Interview

Guy Pearce, Nick Cave and John Hillcoat

A razor-sharp new Australian western, The Proposition continues a collaboration between filmmaker John Hillcoat and rocker Nick Cave that began with 1988's Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, a nightmarish prison flick in which the baddest of the Bad Seeds played a gibbering psycho and contributed to the score. For The Proposition, Cave is responsible for the soundtrack and the script, his first. (He's since written a few more, including a sequel to Gladiator and another one he and Hillcoat hope to shoot this year.) Guy Pearce was their first choice to play Charlie Burns, an outlaw who's forced to turn on one brother to save another. Blessed with such meaty material, the Aussie star contributes his most remarkable performance since Memento. All three men spoke to Eye Weekly while at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

GUY, WHAT STRUCK YOU ABOUT NICK'S SCRIPT?

PEARCE: It was unusual in a number of ways. It felt like you were reading a great story. It didn't feel like the writer used some formula he learned in scriptwriting school; it was more like listening to a song by Nick Cave or Bob Dylan. There was a real narrative quality to it, with none of the tricks that come in most scripts. It also had a particular tone -- you could almost hear Nick's music over top or see John's images. You could feel how uncompromising it was gonna be.

DOES IT ALSO PRESENT A DIFFERENT VERSION OF AUSTRALIA'S HISTORY THAN MOST PEOPLE KNOW?

PEARCE: It's the real version of it, that's the thing. We're brought up to believe that the aboriginals let us arrive, a few people got killed and then everything was fine. That was definitely not the case. It's necessary -- even a relief -- to get a sense of the truth of what was really going on. It is a brutal history.

NICK, HOW DID YOU GET AROUND TO SCRIPTWRITING?

CAVE: John asked me to write the script. As long as I've known him, which is 20 years, he's been banging on about doing an Australian western.

HILLCOAT: The day came when Nick had enough of just thinking about the scoring....

CAVE: I said, "Right, I'll write the fucking thing." And there you go.

NICK, YOU'VE WRITTEN A NOVEL (1989'S AND THE ASS SAW THE ANGEL) AND COUNTLESS SONGS. HOW DID YOU FIND WRITING A FILM?

CAVE: It was extraordinarily easy. I'd never done any work that's so fucking easy. [Big laughs all around.] I mean, any idiot can do it and obviously they do.

HILLCOAT: It's part of the problem.

CAVE: You don't have to know how to write. You basically have to know how to operate a computer, which I didn't actually know.

HILLCOAT: Half the time was spent on formatting and sorting out the margins.

IN THE STORY, THERE'S VERY LITTLE SEPARATING RAY WINSTONE'S LAWMAN FROM GUY'S OUTLAW. ARE THEY MORE ALIKE THAN DIFFERENT?

HILLCOAT: They're two sides of the same coin. That's a tradition in the western. What we deliberately tried to explore were the moral compromises of those positions, as opposed to one man being victorious and righteous and the other being not. And it's more Australian as well -- failure and these fatalistic anti-heroes are something embedded in our culture.

COULD THAT SORT OF THING HAPPEN IN AN AMERICAN WESTERN?

CAVE: Things are done fast and sure and cool in those stories. You know who the bad guy is and who the good guy is.

HILLCOAT: There's a moral righteousness that's clear.

CAVE: And I really like films like that. I like films where you don't have to think too much. [Laughs.] But we wanted to do something that was Australian, which is a society driven by incompetence. This is an environment so difficult to survive in, morality becomes a luxury.

HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS, BUT DO YOU THINK YOU WERE MORE INTERESTED IN THE UGLINESS BY WHICH THOSE VICTORIES WERE ACHIEVED?

HILLCOAT: Most westerns don't look at the moral compromises created by the type of violence that people were involved in. That's what I love about the westerns of Peckinpah and Leone and their reinvention of the west. We wanted to be truthful about the levels of conflict and who was involved and how it affected people. What was interesting to us was the aftermath of violence as opposed to the actual event. On screen, the event is very chaotic and brutal and quick and messy. Then it's the consequences you have to deal with, and I believe they do ripple through the centuries.

CAVE: Amen! JASON ANDERSON