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Nick Cave.
 Nick Cave has a long association with film, having appeared in 'Wings Of Desire', 'Johnny Suede' and 'Ghosts Of The Civil Dead'. His early drafts for the latter were discarded when the film changed course to include elements of the American private prison system. His macabre novel 'And The Ass Saw The Angel' was intended as a film script but, again "it got abandoned pretty early on and I re-wrote it as a novel," he tells me. Likewise his script for 'Gladiator 2' didn't make it, but now he's finally succeeded, with 'The Proposition', directed by long-term collaborator John Hillcoat.
Cave describes the film as "a multi-layered kangaroo western, set in 1880. It's a story of bushrangers and people in a situation and an environment where they really shouldn't be, trying to survive and trying to make the right decisions and failing."
Filmed in outback Queensland, around Winton, it features a great cast including Guy Pearce, John Hurt, Ray Winstone and Emily Watson. It has all the elements of a traditional western: the outlaws and law enforcers, the wealthy land-owner, the bounty hunter, the native inhabitants, the prostitutes and the good wife, horses and violent shoot-outs, but transposing the genre to Australia gives it new tone altogether, which will resonate well with audiences here.
The arid landscape and spectacular skies, captured magnificently by cinematographer Benoit Delhomme, feature prominently. Cave agrees: "The figures are very much dwarfed by the environment, it's creeping in everywhere. The flies, as an example, are everywhere, all the time, but it looks great."
Cave admits he found writing this film relatively easy. "Once the initial premise was set up, of the proposition [Charlie, played by Guy Pearce, must choose between his bushranger brothers] the characters seemed to write their way through the story themselves. I wrote it without knowing how it was going to end. It just doggedly moves to its logical conclusion," he elaborates.
If the film has any moral message, it would be 'violence begets violence' but as an audience member it's not easy to side with any character. "At some point during the film you should give up trying to work out who the hero is and who are the villains," says Cave. "It's about different people stumbling around in the dark, trying to make sense of things and their position in the scheme of things."
He's watched the finished film three times, confessing, "Twice I watched it kind of panic-stricken and incredibly analytically about my lines and the way I'd written this thing and seeing if it worked on that level. Last night I relaxed and watched it and found it an extremely moving tale about humanity because it wasn't really taking any sides. I think we're forced a lot to look, particularly these days, at people in terms of good and evil. It's something that's always inhabited the American western, you have the good guys and the bad guys and this echoes through to the way certain people look at the world and I think this film is very moving because it doesn't look at the world in that way.
"We all have the capacity for great goodness and great evil in us but most of the time we don't know what's going on. It's only after time that we can look back and see whether we made the right decisions or not, and I think that's the way history works. We can now look back at colonial times and see what the great wrongs and great rights were but we wanted to make a film where we were in there, in the present; where morality is a kind of luxury because of the conditions these people are living under. It's about violence and the consequences of violence."
The film's treatment of Indigenous people is potent; in one scene police are interrogating some chained elders and they ask David Gulpilil's character Jacko to translate the question: 'How long have you been hiding in the hills?' His answer is 'they haven't been hiding, they live there.' Cave explains: "What we wanted to do was to have an aboriginal presence in the film and to weave them into the actual fabric of the story and the life in that town, and even though it's a white man's story, they're an essential part of the whole thing and, at the very heart of the story, they're influencing every action that happens."
While Cave doesn't appear in the film, his music does. He composed and performed the haunting soundtrack with Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis. "Me and Johnny Hillcoat had been talking about the music for years. He's been talking about making an Australian western for 17 years but just wasn't getting the script together, which is why he asked me to write it. Because we'd talked about the music so much, it informed the film quite a lot... the idea of the music, and a kind of music that reflected the landscape, which both me and Johnny see as intensely sorrowful and brutal at the same time. And beautiful," he adds.
'The Propostion' premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. Cave was there and recalls "it did really well. There was a great response to it." But how easy is it for non-Australians to understand the cultural subtleties of our colonial history? Cave admits people laugh more in Australia, musing "... there's a kind of an Australian humour that operated within this film which is in my songs as well, a kind of laughter in the dark, where things get to such a point where all that's left is laughter, which is very much the Australian sense of humour in a lot of ways. Australians have survived by being able to maintain a sense of humour in the face of great difficulty. It's still very much within our character."
How different is film writing to song writing? "Writing a song is really hard. Writing a script's pretty easy" he laughs, adding "When I write a song, it's coming out of me, it's something I'm really pulling out of myself. Writing a script, I'm writing it for somebody else. I've been given the theme and it's much more about craft, I guess. Once you've finished a song, you're always taken back to square one and have to be confronted with original creation again and what you're going to write about. That's the great difficulty with songs, I find."
While he would love it if someone made his novel into a film, and has written another screenplay for director John Hillcoat, he says he doesn't have the patience for a career in film-making, finding the time it takes to complete a project unbelievable, and noting "music is what I do and what I'm all about really". To that end he intends bringing his solo band to Australia to do some concerts early next year. In the meantime, his film 'The Proposition' offers a uniquely Nick Cave view of our past.
Suzy Ramone
 | 'The Proposition' is now screening at Palace Nova Cinemas. |
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