Monkey's Blog - with a little help from Alice

Further thoughts on 20,000 Days on Earth
[Updated 22 January 2015] 

Alice loved this film so much, she's hoping "Santa" (you know who you are) will get her the Blu-ray... You can see the trailer here. It won the directing and the editing awards in World Cinema Documentary when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January this year. So there!

At her Film Group discussion, some-one dismissed Nick Cave as "a self-centred, self-aggrandising narcissist" - or words to that effect. She spluttered, but as no-one else had actually seen the film, not even the complainer, she wants to reassure you that this is not the usual biopic by any means at all!

Muriel & Giorgia Del Don in RedMilk admit this, and add that [it's] a free dive into the mind of an artist who is incredibly profound, humane and surprising... They felt that the film enables us to take a peep through the chinks of the “celebrity”, NickCave. His artistic alter-ego shows us how much that is extraordinary and awe-inspiring lies behind the façade. Forsyth and Pollard’s film has a rare stylistic beauty...

An interview with the man himself, by Joe Lynch, explains how the movie was created: While conversations emerge organically (unscripted) each scene ... was meticulously constructed ... We used sets. Nothing is real (apart from the car and the recording studio). Nick concluded: It was quite an interesting way to tease out some 'truths,' to get to something more authentic even though we were using contrivances. It's a great article: go read it for yourelf at billboardbiz.

Even the sceptical Mark Kermode concluded his Guardian review by saying, Cave may not believe in God or the devil, but his art most certainly does – in much the same way that this fascinatingly self-obsessed film believes in Cave.

From one of Nick Cave's notebooks

Here's yet another fascinating (yes, really) interview, also about making the film, but in addition very illuminating on Nick's creativity as a writer and performer. It's at a website entitled bandwidth, and includes an edited audio version.

Alice must stop Googling "Nick Cave" etc soon, or we'll be at this all day, and no lunch either. Still, it's fun, too, she protests. Oh well... [Sigh] All right. Do try this one at the Telegraph, which talks about his notebooks; his supposed "archive," and the sessions with the analyst, Darian Leader.

If you're into the "How did they do it?" stuff (which Alice quite definitely is) there's an interview with 20,000 film-makers Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard at - guess what! - Filmmaker.

The film itself ends with a beautiful shot taken at night as Nick walks through a colonade onto the beach, gradually zooming out until we realise it was taken from the sea! Update: Alice is delighted she now has a better rendition of it. You can view the whole of that sequence on YouTube. [Note: this is a better copy than the one we originally linked.]

Alice was so inspired by Cave's final words in the film, that she's insisting on quoting them.

The song is heroic, because the song confronts death. The song is immortal and bravely stares down our own extinction. The song emerges from the spirit world with a true message. One day, I will tell you how to slay the dragon.

All of our days are numbered: we cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all, because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent til you do it. Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the world, a little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about. If you can hold onto that flame, great things can be constructed around it: they are massive, and powerful, and world-changing - all held up by the tiniest of ideas....

In the end, I am not interested in that which I fully understand. The words I’ve written over the years are just a veneer. There are truths that lie beneath the surface of the words. Truths that rise up without warning like the humps of a sea monster – and then disappear. What performance and song is to me is finding a way to tempt that monster to the surface. To create a space where the creature can break through what is real and what is known to us. This shimmering space, where imagination and reality intercept. This is where all love and tears and joy exist. This is the place. This is where we live.

Aaaah. Yes.