Nick Cave returns to a life in full colour in the 2022 film This Much I Know To Be True
Nick Cave’s life was shunted off course when one of his twin boys died in an accidental cliff fall. The Bad Seeds frontman has been renegotiating his position in the world, with a little help from his friends.
Nick Cave’s life was shunted off course when one of his twin boys, 15-year-old Arthur, died in an accidental cliff fall near the family home in Brighton, England, on July 14, 2015.
Up until that point, the Australian-born singer, songwriter, composer, screenwriter and novelist had lived a long and fruitful creative life that continued to ascend in surprising and fascinating ways.
For decades, he had been globally known and admired as a singular – and often fearsome – presence with microphone in hand, fronting a group of sharp-dressed men known as the Bad Seeds, a band he formed in Melbourne in 1983.
After the fall, though, Cave was presented with an unenviable challenge: how could he work through the most exquisitely painful loss a parent can experience while also being one of the world’s most recognisable and prolific performing artists?
This was a quandary with no correct answer, for a person cannot know how they will react to trauma until it is visited upon them. Slowly, cautiously, Cave opted to continue work with his bandmates on what would become Skeleton Tree, their 16th album, which they began before Arthur’s death and finished afterwards.
One day, the chief Bad Seed went into his local newsagent and saw an issue of the music magazine Mojo on the newsstand. In the fog of grief, he was struck by a sickening thought that had evaded him: at some point he would have to talk to the press about Skeleton Tree, and what had happened, and he didn’t want to do that. Perhaps there was another way.
This is how the New Zealand-born filmmaker Andrew Dominik – best known for the 2000 film Chopper – was entrusted with bringing his cameras into Cave’s inner circle. Without clear plans or expectations for what they might find, he recorded an extraordinary documentary named One More Time With Feeling. It received a limited screening in cinemas worldwide on September 8, 2016, the day before Skeleton Tree’s release.
“It was a practical response to a practical problem, which was that he didn’t want to do press for the album, but he had to do something,” Dominik tells Review. “He realised that the situation had to be addressed in some way; there was no way not to address it.
“But that’s not what he asked me for. What he asked me to do was to come and just shoot the songs – but the songs would only add up to about 40 minutes, and if you’re going to sell tickets in a theatre, you need a little bit more time.
“So we had to shoot some other stuff.”
That “other stuff” included some wonderfully light moments, like Cave’s teenage son Earl visiting the studio, sitting at the mixing desk beside his dad and being introduced to what a sound engineer described as the “DFA button – ‘does f..k all’.”
The band sections were beautifully filmed, and the singer gave some of his most vulnerable and mesmerising vocal performances, most notably on the yearning track I Need You, where his high voice sounded like it was on the brink of collapse.
There were some truly devastating scenes, too, including one where Cave sat beside his wife, Susie, inside their home. Breathing back tears, she showed us a framed painting by Arthur, aged five, she had recently found in storage. It was a scene of the windmill near where he died. “I hid it for a while from Nick,” Susie said quietly. “It freaked me out, as well. Why is it framed in black?”
In on-screen interviews and voiceovers, Cave grappled with his new reality, noting that what he was doing for Dominik’s camera was frightening, as previously he would never have dreamed about the possibility of so baldly opening himself up in such a way.
On first viewing, Nick and Susie are said to have hated seeing themselves in the film, but loved seeing each other in all their tender vulnerability and excruciating reluctance. Previously, they were two birds trapped in an oil slick, incapable of moving – until watching Dominik’s film had a freeing effect that allowed them to start to move on.
In a voiceover, Cave had wondered what happens to a person when an event occurs that is so catastrophic that you change, from one day to the next, before answering himself: “You have to renegotiate your position in the world.”
That renegotiation has continued for nearly seven years, and its newest artefact is another film by Dominik, This Much I Know To Be True, a title taken from a lyric that appears in a recent Cave song named Balcony Man.
Filmed in March 2021 using a similar style that blends documentary and performance footage, it contains songs from the two most recent Cave releases: Ghosteen, his extraordinary 2019 double album with the Bad Seeds, which directly addresses his grief and loss; and Carnage, an album recorded with longtime collaborator Warren Ellis and issued last year.
Unlike its black-and-white antecedent, this new film – which will also be screened in cinemas globally for one night only – is in full colour, and the difference between the man at the centre of both documentaries is striking.
“I don’t think the Nick from One More Time With Feeling would believe that the Nick from This Much I Know To Be True was possible,” says Dominik, who is 54.
“With (the first film), he’s trying to take a step forward, and he’s failing; they’re still in the weight of the trauma, and it didn’t even seem like there was a way forward. He was faking it, and taking fake steps forward, and being honest about it in the film.
“In this film, Nick has actually recovered. I’m not saying that Nick wouldn’t turn the world around if he could, and he wouldn’t undo what’s happened. But he became determined, I think, to react to the loss as responsibly as possible because of the other people in his life that he loves.
“The loss is integrated into his life, and Nick’s a happy guy; he’s actually happy, for the most part. It’s been amazing to watch him because he’s had to work out how to lose Arthur, and he’s had to work out, ‘What’s the best and most responsible way to do it?’ In (the new film), he’s passing it on and telling us what he’s learned. It’s pretty simple, and it’s very beautiful and moving.”
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True to that sickening feeling of potential press intrusions he felt at his newsagent, Cave has spoken to very few journalists in recent years. One of those was this newspaper’s former music writer, Iain Shedden, in a Review cover story published in early 2017, ahead of the Bad Seeds’ national tour in support of Skeleton Tree.
Instead, he has sidestepped the usual press cycle demands on popular artists in favour of letting Dominik’s films do some of the talking for him. As well, he began an email newsletter named The Red Hand Files, where fans from around the world send in questions which he occasionally answers, and publishes online.
This unique form of engagement with his audience has chimed well with Cave, who clearly puts a lot of thought into addressing these queries. It has proved to be a handy way to reveal a different side of the musician that can be missed by those who have only ever seen him as a scowling man in a dark suit. Now approaching 200 responses, the results are often funny and wildly discursive; a recent favourite centred on Cave being mistaken for the actor Nicolas Cage.
In the new film, Dominik includes a scene with Cave at his laptop, scrolling through the 38,000 fans hoping for a response, with many of their posts containing thorny queries. “These are desperate questions from people who don’t have anyone to ask,” he says, frowning. “They literally keep me at the better end of my nature.”
Since becoming a sort of lightning rod and a public spokesman for grief, Cave has regularly used the email newsletter to address concerns centred on life, death, love and loss. In October 2018, when an American fan named Cynthia asked whether he and Susie felt they could communicate with Arthur in his absence, this is part of what Cave wrote back:
“I feel the presence of my son, all around, but he may not be there. I hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me, though he may not be there. He visits Susie in her sleep regularly, speaks to her, comforts her, but he may not be there. Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake. These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity. Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed.”
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Since joining the Bad Seeds in 1994, Ballarat-born multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis has become Cave’s closest collaborator. Their 2021 album Carnage is the newest expression of their connection, which has been solidified after nearly 20 years of work co-composing soundtracks for film and television, including Blonde, an upcoming film by Dominik centred on Marilyn Monroe’s life.
“I’m amazed when I see how much work Nick and I have done together,” Ellis tells Review. “I never foresaw any of that. As long as I’ve known him, Nick has been incredibly diligent and driven. I find it amazing that we can be putting out music these days that seemingly speaks to so many more people, and it’s on our terms. I guess I’m proud of that, but I’ve never been about making music for any other reason than I just simply love doing it.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and I feel incredibly grateful that somehow, I’m still here doing it. I never really had any designs that I was going to last the distance with this – because as we all know, a lot of really talented people don’t.”
As the new film underscores between song performances, Cave and Ellis are very different people; the singer is highly ordered in his thinking and writing, while the violinist and arranger is far more at home in chaos, as the extremely cluttered and disorganised filing system on the desktop of his laptop computer shows.
Yet both men are highly disciplined artists willing to chase every proverbial rabbit down every hole, just to see what they might find.
“What’s amazing about them is how they both believe in having a relationship with the unknown,” says Dominik. “They believe in not playing to their strengths. They believe in putting themselves in situations where they don’t know what’s going to happen, and seeing what comes out of them.
“Essentially, what they’re doing is making themselves vulnerable – and I think in order to do that, you have to really trust and love the other person, because it’s a very difficult thing to do. Their relationship is in the music: all the feelings they have about each other is in the music, and they make it look so easy.”
By leaning on Ellis, Dominik, Susie, Earl and plenty of other people, Cave is today a man transformed. Now 64, the new film shows that the showman we knew is back – a little more guarded, perhaps, but more commanding than ever.
After a pandemic-enforced holding pattern, his tour schedule has recently resumed, too, and will visit our shores later this year.
One of the best recent Bad Seeds songs, Jubilee Street, slowly builds from a slight, gentle introduction toward an awesome full-band conclusion, replete with a string section and a choir. It has become a fixture of Cave’s live sets since its release in 2013, and its closing lyrics have taken on new resonance as a life-affirming mantra for a man rebuilt.
In its thrilling final moments, Cave is on his feet, stalking the front of the stage and repeating with great urgency: “I’m transforming / I’m vibrating / Look at me now,” he sings. The ascent continues.
This Much I Know To Be True screens in cinemas nationally on Wednesday, May 11. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis will perform at Hanging Rock, Victoria, on November 25-26, with more tour dates to be announced.
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