I Am the Real Nick Cave

By JOHN WRAYJULY 1, 2014

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Nick Cave CreditRichard Learoyd for The New York Times
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I went to Graceland once, Nick Cave said. The rest of the
band went in, but I stayed out on the curb, smoking
cigarettes and feeling sorry for myself. Those last Elvis
performances the ones for television, when he was
already sick I must have watched those clips a hundred
times. Theyre like crucifixions. He paused for a moment.
I couldnt bring myself to go inside.
It was a bright afternoon in early February, and Cave was
in a boutique in Berlins trendy Friedrichshain district,
buying souvenirs for his sons. Do you have these in kids
sizes? he asked, holding up a belt with the word
kleptomaniac engraved across its buckle. The
saleswoman was making a serious effort not to seem
star-struck, but Caves attention was elsewhere. These
might work, he said in his travel-worn Australian accent,
as he squinted fiercely at a pair of fuzzy white abominable
snowmen. My kids are at that lovely age where theyre just
figuring out whats good in music, he said. Theyre just
grabbing stuff, on Spotify and all that, and occasionally
theyll find something thats really mind-blowing. But
sometimes I hear what theyre playing, and I just want to
cut my wrists.
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Asfarasworkgoes,Imsomethingofa
megalomaniac.Butamegalomaniacwith
extremelylowselfesteem.
Cave, perhaps best known as the frontman for the seminal
postpunk groups Birthday Party and Nick Cave and the
Bad Seeds, was in Germany to promote 20,000 Days on
Earth, a film about his life, which was showing at the
Berlin film festival. At 56, Cave can claim at least half a
dozen vocations: songwriter and performer with the Bad
Seeds and their garage-rock offshoot, Grinderman;
screenwriter of the acclaimed (and extremely gory) movies
Proposition and Lawless; novelist; film-score
composer; lecturer; script doctor; and on certain (perhaps
thankfully) rare occasions, even actor. His books are best
sellers; his film scores have won prizes; musicians as
far-flung as the Red Hot Chili Peppers and St. Vincent cite
him as an influence; and the Bad Seeds most recent
album, Push the Sky Away, has proved to be one of the
most commercially successful of the bands career,
reaching No. 1 on the UK Independent album chart.
As far as work goes, Im something of a megalomaniac,
Cave told me later that day. But a megalomaniac with
extremely low self-esteem. We were sitting in the
restaurant of his hotel in Berlin Mitte, trying to have a
conversation in the face of frequent interruptions from
festival staff, acquaintances and a seemingly never-ending
stream of admirers. Tall, gaunt and slightly ungainly, in
his snakeskin shoes, chunky rings and rakishly
well-tailored suits, Cave resembles nothing so much as a
postmillennial hybrid of bookie and peer of the realm. His
long, backswept hair, dyed black since the age of 16, frames
a face that has been described both as angelic and
hideous to the eye, the latter by Cave himself, in song. Its
the kind of look only a rock star could get away with,
especially at his age, but on Cave it seems as dignified as
inexplicably appropriate as those rhinestone-studded
jumpsuits did on Elvis in his later years. Caves public
persona has been called theatrical, but a more precise
term might be cinematic. Like many self-mythologizers,
charismatics and plain old eccentrics, he has always
appeared to be performing in a movie only he himself
could see.
The closest the rest of us may come to seeing that movie
may well be 20,000 Days on Earth. Cave co-wrote the film
with its directors, the artists Iain Forsyth and Jane
Pollard, with whom he has collaborated on a number of
smaller projects music videos and short films. Its
unorthodox, to put it mildly, for the subject of a
documentary to be given a screenwriting credit, but very
little about 20,000 Days could be described as orthodox.
As its title suggests, the film is an investigation into the
passage of time, into memory and aging and artistic
survival, as dramatized by a single imaginary day in the
life of its subject, the musician Nick Cave. While working
on a song, Cave began to play with the idea of measuring
his life in days instead of years, and Forsyth and Pollard,
who were documenting the band as they recorded Push
the Sky Away, saw potential for a film. When I asked Cave
what drew him to the notion of Day 20,000, he regarded me
dryly. Fifty-four Years and Nine Months on Earth didnt
have quite the same ring to it, somehow.
A number of recent documentaries have explored the
nebulous boundary between reportage and fiction, but in
20,000 Days, Pollard and Forsyth try to dispense with
that boundary altogether. From the first frame to the last,
the film was plotted and set-dressed and professionally lit
and has all the glitter of a big-budget feature; but, while a
series of voice-overs by Cave were scripted, every on-screen
interaction from a visit to a therapist to a ride in his
Jaguar with Kylie Minogue was spontaneous and
unrehearsed. In the case of figures from Caves past with
whom he had fallen out of contact (like the founding Bad
Seeds guitarist Blixa Bargeld, who left the group abruptly
more than 10 years ago), the co-directors went even
further: No conversation about the scene was allowed until
the camera was rolling.
Nick would have never gone for a straightforward
rock-doc, Forsyth told me in Berlin. We decided to go in
a direction that combined reality with fantasy as
seamlessly as possible which, if you think about it, isnt
too far from the transaction between a rock star and his
fans. People want desperately to enter the world Nick
creates in his songs. You can look around when the Bad
Seeds are playing and see precisely which version of Nick
the junkie, the outlaw, the lover each person in the
crowd wants to be.
The film had its premiere at Sundance in January (it won
the world documentary awards for best directing and best
editing) and will be released nationally in September,
following preview screenings this summer that coincide
with Caves North American tour. That such an
idiosyncratic movie would capture not just the
imagination of the festival crowd but also of a U.S.
distributor is testament, contrary to what even the most
ardent fan in his gutter-punk glory days could have
foreseen, to the remarkably broad appeal that his elegant,
lecherous, literate, unapologetically romantic persona has
come to have in recent decades.
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