20,000 Days on Earth (Directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, 2014)

Note: this is the first of my NZ Film Festival posts. I expect I will finish these reviews sometime before 2025.

There are few artists that trade on mythology quite like Nick Cave. In a career stretching back to the late 1970's, Cave always tackled the big subjects- death, love, God and violence. His music and writing has drawn from the blues, frantic postpunk energy, murder ballads, Scott Walker, Greek Mythology and, of course, Elvis. My interest in him has grown over the years as he has matured into that rare artist who mixes rock and roll id with a gift for storytelling with idiosyncratic detail and power.

20,000 Days on Earth plays around with Cave's own mythology. On the one hand, there is nothing so demystifying as a middle aged rock star being interviewed in a film about their life and career. It is probably the death of a certain kind of mystery to actually get to know artists, or anybody, on a human level. We see Cave pottering about his Brighton home, pondering the weather, running errands and visiting with old friends. We hear him talk about his father, his childhood and his various muses.

At the same time, Cave's presence is still undeniably mesmerizing. When we see Nick and his newly reformed band, The Bad Seeds, run through a new song in the studio all thoughts of the commonplace and ordinary, or even of the typical music documentary fade away. They seem to be tapping into some communal force that elevates and transforms the skeleton of a song into something that moves and is alive. Before an audience, Cave, himself, is transformed. In the film, Kylie Minogue, his one-time duet partner, described him on the stage as a sort of magnificent tree looming over everyone. I like the imagery of that and it really fits Cave.

What makes this film interesting is that the film is using all of these stories and the odd performance piece to help us understand how Cave works and where it all comes from. It's not just some narrative of past glories. We never get a linear rundown of the key moments in his life and career, or whatever. Instead, 20,000 Days on Earth uses Cave's memories and journal entries to illustrate not only his creative process, but also how he looks at life and art. Cave keeps coming back to the transformative power of art and we actually see this process before our eyes and ears. The film often has some beautifully cinematic moments and none more so than the final image of Cave standing resolutely at the water's edge of Brighton at night as the camera zooms out to the stormy sea. This is an excellent documentary.