Nick Cave finally allows a documentary about him, but with a twist

TORONTO – Nick Cave has perhaps long been a logical documentary subject — his sprawling catalogue of obsidian post-punk poetry has inspired an obsessive devotion, he’s dapper and gauntly telegenic, and he’s penned several film scripts, including “Lawless” and “The Road” — but for one considerable hurdle: he was dead-set against it.

Even as a viewer, the erudite 57-year-old explains, he’s simply not interested in documentaries focused on musicians.

“I avoid music ones, mostly because they’re so dreadful,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “Any sort of fascination you may have with the subject of the documentary is very quickly dispelled with a lot of those documentaries, I find.

“I walk away from them feeling like I’ve lost something rather than gained something. When it was put to me to do a Nick Cave documentary, I was absolutely adamant that that wouldn’t happen and had no interest in it, really.”

It makes sense that Cave, the architect of his own elaborate, playful mythology, wouldn’t want to spoil his carefully preserved mystery with a probing, warts-and-all rock doc.

And so “20,000 Days on Earth,” opening Friday, is his compromise. A hybrid of documentary and fictionalized drama, the film is a characteristically idiosyncratic piece of work from an artist who rarely approaches anything in typical fashion. He talked to The Canadian Press about his evolving creative process, celebrity and just how much of his new film is real.

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CP: Scenes with your “therapist” are a big part of the film. Was he someone you knew beforehand?

Cave: He was somebody that (directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard) knew. I’d never met him until we actually walked onto the set. There was no kind of buddying up with each other.

It’s actually the same with (former bandmate) Blixa (Bargeld) and Kylie (Minogue). There wasn’t much contact before we got in the car. We were just kind of put into this completely fictional environment where I’m supposed to be driving a car where I’m not actually driving a car — it’s a car on a frontloader. It’s a completely fabricated scenario, with the idea that something interesting might come out of that situation.

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CP: I was surprised to read that you hadn’t seen Kylie Minogue for years before shooting your scene together, because your conversation is so intimate.

Cave: That was always the case with Kylie. We just got on immediately. We were from very, very different worlds and in very, very different states of mind at the time when we first met. But we just connected very strongly from the start. She’s one of those friends you don’t see for 10 years and take up where you left off.

She has a different management these days. Her longtime management before that protected her image … (and) they were extremely protective of Kylie. She didn’t get to do a lot of things she may have liked to have done, creatively. So she was often quite difficult to get a hold of. But that seems to have changed.

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CP: Blixa delves deeply into why he left your band. To what degree was that new information to you?

Cave: Actually I didn’t know, quite honestly, except for what he said in an email he sent me, which was that there were managerial problems he wasn’t prepared to put up with. That was it. And I never really bought that. But I think he was mostly sticking to that story.

All of those interviews — the funny thing is in a way the people who have been under a reasonable amount of scrutiny, or have done a lot of interviews let’s say, often find they’re more comfortable talking in front of a microphone than they are outside of a microphone. It gives a kind of context and a reason for their conversation.

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CP: Really? I always assumed interviews were somewhat painful for you.

Cave: To a greater and lesser degree. It depends on the interview. But unfortunately, some of us work so hard and so much goes into the work, things like intimate conversations loose their sheen unless they’re in some way valuable to the work process. That is kind of a sad truth.

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CP: I enjoyed your insights into the songwriting process, specifically that you’ve become a more judicious editor as time has gone on. What inspired that?

Cave: On occasion, I do listen to my early stuff — or I’ve been in positions where I’ve had to hear it, let’s say. And it always seems too long to me. I’ve had that (feeling) of I wish we lost a couple verses and a couple choruses and the songs would have been better if they were more concise. I’ve had endless arguments with fans over this, or people who like my stuff. This is not the way they see it at all. And then they cite something like “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” by Bob Dylan, and I come back with: “That would have been a way better song if it had been about three minutes long. Does he really have to go to that chorus again?”

(pause)

I was just thinking how that would look in print.

(laughs)

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CP: Do you understand why fans are interested in you to the extent that they are?

Cave: I think it’s because with the celebrity, the fan is as much involved in the making of that person as the celebrity himself is. And the celebrity is often a kind of perverse creation of the audience. So I think that the celebrities themselves ultimately start to see themselves through their audience’s eyes. It’s kind of a communal creation of some sort. And Michael Jackson and Miley Cyrus or whoever are just kind of monsters in the audience’s mirror.

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CP: In the film you share a funny anecdote about being onstage, believing that you’re killing a performance, only to look into the crowd and see someone yawning. How do you recover from things like that, or seeing audiences playing with their phones?

Cave: The checking-the-phone is so common these days. Watching a concert through an iPhone is simply the way it is now. It’s yet another thing the performer has to swallow about the digital age: that the audience would prefer to watch the concert through a tiny little screen than to see the real thing.

But you have no control over the audience and what they do. Most of the time you’re lost somehwere inside the song anyway, but for sure, it’s a fragile thing.

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CP: I enjoyed seeing more of your collaborative relationship with (longitme bandmate) Warren (Ellis).

Cave: I will say the most difficult part of that entire film was having the conversation with Warren in the kitchen and pretending I hadn’t heard that story 100 times before. Warren loves to tell a story, that’s for sure.

(laughs)

But we just do a kind of songwriting split down the middle. We no longer even bother to work out who wrote what, which you normally do. There’s not really anything I do musically that I don’t do with Warren. The bits that I feel are missing within myself as an artist, he’s able to realize — and possibly vice versa.

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CP: How did you feel watching the movie for the first time?

Cave: I felt very nervous about that. I kind of watched it through my fingers with a giant cringe. Or I expected to find it really difficult to watch. But I was really kind of thrilled for (the directors), because I could see they’d made the film they wanted to make.

It was amazing to see their first edit that everyone sat down to. (It’s) usually an absolute disaster, when you sit down to the first edit of the film and everyone’s there. People come out looking like death.

But this was a lot of good feeling all around because it was clear they were very close to having something that was very good.

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Answers have been edited and condensed.

— Follow @CP_Patch on Twitter.