Nick Cave & John Hillcoat’s The Proposition

(Above [L-R]: Nick Cave and John Hillcoat)

Nick Cave’s music has always had a cinematic flair. The novelist and poet textures his obsession with love, violence and religion with literary allusions, vivid detail, complex moods and a strong sense of storytelling. After the breakup of his first band, influential punk/goth outfit The Birthday Party, Cave started a film script that became his first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel. He made his major-motion-picture debut when Wim Wenders recruited him and his band, The Bad Seeds, for a live performance in Wings of Desire (The macabre songwriter’s music continued to appear in future Wenders films). Cave later played Brad Pitt’s rocker muse in Johnny Suede and starred in John Hillcoat’s Ghosts… of the Civil Dead. The Australian-born musician also scored Hillcoat’s To Have and to Hold, and he now re-teams with the director as screenwriter for The Proposition.

When The Proposition debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, Paste sat down with Cave, Hillcoat and Pearce to discuss the project, albeit after a minor tangent.

NICK CAVE: I read your magazine on the toilet this morning. [Laughter around the room]. It’s rather good, actually. In fact, I was reading this article [Andy Whitman’s “Listening to Old Voices” column, Paste #17]. Is this Shawn Phillips any good? … Anyway, fire away.

PASTE: John, I know you wanted to develop an old Western transplanted to Australia.
JOHN HILLCOAT: It’s something that I wanted to do back in film school, since I was a teenager. The basic ingredients are something that covered the real Outback, the landscape and the Aboriginal people and the conflict with the Empire. It was something that I hadn’t really seen. So I tried to develop it and went down some other avenues that didn’t work out. And Nick always spoke to me about doing music. And he was getting very impatient. He’s a very prolific man, and I’m the opposite, very unprolific. So I said well, ‘Why don’t you try writing it then?’ What we were mutually a bit anxious about was dialogue. I was never worried about a great story coming out of Nick. And once he started, we didn’t have to bring in any dialogue writers after all. He found his true calling, at long last. I know he went off on some of this music and other stuff but…[laughter] Nick, when are you announcing your retirement from the music business?
GUY PEARCE: If you actually announce your retirement from music, suddenly all your record sales go up, and then you go back to it…
JH: But the script was written in what, three-and-a-half weeks?
NC: Three weeks. With half a week trying to work out how to turn the computer on.