Nick Cave pretends to chauffeur Kylie Minogue and Ray Winstone. Nick Cave watches Scarface with his twelve-year-old sons. He goes to a psychoanalyst, has lunch with Warren Ellis and visits the Nick Cave Archive at the “Melbourne Arts Centre” set. But not really.
For their upcoming “drama-documentary” 20,000 Days on Earth, conceptual artists and music history re-enactors Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard don’t just respect Nick Cave’s mysterious side — they relish in it, setting up cinematic narratives and expository scenes for Cave to improvise and ad-lib in. “The thing that seems so kind of prevalent in contemporary music docs is that they’re all about getting behind something, revealing something, taking away the mask, taking away the myth,” Forsyth tells The Guardian. “The important thing for us was not breaking the mythology.”
The car chauffeur is specifically explicit in its metaphor-turned-narrative-device technique.
“The car becomes this place of imaginings, I guess, where the thoughts I’m having materialise in the forms of people that have played some part in my story,” Cave says.
The film has been secretly in progress since “Push the Sky Away” and will be released in 2014.
Speaking of artifice, here’s the Forsyth & Pollard-directed “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds video. That mustache though.
