In 'Lawless,' Nick Cave crafts a new murder ballad

CANNES, France (AP) -- Writing the Prohibition-era bootlegger crime film "Lawless" -- his second realized script and largest movie production yet -- taught Australian songwriter Nick Cave certain foundational lessons of Hollywood moviemaking.

   "I learned that it's a waste of time to graphically kill animals in scripts," Cave says, laughing. "It's going to hit the cutting room floor."

   The education and development of Nick Cave, screenwriter, continues with "Lawless," a tale of three bootlegging brothers (Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, Jason Clarke) in rural 1920s Virginia. In adapting Matt Bondurant's novel, Cave was predictably moved to include scenes from the book of a pig's slaughter and a dead calf's birth, but had to settle for gangster gunplay and an ominous atmosphere alive with the constant threat of sudden brutality.

   The film marks Cave's continuing dalliance with screenwriting, "an extracurricular" activity, he calls it, along with novel and poetry writing. That's in addition to his "No. 1 job" as a musician and frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and the currently dormant Grinderman.

   "I became a script writer with absolutely no idea of how to write a script whatsoever," says Cave, who also wrote the 2005 Australian outback Western, "The Proposition." "I still feel a bit of an outsider in that regard. If I can maintain that approach to screenwriting, it can continue to be enjoyable. But as soon as that's gone and I understand the process, I don't think I'll have much interest in writing scripts at all."

   Violence has been a rich vein for Cave since he emerged in the 1980s with the London-based punk outfit The Birthday Party. As a theatrical lyricist of spare fables, his gothic songs of death and mean men with a "red right hand" have often carried a murderous gravity and narrative bent.

   Like the bloody "Proposition," "Lawless" is another kind of murder ballad for Cave, one populated with colorful characters compelled by primal urges.

   "I don't know where that comes from except that it's a particular talent I have to write about that stuff," says Cave, a native of rural Victoria who now lives in Brighton, England, with his wife and twin sons. "Whether that's from being a country boy walking around the ranges with a shotgun as a child and all that sort of stuff, but that was very much what my childhood was like."

   Cave spoke in an interview first in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where "Lawless" competed for the Palm d'Or, and again by phone from Los Angeles, where he's recently recorded a new album with the Bad Seeds.

   Erudite and droll, Cave, the son of an English teacher and librarian, is an engaging subject whose dry wit captivated Cannes more than the star power of the film's cast, which also includes Guy Pearce and Jessica Chastain.

   LaBeouf attached himself to the script early on and stuck with the project through delays due to financing. He remained with it because of Cave's screenplay and the prospect of working with director John Hillcoat, a friend of Cave's who also directed "The Proposition."

   "When a man says to you, `I'm planning on making "Goodfellas" in the woods,' it's really hard to get away from that idea," says LaBeouf.

   Cave says that the larger size of "Lawless," which the Weinstein Co. is releasing in theaters Friday, "opened my eyes to how film is made," referring to the necessary compromising of a project with many interested parties.

   But screenwriting remains a fascinating process for Cave, who says it comes far more natural to him than songwriting. Despite the 54-year-old's decades in music, he calls songwriting torturous.

   "Songwriting is something where I have to go into a room on my own and battle it out and squeeze out these songs," says Cave. "It's like giving birth out of the tiniest of apertures. It's painful and it's kind of bloody, whereas writing scripts, I feel like a little boy."

   When Cave writes a script, he simultaneously is considering the score. For "Lawless," he wanted to avoid the Americana route, wary of competing with T-Bone Burnett's "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack. Instead, he and Bad Seeds violinist Warren Ellis went for a "raw, punky feel."

   The score is thus full of countrified versions of more recent rock songs not typically done that way, most notably bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley singing the Velvet Underground tune "White Light/White Heat." Cave believes the song, which is about methamphetamine use, connects the film's criticism of Prohibition with contemporary anti-drug policy.

   Though Cave now finds himself an in-demand screenwriter, he says it reenergizes him for his "bread and butter" occupation.

   "Screenwriting is something I use to help keep the process of songwriting alive," he says. "If that's all I was doing, I would have dried up or gone into a real decline years ago with songwriting. I'm always coming back to songwriting. In fact, I'm always running back to songwriting screaming."

Moonrise Kingdom - Wes Anderson (2012)

"Moonrise Kingdom" is a love story between two tween misfits and it may well be Wes Anderson's masterpiece. 

The story starts with a boy named Sam's escape from camp. He's a scout nobody seems to like.
 

Sam meets up with his girlfriend, Suzy, whom he's gotten to know primarily through letters. She is fleeing parents whose idea of family communication is certifiably disjointed.
 

The entire community goes hunting for the young runaways and that's the story in a nutshell.
 

But as with all of Anderson's work, the plot is more or less incidental.
 

The quirky characters are the focus of the film.
 

Ed Norton plays a strict, loving and clueless scout leader who loses a camper.
 

Tilda Swinton plays a villain who swoops in, going only by the name "Social Services."
 

And Bill Murray and Frances McDormand stand out as Suzy's maddening parents whose communication problems most likely precipitated their daughter's exodus.
 

Anderson's point, of course, is that we're all odd ducks.

Von Trier's Cast Stands Behind Their Filmmaker (sort of)

Okay, let me explain. No, there is no time. Let me sum up.

Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier was kicked out of Cannes earlier this week for saying that he found pleasure in the fact that he was “really a Nazi.”
Not only that, but the distribution company decided to bail on him because of the controversy.

So, the cast was asked about the whole mess.

When asked if she would work with Lars von Trier again after his incendiary remarks at the press conference for “Melancholia” at Cannes, Kirsten Dunst said, "Yes, I would work with him, yeah.” But she qualified her endorsement of the filmmaker, saying, “It's unfortunate that he joked about that, it is very inappropriate."



But Stellan Skarsgard, who worked with von Trier in “Breaking the Waves,” threw all his support behind his director. "He can say anything, but what you always have to consider is the thought and meaning behind the words, not the words themselves and everybody knows he is not a Nazi, he was a Jew for 33 years,” Skarsgard argued. “It's absolutely ridiculous and it's embarrassing for the Cannes Film Festival that they behave like this."

Von Trier Uproar

Hey folks, it's been a while.

I've more or less neglected all of my online personas to catch up on sleep for the past month.

Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier has been kicked out of the Cannes film festival for saying that he found pleasure in the fact that he was “really a Nazi.”

"Melancholia" is still in the competition for prizes, which will be handed out at a closing ceremony Sunday.

Von Trier said afterward he had been joking and apologized.

The best part is Kirsten Dunst’s reaction as he’s making the comments.

Lorna’s Silence – Dardenne Brothers (2008)

The latest film from the Dardenne Brothers is an understated study of alienation that reminded me a lot of Remains of the Day and Casablanca. (Not to give this film delusions of grandeur.)





"Lorna's Silence" starts with our heroine, Lorna, who is a profoundly unhappy woman. We don't know what her situation is, but she exudes miser in every frame she appears in.


Lorna has married a Belgian junkie for a green-card and the plan, as it's slowly revealed through the course of the film, involves killing the junkie with an overdose and side-stepping the whole mess of a divorce.

The plot is incidental, though. In fact, we’re not ever fully sure what the story is. We know the plot involves a green-card and a Russian who for some reason needs to establish residency in Belgium.

He's a very ominous figure. We only hear to him referred to as "The Russian."

The focus of the film is the isolation of Lorna.

Slowly, she finds herself attached to Claudy, her junkie fake-husband and gets to work on a plan to save his life. Of course, she can not tell him why she is doing all of this.

She doesn’t want Claudy to know his life is in danger and she stays silent.

Lorna is so stoic that it’s near impossible to tell just how deep her feelings for Claudy go or how they’re progressing until finally, one night, her actions leave no room for misunderstanding.

This is the first spark of happiness or even humanity we have seen in Lorna. This junkie has actually brought her to life.

There is an unspeakably beautiful moment that you’ll miss if you blink. It has no significance and only last a second or two, but it’s so tremendously effective.

Lorna and Claudy, her recovering, junkie, fake-husband, have just left a locksmith/pawnshop.

She is off to work and he is going to ride his bike all day to keep his mind off his withdrawal.

They split up and he starts to ride away.

Lorna, who’s been pretty cold to Claudy so far and showed no emotion at all, until the previous night, and is now falling for him, spontaneously turns and chases after him for a few yards.

It is a desperately joyous little moment as she runs after him for two seconds before turning to walk her own way.

It last three or four seconds, but it says so much about the transformation of her feelings toward this man she just met and had thought of, only days before as expendable.

And the way that The Dardenne Brothers cut from this burst of unexpected joy to the aftermath of heartbreak reminds me of what sets these filmmakers apart from others and why I loved Rosetta so much.

(I’ll be re-watching that very soon, I think.)





Of course, people who build up walls around themselves do so for defensive purposes and once those come down, Lorna is incredibly vulnerable.

Her strength was in the fact that nobody knew her.

The film ends ambiguously, but if you ask yourself, ‘What’s likely to be the next thing to happen to Lorna?’ you probably won’t come up with a happy answer.

Isolation, that front that makes people think you don't need anybody else, might make you look strong, but it's a lie.

In reality, it just makes you lonely and weak.

That is what the Dardenne Brothers are saying here and the message comes across beautifully and breaks your heart.

Oscar Wrap-Up Story That Didn't Make It

So, I'm in Texas, trying to occupy my time with anything at all and it occurs to me that hell, I can write an Oscar wrap-up for work since I did the bulk of the pre-Oscar stuff. Yeah, I'm off the clock, but it beats doing nothing.

Then, I went to our website the next day only to find that I had sent Aaron the links and some info and neglected to attach the article itself. D'oh!

Needless to say, my story did not make it.

At any rate, just so it doesn't go to waste, here it is in all its glory.

For those of you who read my blog and have become accustomed to a certain style, you'll forgive the occasional cheesy line. The following was written with my work audience in mind. And here it is:


The 82nd Academy Awards started with big laughs and ended with history being made.

Steve Martin recognized the fact that Meryl Streep had more nominations than any actor in Hollywood history.

He went on to insist that the glass was half empty, pointing out that the dubious honour just meant that she had the most losses.

"The Hurt Locker,"Kathryn Bigelow’s tense drama about a bomb disposal unit in Iraq took home Oscar’s top prize Sunday night. The film led the Oscar count with six wins including a historic first.

Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to earn an Academy Award for Best Director. The honor of first female ever to win a Best Director statue hould have been Jane Campion or Kimberly Pierce for their fierce efforts in the '90's, but that's neither here nor there.

"Avatar" came away from the Kodak theatre with its share of Oscar gold, though. James wasn't king of the world, but he was king of the post-house as his eye-candy "epic" snatched up trophies for Art Direction, Cinematography and Visual Effects.

The acting categories turned out the way most film critics (including this one) foretold. (Because critics are like prophets.) Mo’Nique won an Oscar for playing the creepiest mother ever in "Precious."


Christoph Waltz won his well-deserved uber-Bingo Oscar for playing Inglourious Basterds’ cheerfully sadistic Jew Hunter.

As predicted, Sandra Bullock and Jeff Bridges won the popularity contests, otherwise known as the Best Actress and Best Actor Oscars for The Blind Side and Crazy Heart, respectively.

I'm not begrudging Bridges his statue, even though, out of the five nominees at least, Colin Firth should have taken it home. Bridges has done so much overlooked work that he deserves a lifetime achievement award. Most notably for "The Fisher King" and "The Big Lebowski."

There were a couple of surprises. Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon was considered by many a lock to win an Oscar for Foreign Language Film. Haneke has long been admired for in the film community, both here and in Europe. It looked like his haunting tale of ritualistic punishment and a series of mysterious tragedies in a small town in pre-WWI Germany was one of the night’s foregone conclusions.

The honour, however, went to Juan José Campanella’s The Secret in Their Eyes from Argentina. Another surprise was seeing Quentin Tarantino going home empty-handed. Most were expecting him to take home an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. One disappointment was that Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, absolutely scalding condemnation of the way entities ‘help’ refugees, went home empty handed.It’s one of the best films that was political criticism disguised as sci-fi since Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Day the Earth Stood Still. But since it’s not your typical Oscar film, the fact that it was nominated at all is something to be grateful for.

Also going home without a single prize was Lone Scherfig’s simple and elegant "An Education." And that was a shame because "An Education," simple as it was, was one of the most honest and moving films of the year.
My heart was broken at how this young girl was taken in by this sleazy Cassonova, but Sarsgaard is so damn charming, we can see why young Jenny fell for him.

For my money, Mulligan should have taken the statue home and Sarsgaard should have at least been nominated, but I rarely get what I wish for when it comes to the Academy Awards.
The broadcast had other highlights other than the awards themselves. In a moving tribute to ‘80s iconic filmmaker John Hughes, actors from his film came up on state to share stories about how he helped shape their careers and lives. It was a surprisingly sad and funny eulogy to one of the many stars lost last year. Now, it’s time to move onward. For most, this means looking forward to the long line of blockbusters Hollywood is getting ready to parade out for us.

But for this film snob, since flying out to Southern France and spending eleven days in cinematic heaven isn’t really practical, I’m going to be spending the next few months reading about international and independent films making their premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May. There is so much coming soon to theatres near us. Let’s get going! Allons-y!