20,000 DAYS ON EARTH

UK, 2013, 97 minutes, Colour.
Nick Cave, Suzie Bick.
Directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard.

The credits of this documentary on Nick Cave and his career start with a counter at zero. It then begins to move rapidly, very rapidly, through the numbers until it reaches 19,999. And all the time, there is an even more rapidly changing, large of photos from Nick Cave’s life.

This is an imaginary, but realistic, day in the life of Nick Cave – his 20,000 day. For many years he has lived in England, on the coast in Brighton, where he feels comfortably at home. He has a wife and children. From this domestic base, and we see him getting up in the morning, we see his relationship with his family and his admiration for Suzie and her support and advice. At the end, we see him relaxing with the children.

His day is very busy including a number of visits, especially to his collaborator Warren Ellis, an eccentric but attractive character. Inserted is a sequence with Ellis and some French children doing background singing. He also visits his archive, some rooms with an archivist at work, going over various documents, pictures, so that there is a record of Cave’s career to live on after him.

There are any number of flashbacks, and many scenes showing Cave at work, by himself, writing in his notebook, lyrics for his songs, scribbled and crossed out. We see him at his piano and his composing. There are many scenes of performance with his group, the Bad Seeds, and, towards the end, a full blast concert at the Sydney Opera House. Throughout the film there is work in composition, performance of Push the Sky.

Cave has an inner intensity which manifests itself in his response to the interviewers, revealing quite a deal about himself, his early life in the Victorian countryside around Wangaratta, the affirmation of his father, his moving into music, the 1980s which he says he largely forgets, a decade of drug-taking in Australia and in Berlin, where he did much of his work in composition.

For those who appreciate Cave and for those interested in how he came to achieve the status he has, there is a great deal of personal detail as well as response from various people, some of whom suddenly appear in the car which he is driving and join in conversation, Ray Winstone (although the connection is not very clear why Winstone is there), former Bad Seeds musician, Blixa Bargeld, and an invigorating conversation with Kylie Minogue.

A disappointment for those interested in cinema is that he does not give any information about his writing for the screen, for his friend John Hill coat, and the films The Proposition and Lawless. Given his busy music schedule, one wonders how he fitted in the writing of screenplays.

For those interested in music, for those who wonder about composers and how they work with their creative processes, and definitely for those interested in Nick Cave and his career, this is both an interesting and entertaining documentary.