Australian musician Nick Cave.
Nick Cave is distracted. One of his twin sons requires his attention as he talks in his Brighton office.
"Just a second. ... Darling ..." gently calls the man whose songbook boasts one of highest body counts in rock history. "Can you give me five minutes? Go and ... listen to some hip-hop or something."
Or go and watch Scarface again, I suggest.
It gets a chuckle. For in the movie 20,000 Days On Earth - a film which supposedly follows a day in Cave's life - there's a late scene of Dad in his big black suit and his then pre-teen sons, Arthur and Earl, watching the hyper-violent gangster flick while sharing a pizza on the couch.
It's a picture of paternal happiness and inappropriate entertainment. "Say hello to my little friend," screams Pacino in the background. Say hello to Cave's, too.
It's all part of the unconventional quasi-documentary about the songwriter, the leader of The Bad Seeds, the rock 'n' roll firebrand, the Australian national treasure, the novelist and screenwriter, the husband and father who turns 57 this month with his creativity undimmed by the years or past laurels.
But Cave doesn't see that the movie is really about him.
That's despite him being in just about every scene as it unfolds as part fly-on-the-wall doco, part wander through the past, part-dramatised road movie, all narrated by Cave in tones more stentorian than his hesitant conversational voice.
He does laugh when I point out that a time-limit phone interview doesn't stand much chance against the film when it comes to meaningful insights. Especially one which comes with scenes in which Cave talks to a psychoanalyst about matters personal.
"You can ask it all again if you like," he offers.
I probably will.
"You can ask me the first time I saw a naked woman if you want."
Sure. But first how does it feel to have a film in which you answer those sorts of questions - questions about the death of his father, about his greatest fears - out in the world?
"I don't know if it's really about my life," he answers after a sighing pause. "Look, I really like the film. I was unsure about the project to begin with because of that very idea that you are talking about, having a film out there about me. I couldn't think of anything worse, to be honest. But the way the actual film is; how far removed it is from the ordinary rock 'n' roll documentary. I'm really pleased with that aspect of it.
"The purpose of the film isn't to tell my life story. It's to talk about the creative process and things that are connected to that."
Things like songwriting and the performance - about how he becomes a man transformed on stage. Things like mortality, fear of being forgotten, contemplations of nature, eroticism, God.
And, of course, the Large Hadron Collider.
Because central to 20,000 Days On Earth - a reference to Cave's time on this planet thus far - is the song Higgs Boson Blues, a great rumbling hymn that was the centrepiece of last year's Push The Sky Away album.
Watch the trailer for 20,000 Days On Earth below:
It's a song that's an apparent jumble of imagery inspired by the search for the Higgs Boson or God particle.
In there is everything from bluesman Robert Johnson at the crossroads, to the Memphis motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated, to colonial Africa, before it all ends up back at Miley Cyrus' place in Toluca Lake, LA.
It's some piece of work. It's pure shouldn't-work-but-it-does-and-wouldn't-work-if-anyone-else-tried-it Nick Cave.
A young member of the Wangaratta Cathedral Choir very early in his musical career, Cave has long tapped religion and matters of faith.
He was invited to write an introduction to a stand-alone edition of The Gospel According To Mark in the early 2000s and his religious, largely Old Testament-inspired, imagery has kept academics up to their eyeballs in theses since his first novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel, made him a man to take seriously on these matters.
But particle physics?
"I was just reading a lot about it, especially through the popular media press, which was talking about it proving or disproving the existence of God and I was interested in the way it entered the popular imagination as a scientific experiment largely because of the name that someone gave it: the God particle."
After the song came out, Cave was invited to Lucerne to see the Large Hadron Collider.
"Obviously the "God particle" to the scientists, there was an embarrassment. But they got huge funding because of it. So anyway it sits in the song and I go through a series of spiritual calamities along the way. It's pretty simple really."
Film-makers Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard capture a riveting studio take of the song in its early stages. It was seeing that footage by the directors - who had been working on a conventional making-of video for the album - helped convince Cave to say yes to a whole biographical film.
Nick Cave in the days of The Birthday Party, early 1980s. Photo / Getty Images
"It was a slow, very slow, drawn out yes and they kind of brought bits of the film in, slowly and incrementally.
"To me [the song sequence] was a genuinely beautiful piece of footage because it shows The Bad Seeds getting exactly to that place we talked about in the film - where we are just finding the song, probably after the second take and we are understanding the song as we play it.
"The take after that, we will never have that feeling again and this is basically the way we try and record our stuff all the time. So they managed to capture that moment. And that song to me is the heart and soul or the film."
"There are some very long sequences, like the Higgs Boson Blues, one which any sane producer would cut into very quickly, but the people behind it had a real belief in the film so they let it ride. That is why I am most pleased about the indulgent aspects of the film."
Those indulgences extend to scenes which has Cave playing chauffeur to Ray Winstone (who acted in the Cave-penned movie The Proposition), former long-term Bad Seed Blixa Bargeld and one-time duet partner Kylie Minogue.
She might be pop lightweight in heavy company but Minogue still offers her own memorable image of first seeing Cave on stage: "You were like this tree from a Hitchcock film in silhouette, in a storm."
Winstone quizzes Cave on his life as a performer, wondering if he will just keep going like the deathless Rolling Stones and whether he still enjoys playing live.
"I live for it, I really do," replies Cave. "It's really that moment where I can be that person who I always wanted to be. There is something that happens on stage where you are transported and time has a different feel and you are just this thing and feel you can't do any wrong. And then you look down at the front row and somebody yawns and the whole thing falls away ..."
There's a live footage with Cave in full rock 'n' roll preacher mode, crouched before a woman at the foot of his concert stage, singing the Higgs Boson Blues' chorus hook to her alone: "Can you feel my heartbeat?"
Cave and a stripped-down Bad Seeds are coming to New Zealand at the end of the year.
His four Auckland and Wellington shows sold out instantly. He has been based outside Australia since the early 80s after the Birthday Party - whose post-punk goth-rock days as "the most violent band in the world" Cave looks back on with mixed feelings in the movie - skipped the Lucky Country and finally split in 1984.
The madness of the Birthday Party years is captured in the movie in a sequence of photos which might have been titled "Eau de Cologne".
At a 1980 concert in the German city, an audience member is standing on the stage edge and urinating on late bassist Tracey Pew, who takes violent exception to the critique and launches himself at the punter, just one of the "skinheads, low-lifes, psychopaths" Cave says the band seemed to attract in those days.
The film wanders back further through Cave's extensive archive - the subject of a touring exhibition of Cave memorabilia in Australia a few years ago - to where school photos of his childhood in country Victoria give way to his first stirrings as a writer and musician.
We briefly meet the legend-stoking, wild-haired goth/junkie Berlin resident writing his first novel. That's him becoming the Nick Cave, a man whose songs across some 15 Bad Seeds studio albums as well as other musical, movie and literary excursions has brought him the sort of rock-cultural heft usually reserved for the likes of a Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan.
And like those figures many years his senior, he's still going strong. That he's sustained creatively and isn't out on post-punk nostalgia tours like so many of his one-time contemporaries, he puts down to just keeping at it, every day.
"I don't know about other people. I know I've tried to change what I do as much as possible. I've worked in a lot of different fields and I have a work ethic that requires that I sit down first thing in the morning and start to write and I'm dedicated to that process.
So stuff happens.
"If I am not doing that, then I would be a post-punk revival band."
Where did that work ethic come from?
"I don't know. I just realised at some point that if I do this - this is not a recent thing; I've been doing it this way for 25 years - if I was going to do this thing I would have to apply myself to it on a daily basis, like any writer has to do. You read the daily rituals of any writer and you will see that they work. Part of it is to sit down and work."
Musically, that has meant sitting down and working with many collaborators - some, like current multi-instrumentalist offsider Warren Ellis, who gets a fair amount of screen time in the movie, have become far more than backing musicians.
"They've been hugely important when it comes to music," says Cave of the members of Team Bad Seeds, past and present.
"I work collaboratively. I always have. Right from the very start. There was period in the middle where I wrote a lot of songs on my own on the piano. But I was searching for a kind of song and I think I found it - or to the best of my ability anyway - and it was time to move on.
"Once again I started to work a lot more collaboratively but these people are hugely important. But any collaborators will know that there is a beginning and an end to these collaborations."
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
Cave's New Zealand dates are billed as a solo tour but he will be bringing a few of the gang "to keep him company".
So what does it take to cut it as a Bad Seed?
"Aaaah ..."
A cheery disposition? A good suit?
"They are funny, the Bad Seeds. They are funny guys. Yeah a sense of humour I would say, for sure."
With the film having wrapped up his first 20,000 or so days, how does Cave see the next 10,000?
"Much the same, I would say. I just get up and go to work in the morning and I don't even feel I have much control over what I actually do in the sense that much of the stuff that comes my way is just presented to me - 'Would you like to do this? Would you do that?' - and that fills my days. I don't see any reason why I shouldn't be doing this in 10 years' time."
Nick Cave plays at Auckland's Civic on December 6 and 7 and Wellington's St James on December 8 and 9. The film 20,000 Nights on Earth is at cinemas now and will have a special screening on December 6 at SkyCity Theatre at 12.30pm, where Cave will be attending a Q&A session after the film.
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