Old Nick and me

His powerful 1988 prison drama Ghosts... Of The Civil Dead was co-written by and featured an unforgettable cameo from Cave, and more recently they collaborated on the bushranger western The Proposition.

PETER MURPHY: I believe the original idea for Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead came about when Evan English was staying with Nick in LA and heard some of the Charles Manson prison tapes Henry Rollins and SST were thinking about releasing. Then you both became interested in acquiring the rights to Jack Henry Abbot’s book In The Belly Of The Beast.
JOHN HILLCOAT: That was the original genesis, in that, because Evan was over in LA, I got him to try and secure the rights to the book. There was a brief correspondence, but Jack Henry Abbot had really had enough of anyone in the media. In the end he got quite angry, because he felt he was a bit of a victim of the media, and I think he was out of his depth when it came to the big outside world.

The script evolved from an almost Dante-esque vision of the penitentiary system, which changed as you researched the modern ‘New Generation’ prisons. One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the Kubrickian visuals, the sterile pastel colours. The prison itself takes on the air of this monstrous organism that lives off the inmates.
Initially our sources were just second-hand: literature and films and documentaries and stuff. But in doing more and more research I came across an article about these ‘New Generation’ prisons and they looked like this campus. And since Evan was in LA, I got him to drive out and check them out, and when he saw them he said they were just incredible. I went over and joined him, and we did this sort of huge research trip, and discovered that there were plans to introduce these prisons in Australia. Nick wasn’t involved in that, although we used some of the basics of the characters and some of the ideas that Nick and I worked on in Melbourne. There were different writers at different points, and then Evan and I were overtaken by this bizarre world in the desert. We realised it had a whole new take on prison films, and was an important statement on the modern world, so we really went into that realm, and Nick felt that it was time to hand the script over to us, and we got Gene Conkie to write it with all this new research. We ended up being magpies, picking the best bits. We tried to be as uncompromising as possible, that was the key word.

What was the atmosphere like during the shoot?
Oh, it was horrible. But it was funny, the ex-inmates and cops and ex-soldiers in the actual cast were fantastic to work with, but the crew, working in that environment, the content just got under everyone’s skin and it was chaos. It got really nasty at times. Bizarrely enough, I ended up thinking, “Shit, these ex-cons and real hardened people are actually a lot more pleasant to work with than some of my so-called compatriots.”

One of the central ideas of the story is that when the authorities instigate a lockdown, the prisoners have their privileges revoked and are confined to their cells. This provokes a riot, thus justifying the funding of a more hi-tech, high-security complex. What was the reaction of the authorities towards what the film was saying?
Well, bizarrely enough, and this is I think because there’s so much realism put into it, we discovered it was being shown inside prisons and being used in training centres, and the Home Office had a copy, so God knows what was going on inside their heads and how they interpreted it. They must have thought, “This is a good way of taking care of this problem,” and, “Watch out for when an inmate does that.” So that was really horrible. We snuck copies into the prisons for the actual inmates to watch to try and get a balance.

You finally managed to secure financing for The Proposition in 2005. You and Nick had been nurturing the idea of a bushranger western for a long time.
It’s a strange thing; the bushranger film actually predates the western. The Story Of The Kelly Gang from 1906 is probably the world’s first feature film. But because the bushranger film was largely based on this one character, Ned Kelly, it became like a colonial costume drama. Even during the ’70s, when Australia stopped burying its head in the sand and became interested in its own history, those films were reasonably romanticised. But Nick and I have been working on this idea for 18 years, on a brutal wider picture of those times, and we were surprised that a genre didn’t appear in all that time. The traditional Western is mythological – bad cowboys wear black hats. We were more interested in the westerns that emerged in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, particularly the films of Sam Peckinpah, Robert Altman and Terrence Malick. Those films still exude that mythic quality, a relationship to the landscape, while revising and opposing the genre.

He’s a musician and you’re a director – how does that work?
We have this dynamic where I listen to music all the time and Nick watches movies – more than anyone I know in fact. We’re both interested in turning genres on their heads, so when I eventually asked him to write the screenplay I knew he could, having listened to his narrative songs. The lyrical quality and the Australian-ness throughout could only have come from him. Also, that perverse black humour is something we both share. You can see it in videos we’ve made together and in this film. More certainly than you’ll find in Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead.

Between Ghosts… and The Proposition, you shot more than half a dozen Bad Seeds promo clips. Is it a challenge to work with a band who profess to hate making videos so much?
I don’t want to overturn the myth, but in terms of them hating them so much, I’ve had quite a different experience. I mean, they don’t like being in front of cameras and waiting around, but I guess I’ve got a bit of privileged relationship in terms of the history, just hearing about how they are on other shoots. Warren, Blixa, Mick Harvey, Thomas Wydler and Nick are all into cinema and really know their films. Nick’s very visually sophisticated and likes talking about ideas, and it becomes a kind of collaboration. They are very different from bands that grumble, show up, have no interest and just want to get the hell out.

For the ‘Loverman’ video you filmed the band undergoing hypnosis.
They actually loved the idea of being hypnotised. At that point they were also used to performing under the influence, and of course you can’t hypnotise people under the influence, so it was quite a challenge for them on that level! We got a professional hypnotist in. It was very interesting, because some people are more prone to being hypnotised than others. That was a bit of an eye opener. The most susceptible was the person I thought would be the hardest, Mick Harvey. I have to say, the temptation to have him doing silly things was very high. The bit where his hands are shaking, the hypnotist had to stop us filming, because apparently your blood sugar levels drop, and he was so deep under, the hypnotist said it could’ve been dangerous.

You shot ‘Do You Love Me’ in a pole dancing club in Sao Paulo, where many of the dancing girls were drag artists.
That was an amazing experience. Everyone in that video is the real thing, it was a real location, so it was quite a remarkable time. We did a lot of research, going into clubs and finding the best clubs, and the girls were great, or the guys, you could never tell which. The club owners were a bit of a worry, and the clientele were an even bigger worry.

The clip for ‘15 Feet Of Pure White Snow’ featured cameos from Jarvis Cocker, Noah Taylor and Jason Donovan, who appeared to be having some sort of drunken religious experience.
Well, he was. He, in fact, could easily have stolen the entire show. Easily. Everyone’s jaws dropped. We all thought, “Jarvis will just walk in here and show us all up,” but actually it was Jason. Nick was so impressed he was vaguely entertaining the idea of asking Jason to be a new member of the Bad Seeds. We had so much good footage we could have done the video alone on Jason, he just was incredible.

If someone had told me 20 years ago that Nick Cave would end up working with both Kylie and Jason, I’d have had them committed.
Nick’s got an incredible sense of humour. In one sense you think he’s just being really perverse, but it’s hard to explain. They’re mutually attracted to their opposites, and Jason certainly has another side to him. I don’t know about Kylie!