
throughout the film, they didn’t want us to form our own opinion of her, Pollard
and Forsyth wanted Cave’s lyrics to tell you who she was. “It just felt right,
the way she’s reflected and refracted in Nick’s songs… to not take that step
into the factual and to reduce her into this real person. She lives in these
songs, the presence she has in these songs, it’s magical it’s bigger than life,
it’s more imaginative. The film tries to do this throughout, to retain this
larger than reality, to sustain the myth. The mysticism.”
20,000
Days on Earth exists on two timelines, one being
the cycle of a day and the other being the formation of a song. The cycle of a
day allows us to experience the mundane aspects of Cave’s life, his
relationships, his routine, his appointments. They’re careful to make these
interactions as interesting as possible so we don’t lose touch with the myth
that is Nick Cave, we see him as a chauffeur, driving a ormer band member with
whom he unceremoniously split (Blixa Bargeld), an Australian icon (Kylie
Minogue), and a British actor with whom he’s worked (Ray Winstone, Sexy Beast 2000, The Proposition 2005, Noah
2014) the directors ensure we’re gaining something from every single one of
these interactions, whether it be about the negatives of his personality, what
he means to his motherland and the stead in which he’s held there or whether he
still gets joy from creating and performing music, there’s always something
going on. Another interesting aspect of this mode of telling time is that we’re
allowed to look into the past by experiencing a day with Cave, we visit his
psychoanalyst with him where he talks about his entire life and the things that
shape him “Memory is what we are, you’re very soul and your very reason to be
alive is tied up in memory” we hear about his childhood and formative
experiences “Those moments when the gears of the heart really change.” This
visit with the therapist is juxtaposed with him visiting archivists who help to
explain to us what those moments were through the use of mnemonic devices such
as notes he wrote whilst performing with his first band The Birthday Party or a
piece of gum that Nina Simone stuck on her piano at a gig they were performing
at.
These devices help to convey the universal
memory that exists within a tight knit group of people. Whilst visiting friend
and bandmate Warren Ellis, Cave describes the transformation he saw within
Simone as soon as she stepped out on stage, the transformation from a difficult
backstage diva into the untouchable figure who could capture an entire audience’s
consciousness. Ellis corroborates this story almost exactly to a T, which spoke
to me as it reflected the way that memory can become communal, adding a new
dimension to the tale Ellis reveals that he picked the gum from the piano after
their set and still owns it, recognising that it was a universally
transformative moment.
The other timeline that exists within 20,000 Days on Earth is the writing and
recording of a song, we’re introduced to the Bad Seeds experimenting with the first
chords of a song on a piano and are taken all the way to the finished product,
watching them perform it onstage at the Sydney Opera House. This aspect of time
allows for us to become more intimate with Cave’s creative process, the
universal aspects and the idiosyncrasies of this process. It allows us to look
backwards at his earlier catalogue, the now rejected wild, Australian junky
that he used to portray whilst playing with the Birthday party, this film
allows us to witness both his aesthetic evolution beside his musical evolution.
The
important thing about rock stars is that their past before being famous rarely
matters, the greater public have no interest in who they were as children, what
their parents did they’re just interested in the living, breathing, constructed
protagonist that exists before them. These two timelines contrasting each other
give us a snapshot of the man as he is today and also the place he came from.
The filmmakers described this as important “It felt like we could conspire with
him to make a bigger film a film about the creative spirit, that burning little
spark is within us and what we do with our time on earth and how we measure it.”
This is what they seek to convey through these timelines. Cave had this to say
about the timelines “It’s a look at the past, outside of the conventional. Most
of what I’m writing about is about the past, creatively I’m concerned with
keeping the thing moving forward, if you start excavating the past you become
chained to it, I’m much more concerned with moving forward.”
We
get a sense that it’s impossible for him to escape from
his past, he can’t escape his roots, he’s almost completely rejected the
aesthetic he developed with the Birthday Party, the Wildman, junky, Australian
loner, he’s lived in England for many years now but we gain a sense of just how
important his background was in shaping the character that we see throughout
this film. ARIA chairman Ed St John says “Nick Cave has enjoyed—and continues
to enjoy—one of the most extraordinary careers in the annals of popular music.
He is an Australian artist like Sidney Nolan is
an Australian artist—beyond comparison, beyond genre, beyond dispute." And
just like Nolan, Cave has spent a career twisting classical Australian and
religious metaphors into something new and original, as we learn in this film
his approach to metaphors is to take these images and twist them until we see
them as he does “Miley
Cyrus floats in a swimming pool on Toluca lake.” We hear this line in the
soundtrack and we’re forced to interpret Miley Cyrus the way he wants us to, he
removes the aesthetic she’s created and turns her into an innocent figure,
drifting, alone, naïve. He’s been doing this with religious
imagery his whole career, whether it’s turning the Saints and God into heathens
and sinners or by elevating himself into the same sphere that they exist upon.
He doesn’t want to allow you to see him as an aging Caucasian male, he wants
you to see him as myth, as a legend.
By allowing for a true collaboration Forsyth
and Pollard recognise that they can
get closer to the truth according to Nick Cave, if they had just followed him with
a camera they would have found a guarded subject and gotten nowhere near what
really drove him, we witness this while Cave is talking to Minogue, “I had to
speed read your biography” implying she knew very little about him before they
collaborated on the iconic Where the Wild
Roses Grow, Cave coolly replies “Oh you read that thing? It wasn’t the
truth...” We gain a sense that this film is what the truth is to him, that merely
describing things as they appear isn’t the most important truth. It becomes
clear that both the directors and Cave feel that an autobiography written in
your own style is closer to the truth than any unbiased, immaculately
researched, biography will be.
Great artists want you to describe their
work with the rich metaphors and purple prose that they’ve allowed you to come
up with, this film allows you to realise that and feel happy doing it. As Jane
Pollard says “Those personas, the Cohen’s, The Dylan’s, the Cave’s we should
look after them because in the future there’s not going to be too many left…” After
leaving this film you can’t help but hope that it helps to create another.
References:
Alexis
Petridis, Nick Cave: 'The
greatest feat of artistic honesty would be to retire' http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/feb/15/nick-cave-greatest-feat-artistic-honesty-retire
The Creators Project, Nick Cave | 20,000 Days On Earth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxcGc8tl5Ls
Hit Fix, Nick Cave talks '20,000 Days on Earth' and trusting the filmmakers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9misnzD1MQ4
Anywyn Crawford, The monarch of middlebrow https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-197/feature-anwyn-crawford/