The Proposition: Nick Cave takes a stab at film

[B.C. Long]

http://www.columbiafilms.com.au/theproposition/

Hopefully it will be like watching one of his albums with Nick Cave writing the script.

[Ghostboy]

I've been looking forward to this for a long time - I'm a huge Nick Cave fan. The cast is great, and the synopsis sounds good (and I think the soundtrack will be amazing - read below). However, the website is awful. What's the point of that tiny Flash trailer? You need a magnifying glass to see that.

Press release regarding the soundtrack:

A powerful western drama set in the savage Eden of 1880s Australia, The Proposition is an elemental story of family conflict and primal violence, destructive love and divided loyalties. Featuring an international superstar cast including Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson and Danny Huston, it is directed by John Hillcoat from a specially commissioned script by the globally acclaimed singer-songwriter Nick Cave.

"Because of Nick's narrative songwriting, the characters are so vivid," says Hillcoat. "I knew something really good would come out of it."

Cave has also composed the film's soundtrack in conjunction with Warren Ellis, his longtime Bad Seeds collaborator and multi-instrumentalist frontman of The Dirty Three. Incorporating soft chamber pieces, ghostly moodscapes and whispered laments, these 16 tracks are as starkly beautiful as the landscape of the film. Story and music are closely intertwined.

"I always heard it musically, and I guess it's written rhythmically as well" Cave explains. "It's very similar to the way my band operates. There are moments of intense violence and there are also moments of long, lyrical, quiet sadness."

But the resulting soundtrack is emphatically different to a Bad Seeds or Dirty Three record. While some of these pieces grew from improvised accompaniment to big-screen projection, many also incorporate violin loops pre-recorded by Ellis at his home studio in France.

"It was very different to making a normal record," Ellis says. "There were no boundaries in that respect, and I enjoyed much more than I thought I would. The music had to be very flexible, and as a result it has a very improvised, loose feel. But that's fine. Beethoven and Mozart did not write with films in mind either."

The soundtrack to The Proposition is punctuated by recurring motifs, fragments of church hymns and abstract avant-folk drones. The softly swelling title theme lends a melancholy signature refrain while 'The Rider' is a haunting ballad in which the scattered natural elements of a starlit landscape engaged in hushed conversation. For a highly distinctive songwriter like Cave, the composition process involved stepping back and allowing the timeless power of the music to speak for itself.

"I didn't want to have songs in it," he explains, "or Nick Cave songs, certainly. For me it was delicately balanced thing. On the one hand you don't want a historical movie with a real contemporary soundtrack, but nor did we want wall-to-wall Irish jigs. I didn't want songs to act as distraction."

All the same, there is a smattering of more substantial songs on the album that will please fans of the Bad Seeds and Dirty Three. Cave and Ellis took great pains for the soundtrack to work as a stand-alone work in its own right. With 'The Rider Song' and 'Clean Hands, Dirty Hands', they lend a note of healing musical balm to the film's bittersweet, blood-splattered finale.

"The film ends a little tragically," Cave admits. "It doesn't end in a traditional Hollywood way. There was a feeling that there needed to be something redemptive, so when you've dusted your popcorn off your trousers you could walk out with a slightly joyful song in your heart."

A musical journey from revenge to redemption, The Proposition is a richly textured new chapter in Cave's already illustrious body of work.

The Proposition is released by Mute on 26th September 2005.

[RegularKarate]

'Cept his book kinda sucked

[The Perineum Falcon]

Twitch's Review

[cron]

An intriguing proposition

Doug Bolton
Thursday October 27, 2005


Dark artistry ... Guy Pearce in The Proposition and screenwriter Nick Cave at last night's London film festival screening. Photographs: Kerry Brown; MJ Kim/Getty


"Writing songs is much harder," is the conclusion Nick Cave has come to after writing his first film script.
His contemplative 'Australian western', The Proposition had its first UK screening at the London film festival last night. Asked by friend and director John Hillcoat to pen both script and soundtrack, he seemed blasé about making the transition from songwriter to screenwriter: "Writing the script was something I did very quickly."

Members of the cast who attended the screening, among them Guy Pearce and Danny Huston, were clearly impressed with Cave's efforts. Pearce said "the beautiful script", was what attracted him to the film.


Cave and the director have one more project in the pipeline, but he has no intention of making a career out of it. Speaking at the Odeon West End last night, he made it clear where his real passion lies: "Music just does something different to me."
Nick Cave's music drives the film, setting the mood and the tempo. Not surprisingly, it meshes well with the script; indeed, lyrics from the soundtrack occasionally drift into the dialogue.

There are echoes of Sam Peckinpah's western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Both are stories outlaws forced to hunt down former partners, and deal with the brutal business of bringing "civilisation" to a wild land. This film also shares Pekinpah's exuberant, bloody violence.

Between the floggings and decapitations, it is a very brutal vision of colonial life. Asked whether the violence on display may be a barrier to mainstream success, actor Danny Huston's response was: "I always thought violence was very commercial... we live in violent times."

This story is set on Australia's "frontier", but it has none of the nostalgia or glamour attaching to the American equivalent. In its place are bad teeth, dirt and lots and lots of flies.

Captain Stanley, played by Ray Winstone, is the Sheriff, who makes it his personal mission to bring the desolate wasteland of 1890s Australia into colonial line. With his wife, played by Emily Watson, he tries to create an oasis of English refinement, while his attempts to maintain order become increasingly barbaric.

Danny Huston, who is also in The Constant Gardener, gives a brutally captivating performance as the seriously dangerous outlaw Arthur Burns. When talking about the almost unbearable conditions endured during filming, he commented that "nothing moves fast in that heat". This seems to include the film in places, but the languid pace is in keeping with the mood.

The tortured figure at the centre of the story is Charlie Burns, played by Guy Pearce. He is faced with the choice of killing one brother or leaving the other to die. Like all the inhabitants of this fetid outpost, he seems trapped in a kind of sweaty purgatory, hopelessly alone in the terrifying hugeness of Australia.

This dark, low key film is familiar territory for Pearce, who has generally opted out of mainstream, movie-stardom. Like 2000's Memento, which he said was one of the films he was most proud of, The Proposition should get a warm reception from critics but is unlikely to set the box office alight.

When asked whether this role re-establishes him after having been out of the lime-light for the last year or two, he replied somewhat indignantly, "I wasn't aware I needed re-establishing."

[Ghostboy]

I can't believe I haven't seen this movie yet - it's on Region 2 DVD, but I guess I'll just wait for it to hit the big screen in the next few weeks. But I bought the soundtrack today, and it's fantastic. In addition to the score, there are some really beautiful, minimalist songs from Cave. Very highly recommended.

[MacGuffin]

Between rock and some hard places
Aussie musician turned screenwriter Nick Cave brings a savage artistry to both, including a new film, "The Proposition."
Source: Los Angeles Times

NEW YORK — The Australian rocker Nick Cave has a history of violence. He was once a rowdy post-punk nihilist and is now more of a gothic lounge lizard, but his songs, typically focused on treachery and revenge, have always been notable for their high body counts.

Given that his chief songwriting inspirations are the Old Testament and the bloodier back pages of American mythology, it's no surprise that for his first solo stab at writing a screenplay, Cave has tackled the most mythical — and most American — of genres: the western. But "The Proposition," directed by John Hillcoat and opening Friday, is also a specifically Australian movie, a hallucinatory depiction of the 19th century outback as nothing less than hell on Earth.
   
"The landscape was the springboard for everything," said Cave. "It's suffused with a loss and melancholy, but there's also a danger to it." This sense of paradox is at the heart of "The Proposition," which, like Cave's most effective music, is able to reconcile lyricism and savagery. The film is, on the one hand, simplicity itself — founded on the biblical theme of brotherly betrayal and the screw-tightening logic of classical tragedy. But it also has a moral complexity familiar from the anti-westerns of Sam Peckinpah.

"What I've tried to get across is that once morality isn't a matter of choice, it's actually a luxury," Cave said. "People in an inhospitable, godless environment do what they do to survive." The film's ambivalence, he added, is true to the Australian temperament. "We have a very murky view of our history," he said. "We're proud of our mythic heroes, but we're also aware that they were kind of incompetent and subject to enormous folly. They're not American-style heroes."

Trim as ever at 48, clad in trademark dark suit and sporting an incongruously drooping mustache, Cave was speaking in his Manhattan hotel just before a trip to this year's Sundance Film Festival, where he would join Hillcoat for the U.S. premiere of "The Proposition." Friends for nearly three decades, Cave and the director have crossed paths professionally several times: Hillcoat directed a few music videos for Cave, and Cave was one of the co-writers on Hillcoat's 1988 prison drama "Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead." The idea of an Australian western was something they had discussed as far back as the early '80s.

Hillcoat, speaking by telephone recently from the remote Thai island where he was vacationing, pointed out that the first Australian feature film was in fact a western: 1906's "The Story of the Kelly Gang." Ned Kelly, the outlaw folk hero with a deathless place in the Australian imagination, has been repeatedly canonized on film, most recently in the 2004 feature "Ned Kelly," with Heath Ledger. But according to Hillcoat, those movies fostered a cultural amnesia. "These bushranger films never incorporated a wider context — the conflicts with the landscape and the indigenous culture," he said.

The director immersed himself in period research and passed his findings to Cave. The resulting film is a deft portrait of the tribal complications that defined power relations in a lawless last frontier. British colonials (headed by Ray Winstone's police captain) and Irish outlaws (a band of brothers including Guy Pearce) are installed as antagonists, but "The Proposition" also takes care to show the aboriginal community as part of this precarious ecosystem.

"I don't know that this comes over here, but it's quite a radical view of Australian history," said Cave, referring to the depiction of the aboriginal people as more than mere victims. "My generation was taught that the aboriginals were a nonaggressive race and the whites came and they were wiped out," he said. "But what we learned was eye-opening. There was black on black violence. There was even a resistance to the whites." Hillcoat stressed the importance of facing up to the aboriginal situation — still a national open wound — in light of continued official reticence. "There's a history we've never come to terms with," Hillcoat said.

The film's politics — and the outspoken views of its makers — have ignited some controversy at home. "One criticism is, 'How dare these two people who haven't lived here a quarter of a century make this black-armband view of Australia?' " said Cave, who, like Hillcoat, now lives in the English coastal town of Brighton. But Cave maintained that an exile's perspective was crucial: "It's primarily because we don't live in Australia that we could make such a film." While Hillcoat, 44, confessed that he had "always felt not at home in Australia," Cave said living abroad has not weakened his connection to his native land. "You never feel more Australian than when you're in England," he said. "Our gestures are too big; our humor is too brash. I have an English wife and I'm reminded on a daily basis that I'm Australian."

Splitting his time

The expats will next collaborate on a contemporary drama, also starring Winstone, that they plan to shoot on the English coast. "It's a sex romp without the sex or the romp," Hillcoat said.

Cave is also working on a follow-up to 2004's well-reviewed double album "Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus," but he admitted that he may have contracted the screenwriting bug. "I've been working on lyrics for the last three weeks and I have three or four lines," he said. "Screenwriting's much easier. I'm not saying I'm particularly adept, but I can do it fast." On the strength of "The Proposition," he was approached by Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott to write a sequel to "Gladiator."

"It was an antiwar movie," Cave said. "It ended in Vietnam and the Pentagon. The gladiator who has returned from the dead is betrayed by the gods and becomes a raging war machine. There's a 20-minute scene at the end that goes through all the wars of history. At one point Russian tanks are coming at him."

For the budding screenwriter, the assignment provided a quick lesson in what you can — and, more to the point, cannot — get away with in Hollywood. "Ridley loved the ending," Cave said. "Or so he told me. But he also said there's no way we're going to be able to make it."

[MacGuffin]

Even casual music fans recognize the name Nick Cave and realize how important he was and is to the music. His influence has reached the point where new bands may not even realize how much of an influence on them. Though even hardcore Cave fans may not remember the movie Ghosts... of the Civil Dead which he wrote. Well now discover him again for the first time because he's written another screenplay for director John Hillcoat. This time it's an Australian western starring Guy Pearce, Danny Huston, Ray Winstone and Emily Watson. Pearce and Huston are brothers who are vicious killers in the late 19th century and are being hunted by Ray Winstone's character. He captures Pearce and promises him his freedom if he agrees to turn on his brother.

Daniel Robert Epstein: How did The Proposition come about?

Nick Cave: I've known [director] John [Hillcoat] for about 20 years and for about 18 of them he's been talking about this Australian western that he was going to make and that I would do the music for. I've continued to work with him through that 18 years and eventually he commissioned a script that was basically an American western dumped in Australia. We both thought that that was not the thing that he was trying to do. Then he went, "Well, fuck it. You write it then." So I did and I wrote it in about three weeks. I didn't want to take any longer than that because I refused to invest any more time in something that I knew would never get made. After many unbelievably difficult years of trying to get the film made John actually made it happen.

DRE: Both Guy Pearce and Danny Huston just looked evil, was that written in the script?

Cave: Well, in the script Danny Huston is always looking through a curtain of greasy hair. For the Charlie Burns character, who is essentially the central character in the film, the first actor we really wanted was Guy. I was actually thinking of him when I was writing this character. I just felt that it needed to be Guy, and Johnny felt the same because so much goes on in his face and he's so tightly wound as an actor. He was just brilliant in LA Confidential and Rules of Engagement.

DRE: How influenced were you by American westerns for this?

Cave: I think that John is heavily influenced by the anti-westerns and the revisionist westerns of the 70's like McCabe and Mrs. Miller and [Sam] Peckinpah's stuff. But I think that we felt that the average Australian has a different view of their history then the average American. I don't think that we see things so much in black and white or good guys and bad guys or villains and heroes. We have a much more conflicting, ambiguous, shame based view of our history. I think we basically see it as a history of failure and incompetence.

What inspired me was a lot of stories of these bushrangers like Ned Kelly and stuff like that. The antics that they got up to are hilarious with how foolish and doomed they are. Our heroes are very much murky characters. We really wanted to write a story where you can sympathize with someone and then another who's the one that you want to see get their comeuppance at the end. But you get confused about which one is which. Sometimes you feel aligned to one character and then you shift your allegiance to someone else and then in the end they are a band of people in a place that they should never be, being slowly dismantled by their own folly.

DRE: Could you talk more about Australia's perception of their history?

Cave: Well, if you've seen those photographs of the lynchings of black people in America where the people are standing there and they brought the kids along as if this was entertainment. I don't think that that necessarily means that there's no hope for these people. But at the heart of this film it's a group of people in a place that they shouldn't be. Maybe there are places on this earth that don't really need to be populated. I think that that fascination with violence or even that bored fascination with violence that's on that little girl's face, who is watching the whipping, is intrinsic in our nature. It's in your nature. It's in my nature. I think that genocide, racial hatred, murder are all fundamental parts of being human. I think that we feel that the more we progress we make the less we do these sorts of things, but I think that it's actually that we do more of these sorts of things. The more technology that we have at our fingertips shows me that we're just learning how to destroy people at a faster, more efficient rate. I think that this is fundamental in our character as human beings and that might sound bleak, but the evidence seems to suggest that that's the way it is. That's the end of the lesson [laughs].

DRE: Why didn't you have a role in this?

Cave: That was John's decision [laughs].

DRE: Was there a role you wanted to play?

Cave: No, I didn't really want to be in this one. I've written another one for him and apparently I have a part in that one.

DRE: What's that?

Cave: It's an English seaside drama starring Ray Winstone. It's very different.

DRE: Was your writing process different for the new one?

Cave: Yeah, totally. I got Final Draft on the computer and it makes things easier. You just press the button and there it is. I got that and I was able to write this new one in two weeks.

DRE: What are your influences as a screenwriter?

Cave: I watch an unbelievable amount of films because I don't have a particular interest in films. I don't have an interest in films the same way that I have an interest in music or I have an interest in literature in the sense that when I listen to a song I'm always listening to it analytically and I'm always asking that song questions about how it arrived at that place or how the lyrics got to be like that. I never just listen to music in the way that I think a normal person probably does and I read books in the same way. I'm really interested in language and how it's used. With films I watch them indiscriminately. I go to the DVD shop, get four DVDs, go home and sit there. I don't have to use my brain. I can just get sucked into a story which is the great thing about films. You just turn it on and you get swallowed in whether you like it or not. Now I have an enormous library of really bad, mediocre and great films in my head. They all have some influence. I often watch a film and think, "Why didn't they do that? That would have been much more interesting."

DRE: Did you write the music for The Proposition while you were writing the screenplay?

Cave: Yeah. The script has all the musical cues in it. So I'm writing that as I'm writing the script. I think that the script is very musical.

DRE: Did you feel that any of the characters were your voice?

Cave: Not really. But I pretty much wanted to be able to sympathize with them all in some way or another. The real villain to me is the guy who owns the town and orders the whipping.

DRE: The record executive type guy?

Cave: Yeah, exactly [laughs]. I wanted the other characters to be sympathetic in one way or another no matter how evil they were. The only way that you feel sympathetic to someone is if they mirror something in yourself. I guess they all mirror something in me and in all of us.

DRE: Did you go on location at all?

Cave: No. But I was on location a week prior to filming it where I rehearsed with the actors and rewrote anything that they felt uncomfortable with.

DRE: It looked so hot there.

Cave: It was hot. It was in the mid-50's Celsius. It's inhumanly hot. A lot of the stuff was indoors where it gets even hotter and the set is made up in the desert. The equipment would be breaking down because it was too hot for some reason. I don't know the details but it was fucking hot anyway.

DRE: The western genre is quite malleable, did you always know that all these elements would be in the script?

Cave: No. We didn't know what was going to happen actually. Basically John was in the studio and I was mixing No More Shall We Part, a record we made. He brought the script in for this Australian western that he had written and I read it in there and neither of us thought that it was appropriate. Then while we were in there mixing the record we'd go, "What about having three brothers?" So basically when we left the studio I had the premise for the story. I just started writing it and we just knew that it wasn't going to end happily.

DRE: There is a lot of violent imagery in The Proposition, was that your or John's idea?

Cave: John is very interested in violence. His first and second films are violent. I think that he's certainly interested in the aftermath of violence and where violence takes you. When John does violence he does it fast and brutal and then you deal with the ramifications of that. People talk about this film being a violent film which I find slightly irritating because so much stuff that comes out of Hollywood has these great ballets of violence. Scripts are being written for the express purpose of just having a whole lot of violence, like Tarantino films which I find pretty unwatchable most of the time. So when John deals with violence I think he deals with it in a realistic way. It's a fundamental part of the story especially since it was a violent time.

DRE: Did doing the score take longer than the script?

Cave: Yeah. To write a song and see it through to the end is really hard. It's really hard work. It's not building a house or bricklaying or anything like that. But for me it's a really difficult process and the hardest part of it is when you're trying to start off a song and I'm just sitting alone in my office and trying to think about what I want to write about. I get exhausted by my own tiresome opinions about things and all of this bullshit that I have in my head. It's very difficult to get through that and cull together song. Whereas when I'm writing a script I'm just sitting there and someone says, "Write an Australian western." I don't have to worry about the way I feel about anything. All I have to do is sit there and create a few characters and get them to do whatever and off the story goes.

DRE: Are you going to be touring this year?

Cave: We're touring a little bit with my solo band in a couple of weeks actually around England.

DRE: What's the difference when you tour with your solo band?

Cave: There are a lot less of us [laughs]. The Bad Seed is, I don't know how many people. The little band is four people and it's something that I can just take out on the road with a minimum of fuss. We can tour and play whenever we like and we don't have to do it on the back of a record so we can do completely different renditions of the songs.

DRE: Are you planning on writing any more novels?

Cave: No.

DRE: How come?

Cave: I think that once you've written a couple of film scripts you can never write a novel again. Also I just never had any desire to write another one. It's just not something that I've wanted to do. Writing one in the first place was just this perverse idea at the time. Someone said I should write a novel and I went, "Oh, okay." It was that type of thing and I wrote one and I don't have any ambitions to be an author really. For me I just really want to be a songwriter. That's what I'm primarily interested in.

DRE: Do you listen to much new music?

Cave: To me it's new, but I listen to all sorts of music. Not a lot of contemporary music though.

DRE: You've been on the same high level in the music industry for a long time

Cave: Yeah, it's absolutely a luxury. I've felt coddled by this relationship where I can pretty much do exactly the music that I want to do. The record company encourages that. I see a lot of other bands that do fall from their labels and get onto other ones and it's fucking tragic. I'm unbelievably grateful that we're on Mute Records. They support us.

DRE: Is it harder to get people to buy your records now?

Cave: Well, we sold more of the last record than any of the previous records. We had a slump in sales with the record before that, but I think that was because of the record wasn't that good. So we're surviving the internet crisis all right so far. I know that for myself I use a computer and I listen to music from the internet and stuff. I have an iPod and I find myself listening to more music. It's totally opened up the music that I listen to and the accessibility of things. I find that I'm listening to a far greater range of music than I was six months ago before I had this equipment.

DRE: I see that the Road to God Knows Where/Live at the Paradiso is coming out on DVD this year.

Cave: Possibly, yeah.

DRE: Did you have to look over those shows?

Cave: No. I never look at my stuff.

DRE: Why not?

Cave: Because it just puts me off of my game. I'd rather live in a fantasy world that what I do is brilliant and I don't want to ever really want to see it for what maybe it really is. So I never listen to my music. I never watch myself on the TV, especially footage of myself live.

[godardian]

Wow, this sounds really cool, definitely something to check out. I wonder if Wim Wenders is any kind of influence on Cave after their collaborations? I'd be curious to see this. I really like Nick Cave a lot while at the same time finding him a tad overrated by the hardcore Caveheads (I'm 100% certain many of them would say the same thing about the artist to the left, though, so I can deal).

Has anyone read Cave's novel? I did, and I liked it. It was something of a Flannery O'Connor pastiche as I recall, but a reasonably thoughtful and well-written one.

[Ghostboy]

I really like Nick Cave a lot while at the same time finding him a tad overrated by the hardcore Caveheads (I'm 100% certain many of them would say the same thing about the artist to the left, though, so I can deal).

Well said, and an excellent comparison.

I saw the film this morning, and it's wonderful - essentially a filmed murder ballad, steeped in historical detail and the sort of raw mythic/biblical allegory Cave is so fond of in his songwriting. I'll write a longer piece later, but for the time being, consider it very highly recommended.

[Weak2ndAct]

Yeah, it's pretty darned good, and if you're at all a western fan-- definitely check it out.  And man, it is crazy violent.  This movie has one of the most unbelievably gory head-shots since, 'Wild at Heart' maybe?  My only gripe with the film is that I wanted a liitle more backstory/depth to the Pearce/Huston relationship.  It's one layer away from being really amazing.  Still though, recommended for sure.

[modage]

i will rent this as a double feature with the Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

[Ghostboy]

i will rent this as a double feature with the Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

That'll be a damn good double feature.

Here's my slightly more expansive take on the film.

[w/o horse]

The characters and story were thick in every scene, enough so that if I saw it again I'd probably appreciate certain scenes more.  A screenwriting teacher of mine used to always say "Logical but unexpected" and this film felt quite logical and quite unexpected to me at all times.  It was intense and beautiful.  My only complaint is that some scenes felt truncated.  Sometimes I felt that the idea was better than the execution: a song would abruptly end or a short scene wouldn't exactly fit or the cut would be him over a natural bridge and then him in the desert.  These take me out of the movie for a moment.

[squints]

I just recently saw this and I was blown away. The best western in years. My initial interest in the film was sparked by Ebert's review where he compared the character of Arthur Burns with the character of The Judge from Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Merdidian. That book was such and engulfing and twisted read that I knew I had to see what this movie was all about. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis's score was great and it reminded me of Leonard Cohen's narrative lyrics following McCabe in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. The cinematography and landscape of The Proposition reminded of Jodorowsky's El Topo, a certain nightmarish atmosphere the could very well be a representation of hell. The dialogue, the action, and just the overall feel of the movie was spectacular. I can't wait to see it again