‘Blonde’ director Andrew Dominik shines spotlight on friend and music collaborator Nick Cave in ‘This Much I Know To Be True’

Australian director-screenwriter Andrew Dominik has been in the news ever since the teaser release of his highly-anticipated Marilyn Monroe biopic,  Blonde, a few weeks ago. But that’s not the only reason the 54-year-old maverick filmmaker is trending. His new documentary,  This Much I Know To Be True, on longtime friend and collaborator, the Australian musicianNick Cave, came to India last week after a worldwide release in May.

A companion piece to Dominik’s 2016 documentary on Cave,  One More Time With Feeling — made in the wake of the latter’s teen son Arthur’s demise —  This Much I Know… is largely about the creative partnership between Cave and composer Warren Ellis who have been in bands together.

It is apparent Cave put a lot of faith in the filmmaker, and over the course of the two documentaries, Dominik has stood alongside his friend and watched the musician transform. “His grief seems to have embedded him more into life and opened up his heart. He used to be a lot more of a difficult character than he is now,” says Dominik.

Instant connect

The pair had a somewhat strange introduction when Dominik was dating Cave’s ex-girlfriend, about whom Cave wrote the eponymous 1988 hit song ‘Deanna’. Cave would call for his ex and end up talking to Dominik. “We used to talk and have always been able to talk,” the filmmaker says, confessing that he has always been a fan of Cave as an artist. “Nick’s music has sort of been the soundtrack to my life,” he says. Eventually, Cave and his bandmate Ellis scored Dominik’s 2007 film,  The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Dominik says he admires Cave’s “relationship with the unknown”. In  This Much I Know…, we get to see Cave’s unique creative collaboration with Ellis. Earlier, Cave would never sit in a room with someone else to make music, but now Ellis just starts playing some music, and Cave tries to sing on top of that. “It’s very playful what they do: getting into this liminal state where they don’t know what’s happening, and that’s where stuff seems to happen,” says Dominik. Cave and Ellis have also scored  Blonde, starring Cuban-Spanish actor Ana de Armas as Monroe. The film is based on the eponymous novel by Joyce Carol Oates, which is a fictionalised chronicle of Monroe’s inner life.

Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in ‘Blonde’

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Perhaps thinking of his long-time passion project  Blonde (he first wrote the script in 2008), Dominik compares his style of documentary filmmaking to climbing a mountain without ropes. “You get up to the top fast, but if you put a foot wrong, you fall to your death. It’s exhilarating,” he says. How does that translate on set? “I just turn up and try to reveal the truth that’s in front of me.”

Thus, for instance, in the first documentary, we see Cave “trying to take a step forward in the shadow of his grief; trying to be positive but failing,” says Dominik. Whereas, in the new film, he has integrated the loss into his life. He wants to pass on what he has learnt; that “we are all going to find ourselves losing everything at some point.”

Finding a balance

Director Andrew Dominik at the 73rd Venice Film Festival in September 2016
| Photo Credit: Getty Images

According to the filmmaker, while Cave remains focused on his music, his priorities have undergone a healthy change. Cave’s sense of self is not so much tied to his work, but to the people he loves. “It’s ironic that just as he stops taking his work so seriously, it gets better,” laughs Dominik, “But in the end, how important is work really?”

Interestingly, when asked about his own life beyond work, Dominik is dismissive. “I’m no one.” He says he finds himself at the end of a weird state of working consistently for the past three years and staring at “this empty life stretching all the way to the horizon,” he chuckles nervously. “I am not quite where Nick is. I’d like to be.”

Making these films on and with Cave, the second one during the pandemic, seem to have taught Dominik much about loss and grief. He thinks that if we don’t react to loss with bitterness, it makes us realise that we are all in it together in “a kind of compassionate embedding in the world,” he says. Like Cave, Dominik suggests that more people should try to find meaning in loss. “Because loss is one of the basic conditions of the human experience, and we don’t have any choice in the matter, but we do have a choice in how we respond to it.”

The writer is a Mumbai-based journalist.