'I wake.'
'I write.
'I eat.'
Mmm, I've probably had more meals with you than my wife.
'I watch TV.'
Want some?
'This is the place.
'This is where we live.'
'This is my 20,000th day on Earth.'
This film does a rather clever thing, really,
that it, erm...
reveals more than I think has been revealed
in anything about me before.
Erm, but at the same time,
creates more mystery by revealing that.
I mean, there's a kind of juggling act that happens in the film.
Do you love performing still?
I live for it.
There's something that happens on stage where you are transported.
Nick had started to work on his new record
and he called and said,
look, why don't you come into the studio with some cameras,
cos no-one's ever done that.
Kind of right at the beginning,
when him and Warren are writing and it's very, very early days
and normally they wouldn't let anyone
anywhere near them with a camera.
But because we've kind of got to know each other pretty well
over the last few years, and we're kind of, you know,
good at keeping out of the way and being low-key.
So Nick had said, "Come in and shoot some stuff, see what you get."
And the stuff we got was just amazing,
just absolutely floored us
that we were getting this kind of access
to such a sort of intimate moment of creation.
And so we just knew immediately we had to do something bigger.
They suggested making a Nick Cave documentary,
and this was something I had no interest in doing whatsoever,
because, to me, a Nick Cave documentary
meant telling the same story that gets told
in all the editorials and biographies
and that sort of thing, that holds no interest...
My story, as such, holds no interest to me, really.
Erm, so I kind of agreed to allow them to...
To work at something,
as long as it was something that was different,
something that no-one had seen before,
and they kind of went ahead
and did this and, I think, produced something that was...
extraordinary, really.
This is a world I'm creating.
A world full of monsters and heroes,
good guys and bad guys.
It's an absurd, crazy, violent world,
where people rage away
and God actually exists.
We had those two cycles
that play out in the film.
One is the very simple cinematic structure
of a day in the life.
Your audience knows where they're at,
it's a journey,
you're going from one end of the day to the other.
And then, parallel to that,
we have the creative cycle,
the journey of a song
from the moment that the lyrics pop into Nick's head
or the melody begins to take form on the piano,
all the way through demoing, rehearsals,
and then onto the stage of the Sydney Opera House.
We had an agreement to begin with that I would...
..allow myself to be kind of put through certain scenarios,
which, quite frankly,
I was extremely doubtful that it would be successful.
Erm, knowing that I could remove anything that I didn't like.
So when they wanted to film me waking up in the morning with my wife,
this idea was kind of ludicrous to me.
The idea of standing in front of a mirror half-naked
and looking at myself in the mirror
also filled me with a certain amount of horror.
But, you know, they filmed it in a mysterious sort of way,
and it worked.
The opening scene of Nick waking up in bed, really,
was, as much as anything, a kind of in-joke for us,
that it was kind of almost the most intimate moment
you could share with someone
is that moment where they wake up in the morning in bed with their wife,
and that we kind of start there and then immediately just run
to somewhere completely different.
As you get older, your world shrinks. Erm...
What you have to write about
becomes less and less
and the imagination becomes more and more important, in a way,
and memory becomes more and more important.
And I think this became the overarching theme
because of that.
So, it was kind of interesting
to make a film where...
A film that masqueraded as real life,
as a day in the life of Nick Cave,
but at the same time was completely fictitious.
My biggest fear, I guess,
is losing my memory.
It does worry me at times
that I'm not going to be able to continue to do what I do,
and reach a place that I'm satisfied with.
Why's that?
Because memory is what we are.
You know, and I think that you're very soul
and your very reason to be alive
is tied up in memory.
Having known Nick for a period of time,
and having worked together in the past,
really taught us that we knew, from the very beginning,
that you have to hold Nick's attention.
If he gets bored, you lose him,
and suddenly you have a very different Nick.
So you've got to work quickly.
I don't like acting, I can't...
There's nothing worse than sitting around on a set
waiting to do your thing and all of that sort of stuff,
and to be doing that in a film that's about yourself
is even more hideous.
But, really, mostly I wanted some of the live stuff...
Some of the performances of the songs,
some of that rehearsal stuff,
erm, you know, I love that stuff.
That was really natural, that was really true.
So much more was in those performances
than you can ever get in a video.
We used the music as a way of enhancing some of the kind of beats,
the moments in the film,
and to give you a break
from endless philosophical thought and theory,
or storytelling.
For me, there's a kind of psychodrama
that goes on between singular people in the front row
that becomes very important
in the telling of the narratives of the songs.
I get a huge amount of energy from...
From picking up singular...
Really? Do you make it your mission to terrify them?
Well, it's that kind of mixture of awe and terror
that you can get from one person or a small group of people
that is really, erm...
That gives a huge amount of, erm...
energy to kind of transform yourself.
Hadn't seen Kylie in years, actually. Erm...
It kind of really brought home to me
how those sort of friendships can get lost
just because of how busy you are,
and life, and all that sort of stuff.
You know, the mythology is the story,
I think that's the thing.
The conceit somehow that you can get behind the mask of a rock star
is kind of bizarre
when you think about it too much, because, you know, a rock star,
as Nick says in the film, if they're any good,
the mask is gone, there is no mask.
They are the thing that they've created,
there's no mask to take away.
You know, Nick spent 35 years that we know of, in public,
creating the character that is Nick Cave,
and who knows how many years in his bedroom as a teenager before then,
and he is the thing that he's created.
My last will and testament.
OK, seems like I wanted all my money,
which was nothing, I would say, at that time,
to go to the Nick Cave Memorial Museum.
THEY LAUGH
A small but adequate room, or ruins,
that will serve as the Nick Cave Memorial Museum.
Do you remember writing it?
No.
It was... '87 was a...
It was a difficult year to remember, '87.
'80-anything was difficult.
You could make this film about anybody's creative process,
I don't think you'd make as good a film with anybody else.
I don't think anybody else would be quite so...
erm...strange,
and yet, profound.
You know, I've been involved in films, other films,
and there's always the core idea
and the core idea, the pure idea,
very rarely gets realised.
Film-making seems to be, to me at least,
a form of massive compromise.
And I was really struck
by how close the film is to the original idea.
It's something else when you go and see a film
and you can see that the artist's vision has been realised
and it hasn't been compromised and it...
It makes it through to the end,
and the credits come up
and you think, OK, that guy, or girl, or whoever,
has made a film...
that is true to what they want, or you get that feeling,
and that's the feeling I got from...
from 20,000 Days.