2.Main Content
Training
John Hillcoat & Nick Cave on The Proposition
Nick Cave and John Hillcoat joined a Script Factory/LFF audience to talk about The Proposition
A SCENE London event, in association with The Times bfi London Film Festival 2005
An Enticing Proposition
National Film Theatre - October 2005
Director John Hillcoat & Screenwriter Nick Cave
In conversation with Nick Roddick
The Proposition is released in cinemas across the UK on Friday 10 March 2006 by Tartan Film Distributors.
Nick Roddick
Nick, you’ve been talking about this project off and on for 17 years, and I’ve heard two or three different versions of how those years went by – would you like to talk us through it?
Nick Cave
I’ve known John for 18 or 19 years. He made a prison movie 17 years ago called Ghost of the Civil Dead and he was one of the filmmakers that hung around in the Melbourne scene at the time – there was a music scene, painters, filmmakers and so forth. Even before that, he was talking about making an Australian Western, and that I would do the music to it. He talked about it for another 17 years, and I kept saying “I know what I’m going to do for the music”. We talked about the music a lot and the different sorts of music that we liked in films, but there was no script forthcoming. Eventually, John got another scriptwriter, but we both felt it was like an American Western dumped in Australia. It didn’t have anything to do with Australia at all.
NR
So the aim was always to write an Australian Western?
John Hillcoat
As a teenager in Canada, I came across a book by Michael Ondaatje called Collected Works of Billy the Kid. It was an amazing book because it mixed fact with fiction, intercutting poetry with factual interviews. It had a resonance that I later found in Peckinpah films, but he was a Canadian. When I went back to Australia, after getting really inspired by American cinema in my teens, I had a desire to do something like that.
NR
So you figured that if a Canadian could write a Western, you as an Australian sure as hell could!
JH
Yes!
NR
In what way was it going to be different as an Australian Western?
JH
The history is very different, yet there are still similarities: people struggling with the environment, the climate, the outlaws and the law, trying to define the Empire. Although it is the Empire where it really changes, plus the indigenous culture in Australia. The clash with the British was an amazing history that I hadn’t seen in fiction films. The notable exception was The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith which was the great inspiration. We have Tommy Lewis who starred in that film in the audience today... I was a teenager when I saw that film and it made a big impact. I’d seen other Ned Kelly films and yet they didn’t have the ‘bigger picture’ in a way. They were more like biogs. They didn’t have the mythic lyrical thing that the Americans tapped into.
NR
Moving onto Nick’s script – you’ve written novels, poems, a song or two…
NC
I don’t write poems, they’re songs…
NR
This is the first time you’ve written a movie script. How did you approach doing it?
NC
John supplied me with a theme. He said, “Would you write an Australian Western?” We’d looked at this other script but he said, “Would you write it?” I said I would, but I’d been given a theme. So the act of writing it became simple because John had the idea and I just had to invent some characters and get them to write the script for me. That happened pretty fast.
JH
That surprised both of us. When we initially spoke about it, we were mutually sceptical about whether Nick could deal with the format of scripts because they’re different from songs and writing novels. Dialogue, for instance. We initially talked about Nick writing a treatment, or the bare bones, then get a professional screenwriter to flesh out the dialogue. But once Nick started, it took over.
NC
Treatments to me are a waste of time. I started to write the treatment, and then thought fuck it, I may as well write the script. I really enjoyed the dialogue once I got the hang of it.
NR
Did you go out and buy yourself a lot of expensive script formatting software?
NC
No. I had a coloured Apple Mac that everyone tells me is obsolete. What really took the time was the tapping along to get the name and centring it in the middle. That took an enormous amount of time and was very frustrating. [Laughter] We’ve since got FinalDraft and have written another film script and that cut it down to half the length. That was written in two weeks as opposed to four weeks… [Laughter]
NR
But it doesn’t sound like quite as much fun.
NC
I don’t want to talk about FinalDraft here, but it is really good, because once you get going you can just go bing!
NR
A lot of screenwriting schools say that you have to have the software to set yourself up to do it, but you’re proving that this is not the case.
NC
Well, I don’t know about that.
JH
Aside from the tab thing, I took it that the dialogue didn’t always work.
NC
Once there was a hard copy, I was basically fixing it up with handwriting, which was a hell of a lot quicker. It sounds like a running gag, but these things become intensely frustrating when you’re trying to write something. So, you know: fucking FinalDraft man! [Laughter]
NR
It’s a consciously 19th Century language. John mentioned that he’d read the Michael Ondaatje book, did you look at Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly book. Was that influential?
NC
I read that, and it felt enormously influenced by the Michael Ondaatje book. The fact/fiction thing. I was equally as taken by that book. The welding of fact and fiction and the poetry – it is actually just a collection of poems.
JH
The Carey book came out after you started.
NC
Fuck the Carey book. That didn’t have much influence!
NR
You mentioned three elements there: fact, fiction and lyricism (or poetry, whichever you want to call it and the latter part has to do with your song writing), but there is a factual basis to the story of The Proposition.
NC
No….
NR
Not the story itself, but the history.
JH
All the events were similar events. It was echoing similar things that had happened.
NC
Yes, but there wasn’t a guy that was sent to kill his brother up in the hills, and all that sort of stuff.
JH
But there were the intense conflicts with the bushrangers, and a lot of the Aboriginal scenarios were based on things that were occurring. We were like magpies. Samuel Stoke was kind of inspired by Gus Winkle, in that he was a bushranger that was 14 years old. This guy died in a shoot out with police when he had just turned 15. There were things like that. Obviously Samuel Stoke’s character was completely different.
[First clip – Ray Winstone character offers Guy Pearce character ‘the proposition’ ]
NR
The way that you present that proposition: you start with a close-up of Ray Winstone and end with a close-up of Guy Pearce, and in between you cut into five or six other scenes. Was that the way you wrote it, or the way it evolved? How did you go from that sequence as formulated in the script, to that sequence of shots?
JH
There were flash-forwards of Charlie riding out and Mikey being led away. That was in the script and there was a rhythm to it all. There were things that did change around a little bit. We were very keen to avoid using flashback in the film, and for a while they were under a bit of pressure to at least shoot a flashback of what happens at the Hopkins. What happened was that the Charlie character going through the house we thought was enough to tell that. So it was a bit of both. The structure was already in the script of the flash-forwards and stuff, but we did move it around a bit in the edit.
NC
There was also pressure to clarify what happens at the Hopkins’ Ranch and there’s a bit of dialogue at the very end there where it goes on about Arthur Burns being an abomination. That was put in later on, and I was quite unhappy about that because to me it sounds like some exposition, which isn’t necessary. At times there were a load of cold feet about the clarity of the thing and certain compromises were made.
NR
So the pressure was on you to make a more directly narrative story that explained more.
NC
Only in early edits of it, certain people found it confusing or felt that more needed to be said about the backstory. The one thing I will never do again in a script, if I ever write another one, is do a fucking backstory that’s for sure! When I watch it as a scriptwriter, [I think] it would’ve been nice if he had walked into that situation with no dialogue on the top.
NR
How do you work on the rhythm of that because when I first saw the movie I was aware of the fact that it was a Western, not so much by all the iconography and the shots, but by the pacing of it and the use of close-ups and the use of music, particularly as in a Peckinpah Western. The opening sequence is almost out of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid – the shoot up in the whorehouse. How did the two of you as writer/composer and director, create that rhythm? Was it there in the script?
NC
I think it was there in the script. We both like counterpoint – going into one scene which is directly opposed in an emotional way from the next scene, so you’re jarred and lulled, then jarred back awake.
JH
We consciously wanted to avoid the standard narrative build-up of one twist after another that’s all accelerating. There is a bit of that but predominantly we wanted to contrast moments of lyrical beauty and tenderness between Martha and Stanley. It’s all about contrast with sudden eruptions. It’s a stop/start structure that’s there.
NR
You spend a lot of your time writing words for music and you’re here writing words for images, and I wonder if there are any similarities in the way you approach it?
NC
When I’m writing it I’m always speaking the words out loud. There needed to be a beauty and rhythm, melody and lyricism to the language, which I thought was an easier thing to do because it’s a language of long ago, so there’s a sort of florid verbosity in it. We’ve since done a contemporary script with contemporary language and it’s been a similar kind of thing: it’s about rhythm. I guess that comes from years of writing songs really.
JH
I also remember reading an interview where Scorsese says all his films are five acts, not three. For various filmmakers, that three act structure has come out of theatre. Films can have different rhythms. Nick’s musical sense really helps with finding an internal rhythm.
NR
Would you say that The Proposition has five acts?
JH
I don’t think in acts, and I let other people say, “That’s act one, two, three”. I never, ever think that way.
NC
I never read that interview, and certainly I don’t think that way. It seemed important to get the story moving fast, which comes from me having a pretty low attention span when I watch a lot of films, and I really like a film where I know what’s going on immediately and I can sit back and watch the action unfold. I wanted to do that – I’m going to present you with a proposition, the film is called The Proposition…
NR
And that comes four or five minutes in…
NC
…Yeah. Then you’re able to look at character development which is much more interesting to me than the action as such.
JH
Then the characters drive the story rather than the other way round. That happens a lot these days where there are so many twists and turns that the characters and the actors are just servicing a construct or a contrivance.
NR
The script is sparse and elusive at the same time. The part where Emily Watson walks down the main street and people turn and look away from her, and doors shut, and she finally goes to speak to the butcher. You have the whole history of her in the town in that one walk down the street, and there are only two lines of dialogue, and that’s about turkeys. Similarly, the first real scene on the cliff top between the two brothers doesn’t have a great deal of dialogue. The dialogue is shot from behind them a lot of the time – but it’s about the landscape in front of them. The landscape becomes equally as important as the character. Do you agree?
JH
Nick and I spoke about that right from the beginning. The real catalyst in the desire to make this happen was the production designer, Chris Kennedy, took me on this incredible journey into the interior, and we crossed the Simpson Desert, and we went through the Outback. The power of the land was like a force that I’ve never encountered, and I’ve been all around the world and I’ve never come across that kind of power. Nick comes from a country town, not quite like the one in the film. But knowing the land was a huge thing.
NR
So the landscape was almost a shock to you when you experienced it in that way.
JH
Yes. What struck me as a difference to the American West was that it was even more extreme and harsh, and yet the sunsets were even more breathtaking. There was a conscious decision to explore the way that extreme environment affects people, which I think Nick did brilliantly with the whole Martha/Stanley thing. It’s an allegory for the way Empires try and impose their will against absurd odds.
NR
How do you write landscape?
NC
The whole thing originated from the landscape. It seemed to me a landscape that was both very brutal and very beautiful at the same time. That was the kind of film we wanted to make: a beautiful brutal film.
NR
As are the characters a product of the landscape too. The one extraordinary thing is the level of culture that Arthur Burns (the John Hurt character) has.
JH
It’s the time that psychopaths always get sentimental, around sunsets…
NC
About who’s good and who’s evil – we wanted to dispense with that from the beginning. I’m tired of watching films where you have an evil guy and every shot that he’s in, they try to make him as evil as he possibly can, and everything that he does is so fucking evil. To me that’s intensely tedious and boring, and untrue.
NR
Does the Sergeant have his moments of beauty and grace?
NC
Well, just look at him!
[Second Clip – the two brothers on the hill over-looking the sunset]
NR
There’s obviously a classic instance of dramatic irony there, in the sense that he is lying about Molly O’Boyle. We know that he’s lying and he knows that he’s lying, but does Arthur know, or does he guess do you think?
JH
Yes. What I discussed with Danny is that he doesn’t know exactly the details, but he senses it because he’s one of those scary people with a keenness of mind that knows things. I think he even knows that eventually his brother has got to kill him. But we didn’t want to spell it out too much. Hence when Sergeant Lawrence tries to tell him about what Charlie is up to and the deal that is made with Stanley, he’s not interested because he already knows at that point that it’s already over.
NR
There’s another deeper irony too, which is all the constant references to family throughout the film. Family is in some ways sentimentally sacred to Arthur. There’s the great line when they’re riding out at the very end where they define misanthrope, and the young guy says, “are we misanthropes, Arthur?”, and the reply is “no, we’re family”. Is there a sense of irony in that, because the Ray Winstone character has no family?
NC
What hangs over the film, and certainly over Ray and Emily’s relationship, is the fact that they don’t have children. It’s never spoken about until the very end where she talks about a dream that she’s had. They’re childless and incomplete because of it. Whereas Stanley’s nemesis actually has a family, as fucked up as it is. He’s constantly going on about family, which is a beautiful irony and a haunting thing that I thought they brought out beautifully in their relationship.
NR
How did you work with those three main actors: Ray Winstone, Danny Houston and Guy Pearce, all of whom look like they’re melting away in the heat (which probably on location they were). Danny Houston is an elegant kind of guy normally, but here he looks like shit. Is this just part of what Ray Winstone calls ‘the horror of the place’?
JH
It was also a thing that I had a bugbear about all the period films that I’ve seen in those times, where they’ve got the grubby clothes. The clothes are authentic, the hair is authentic, but they’ve got beautiful white teeth. When I first met Guy Pearce talking about the film, he’s a real stickler for detail, and we ended up having more conversations about teeth and hair than anything else. We mutually wanted to embark upon making it as real as possible, because I’m also a greater believer in trying to transport you into another time and place through details. The entire cast were excited by taking it to those degrees. Then the dates slid into summer in the outback and gave it an extra layer of reality in terms of the heat and Ray’s whole body language. The person that suffered the most was Emily, which was true to the character as well. She was the one that was trying to hold it together, was missing England and was trapped in a corset.
NR
So you made her dress up just to get the character right?
JH
The actors were equally vigilant of the detail and getting it right. Also, one of the things I loved about the anti-Westerns (say, Peckinpah) was that they did bring a gritty reality to those times, and the actors really wanted to go there. The extremes out there were amazing, so it worked for us, instead of against us. Logistically it worked against us, but in every other way it worked for us.
NR
The whole structure of the movie is very simple, it’s built around the proposition in which there can be no winner. There is no way out of the deal that Ray Winstone sets. It’s the same notion as Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, that people are on a crash course and they’re going to kill each other no matter how much they love one another. The same happens for virtually every character in the film. Ray Winstone puts himself on the line with that proposition and suffers as a result of it. It’s like a Greek tragedy in that sense, and the Greek tragedy and the Western come together in an extraordinary way.
NC
I didn’t think that.
NR
But you thought about the inexorability.
JH
There is a fatalism and destiny.
NC
There’s no way out of the ending. I didn’t know the story when I was writing it. I knew the proposition, and writing my pages and sending them to Johnny each evening, but neither of us knew where it was going or what was going to happen at the end except that it wasn’t going to be good. It couldn’t be good.
JH
We knew ultimately that all these characters would not come out unscathed, and that they’re all morally compromised. It was the futility of violence that we were trying to get to.
NC
The great pleasure for me was to systematically dismantle these people as I went along. They were people who were living in an environment where they just shouldn’t be, in some respects had no right to be and simply couldn’t win in.
NR
Were the Aboriginal people a strong presence in the script? Because they do belong in that landscape, they can operate in it, yet they’re also being ripped apart by these forces which are greater than they are. Is that the way you saw the history of Colonisation?
NC
We wanted to deal with Aboriginals in a way that they were very much a part of the film rather than as an agenda. That it wasn’t a film made so that white people could see what the Aboriginal situation was all about. We wanted the Aboriginals to be incorporated into the meat of the story. That was the only part of the whole thing that I researched to some degree and found that what I’d learned at school was quite wrong. There was much violence going on between Aboriginals and there was a resistance to the whites. This was an eye-opener and really exciting to put into a script, because there are very few Australian films that deal with that.
JH
In doing the research, I remember coming across the fact that the thing that Ned Kelly feared the most were the black trackers, and yet no Ned Kelly film has that. At that time, every aspect of life was being affected by that clash and we were just showing it in a matter of fact way as part of the fabric of life at that time. One of the greatest experiences was what the cast brought to the film. One of my favourite details was when Toby leaves and says “Merry Christmas” and takes off his shoes, then leaves them there. That came from Rodney who when we were talking about the scene said that for black fellows, wearing leather shoes, it’s the first thing that they get rid of given the chance. If they were going walkabout, it’s the first thing they would do, so it was a symbolic gesture. Tommy Lewis also brought in at rehearsals that he really wanted to kill David Gulpilil. Nick and I were wondering whether it was an ego rivalry thing. Then we realised, as Tommy explained it, that of course the black tracker, as played by David Gulpilil, would be for Two Bob the first and highest priority to eliminate because he betrayed their people and was from an enemy tribe. It was things like that that enriched the film.
NR
It is difficult not to remember all the other films that David Gulpilil played in.
JH
Yes, there was a great history between the two actors. The notion of black on black violence was taboo.
NR
But it was a detail, not an agenda.
JH
That’s right. But it was such a major aspect of that period, and we wanted to be as brutal and honest about it as possible. It was that collaboration and research that really enriched it.
NR
Nick, you said you sent your pages to John each night. Is that they way you worked? Did you fax it or email it to him? What was the process?
NC
I emailed it, and would ring up a couple of hours later. It was an extremely exciting thing to write, for me. The difficulty with song writing is to think - to constantly have to think about what I’m going to write about. Then once you’ve finished a song you’re back to that point again and you’re slumped in your chair thinking, “what the fuck am I going to write about?”. This goes on and on with song writing. With the script, you’ve got one idea. You’re given a theme and you can just run with it.
NR
What were the conversations that would take place two hours later?
NC
Did you get the pages! John would say, “I love the way you did this”. I’d say “I like that too, and hey, did you like that bit?” It was like that. It was exciting.
JH
I was a bouncing board really, and fed some research and things.
NC
I don’t have that with song writing. I don’t go to my guitarist and say, I’ve written a new song. That doesn’t happen. So in that respect it was a true collaboration.
NR
You’ve said that writing scripts was a hell of a lot easier than writing songs.
NC
Yes, it is. For those very reasons.
NR
Were there any stages where you thought it went off in a direction that wasn’t right? And you as a filmmaker [John], who was working with a first time scriptwriter, felt that it wasn’t going the right way. Did you feel the need to stop him?
JH
No. The exciting thing was that we mutually expected that dialogue would be an issue, but immediately, with the set up of the proposition, it just took off.
NC
John had done an enormous amount of research and he gave me a pile of stuff that he thought I was going to read. But I found I could run things through him, and say “Do you think this could happen” or “Did this happen with guns”, or whatever and John knew his stuff.
NR
So you did no real research?
NC
Well, I read a book about the Aboriginal situation. But, you know, it’s a film script.
JH
But Nick has also watched more films than anyone I’ve ever met. Sometimes several a day so, over the years, there has been some kind of absorption going on.
NC
I watch an enormous amount of videos, and I watch them without any kind of discrimination whatsoever. I go into the video store and just get three.
NR
Is there anything that has particularly influenced you?
NC
It all has, in that you watch things and you learn what not to do and what to do. Films for me are different from what they are to you. For me they are a distraction, something that I can get involved in. There’s a story that lasts for two hours and takes me away from things. It’s a very different experience that I have when I listen to music. I can’t listen to music without being analytical about it. I can’t really listen to background music.
NR
Would you say that you were the other way around John – that you can listen to background music but have to watch films?
JH
In my free time I listen to music more than I watch films, so there’s something there that works.
[Third clip where David Wenham visits Ray Winstone at home]
NR
That’s probably one of the longest sequences of one single piece of dialogue in the film, that you don’t break up with any flashbacks, flash-forwards or any other shots. It’s also the moment in which Captain Stanley’s relationship begins to fall apart, and he is finished. The proposition that he has made is going to destroy him as much as it’s going to destroy Charlie. Am I right in seeing it that way?
NC
It’s basically his death sentence. If they go ahead and flog Mikey, then everything is going to come down on him. It was nice to bring in Martha at that point to bring in the cup of tea.
NR
You bring her in at that point, “you gentlemen are going to give a hundred lashes, I thought you might like a cup of tea”. It’s almost comic as a juxtaposition. You bring her in a second time, when David Wenham’s character raises his voice intentionally, so that she can hear it. There’s a subtext of class there isn’t there?
NC
He did well for himself. He married up.
Audience member
Did Nick have any actors in mind when he finished the script, and did he agree with the director in who was cast?
NC
Actually no. Except Guy. He was the first person we pursued. There wasn’t a lot of dialogue for Guy, and we needed someone who was really tightly wound and had a face that everything goes on in. I’d seen several roles where Guy had done this really well. There was LA Confidential, for example, where he is fantastic, and also Rules of Engagement. He’s incredible in that film and he doesn’t have much dialogue, but there is so much going on in his face. He’s so wound up (he has a jaw thing going on). He was in the back of my mind. The others we discussed later on.
JH
Guy was the first, at a very early stage, when we were still tinkering with the script.
NC
We couldn’t get to Guy, because I think he was having some kind of nervous breakdown for a year. We’d sent the script early on and he received it, but he had decided that he didn’t want to be an actor anymore. It was an intensely frustrating year trying to get hold of him. Eventually we managed to get his home number and I rang him and said, “Listen, it’s Nick Cave here. Would you read the fucking script?”.
NR
Was that the first time you’d spoken to him?
NC
Yes. I think he was smoking pot at the time.
JH
He thought it was a gag initially.
NC
Then he came on board and it was a huge relief. We could then work on getting the other actors, a brother, that was a convincing brother for him, and so on.
NR
Ray Winstone is almost playing against type. He’s sensitive and depressed. Tim Roth once said that when he cast him for War Zone, he’d written on the script “Not Ray Winstone: too thuggish” and that’s absolutely the way he isn’t in this movie.
NC
I was worried about Ray initially. It was John who was rooting for him. I’d seen him in particular sorts of roles, but as soon as it came to rehearsals and he did this stuff, it was extraordinary what he brought to it. There was a vulnerability. He had a script where he could be vulnerable, and he brought an emotive quality to the whole thing and a tenderness with Emily which was extraordinary.
NR
Did you write his headaches into the script?
NC
Yes.
JH
There was something special in having actors like Ray Winstone and Danny Houston in that they stretched themselves. It was exciting having Danny play a dark force, especially because we’re used to a jovial, beautiful man. Likewise with Ray, the vulnerability and the depth that he has, that’s really exciting.
AM
What is your new screenplay all about?
NC
I can’t tell you that, except that it’s really fucking good and took two weeks to write. [Laughter]
JH
We’re still working on it.
NR
Guy Ritchie says it took him three years to write the script for Revolver.
NC
He should get FinalDraft…
Audience Member
Why do you think this is the first film to use the genre of the Western against the Australian landscape?
JH
That’s a question I kept asking myself because I couldn’t believe it, I thought it was the obvious genre for Australia. The first feature film I ever made was The Kelly Gang, so bushranger films pre-dated the Western. But it struck me that they became biog costume dramas and didn’t have the broader canvas of Westerns. All the bushranger films either survived or died depending on their relationship with the Aboriginal community. Maybe it was with the trackers that go with them or the bush knowledge that kept them away. With the landscape and all the mythical stuff, it has surprised me. It’s also with the brutality of Australia’s history, which is one of the most racist and bloodiest histories of any country, there has been a slight reluctance to get our hands dirty, so maybe that’s all part of it.
AM
Did you have any landscape in mind when you wrote the script, and how much does your music influence your writing?
NC
We had the Australian landscape in mind. There were certain physical things, like a rock ledge that hung out, specific things that were in the script. I come from Victoria, which isn’t really the Outback, but it is the bush. When I arrived in Winton, I saw some photographs that Benoît Delhomme had taken (the DP), they were extraordinarily beautiful and I couldn’t believe that I’d never seen Australia depicted so beautifully before. He was a Frenchmen, so I suppose he approached it with a different kind of eye. The way it looks is to do with Johnny, scouting for the location, finding the right place to do it and Benoît’s photography.
JH
One of the strangest things for me, whilst editing in post, was to discover that my father had found all these photographs of his father, and his father’s father (my great grandfather) and it turns out that they both lived and worked as cattle drivers not only in Winton, but in the actual station that we were filming in. I had no idea about that. Logistically, we were looking at South Australia first, and it was other things that drew us to Queensland.
NR
Like the heat and the flies.
JH
We also happened to pick locations that were sacred sites, which is very tricky.
AM
Scriptwriting is very difficult, and you happen to be very quick. How long did it really take you to write this script?
NC
Three weeks to get the first draft out (120 pages). Then it went to the Film Council and they said, “How much money do you want?”. Then it sat there for two years. Then we were about to make it, and someone there read it and thought, “fuck, this is a mess!”. So we did a quick overhaul which took two days and knocked it into shape, and that was that. How long do yours take? I don’t have the patience to get involved in a project that takes a long time. It takes a certain type of person that is able to do that. John does, and a film director needs to have that ability to apply themselves in that way. I look at John in amazement, The Proposition took years to get off the ground and to get made. To be able to hang on to one idea like that is, to me, amazing.
AM
Do you write your songs that fast too?
NC
A song can take a month to write and is a whole different thing. I’m plumbing a different part of myself there that I find difficult to do. To get something down into a concise three or four verse thing is extremely difficult. There are songwriters who write their songs in three minutes, and I’m jealous of the way that they kind of sit down with a guitar and write a song. For me it takes an enormous amount of work to write a song.
NR
You seem to have an internal dialogue when you write your songs, is something similar happening when you write a film script?
NC
The songs are often character-driven and narrative. They tend to have a beginning and an end. A lot of rock songs don’t have that. You can change the verses around, and they’re more just a basic cry from the heart. Mine tend to be narrative and have a dramatic arc and a moral at the end. It’s just the way that I think, and I think I’m more naturally inclined to writing a script than I am at songs. A song affects me deeply, on a different level than watching a film does. I spend a lot more time watching films, but I find that songs get straight into my bloodstream and can change my body chemistry, change everything about me in three minutes. I find that an unbelievably mysterious aspect of music. Films serve a different function altogether. I suppose that the reason I write scripts so quickly is that I don’t feel responsible for what I’m writing. I feel that I’m writing something for somebody else, and that frees me up enormously.
AM
What gave you more pleasure: your first album or your first film?
NC
I can’t remember my first album. I can’t remember my second album either.
AM
Can you remember the last one?
NC
Yes. But I can’t listen to my music and I never do. Once an album is made, that’s it. Once it’s mastered, I never listen to it again. It goes out into the world, and I sometimes hear it in restaurants (not that often!), and I ask them to turn it off. I can’t listen to my music, other than with a sense of discomfort and overwhelming horror. But with my first film, it’s very different. I feel like a much smaller part in a greater apparatus, and it’s a real pleasure to sit back and watch this film. I don’t feel responsible for it in the same way that I do with my songs.
AM
Could you tell me your favourite music video that you made?
JH
Making Loverman was enjoyable because I got to hypnotise the band with a professional hypnotist.
NC
That was good for me because I don’t remember a fucking thing about it.
JH
I’ve always seen music videos as a totally different medium.
NR
The script may have only taken you three weeks, but it was an incredibly dense script, with a huge number of scenes woven into it. So you obviously do more in three weeks than some people do in a lifetime.
NC
I don’t want to make too big a thing out of the three weeks thing. But, thanks…