20,000 Days on Earth

20,000 Days on Earth is a film with and about Nick Cave. It follows an idea from its first spark onto the stage of the Sydney Opera House. Forsyth and Pollard set out to chart that journey as a whole: the initial fragment, the demo, the refinement, the recording, and, at last, the performance in front of an audience.

Forsyth and Pollard had worked with Cave for years, and when he and Warren Ellis began writing new songs for the album Push the Sky Away, he invited them to Brighton to film in his home office. They went with no specific project in mind and no crew, just a camera each, and then followed each stage of the process of making the album. This was the first time Cave allowed the early stages of his creative process to be documented.

It was in the first three days of the recording at La Fabrique Studios in France that they realised how remarkable and intimate their encounter with Cave’s creative process was and how the footage being captured needed to be shaped into a feature film for the cinema screen.

The film features the first full band recording of the song Higgs Boson Blues; the scene captures the alchemy of the musicians working together to find and grow the idea into a fully fledged recording. Nobody in the room yet knows what they have. Nothing in these sequences was directed or repeated.

Forsyth and Pollard began to construct a vessel to carry the core thread of footage following Cave’s ideas from first sketch to full performance. They found their inspiration in Cave’s songwriting notebooks for the album. He had jotted down a quick calculation to work out how many days he had been alive; under this was the phrase 20,000 Days on Earth. They were drawn to how this phrase seemed to be both completely alien and utterly human, simultaneously cosmic and commonplace. This sparked their decision to shape the film around a fictitious day in Nick’s world – his 20,000th day on earth.

All the scenes in this strand of the film were built, but no dialogue was ever written; Cave was entirely improvised and was never asked to say anything twice. The first scene Iain & Jane wanted to film was the session with the psychoanalyst Darian Leader. Filmed three months before the rest of the shoot, Leader and Cave spoke for a total of 10 hours over two days. Working with their editor, Jonathan Amos, Iain & Jane used this sprawling, exciting encounter to inform the themes for the rest of the film.

One of the key moments from the session with the psychoanalyst is the story Cave tells of inviting Nina Simone to play at his Meltdown Festival in London. She arrives backstage, at what will become one of her final concerts, in a foul temper, walks out to the piano, takes the gum from her mouth and presses it onto the piano lid, before, over the course of the show, becoming somebody else entirely. He speaks about how he and the whole audience witnessed her transformation and were also transformed by it.

Iain & Jane set up three improvised scenes in Cave’s car – brief, semi-spectral, slightly surreal encounters with figures who mean a lot to Nick – Ray Winstone, Blixa Bargeld and Kylie Minogue. Talking to Ray Winstone, Cave describes how the same thing happens to him when he steps on stage: a moment of forgetting who you are and becoming someone else.

Then, over lunch with Warren Ellis, Cave talks about that Nina Simone performance, Ellis confesses that he took Nina Simone’s chewing gum off the piano at the end of the show. That’s how significant a moment it was to him too. This thread becomes the lifeblood of the film, culminating in concert footage near the end of the film where Cave is fully engaged in an act of transformation, singing Jubilee Street with the lyric, “I’m transforming, I’m vibrating. Look at me now.”

The film premiered at Sundance in January 2014, winning the World Cinema Documentary awards for Directing and for Editing, and went on to a BAFTA nomination for Documentary, the Douglas Hickox Award at the British Independent Film Awards, a Grierson for Best Arts Documentary and two Cinema Eye Honors. From 2017 to 2024 it was a set film on the A-level Film Studies syllabus in England and Wales.