Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's 20,000 Days on Earth is a film centered on the legendary rocker and writer Nick Cave, but it isn't your average music documentary. Instead of just following Cave around for an "in the life of..." type movie, the filmmakers and Cave actually staged scenarios.
For example, Cave appears driving in a car with English actor Ray Winstone in the passenger seat, Australian singer Kylie Minogue in the backseat, and former bandmate Blixa Bargeld explaining why he left the Bad Seeds.
In that scene, there's a moment when Cave asks Minogue what she's afraid of, and she replies, "I worry about being forgotten and lonely." In an interview with Rolling Stone, Cave addressed this moment. "We hadn't really spoken for a long time, so it was quite special to be with her again," he said. "We were really close in a detached kind of way. We both really liked to be with each other. That was a poignant answer, and a very honest answer. And none of that is staged. We just got in the car."
Also in the car, Bargeld explains that he decided to leave Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds because it was different than the band he had originally joined. "He left after about twenty years through an email," Cave told RS. "It was a very short email: a couple of lines. I rang him up and asked if he was sure. He said yes. And that was that. I'd never really talked to him or worked out why or what had happened. That conversation was the first time we'd ever really talked about why he'd left the band."
In the film, Cave discusses his first sexual experience as being with a "kabuki-like" girl who dressed him up in women's clothing. When asked if this was truthful, considering the partially staged nature of the movie, Cave said: "Largely. It's edited, of course, but editing can do all sorts of mischievous things with the truth. Once you sit down and talk to someone for a very long time with hardly any lunch break, after a while it just becomes impossible to be guarded with your answers."
