Nick Cave
Nick Cave
Nicholas Edward "Nick" Caveis an Australian musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional film actor. He is best known as the frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, established in 1983, a group known for its diverse output and ever-evolving line-up. Prior to this, he fronted the Birthday Party, one of the most extreme and confrontational post-punk bands of the early 1980s. In 2006, he formed the garage rock band Grinderman, releasing its debut album the following year...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth22 September 1957
CountryAustralia
Well, as anyone who actually writes knows, if you sit down and are prepared, then the ideas come. There's a lot of different ways people explain that, but, you know, I find that if I sit down and I prepare myself, generally things get done.
The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new.
The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.
You know, an idea is just an idea. There seems to... the kind of epiphanies that you have, like the little sudden bursts of light, they're very small and they're very short and it's the pursuit of the idea that's the important thing. . . . I know a lot of people who have way better ideas than I do that-much more frequently than I do that just can't sit down and actually do it. Ideas are such are a little overrated really; it's the work behind the idea that's the important thing.
All of our days are numbered. We cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all, because the worth of an idea never becomes apparent until you do it.
I became a script writer with absolutely no idea of how to write a script whatsoever. I still feel a bit of an outsider in that regard. If I can maintain that approach to screenwriting, it can continue to be enjoyable.
To my undying shame, I do read reviews. I don't read them all, but I like to get some kind of idea how things are going.
They all have their share of thoughts about what needs to be done. So we just ignored them.
Our Easters were elaborate productions with these big Easter Egg hunts out in the woods, and it was always, like, major . There was a golden egg and these crazy Easter baskets. My mother had seven sisters, and they all had children, so we'd have like 40 kids doing stuff together. It was a very celebrated time, one of many, and I realize now how it affected me as a kid.
I've always been interested in both areas. For a long time, they were on a parallel plane, and I didn't dedicate myself to one or the other any less or any more. And then I just reached a revelation that it wasn't just about dance, it wasn't about fine art. It was about these two forces that were important to me, finding a medium that would allow me to investigate both.
This one's got a story rather than being a series of cool vignettes.
I was making them do things and make the decisions that I always wanted them to do in movies. I mean, we had no story, we only had the proposition, so I was just writing 10 pages a day and handing them over and seeing what happens.
I think for Johnny, Australia had its western story as well,
I guess in all these films, ... there is a sense that morality is a luxury that we can afford in less fraught times, but in extreme situations and extreme environments, morality becomes a very grey issue.