By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Out of the Cave: what follows a Proposition
Proposition screenwriter, murder balladeer and all-round mustache man Nick Cave talks new projects with Bernard Zuel at Sydney Morning Herald upon the release of a new album by a four-piece group drawn from his Bad Seeds that he’s calling Grinderman. “The 49-year-old father of four is in a well-fitted brown pinstripe suit with a blue patterned shirt, thin legs stretched out and ending in little black boots… [A]s ever he is dressed somewhere between stylish and sharp. That preternaturally black hair is long, swept back off the high forehead in a flourish, though you can see a bald patch at the crown… [A]musement twitches at the corners of his mouth. Well, what you can see of his mouth under an extravagant moustache. Grown for a film role but retained when he saw how much it offended some people, the mo is part bushranger, part ’70s porn star. It looks somehow appropriate on the man who [wrote] the starkly brutal Australian western The Proposition. And he has described one of the film scripts he’s working on now as a “British sex romp” called Death of a Ladies’ Man. Its central character is a sex-addicted man who sells beauty products in Brighton, near Cave’s home… “Well, I’m nearly 50 and I’m not doing anything that I don’t enjoy any more… just don’t involve myself in anything that doesn’t look like I am going to enjoy it from the start. I guess the days of deep despair and anxiety in the studio are behind me. And it’s been like that for a while, actually. It’s not to say that I’m not without that in the writing process or when I’m on my own in the office and have to write songs. But pretty much we have an unspoken agreement that you don’t bring your shit into the studio…. A lot of what I write these days I’m writing to entertain myself, and it’s not that they’re not serious songs any more, but there is a lightness to them I’m really pleased about.”