20,000 Days on Earth

When Nick Cave speaks, peo­ple lis­ten. Whether he’s up on stage in his ele­ment, snaking and thrust­ing like Mick Jag­ger pos­sessed, or idly chit-chat­ting with a band­mate or close friend, the Aus­tralian alt-rock icon has the com­mand­ing pres­ence of an evan­gel­i­cal preach­er. It’s fair to say that Cave has rel­ished hav­ing his voice heard for the past three decades. But now, at 56, the time has come to take stock.

Part psych-chair con­fes­sion­al, part con­cert hall ser­mon, part ode to his adopt­ed home­town, Brighton, 20,000 Days on Earth doc­u­ments an artist fac­ing their own mor­tal­i­ty for the first time. Not in a lit­er­al sense — var­i­ous clips from recent live per­for­mances sug­gest there’s no risk of Cave pack­ing it in any­time soon. No, this is an artist look­ing square in the mir­ror and ask­ing, ​‘What am I doing here?’ and more sim­ply, ​‘What am I?’ The response is inti­mate and engross­ing, and will no doubt have Cave’s legions of fans in rap­tures. But an objec­tive biog­ra­phy this isn’t.

Con­cep­tu­al­ly, direc­tors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pol­lard pitch their film as a Cave on Cave-style dis­cus­sion around the most com­mon themes and trends in his exten­sive reper­toire. It’s his sto­ry, and this is the only way he’s pre­pared to tell it. And that’s fair enough. Besides, Cave is sur­pris­ing­ly forth­com­ing, self-effac­ing even, when rumi­nat­ing on his lega­cy, although the heav­i­ly staged day-in-the-life for­mat gives him ample oppor­tu­ni­ty to mas­sage his own ego. Pre­ten­tious? Maybe. Self-indul­gent? Unavoid­ably so. Enrich­ing? Absolutely.

This is a unique­ly refresh­ing pro­file of a pop­u­lar yet strange­ly unfa­mil­iar cul­tur­al icon. In its best moments — most mem­o­rably a din­ner scene in which Cave and long-time bud­dy and col­lab­o­ra­tor War­ren Ellis recount a leg­endary Nina Simone gig they attend­ed sev­er­al years ago (“All she want­ed that night was cham­pagne, cocaine and sausages”) — 20,000 Days on Earth man­ages to peel away the famous­ly morose per­sona to reveal the ​‘real’ Nick Cave.

We learn about his heroes and demons, his fears, desires, great­est con­quests and deep­est regrets. The title refers to an approx­i­mate cal­cu­la­tion of the amount of days Cave had been alive for on the day he start­ed record­ing ​‘Push the Sky Away’, the fif­teenth stu­dio album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Using this as their jump­ing-off point, Forsyth and Pol­lard explore Cave’s cre­ative process from a large­ly exis­ten­tial stand­point, struc­tur­ing their film around the uni­ver­sal notions of iden­ti­ty and exis­tence, and the ways we define both.

The trou­ble with this is that Cave, as he wry­ly infers in his open­ing mono­logue, is no mere mor­tal. It’s clear he’s oper­at­ing on a high­er plane than the rest of us, and while most of us won’t be able to relate to his expe­ri­ences, his con­stant the­o­ris­ing and lyri­cal pon­tif­i­cat­ing make it even hard­er to engage with his insights and obser­va­tions. Dur­ing a Twit­ter Q&A last year, Cave told one young fan who expressed a desire to be like him to ​“low­er your expec­ta­tions”. The same goes for any­one hop­ing to estab­lish a spir­i­tu­al con­nec­tion with this charis­mat­ic and elu­sive idol.

Get behind-the-scenes with over 50 min­utes of exclu­sive extras only on We Are Colony.