QUICK STUDY: Happy as he is with The Proposition , Cave prefers the music industry to the film industry.
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Nick Cave wrote the script for The Proposition in three weeks. Three weeks? “Yeah,” he says over the phone from London. “I banged it out and gave it to John [Hillcoat] and went back to making music. And then, I don’t know, a year and a half later or something, John by some miracle actually raised enough money to get it made, and I was brought out to Winton, in the heart of Queensland, in stinking heat, to this little town where all the actors had assembled. And I could barely even remember the story, I was just brought in there to help with any dialogue that wasn’t kind of flying properly. And it was just extraordinary, I was sitting there watching Ray Winstone and Danny Huston and all these great actors doing this stuff, and I was just thinking, ‘Fuck, this is really good!’ ’Cos it was just this pile of words to me.”The Proposition originally came about, he says, as a sort of challenge. “Johnny had been trying to get an Australian Western off the ground for many many years, and I was supposed to do the music for it. He did get a script together, and he showed it to me, and we both thought it was . . . not right. It was an American Western set in Australia. Just sort of plunked in Australia, it wasn’t Australian at all. And I mentioned that to him, and he said just kind of out of desperation, ‘Well, all right then, why don’t you write it?’ So I said I’d give it a go. And it just seemed a very natural thing to do in the end. I’ve been telling stories for, y’know, all my working life, and this seemed like a logical extension.”
Speaking in the languidly eloquent tones of a literary man, the 48-year-old Cave assures me that his next film project is about “a sexually incontinent hand-cream salesman” and will be shot this summer in the English seaside town of Brighton, where he now lives. The director will once again be John Hillcoat, and the star will once again be Ray Winstone. Winstone’s performance in The Proposition was for Cave one of the highlights of the process. “Ray and Emily [Watson], they brought this tenderness to their relationship that was really moving to watch. Just to watch them really bleed this thing, y’know, and make it something really beautiful.”
Compared with other items in the Cave œuvre — notably his 1989 novel And the Ass Saw the Angel, with its “embranglement of words” — The Proposition relies more on image than language. Its characters are tight-mouthed, tending to disregard speech in favor of a quick squint at the simmering horizon. The exception is bounty hunter Jellon Lamb: John Hurt wheezes out paragraphs of Elizabethan floridity while capering drunkenly in his shack at the foot of the hills. “Once I started writing the scene in the shack, it went for fucking ages, there was way too much of it and they kept having to cut it down, unfortunately, ’cos it was a great performance. . . . He’s just this overeducated dog that’s living out the back of beyond.”
So which is worse, the film industry or the music industry? “Oh the fucking film business, any day!” laughs Cave. “Because there’s so much money involved, one just has to toe the line. In the music business, you get to say no. You can say no a lot, actually. And you can get away with it and there’s even a certain kudos involved, but in the film industry, y’know, they just don’t accept that.”
