20,000 Days on Earth

‘20,000 days on Earth’ and Nick Cave has ceased to be human. He’s just one of those guys with his head in the clouds, swimming along nicely with his lyrical tide. But this film, shows another side to Nick Cave. A side of values and of honesty and of being human, despite his best efforts.

nickcave.com

smh.com.au

 The film masterfully merges reality and some inventive staged reality in a collage of performance archive, some very cinematic re-constructions, some extraordinarily sinister discussions in a car and a rather open interview with Cave. It seems that this in itself, is a statement about the kind of person Nick Cave is, he is his past, he is his music career, he is, who is he is – and that’s it.

 

sweetarchiveblog.com

The most beautiful moment for me is when Cave admits his deepest fears.

‘What do you fear?’

‘Losing my memory’

And when asked why, his simple answer is ‘memory is what we are’…and he’s right. I don’t think anyone’s ever got it so right.

theguardian.com

Throughout the film we are treated to a world of Cave’s memory. We hear about his relationship with his father, the kind of illusive yet doting parent you seem to find in any dance film or x-factor back-story only this time it is genuinely heart-wrenching to hear. We visit what seems like our film-makers archive, filled with Nick’s past, where he takes us through performances of the Bad Seeds and points out a particularly vivid memory of a German man urinating on the guitarist. If Nick’s greatest fear is losing his memory, he need only visit here to catch the tide back to his life in Brighton.

nypost.com

He is not a man of particular emotion, at least not visually but there's clearly a hell of a lot going on upstairs. He never seems fully present in any conversation. It’s almost like he is formulating lyrics in his head at the very same time that the moments before him become the memories he so adores. We see his persona spring to life at seeing and sharing the stories of his past, vividly recreated for us through archived images and film and yet simultaneously, Cave lives every one of his days in existential crisis, but manages by getting his head down, shutting out the world and writing something beautiful with it. 

blogs.indiewire.com

He is, on reflection, more human than we thought. He’s made mistakes, he’s grown up, he’s fallen in and out of love and ultimately he quite happily loses himself in a world where memories of all of this cease to be memories at all, they are turned into lyrics, put to music and actually begin to feel real again. The great thing about a seemingly candid interview with a star is that you see things you never knew, you find out that actually, beneath all of those well-known anthems, is a person and ’20,000 Days on Earth’ succeeds in saying something quite profound about the art of songwriting, as well as celebrating Cave for the oddball genius of a great that he is. 

collider.com