his deflection must have meant something
else. So later I e-mail him to ask again.
“Well, ‘nearly wholly innocent’ is much bet-
ter than ‘totally innocent,’ ” he points out. “I like
the idea that the man feels he is innocent apart
from the fact that he committed the crime.
This is an interesting idea. ‘Totally innocent’
just means he didn’t commit the crime and has
been wrongfully imprisoned and hence the rest
of the song doesn’t really make any fucking
sense. But, hey, it’s Johnny Cash and I idolized
the man and it was a complete honor that he
sang one of my songs and it would have been
simply churlish of me to quibble.”
- ••
ANOTHER WAY Nick Cave has kept himself
busy over the years, aside from the songs and
the performances and the film music and the
novels and the lectures, is screenwriting. His
first proper attempt, an Australian Western
called The Proposition for his film-director
friend John Hillcoat, was the most satisfy-
ing, but more recent experiences have been
less so: “I was somehow under the impres-
sion that in Hollywood your imaginative
dreams could be realized in some magical
instant, which is actually just not true at all.
You know, there’s a gauntlet of enemies of the
imagination that you have to run through,
and see if you can get to the other side with
some shreds of the original idea intact.” He
still seems stung by the struggles and com-
promises involved in the last film he wrote, a
Prohibition drama starring Tom Hardy called
Lawless, also for Hillcoat. “That was it for me,
really,” he says. “I think I can pretty much say
I’m not writing another script.”
Still, one of the most improbable Nick Cave
stories of all lies within his part-time script-
writing career. At one stage Russell Crowe was
keen to star in The Proposition, and so he and
Cave got to know each other a little. One day
Crowe called Cave up out of the blue.
“He said, ‘It’s Russell here, how’s the script-
writing going?’ ” says Cave. Cave says that he
replied, “I never want to write another fuck-
ing script in my life” because at that time The
Proposition was going through lots of problems.
And that was when Crowe asked Cave to
write Gladiator 2.
Cave was blindsided, but not so much that
he failed to ask the most obvious question.
“I was, ‘Didn’t you die in Gladiator 1?’ ” he
remembers. “And he was just like, ‘Sort it out.’
He wanted something with mythological crea-
tures, I think set in another world—in heaven
or hell, purgatory, something like that. He
hadn’t quite worked that part out.”
First, Cave wrote a treatment that tried to
follow Crowe’s instructions—“Russell con-
fronting ogres and all this sort of shit, right?”—
but that came back from Ridley Scott with big
red crosses all over it, and notes that said “I
do not want to make a movie like this.” Scott
asked Cave to watch a lot of Bergman movies,
which Cave took as a nudge toward something
“kind of deep and thoughtful, and kind of exis-
tential.” Suitably re-inspired, Cave sat down to
write the full script (which really was called
Gladiator 2). He says now that even as he was
writing it, he knew it would never get made, so
he resolved to enjoy the process.
Eventually he came up with a theological
story in which the gods blackmail the glad-
iator Maximus, who begins the movie in
purgatory, to kill the followers of a new reli-
gion whose rise is making them die o≠—the
religion turns out, of course, to be Christianity.
At the same time the gladiator searches for
his son. “Gets a bit fucking complicated, actu-
ally,” Cave remembers.
Along the way, he honored a very specific
request from Crowe, who had told him about
an unused scene written for the first movie in
which the gladiator was charged by a rhinoc-
eros. “Russell’s like, ‘Just fucking imagine fuck-
ing two tons of rhino charging at me! What do I
do? What do I do?’ And I’m, ‘I don’t know, what
do you do?’ ” But Crowe wanted his rhino. “He’s
like, ‘We still have the software for the rhino—
put a fucking rhino in there.’ ” So Cave did.
As the film moved toward its close, he says,
Maximus finds himself caught in an endless
battle, turning up at the Crusades, the World
Wars, Vietnam. “I thought that Ridley’d like the
end, because it was like a 20-minute sequence
of all-the-wars-of-history type of thing, of this
unstoppable war machine,” says Cave. But the
script went nowhere. “Russell didn’t like it. He
wanted a full-on mythological action movie,
slaying dragons and sea monsters and all that
sort of stu≠, kind of Jason and the Argonauts
and stu≠ like that. Ridley said that he liked it
but that it would never get made.”
In the intervening years, a draft of Cave’s
script has leaked out, and it’s a weird and
remarkable feat of the imagination. At its very
end, Maximus, now dressed in a black suit and
wearing a tie, is seen washing his hands in a
bathroom, then walking down a hallway to join
a Pentagon meeting with ten other men in suits
at a round table. He looks at his laptop and
then says to the others: “Now, where were we?”
“It was just a completely ridiculous wigged-
out thing,” says Cave, “that I had kind of fun
doing.”- ••
ON FEBRUARY 14, 2017, Nick Cave, who
very deliberately had not written a single
lyric since finishing Skeleton Tree toward the
end of 2015, sat down to begin work on songs
for a new album. “I kind of do an enforced
shut down, confine myself to barracks for a
while and confront the big hairy goggly eyed
monster head-on,” he explains. “It is anyone’s
guess where the lyrics might go. It is exciting
because I feel full of words. And feel I have a
new sort of lyrical confidence and that they
really can just go anywhere.”
Cave has always been a man of disciplined
work habits, and for many years he would
rise each morning, put on a suit, leave his
Brighton home, and go to his o∞ce, where he
could sit surrounded by books and art and the
other kind of ephemera that has fascinated or
inspired him over the years, and try to work.
(As he memorably quipped a few years back: “I
used to go six days a week, till I couldn’t stand
it anymore. Now I go Sundays as well.’’) In the
months after Arthur’s death, he kept trying to
resume this routine. The o∞ce “became the
place that sort of defined that period, those few
months, a place where I’d sit and smoke and
try to work and stu≠.” No longer. “I just don’t
go in there. Not even a step.”
Nowadays, he works at home, principally
on a dark-color sofa in a large second-floor
bedroom at the front of the house, next to
windows that look out over gardens to the
sea. I visit him there toward the end of his
second week of writing. He is unfailingly polite
and thoughtful. He’s wearing a collared shirt
and what appears to be suit trousers. His
sculpted hair, which he has said he has been
dyeing since his teens, is the darkest of blacks,
and I can’t help but think of the hotel-bathroom
dyeing ritual—“I carefully concoct a paste in
a bowl”—described in The Sick Bag Song, the
surreal epic narrative poem he wrote on tour
in 2014, a sequence that includes the memora-
ble observation: The bathroom light is brutal.
/ I reposition my face so that I stop looking /
Like Kim Jong-un and start looking more like
Johnny Cash, / Or someone. He makes tea for
himself and co≠ee for me, and we talk.
This is life now. “I think that Susie and I
both just stepped into an alternate reality,
you know, but that you could slip a cigarette
paper between the two worlds, both in terms
of the time that it took for us to change and its
closeness to reality,” he reflects. “It was just
this sort of netherworld. There’s definitely a
kind of recognition of the life that we used to
lead, and almost a shame that we could live
a life, and worry about certain things that
we worried about back then, that just seem
absolute luxuries in this new world. You know,
indulgences. And that is a big change for us.
I think we are not really concerned about a
lot of things that we were concerned about
before, and have a much more acute fellow
feeling, let’s say, than I think either of us, me
in particular, have ever had. I think for both
of us, it has something to do with not wanting
to cause any more su≠ering in our day-to-day
lives than we possibly can. So everyone’s more
gentle with each other. And we’re nicer peo-
ple, I guess, to put it one way, I suppose. And
conflict doesn’t have the same sort of seduc-
tive energy that it used to.”
We spend quite a lot of the morning dis-
cussing Cave’s past, and he says that people
have often misunderstood the attitude with
which he approaches what he does, an atti-
tude that has never changed. Maybe people
confused a darkness of taste for a nihilis-
tic intent. Maybe it was simply the way he
appeared onstage. Cave himself floats the idea
that maybe it’s just the way his face is, exuding
a mood that isn’t actually his.
“I mean, I was never a depressed person,”
he says. “I’ve always been basically optimis-
tic. I see great beauty in the world. You know,
I look around and it’s a fucking awesome
beautiful place. That’s how I’ve always felt.
I’m not saying this is some kind of thing at the
moment—I’ve always looked at the world in
that way.... Writing is basically an act of love,
and a kind of joyful thing to do. That quicken-
ing of the heart that comes when you’re onto
something. I mean, I get all kind of shaky and
stu≠ like that. It’s an immensely positive act,
nothing to do with sadness or depression or
any of these sorts of things, no matter what
you’re writing about.”- ••
MANY YEARS AGO, Nick Cave had the
notion to erect a large bronze statue of him-
self in the small Australian country town of
Warracknabeal, where he was born. At the
time, the idea was some combination of con-
ceptual art prank, odd film project, and delib-
erate folly, because, of course, there was no
fervent groundswell of popular opinion that
this should happen. “There was a kind of
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