Interview: John Hillcoat/Nick Cave

It is too easy to call The Proposition a “Western,” or even, more accurately, a “Period Piece,” the truth is this film should be in a genre called “Well-Crafted.” Sometimes a film comes along that obviously demonstrates that the right choices were made. The right cast, the right director, the right camera set ups, the right pacing, the right composition, etc. Does that make it a masterpiece? That word is thrown around so much it means nothing. It means that this film is well crafted, meaningful, consistent, entertaining and worthwhile. If you want to feel like you are in the hands of good storytellers who pay attention to detail then go see The Proposition.

Written by murder ballad icon Nick Cave and directed by John Hillcoat, known for his pitch black comedy from 1988 “Ghost… of the Civil Dead” (another collaboration with Nick Cave), The Proposition stars Guy Pearce, Emily Watson, and Danny Huston. Guy Pearce barely speaks twenty lines in the film but his dirt-stained, rotten teeth performance compels you to the end. Danny Huston, who always sounds intelligent in any role, fulfils that duty here but he uses it as subtext as he plays a murderous villain that lives in the caves of the outback and recites poetry as he rides to his next victim. Nick Cave’s characters are rich is contradiction and poor in the pockets. But it is John Hillcoat who brought all these elements together (including the raw, gritty texture of Benoit Delhomme’s photography) to give us a breath of fresh air when it comes to movies. This is a classic film.

I sat down with John Hillcoat and Nick Cave while they were in New York.

Justin Ambrosino: Explain the dark nature of this story?

John Hillcoat: I love research and the one thing I wanted to do was to make something that was quite truthful to how brutal those times were. Our history has been whitewashed in many ways. So, by necessity, making a story about the frontier it had to be dark otherwise it would have been a kind of myth. But I have to say there are some funny lines, where audiences laugh and a great lyrical beauty that I wouldn’t call dark. There’s contrast.

JA: How did this story come about?

Nick Cave: John was in the studio filming the Bad Seeds when he asked me to write it. So I started knocking the story about like, “ How about you have three brothers,” and basically by the time I left the studio we had the idea of the Proposition. Then I started writing ten or so pages a day and emailing them and we would talk about it. All we knew was that it wasn’t going to end happily.

JA: Was there anyone interested in making this film as you were writing it?

NC. No we don’t many people interested in things while we are writing it. And that for me was one the great freedoms when writing the script – there was no one involved at all just me and John. At the time of writing it, I felt like I was writing something for John, that is wasn’t really my thing. It was something that he wanted me to do. I was determined to write it very fast. I thought it was never going to get made anyway so I could do whatever I like. I came in the beginning then there was an enormous amount of frustrating work that went on for two years between, then came I on in the end to do the music, so I had all the fun and quite well paid as well. John had to slog all the way through.

JA: When you wrote this did you have music in mind?

NC: Yes I did. The script has music cues in it. It felt like a musical thing to be writing it. The rhythm of the film felt musical to me. We’ve been talking about doing the music for twenty years. I was going to do the music to this western that John was going to make. But when it came down to actually doing it, it was something actually grew instantly in the studio. We did it in a very short time from watching the film.

JH: The very first thing was the script, the very last thing was the music, but the fact that it came from the same person made an extra cohesion.

JA: Did Nick come in for any of the preproduction planning?

JH: In rehearsal Nick came out. For me, with film, it’s just a constant development and as different people get involved it just keeps transforming. So with the script, as soon as the actors start acting, as soon as you put a face and they start talking the dialogue, it becomes something else. And actors are often great interrogators of the script, like when you see it performance-wise, you see sometimes a certain ideas or certain lines of dialogue that don’t quite fit and you don’t get that on the paper. So having Nick there was great. We worked in a very collaborative way with Nick. We would refine the script basically with the actors.

JA: How much did the dialogue change with the actors?

JH: Just small things. If anything it was more things unsaid. Like dropping out a line that doesn’t seem necessary but on the page it was.

JA: Can you explain the back story to these characters?

JH: With the character of Arthur, there was sometime pressure to have a flashback and have a back story to explain why is this character the way he is. We were quite determined not to do that because to have some kind of back-story of a horrible mother we all agreed would make the character less alive and we would be over explaining something; it becomes exposition. And also the story is this struggling of who is good and who is bad and if there is this sudden flashback, you would lose that tension.

JA: With the grit under the finger nail, and the flies all around and the dirty teeth, where did those images come from?

JH: We had photographs. I was also blessed with this cast and we all shared a common frustration with period pieces. Guy Pearce was the first actor that came on and I had more conversation with guy about hair and his teeth than about the character. We starting talking about period films and I was talking about how you see these films and they all got beautiful white teeth and everything else is fine in keeping. A lot of that comes from vanity and the star system but that was not on the agenda with any of the cast.

JA: How did you get the cast?

JH: A lot of the cast was very attracted to the idea of playing there characters that were both good and bad. For them it was breath of fresh air. They just don’t get those sorts of roles. Plus some of them have always wanted to go to Australia. I was concerned with Emily. She said “Look I can handle the 20s (Degrees Celsius), if it goes into the 30s I start to struggle.” We were in the high 50s and she had a corset velvet dress. We were driven into night shoots because the cameras were so hot you couldn’t even touch it. But they went with it. It was enforced method.

JA: Can you explain the ways you choose your shots for the film? Did you storyboard?

JH: Yes I storyboarded. The D.P. was fantastic – Benoit … what I first do is I have notes on the style in preproduction and I storyboard my own kind of crude drawings. This was the first time ever that I used a storyboard artist. I then got Benoit to sit in and go through everything revising, planning it. It is also one of those things that we do a lot of preparation, but when we are shooting I like it to be open. Like just a blueprint. It is more useful for the crew to communicate what you are after. But certain scenes, like the bathtub scene was thought up and planned back in preproduction and shot exactly as planned. There are other things that we saw what the actors did and adapted to that.

JA: How did you find the locations that the script called for?

JH: Well the caves were the trickiest part of it because to find the great barren landscape with caves, which was the one location was very, very difficult. Australia is so vast and so massive. And we did actually look at another location in South Australia and the problem was, we found the caves and we found the great barren landscape, but they were so far apart we would have had to move the entire unit and it was cost prohibited. We ended up searching the entire country for a place that could sustain the cast and crew and give us that bloody cave. But it was fantastic because we discovered this place where all the locations were twenty minutes from the town.

First Look Studios released The Proposition on May 5th in New York and a wider release will occur in the weeks to come.