Nick Cave's 20,000th day on earth

'20,000 DAYS ON EARTH': JUST ANOTHER DOCUMENTARY ABOUT NICK CAVE?

Brighton's Western Pier on Christmas Day 2014

It is Christmas day and yesterday the film by Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth ‘20,000 Days on Earth’ came out in cinemas in Paris.  This film, set in Brighton, is not just another documentary about Nick Cave.  It is in fact a fiction.  

In the film, Nick Cave hears his alarm clock ringing.  He gets out of bed, leaving his beautiful black haired wife, Susie Bick, lying in bed.  He goes out in a black car to his office and types on a typewriter.  Then he has an appointment to be questioned by psychoanalyst Darian Leader.  Afterwards other people question him: Kylie Minogue, Ray Winstone from The Proposition and Blixa Bargeld, best known for his work with musical groups Einstürzende Neubauten.  He then rehearses some songs.  He visits some curators who house his precious ‘important shit’, old photos and junk he’s picked up, and next he has black tagliatelli and eels with violinist of the Bad Seed: Warren Ellis.  Then he goes home to have pizza with his two sons and afterwards goes to bed.  The end.

Like a groundhog day, it’s a regular day, on a coastal town called Brighton.  But it’s a day that is all artificially constructed like fiction is. Everything is put together.  It’s not a real day.  Blixa has been shipped in, a meeting and conversation that should have taken place fourteen years ago when Nick received an email in Paris telling of his leaving the Bad Seed.  Until this day, Nick had never been told the reason why.  “Why did you leave the band anyway?” he asked Blixa.  Cave’s intuition told him that for Blixa Bargeld it was the end of a creative road together.  And Kylie Minogue is brought in too, twenty years after recording the Wild Roses song “I actually had to skim read your biography,” she confesses cheekily.  As is Darian Leader and Ray Winstone.  The day is artificially constructed to seem true, and yet like a story it is fake and yet it delves into truth.

This day is the precious result of all the days.  It is a day, which, like one of Nick Cave’s songs, tells the story of all the richness of a day.  It tells how all the days, containing those signs and messages and meanings, which Cave superstitiously notes down, can build the path of future days.  It tells how all the pains, and memories of the past can create the loves of the future.

Nick Cave, our troubadour, inhabits the twelve hours of a day, like he would the stanzas of a song, the keys of a piano or notes on a sheet of music.  He says, “A song brings out a hero in the listener.” Stories awaken our spirit. He tells Kylie how for him an audience is the group on the front row, and he tells his stories to them alone.

“I live to perform” he says.  Telling stories, writing songs, is Cave’s mission. He shows you how he writes a song.  “A song is just counterpoint” he says.  “You bring one line on, and then the second line is there to react with the first line.  That is when something happens: in the third line”

This film is a poem.  It tells of the fire of life.  It tells of the importance of all lives.  Not just Nick Cave’s, but a life in general.  “Life,” he says, “is a flame that will only disappear and fall into darkness if you don’t protect that flame and make something of it, letting nothing discourage you.”  He tells of his important shit: such as a piece of Nina Simone’s gum belonging to Warren Ellis (which he jealously covets) or a photo of someone peeing on the stage while The Birthday Party play in Berlin. Objects are physical proof of internal changes, kept in forensic bags.  He tells of his successes, he tells of his adversities. He confesses going to church, shaking the vicar’s hand and then going off to score.  We hear of the death of his father.  We hear of his father’s first encouragement and the signs of his father’s own passionate love of Nabokov’s Lolita, the flame lighting him up, and inspiring him.  How his father had secretly watched his performance and said he performed like an angel.

We hear of Cave’s poignant moments. How pain can make beauty.  We hear how love can make pain.  We hear how life is godly and life is lonely and life is frightening.  We see how memories can make our present.  How the past can inform the future.

“My biggest fear is losing my memory” Cave says, “because what I remember, those memories of people and the past are what makes me.  They don’t play a part in my life now, but they are still important to me”.  Real curators play the role of curators with white gloves handle the artefacts he has collected and kept: torn pieces of paper, notes, scribbled drawings.  Pieces of life are preserved, becoming like a museum, but life is also alive and something that controls us, something bigger than us. Though each day is a separate story, the question of this film is that all the days contain tentacles of life into which grow the next day, feeding story from story. 

The setting of Brighton in itself is a place which Nick Cave says “chose me, rather than me choose it”  “I think a place chooses you, rather than the other way around”

proving that geography is a place where meetings can take place to metamorphose the soul.  

“All the objects I keep have touched my soul” “I’ve always shoved objects in a bag, and kept them somewhere” he says.  We feel in this film, like The Christmas Carol, the ghosts of the past, the ghosts of the future and a crying reminder to everyone how these ghosts are here to inform us and remind us of one thing: the preciousness of our days on earth and that our future is born of all those tiny moments in a day.

He reminds us of what is true for all of us: that life is made of small moments.  His honesty is exposed in a diary along with recording the weather, another thing in life beyond our control, and life’s narrative, uniquely perceived and understood by each one of us.  Just like a song is not true and is fictional, it is however composed of truth.

Nick Cave’s 20,000th day on earth is a story about a man's life, that is a fiction and yet captures a masterly day, a result from years of insights to guide future decisions, a day to inform and delight us all.  It is about the specialness of just a day and all the combats within that day and it awakens our hero within us and is a thrilling pleasure to watch.