Nick Cave on Lawless, the sentimentality of sadists, and the war on drugs
Nick Cave’s recent albums with Grinderman come straight from the id, but in the last several years, he has given himself as much to literary pursuits as libidinous grunts. In addition to writing his second novel, 2009’s The Death Of Bunny Munro, Cave has started a third career—or more, depending on how you count—as a screenwriter, writing three scripts for director John Hillcoat (The Proposition). The latest, Lawless, is a typically bloody Cave affair, loosely based on the story of the three Bondurant brothers, who ran a Virginia moonshine business at the height of Prohibition and protected it from organized-crime infiltration by any means at their disposal. Cave, who continues to record with his longtime band, The Bad Seeds, talked to The A.V. Club about his unhealthy love of horror movies, coaxing Ralph Stanley to cover The Velvet Underground, and Tom Hardy’s unlikely acting inspirations.
The A.V. Club: Your relationship with director John Hillcoat goes back several years, but how did you come to adapt this book, Matt Bondurant’s The Wettest County In The World?
Nick Cave: I’ve had a relationship with John since we were 19 or something. I met him in Australia. It was a kind of a music/film scene where people all knew each other, and it came out of that in some way. But it was 10 years ago or something like that that we started working together [with 1988’s Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead]. Especially on film. So then that came from writing The Proposition, and we just try to do as much stuff together as possible. We’re always looking for projects, and [producer] Lucy Fisher brought along this extraordinary book by Matt Bondurant that was a violent but lyrical masterpiece, and although at the time I had no particular interest in writing somebody else’s story or adapting a book, this was just too evocative to pass by, really.
AVC: You’ve written your own screenplays and novels before, in addition to your long career as a musician. How different is it working from someone else’s source material? It seems more involved than working up a cover version of a song.
NC: Yeah, I mean, you have some responsibility to the source, so you have to remember that, but it’s not actually that much different, because I find once the elements of the story have been laid down, the actual narrative becomes quite simple, and John has always brought those narrative elements to me. For example, with The Proposition, he came and said, “I want to do an Australian Western set in the outback in this particular year. Can you write a story about that?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I can.” So he set the theme up in some way. I wrote another script for him, which looks like it’s going to get made. He said, “Can you write one about a traveling salesman working in England?” I said, “Yeah, I’ll do that.” So my interest is not so much in the subject matter itself, but in the idea of being able to write something. So I was given a story with Matt Bondurant’s book and simply began writing that, and in a way, it’s the same way with the other films. Once the theme is there, the stories come relatively easy.
AVC: Both Tom Hardy’s Forrest Bondurant and Guy Pearce’s Charlie Rakes take on a kind of mythic status as the film progresses. Did they jump out of the book for you in that way; did you see an opportunity to do something particular with those two characters?
NC: Forrest is a great character in the book, and somehow [Hardy’s] interpretation of that was easy. He took it somewhere else completely. His references to the character were, at the time, mystifying. He came in saying, “I want to play Forrest Bondurant like I’m an old lesbian.” Another time he said, “I’m going to play Forrest Bondurant based on the old lady in the cartoon “Tweetie Pie.” Do you know that? Do you know Sylvester and Tweety?
AVC: Yes.
NC: Okay, you know the old lady who looks after them?