People say you can see your life flashing in a few seconds in front of your eyes before dying… This is actually how ‘20,000 Days on Earth’ starts, with tons of memory pixels rebuilding the 19,999 days of Cave’s life on the wide screen. The documentary is a collaborative effort between directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard and singer songwriter Nick Cave, and I got the chance to attend the premiere at Grauman’s Egyptian theater in Los Angeles on Thursday night – the first screening of the movie outside of Sundance festival.
There is something about counting life as days and not years that brings mortality a bit closer, but Cave wakes up in his house in Brighton, England, notes ‘he’s no longer human’, while going from his bed to the bathroom, and we follow his 20,000th fictional day until the time he walks along the beach after sunset. However this is clear it’s not a real day, for Nick Cave, nothing is real, or at least nothing in his rock documentary is real, as he obviously was not interested by showing the day-to-day reality of his life.
The film is a series of introspections on Nick Cave’s intense interior life, haunted by people of his past (actor Ray Winstone, singer Kylie Minogue, former bandmate Blixa Bargeld) who suddenly appear in his black Jaguar like ghosts playing taxicab confession for philosophers. Nick Cave, with his slim tall silhouette wearing impeccable suits and immaculate white shirts, sits for an interview, although we are not sure whether he is talking to a journalist or a shrink, and writes with an old-fashioned typewriter in his office surrounded by objects and photos (mostly of rock and Hollywood legends) which help him build his unique world. ‘Mostly, I write’, he says to describe his daily occupation, and the most astonishing part (actually not fictional) is to see him waking up early and showing up at his office as if he had a 9 to 5 regular job… We see him recording his last album ‘Push the Sky Away’ with his band the Bad Seeds, eating with Warren Ellis (‘I’ve probably had more meals with you than with my wife’) while talking about an epic Nina Simone’s concert, and we see him performing and transforming himself into this theatrical Cave character during live performances (‘Higgs Boson Blues’, ‘Jubilee Street’, ‘Stagger Lee’ at the Sydney Opera House), ‘We want to be someone else, by forgetting who we are’, he explains at one point of the movie. And there’s no doubt Nick Cave wanted to be someone else, a semi-god whose art touches immortality. ‘Don’t expect any of that transformation stuff tonight’, he said during his intimate performance/Q&A after the movie, ‘I don’t transform at Q&A’s’. This blend of grandiosity and comical humility is exactly what defines Cave, a difficult combination he achieves perfectly, as not once he sounded pretentious, he is ‘a megalomaniac with extremely low self-esteem’ as he told the NY Times.
However, I didn’t really care for the transformation – I actually had a ticket for his show at the Shrine the following day, and would have plenty of this later – at the moment, I already had plenty to ruminate with the movie dialogues and monologues. When you are in presence of Nick Cave, you expect greatness and profoundness and he certainly doesn’t disappoint. The parts of the movie I really liked were these moments of spoken words/ Cave mythology/philosophical reflections dealing with creation and songwriting (and at this point I am going to paraphrase more or less from what I can remember): ‘Songwriting is about counterpoint, like letting a child into the same room as a Mongolian psychopath or something, and observing what happens’.
He also says to be much more interested by feeling a song before it is understood and domesticated, when the song is still in charge, ‘Once you have understood a song, it’s not of much interest anymore’.
One of Cave’s biggest fears is to lose his memory, ‘memory is what we are’ he says to the therapist/journalist, and you see him later visiting his archive, stuffed with old photos, objects and notebooks, having the weird feeling to be visiting the museum of his own life. Especially he finds and reads an old letter in which he requested that all his money be given to the ‘Nick Cave Memorial Museum’. He seems to care a lot about these photos and memorabilia, as if he was constantly fighting against the fading away of memories, which can only become a story when they are repeated and repeated.
Nature and uncontrollable weather is the other Nick Cave’s greatest fear and inspiration, thus, with its grey skies and dramatic storms, we can understand why he decided to settle down at Brighton Beach, it is the perfect scenery for his mythological world, in which god exists, and takes score, ‘I control the weather with my mood, but I can’t control my mood’, he says to the therapist just to mess up even more with his god-like dimension. It makes sense that his songs and his words are his main preoccupation and he is well aware of their spiritual dimension, ‘songs are heroic because they confront death, songs are immortal’, he says during one of these voice-over moments. Nick Cave sees his words like a veneer, whereas the truth is like a sea monster that eventually surfaces and disappears, and music and performances’ only attempt is to make this monster surface…
Of course if you are a die-hard Nick Cave fan you will enjoy every minute of this film, but there is enough humor and interesting reflection about art and songwriting to captivate anyone’s attention. You will not learn anything real about Nick Cave’s life – may be the most real moment is that scene at the end where you see him sharing pizza in front of the TV with his twin sons – but it’s not a behind-the-image type of thing, the movie rather brings more mystery about one of the most enigmatic songwriters of our time.
After the screening, we had the chance to see Nick Cave interacting with the audience and singing a few piano songs, such as ‘Into my Arms’, ‘Love Letter’, ‘The Mercy Seat’, ‘God is in the House’, ‘The Ship Song’, and ‘People ain’t no Good’. Of course it was a real treat, and many people wanted to request songs and ask questions,… But what do you ask Nick Cave? Either a frivolous question regarding his opinion about the Rolling Stones (‘a fascinating experiment’), or a deep one about the title of the book at the top of his piano in the movie (but he can’t tell because he is stealing all his lyrics from that book). Either way, Nick was turning almost everything into a joke, but he took the drawing that a young woman made for him very seriously and gave a warm hug to the girl, who looked so shy and totally transformed by the experience… next time I know what to do to get a hug from Nick Cave. Let’s also say you will never get an autobiography from him (unless he gets desperate?), but you may hear a soundtrack and he and Warren would love to score a Hollywood horror, bloody movie, they would even do it for free! ’How many songs did you write and what happens to the songs we don’t hear?’ asked a girl, ‘I can send them to you, do you have a band?’ Nick answered.
When I was walking to my car, I saw a small group of people waiting on the side of the building and two black limos parked along the sidewalk… They were fans waiting for Nick Cave and his family (his wife and sons were here) to exit the place. I decided to wait with them a little bit. Shortly, here he was, tall Nick signing autographs and posing for pictures, he could not have been nicer I have to say. I rarely do that, but I asked him for a picture too when he was about to get in his car, after all, it is not everyday that you can be into Nick Cave’s arms.
