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.

P: How worried were you about the dialogue?
NC: I basically said that I would write a story and bring someone in who knew how to write a script. … Well, the first thing I realized about writing a script is that you don’t actually need to know how to write. I get sent a lot of scripts for acting parts that I generally don’t do. Not as many as Guy would get, but maybe 10 a year. And they’re dreadful. Like it’s really difficult to string a sentence together. Basic stuff.
GP: Most of them feel like kids’ storybooks. They’re all very sort of, ‘I’m gonna take you through this piece by piece; make sure you keep up.’ That’s the general feeling I get with scripts.
NC: So I have this slight advantage, which is talent. [laughter] Anyway, on a more serious note, it turned out to be a really exciting process.
JH: Nick watches loads and loads of film, and I think that filters in.
NC: Well, I watch DVDs happily indiscriminately. I just go in and kind of grab three, and so I watch the most unbelievable shit you can ever imagine, and occasionally a good film. I just watch them for a different reason, for something I can kind of zone out to. That’s my use of cinema really at home. Because I work on other things through the day and films are great, they’re easier. And the more moronic, the easier it is to be manipulated and taken into something. And I think watching all that rubbish over the years has been a huge benefit. [laughter]

P: What drew you to the script, Guy?
GP: Essentially, what Nick had said before—talent. You read something that actually feels like something rather than trying to be something, or trying to manipulate you into thinking of something. It was a real relief to actually find something that just invites all sorts of horrendous emotions. It just felt really brutal. And I’m always interested in doing things that are quite extreme. I don’t see life as a shiny, fluffy experience as some people do.
NC: We wanted to make a film that was actually quite thoughtful, but at the same time had a narrative thrust that really kept you hanging in there from one scene to the next. People kept saying it was a violent film, but it’s actually quite a sad, lyrical…
JH: and beautiful…
NC: and beautiful film.
GP: There’s quite a dislocating rhythm to [it]. There seems to be lots of rules in what you do when you write a script. By page 20, this happens and, by page 40, that happens. The great thing about this [film] is it kind of goes, ‘Page one—bang! There you go. Deal with that.’ All of a sudden you have to deal with the proposition for the rest of the movie.
JH: The gaps of the story were over and done within the first 10 minutes, so then you could get into the characters and everything else, as opposed to… I mean, there is that ‘What’s going to happen?’…
GP: ‘How are these people going to respond to what’s going to happen?’ It’s actually allowing the time to hang onto somebody and see how they’re going to respond to the situation rather than, you know, ‘How big is the bomb going the be that they’re going to make?’
NC: Because you know what’s going to happen.
GP: It doesn’t trick you into thinking it’s not going to happen. There’s a really nice obviousness about it, where you go, ‘I feel like I know what’s going to happen, but now I’m going to sit for the next two hours and watch these people figure it out for themselves, which forces you as an audience to put yourself in that position. How would I f—in’ deal with that myself?
JH: I think the best Westerns also have that fatalistic inevitability.
GP: And I reckon that’s so much more interesting than ‘the twist.’ The twist is like, ‘Ah….’ It’s an amusement. I find it far more interesting to lay something on the table and watch people deal with it.

P: There’s a lot of moral ambiguity and a very complex richness to the characters.
JH: We both wanted to make sure, unlike the American West, where it’s very clear-cut with heroes—the Australian history already has an anti-hero thing. We were conscious of exploring the moral compromises that people have to make.
NC: It was to make something that was Australian and reflects the landscape.
JH: And to be truthful in those times, or any times. To me, that’s what life is. And when it comes to violence, I think everyone—no matter what your moral position is on it—everyone gets compromised. And the suffering that violence brings is quite complex.

P: Racism and colonialism are an important part of the film.
NC: I think especially with the Aboriginal situation, it was important that we made a story that was what we considered to be truthful. The Aboriginal cast really loved filming the script. They got a chance to fight back in the script, which very often is not the case.
JH: And to show how they fought each other, as well. Again, it’s very complex. And that history, those wounds have never healed. And the recent government—it’s been a big issue because they’ve effectively denied that history. So it’s kind of been an ongoing…
GP: Emasculation. And they portrayed [them] as sort of a peace-loving, nomadic people. ‘Welcome! Come into our lovely country. Make yourselves at home.’ The Aboriginal standing on one leg—the white people came in and massacred them. That was a kind of sudden rewriting of the history from the colonial view of what happened, where they weren’t even people, I guess. So it was important to show that there was a resistance going on.

P: What was it like shooting on location?
GP: Everyone was really inspired in that way where everyone wants to work a little bit extra and put in a little more. It was one of those films you didn’t want to finish. It was a great experience, especially in the face of 58-degree [Celsius, 136 degrees Fahrenheit] heat.

Did that actually help you get into character?
GP: I guess, yeah. There was definitely an aspect of the environment that you can’t ignore, when it’s that hot, with the red dirt and the smell.
JH: Particularly for the English that weren’t familiar with the Australian climate, it was a real shock. Emily [Watson] spoke to me on the phone saying that 20s or 30s is pushing it. And it was getting up to the 50s. It also brought alive the setting. The film was actually set in that; it was meant to be really hot with flies everywhere and you’re fighting the element. That reality—everyone could feel and see how it was.
GP: You’re just reminded, constantly thinking, ‘How did people survive?’
JH: I’d never realized until doing the research that the number one cause of death at that time was the heat. It was complications from the heat because of the clothes. The old colonial empire-building thing of taking their own culture, which was totally at odds with the country that they’re dealing with, and the insanity of wearing three-piece woolen suits, and women with corsets. The child-birth scenario was pretty grim in those days, anyway. But add in corsets—they had all sorts of internal problems. And then drinking, which dehydrates you. They didn’t know or understand these things, so they were dropping like flies.
GP: [The heat, the rain, the devastating dust storms]—it reminds you how small you are.

(To read Paste's review of Cave's Proposition soundtrack, click here.)