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Home , Barry Adamson, Blixa Bargeld, Grinderman, Jim Sclavunos, John Hillcoat, King Ink

FILM4, CORNICHE PICTURES, PULSE FILMS AND THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE PRESENT

IN ASSOCIATION WITH PHI FILMS AND GOLDIN FILMS

A PULSE FILMS / JW FILMS PRODUCTION

20,000 DAYS ON EARTH

A FILM BY

IAIN FORSYTH & JANE POLLARD

OFFICIAL SELECTION

Sundance Film Festival 2014 - Winner Best Directing and Best Editing International Film Festival 2014 True/False Film Festival 2014 New Directors/New Films 2014 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2014 San Francisco International Film Festival 2014

RUNTIME: 97 MINUTES / NOT RATED

CANADIAN DISTRIBUTION CONTACT

Films We Like, Mike Boyuk, mike@filmswelike.com, 416.971-9131

(Canadian Publicity) Jasmine Pauk, jasmine@filmswelike.com, 416.971-9131

Download press kit and high rez images http://filmswelike.com/films/drafthouse/20000daysonearth

filmswelike SYNOPSIS

20,000 Days On Earth is an inventive, lyrical ode to creativity and an intimate examination of the artistic process of musician and cultural icon . In their debut feature, directors Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard fuse drama and documentary, weaving a staged day in Cave’s life with never-before-seen verité observation of his creative cycle. It features those who have affected his life, including wry tales from shared with his regular collaborator, the multi- instrumentalist ; actor and friend Ray Winstone; and , who shared a duet with Cave in the breakout hit "Where the Wild Roses Grow." These voices from the past revisit Cave in daydream-like scenes as he sits behind the wheel, driving through his adopted hometown of , England.

Neither a music documentary nor a concert film, 20,000 Days On Earth still contains electrifying performances. Audiences see a song grow from the tiniest of ideas to an epic performance at Opera House. Cave also opens up to a psychoanalyst as he discusses how his early years continue to inform his work, and journeys through his memories via mementos from his personal archive. This category-defying film pushes the form into new territory, exploring universal themes about artistry and celebrating the transformative power of the creative spirit.

ABOUT THE FILM

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard have worked extensively with Cave on various projects over the past seven years and now know him very well. Cave says, “I’ve always liked their unorthodox approach to things and on a personal level we have always gotten on very well. I invited them into La Fabrique Studios to film some promotional footage for . As it turned out, in the end, they shot everything and the studio footage was so compelling we decided to expand the idea.”

Forsyth and Pollard recognized that this invitation from the resolutely camera-shy Cave was an unmissable, unique opportunity. They started filming without a plan for what the footage might become, and with unprecedented access began to capture extraordinary moments of Cave’s creative process. “Nick’s surprisingly brutal with his ideas; songs mutate with speed and lyrics are slashed and forgotten,” says Pollard of the time spent filming in Cave’s office and the recording studio during the first half of 2012. “Instinctively we knew what we were shooting had to form the starting point for a film, so we began to dream up ideas of what that might be,” Forsyth adds.

Cave next agreed to hand over his notebooks, which proved fertile ground for the filmmakers. “We were able to trace the transformation of his ideas,” says Forsyth. “We found disparate phrases which instantly sparked ideas that excited us. This included a calculation to work out how many days he had been alive on the day they started recording the , next to the unusually coined phrase ‘20,000 days on earth’.” Pollard adds, “We began to work with the idea of what makes us who we are and what we do with our time on earth.” The phrase eventually spawned the opening line of the film and the pair resolved to structure the film around a fictional narrative of Nick’s 20,000th day. Cave adds, “This day is both more real and less real, more true and less true, more interesting and less interesting than my actual day, depending on how you look at it.”

Taking the found phrases and ideas from the notebooks as starting points, the artists began requesting Cave to write short texts on prompted topics. An edited selection of these was to form the voice-over backbone of the film. Cave comments, “The ideas initially came out of them looking in my notebooks. They could see my interests, my concerns and they would ask me to elaborate.”

“With Nick, we quickly arrived at this shared understanding that what we didn’t like about a lot of contemporary music documentaries was their presumed unobtrusive, observational style. That seeing the ‘real’ Nick Cave would somehow reveal something more about Nick Cave. Watching a rock star washing the dishes or taking the kids to school might be interesting to some on a vacuous star-spotting level, but it doesn’t intellectually engage you,” Forsyth explains.

By remembering visionary films including Led Zeppelin: The Song Remains The Same, and Jean-Luc Godard’s One Plus One (Sympathy For The Devil), Forsyth and Pollard began to craft the visual and structural language they wanted to use. “With these films, the results don’t necessarily match the ambition of the vision, but they tell us that we should never sway from having crazy, bold intentions,” explains Pollard.

They knew they didn’t want to make a reverential portrait of the artist, nor unmask him to reveal the ordinary. Instead, Forsyth and Pollard wanted to play with rock mythology and harness what is gloriously extraordinary about Nick Cave.

“The thing that is remarkable, that is inspirational, the thing that affects you about Nick is his brain, his creativity, his ability to reframe and shape-shift the normal to make it truly vivid and moving,” says Pollard. “That’s what we wanted to engage you with. We wanted to portray the Nick that tells stories, that thinks, that weaves myths, the man who is constantly churning everything through the mill of the imagination,” Forsyth adds.

20,000 Days on Earth rails against the part of our culture that now normalizes genius and talent through TV shows such as American Idol. “There’s a strand of the culture that says almost anyone can do it; [almost anyone can] be made into a successful star,” says Pollard. “But I want us to celebrate those remarkable practitioners, the Cohens and the Dylans and the Caves, who have carved their own persona and path, who work magic with words and music.”

Up to this point, Forsyth and Pollard had worked alone in order to minimize their impact on the dynamics of the writing and recording sessions. This was not the approach they wanted to take when filming their fictionalized day in the life of Nick Cave. “We believed that if we’re going to take up Nick’s time, if we’re going to take up our own time, then this needed to matter. It needed to be ambitious.” Stating their intent, Forsyth explains, “We took the idea to Pulse Films, brought in Jim Wilson and got the brilliant cinematographer Erik Wilson on board.”

Was it liberating for Cave to have the pair directing this creative work and for him not to be in charge?

Cave answers, “I wouldn’t have done it otherwise. They have a huge amount of energy. They have worked hard on this film. It has been a privilege to watch people invest so much energy into something like this. Pulse and Film4 have been amazing as well, in the sense that they have stepped back and allowed Iain and Jane the space to do their thing. I’ve worked in film before and that’s not often the way that is. Iain and Jane have succeeded in getting what they wanted with very few compromises. That’s been one of the most heartening things for me. It has restored my faith in film! Most films in my experience are fraught with compromise. That’s the nature of filmmaking. I think they were given a lot of freedom to allow the film its ambiguities, its eccentricities and, most of all, the time for scenes to develop and breathe. It has a lovely air and space in it.”

Forsyth and Pollard began talking to -based production company Pulse Films because of their focus on thought-provoking and structurally adventurous films, such as Shut Up And Play The Hits, about the last days of the band LCD Soundsystem, and docu-drama Who Is Dayani Cristal? with Gael Garcia Bernal. The project immediately ignited the interest of Thomas Benski, Pulse founder and 20,000 Days on Earth executive producer. “We pride ourselves on being a place where brilliant filmmakers and great talent can combine to take creative risks in a way that still serves the market,” explains Benski, “which is why Iain and Jane’s collaboration with Nick felt like such a natural fit.”

“What has always excited us at Pulse is to tell music stories differently, bringing them to life through truly original approaches,” says 20,000 Days on Earth producer Dan Bowen. “When we first started seeing material they had brought back from the studio, there was something so distinctive about it; it pointed to a clarity of vision and you could quickly begin to see the film they were imagining. Combine that with Nick as a subject and it was very exciting.”

“The film world is very different from the art world in which we’ve grown up, and we’ve been astounded by the networks of support we’ve met at every level. The team at Pulse, and in particular Dan, our producer there, became unflinching in finding ways to enable us to make the very best film we could,” Forsyth comments.

Next on board was experienced independent film producer James Wilson, whose credits include ’s Under The Skin, starring Scarlett Johansson, and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead. As a fan of Cave’s work since the 1980s, Wilson was as intrigued by the subject matter as the filmmakers’ bold approach to it. “They had me at hello,” says Wilson of his first meeting with Forsyth and Pollard in the autumn of 2012. “I love the film-essay form and this was one that explored rich themes about the importance of art and creativity, and the relationship between artifice and truth in a wholly original and cinematic way.”

Forsyth and Pollard were impressed by the vision of Wilson. “Jim saw in us a version of us that we wanted to be,” says Pollard. “He saw auteur filmmakers; he saw a strong directorial voice.”

Wilson had just produced two creatively unconventional films (Under The Skin and Sophie Fiennes’ The Perverts Guide to Ideology) with Film4 and the BFI, and believed the directors and their idea had the artistic ambition to which these companies might also be drawn. “Right now at the BFI and Film4 there’s an appetite for bold cinema with an authorial stamp on it,” he suggests.

Impressed by a mood reel Forsyth and Pollard had constructed, first Film4 and then the BFI stepped in to majority finance the project with UK private equity firm Corniche Pictures. Pulse brought on board Goldin Films and Canadian financiers PHI Films to complete the financing lineup and made an equity investment of their own. Hanway Films is handling worldwide sales outside the UK, and Cave’s native Australia, which has been pre-bought by Madman.

Working around Cave’s touring commitments meant 20,000 Days on Earth had to be shot on an accelerated schedule. “The tail of Nick Cave’s schedule was furiously wagging the dog of independent film financing!,” says Wilson. Indeed, when the film screened for the first time at Sundance in January, it had been a year almost to the day since principal photography began.

“This couldn’t be a vanity project. We were very explicit about that. It was a warning sign in all our heads, including Nick’s,” says Wilson. Cave adds, “I was very hesitant about undertaking this. I was ambivalent of the process anyway because I am suspicious of biographies and celebrity documentaries as they can appear self-serving and masturbatory. But these guys are artists. They come from the art world and not from the film world, so they have no problem with ambiguity and mystery. They approached things from a different way and they had a good, original idea.”

20,000 Days on Earth is not a solemn, deferential portrait of an acclaimed musician. Instead, the directors were much more interested in probing universal themes including mortality, our time on earth and how we spend that time. Forsyth and Pollard’s use of wit and humor deflects and deflates any hint of pomposity. “We believe you can have a tremendously moving or inspirational film and still have moments that are raucously funny,” says Pollard. “It’s not a slight thing to be able to make people laugh. It’s an incredible thing. The audience gets to shuffle, become active and then reset a bit when there is a laugh. It refocuses your mind and gets it ready to take on something else.”

The directors were thrilled when editor Jonathan Amos instantly understood this, appreciating the comedy in the material. They chose Amos precisely because of his credits, which include the sharp UK comedies Peep Show and Pramface for TV, and features including Attack The Block and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

“Humor was the really big thing for us,” says Forsyth. “We wanted to make a funny film. Nick is funny. Everyone in the band is. Spending time with them can be hilarious, and we wanted to reflect that. But more importantly, it’s a timing thing. If you can cut comedy, if you can make the timing of scenes work and hold the humor in them, then you will get what we were trying to do.”

But it’s the sheer artistry and vision of Forsyth and Pollard that elevate the film beyond the realm of a regular music documentary. It’s their ambition and ability to communicate a feeling to us. “Our way of making art is to start by defining the emotion we want the person experiencing it to feel,” says Pollard. “With 20,000 Days on Earth, it’s about letting other people feel what you feel when you get to know Nick. You’re inspired and impressed. We want you to get to the end of the film and feel fired up, to think ‘I need to be better, I need to do more’. Anybody can have an idea. You’ve just got to see it through.”

It was apparent early on to Bowen and Wilson that Forsyth and Pollard’s approach could appeal not just to Nick Cave fans, but to lovers of cinema and great storytelling as well. “They found this magical balance between the real and the fictitious with these bold ideas for situations they were creating,” Bowen explains. “Iain and Jane have always approached their work with the audience in mind, and this is the ultimate example of a film that’s unique and ambitious, but also totally accessible.”

Is the film everything Cave hoped it could be?

Nick answers, “Yes. Even though it’s fictional on one level, it’s also very real. That’s the beauty of it. We got closer to something through fiction and that’s really what the film is all about. It questions the importance of the real world in contrast to the imaginative world. Or it tries to live within the space where those two worlds converge. Something very raw and revealing emerged from these fictional contrivances. I am really happy for Iain and Jane because I feel they got exactly what they were trying to get. It was always very strong from the first edit. It always felt solid with both feet firmly on the ground. So everyone could take a breath and sit back and let the directors do what they wanted to do.”

He then adds, “The creative process is both mysterious and not mysterious. On the one hand the creative process is just sitting down and doing the work. Yet there’s an element of magic about it as well. Iain and Jane went about trying to capture that in a film in an interesting, crab- like way, approaching it sideways and in doing so reveal a lot more than the standard warts- and-all exposé. There is a lovely slyness about the film.”

“The film doesn’t comply with the conventions of documentary, or drama-documentary,” says Bowen. Wilson adds, “It’s not a factual report of a story or issue. It doesn’t reconstruct events that have happened. It’s not a music concert film or a rock biopic. By staging real behavior in fictional spaces, it creates something new that beautifully resists pigeonholing.”

“Nick can’t act,” smiles Pollard. “But he is brilliant at being Nick Cave. So we needed to construct scenarios that at least have an element of reality and surprise for him, with room for him to authentically respond, to think and be in the moment.”

To depict the 20,000th day, set entirely in Cave’s adopted home town of Brighton on England’s South Coast, Forsyth and Pollard created an intense, hyper-real world employing very high production levels. Their aim was for everything that happens within this ‘day’ to feel completely authentic, with minimal editorial input from them or the crew once the scene was up and running.

The ‘day’ was devised around two key scenes designed to allow Cave to talk about himself and his ideas in a way that would extract something new, meaningful and substantial. The first is a meeting with acclaimed psychoanalyst Darian Leader and the second, a visit to a reassembled Nick Cave Archive.

Leader is a British psychoanalyst and founding member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. He met the directors while they were students at Goldsmiths College of Art and they became friends. “We wanted someone who we could trust and with whom we could work closely. We believed Darian could provoke Nick to respond to questions in the way a journalist would not be able to, and then build on that,” says Forsyth of their decision to use Leader. “The important thing is that the situation was predominantly real for Nick, there was no script, and we made sure they didn’t meet before they sat down to talk with the cameras rolling. Nick was aware that Darian was an actual psychoanalyst and they ended up talking over two days for almost ten hours.”

Many of Cave’s personal notebooks and possessions are held and cared for within the Nick Cave Collection at the Arts Centre in , Australia. Forsyth and Pollard re-imagined the space in the basement of Brighton Town Hall and brought over the real head of the collection. “We knew if Nick could spend two days randomly—or what seems to be randomly—pulling out objects and photos, there would be an authentic journey for him and it would become a way of unlocking a stream of memories,” Pollard says.

The directors were in search of the moments that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. “One of those was when Nick talks to Darian about and the times he has felt or witnessed transformation through performance. We all felt it in the room,” admits Pollard.

The concept of performance is very important to the directors and runs as a theme throughout 20,000 Days on Earth.

“For us it’s always about constructing a situation, making things happen and then finding a way of capturing the spirit of them the best way you can,” says Pollard of their method of setting up scenarios and filming whatever happens within them.

“That’s what Nick responded to,” explains Forsyth. “We made it our problem to get what we got and then come away and make it work in the edit. The big secret, which we never told anyone, was that we were always prepared to fail. There’s a freeing up that happens when you accept failure as a very real option.”

The directors put together an experienced team who appreciated their way of working. The crew was led by cinematographer Erik Wilson. “We’d worked with cinematographers before, but not to this extent,” says Pollard. “It was really important to find someone who would trust our process. Erik is not only an exceptional cinematographer; he’s also a lovely man, wide open to new ideas and infectiously enthusiastic to work with.” Forsyth adds, “Erik never called a technical halt to a scene. He just let us get on. There would be a lot of times when Jane or I wouldn’t be at the monitor because the scene needed one of us closer to Nick, but when you sense a temperature change, you don’t need to know exactly what it looks like on the monitor. We trusted Erik would get it.”

The psychoanalyst’s room is a dressed set in Richmond, South London. The look is a nod to a 1970s aesthetic, inspired by the work of photographer Steven Meisel, of whom Cave is a fan. The filmmakers had a timeless look in mind for the film, particularly the archive. “We wanted the scene to be intensely cinematic, a timeless subterranean world brimming with all of the stuff of Nick’s past and flickering full of analogue technology. It looks nothing like the real archive, but the truth doesn’t matter,” Forsyth claims.

The third significant location created was the home of Warren Ellis, Cave’s regular musical collaborator in the Bad Seeds, where Cave drives for lunch following his encounter with Darian Leader. “This scene is at the centre of the film and we shaped it as a chance to let someone other than Nick do the talking. Warren is a prolific storyteller and Nick is entirely at ease with him,” says Pollard of the change in tempo at this point in the day.

As with the archive and the psychoanalyst’s office, Forsyth and Pollard had a strong sense of what they wanted the feel of Ellis’s imagined home to be. “Warren’s house speaks of his character and personality, of being on the edge of something, off the grid, close to the elements,” says Forsyth of the overgrown, wild cottage, which is actually a historic coast guard’s house in Seaford, near Cave’s home in Brighton.

Forsyth and Pollard’s previous visual artwork has explored a fascination with the concept of altered states, daydreams, hallucinations and the moments between sleep and waking. This led to the three scenes representing the car journeys Cave makes during the day. They wanted to find a way to visually represent those moments when our minds slip and wander to another reality.

“The car gets Nick from place to place and gives the day some structure, but it’s also the place where he gets to sift through his thought processes. The car is an extension of the inside of Nick’s head, with other people manifesting as a kind of inner dialogue,” says Pollard. “It really doesn’t matter if they are actually there or not,” adds Forsyth.

Nick Cave recalls the archive scenes in the film: “During the archive section, I just sat there for a couple of days and looked at photos and talked about them and largely forgot about the cameras and you can see that in the relaxed nature of these scenes. But the car scenes were much more about the emotional minutiae that exists between two people. Although they are spontaneous and unscripted, they were a lot more difficult to do than they may appear. And I had to drive a car at the same time! Or pretend to! We made it difficult for ourselves as we wanted a kind of tension within these scenes.”

In the car, voices materialize in the form of three people who have had previous roles in Cave’s life: British actor Ray Winstone, who starred in the film The Proposition penned by Cave and directed by ; German musician , who was in the original line up of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds for twenty years; and Australian singer and actress Kylie Minogue, with whom Cave duetted on his most successful single to date, “Where The Wild Roses Grow,” in 1996.

Each person extracts different reflections and insights from Cave at particular points of the day. “What was attractive about Ray is that because Nick is such a strong character, a lot of people around him can be overshadowed or reverential, even people who know him pretty well. There is an inevitable amount of awe that kicks in around Nick,” says Forsyth of the ease with which Winstone engages Cave in a conversation about age and aging. “Whereas Ray is always just Ray. He treats everyone the same; there’s no bullshit.”

Bargeld had been a significant voice in the Bad Seeds and Cave’s right-hand man before abruptly leaving the band in 2003. Prior to shooting their scene together, the pair had never talked about the reasons behind Bargeld’s departure.

Minogue gave Cave a glimpse into the world of mainstream commercial success and super- stardom. “Kylie is a real Australian icon and national treasure. Nick is absolutely impressed by her, her work ethic and professionalism. He really saw the universal accessible merit of what she does and how she does it. There is nothing ironic about Nick’s interest in her,” says Forsyth. Pollard quickly adds, “He displays such a fondness even when speaking about her that we wanted to put them together again for the first time in many years.”

Cave recalls, “I hadn’t really seen Blixa for some years before I sat in the car with him and we started talking. I had never asked him why he had left the Bad Seeds, for example. Kylie was similar. These scenes just found their own dramatic tension. In the Kylie scene there is something rather lovely going on as we can’t see each other’s expressions, but the camera can.”

The directors were careful to not prepare the three too much, preferring to simply explain the premise to the scene and why each is in Cave’s head at that moment. “What I loved about the drives is that they were the most risky scenes,” says Pollard. “You do two days in an archive or a sit-down interview and there is going to be some magic in there. But the drives were totally improvised. We had a set route and did two laps with each person. There was no point in going again. They had exhausted all natural conversation and were starting to get self-conscious. You just have to trust you’ve done enough preparation in seeding ideas and then wait for the edit.”

DIRECTORS Q&A

WHAT DREW YOU TO FILMMAKING?

We're visual artists. We've been working collaboratively since meeting at Goldsmiths in London twenty years ago. Our work is usually installational, often incorporating moving image, sometimes performance, and sound is usually a key factor. For example, we recently made an installation using Ambisonic sound in collaboration with Scott Walker for the Sydney Opera House.

One of the things that excited us the most about making a long-form film was the opportunity to engage with an audience over a longer period of time, for ideas to be able to play out and evolve as they're weaved together and connections drawn. Having worked in museums and galleries throughout our career, you start to get an instinctive sense of the attention span you can expect from an audience. People are used to giving art a few minutes of their time. If you can engage someone for twenty minutes in a gallery, then you're doing incredibly well. Perhaps as a result of that, our work has tended to focus on a singular key idea. An artwork trying to do too many things is confusing; it frustrates and repels your viewer. But a film… well, that's a different thing. It's a challenge, that's what really drew us to filmmaking. It was something that we didn't know we could do. And that's exciting.

WHAT MOTIVATED YOU TO TELL THIS STORY?

We set out to make a film about the creative spirit, so in many ways we could have made it with anyone, but we couldn't have made it with anyone better than Nick Cave. We met him maybe seven or eight years ago. He asked us to make a music video, which we'd never done, but agreed to try! Since then, we’ve worked together on various projects and have become friends. When Nick began work on his latest album, he called and said he thought he could probably cope with us being there and filming while he and Warren began writing. He's never done that before, so we jumped at the chance. We filmed them writing together and then moving into the studio with the band to make the record. Once we started to see the material we were getting, it was immediately obvious that we needed to do something more than make a short film about the making of an album. So we began to dream about what this film might be.

At first, Nick was incredibly reluctant to have a film made about him. He's had many offers over the years, but it's something that just doesn't interest him. But the more we discussed ideas and explained what we wanted to do, Nick slowly came round to the idea once he understood that we didn’t want to make a “fan film.” It’s not a biography, and if you’re interested in facts and figures about Nick, this isn’t the place to look. We wanted to make a portrait of an engaging and inspiring artist and his creative process. The themes that interested us are universal; we can all relate to them. We were interested in how you choose to spend your time on earth, what it is that makes us who we are, and what can make us the person we want to be.

HOW DID YOU FIND YOUR SUBJECT?

Our subject came out of friendship, and out of trust. We couldn't have made the film we made about somebody we didn't know. And we're sure Nick would never have allowed the film to be made, and certainly to be made in the way it was, by anyone he didn't know. There's a trust that's developed over the years that we've been working together and that's really what was at the heart of the project. We were able to say to Nick, "Look, let's try this. If it doesn't work, we'll trash it, but let's at least find out if it'll work. Let's try it." And he agreed.

To be frank, we never really set out to make a film. And throughout the making of it we never felt like we were making a film “about” Nick Cave, even though he is, of course, at the heart of everything. Our approach to our work as artists has always started by defining the emotion we want the viewer to feel. We approached the film in exactly the same way. We want the audience to feel what you feel when you get to know Nick. You’re inspired and impressed. We want you to get to the end of the film and feel fired up, to think, “I need to be better, I need to do more." It’s been described as a “love letter to creativity,” and in many ways that’s true. Anyone can have an idea, but for it to be worth anything, you've got to see it through.

WHAT WERE THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES WORKING ON THE PROJECT?

Once Nick understood what we wanted to do with the film, one of the biggest challenges was then finding ways to communicate that to others. We spoke to production companies, producers, financiers and all sorts of “industry” people and had to make sure they understood that we had no intention of making a typical “rock doc.” We felt no obligation to tell the “Nick Cave Story,” to stay true to or even incorporate his biography. Nick has spent more than thirty years as a master storyteller, weaving truths and untruths, re-writing myths and creating modern legends. We wanted to stay true to the spirit of Nick’s story, rather than the facts. The truth doesn’t matter. We were lucky in that we found our amazing team, including our producer Jim Wilson who was really able to take our vision and make it possible. Then once our financiers came on board we were able to stop explaining and start making!

We of course experienced many of the tedious problems that most productions face: the weather was against us, time and money were usually against us, but the one logistical challenge throughout was working with Nick's schedule. He works incredibly hard, and is constantly engaged in several projects. So we had to find the pockets of time we could get with him, and then use them. This wasn't easy while we were still trying to complete the financing and get everyone on board, and we learned quickly that the film industry just isn't used to moving at that sort of pace. We were incredibly fortunate to have the support of our production company Pulse Films, who completely got that we needed to grab Nick's time when it was available, and that this was a project that had to be made to fit with his schedule. The important thing is that we got there, and the film got made.

WHAT OTHER FILMMAKING PROJECTS (OR CREATIVE ENDEAVORS) ARE YOU WORKING ON OR HOPE TO BE WORKING ON?

Our sound installation with Scott Walker will be touring soon, and should be in the U.S. in 2015. We're also beginning work on a collaborative project with the musician Joe McAlinden (ex- Superstar/Teenage Fanclub) and the author Alan Warner (Morvern Callar/The Sopranos). We're also hoping to begin work soon on our first drama feature film. We've learned so much making 20,000 Days on Earth, and can't wait to make another film!

DIRECTOR BIOS

IAIN FORSYTH & JANE POLLARD

Forsyth and Pollard met while studying Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in London in the 1990s. Museums and institutions worldwide collect their work. They became known for their recreations of highly charged cultural moments, which pioneered the use of re-enactment within contemporary art, including their critically acclaimed A Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide, a painstakingly faithful live re-creation of ’s final performance as Ziggy Stardust, twenty-five years after the original event.

Performance and music play significant roles in their practice, leading to notable collaborations, including a sound installation with Scott Walker at Sydney Opera House, experiments with subliminal sound with Spiritualized’s Jason Spaceman, a video art piece featuring Ben Drew/’s first performance on camera and, of course, their ongoing collaboration with Nick Cave.

Forsyth and Pollard only work collaboratively, never alone, and with no formal division of labor. “When you’re working on something creative, the internal dialogue can become a bit boring, a bit insecure, sometimes self-indulgent and often vulnerable. When you’re working this closely with another person, not only is there a sounding block there, but you also have to fight for the things in which you believe,” says Forsyth. “And you egg each other on. There is a daring there. There’s a speed I love about collaborating. There’s another brain that can fire something back at me, and that’s exciting; that shows me a new way of seeing something. We know if both instincts are aligned, there’s no question.” And if they don’t agree, there are always Post-It notes. “When everything else has failed, a secret ballot is our way of dealing with a tie breaker situation,” says Pollard. “It always works out.”

NICK CAVE BIO

Nick Cave has been performing music for more than thirty years and has written and published over 250 songs as the lead singer of The Birthday Party, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and . He’s also an acclaimed film score composer, writer, novelist and occasional actor. His first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, was published in 1989; was published in 2009. Cave has also published collections of lyrics and prose, including and The Complete Lyrics.

Cave wrote the screenplay for The Proposition (2005), directed by John Hillcoat, and again took on the screenplay adaptation role for Hillcoat's Lawless (2012). Together with Warren Ellis, Cave has composed and recorded soundtracks for The Proposition (2005), 's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2006), John Hillcoat's The Road (2009) and Lawless (2012), and multiple documentaries including The English Surgeon (2007), The Girls Of Phnom Penh (2009), (2013), and Loin Des Hommes (2015).

The universally acclaimed Push the Sky Away is the fifteenth studio album from Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. Released in February 2013, it charted top ten in 19 countries, including seven at number one. Written by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis, the album has been awarded this year’s prestigious Ivor Novello Songwriting Award.

CAST and CREW

DIRECTED BY IAIN FORSYTH & JANE POLLARD PRODUCED BY JAMES WILSON and DAN BOWEN WRITTEN BY IAIN FORSYTH & JANE POLLARD NICK CAVE EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS THOMAS BENSKI LUCAS OCHOA ANNA HIGGS TABITHA JACKSON HANI FARSI PHOEBE GREENBERG PENNY MANCUSO PAUL GOLDIN PAUL GRINDEY CO-PRODUCER ALEX DUNNETT DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY ERIK WILSON EDITOR JONATHAN AMOS A.C.E. MUSIC BY NICK CAVE & WARREN ELLIS SOUND DESIGNER JOAKIM SUNDSTRÖM PRODUCTION DESIGNER SIMON ROGERS FEATURING NICK CAVE AND (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE) SUSIE CAVE WARREN ELLIS DARIAN LEADER RAY WINSTONE BLIXA BARGELD KYLIE MINOGUE ARTHUR CAVE EARL CAVE THE BAD SEEDS ARE WARREN ELLIS MARTYN CASEY CONWAY SAVAGE GEORGE VJESTICA

MORE INFORMATION

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