By his own admission, director Andrew Dominik’s relationship with Nick Cave did not get off to an auspicious start. It was the late 80s and Dominik was a film student, whose new girlfriend had broken up with Cave “about three months beforehand”. To compound matters, shortly after they began going out, Cave released a single bearing the woman’s name: Deanna, which depicts Cave ejaculating over her clothes and then enticing her to join him in a murder spree inspired by 50s teenage serial killer Charlie Starkweather. “Yeah, it was kind of intimidating,” Dominik says today, over Skype from his LA home. “I was 20 years old or something, and Nick Cave was like the dark prince of Melbourne. I wasn’t predisposed to being a Nick Cave fan, but he’s really good and I reluctantly became one.”

Nick Cave documentary was 'instinct of self-preservation' after death of son Read more

Furthermore, the pair also became friends, then collaborators. First, Cave wrote a song for Dominik’s first feature film, Chopper, which was not used, then Dominik offered him a small part in 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Cave “asked me whether he could do the music as well, and I just felt kind of put on the spot and didn’t know how to say no, which turned out to be a great decision.”

Dominik says he was part of “the basic rallying round” for Cave and his wife Susie Bick after their 15-year-old son, Arthur, died following a fall from a cliff in Ovingdean Gap, East Sussex, in 2015. He was surprised when Cave suggested he make a documentary about the completion of Skeleton Tree, the album Cave and the Bad Seeds had begun making before Arthur’s death. However, “without hesitating” he agreed to the idea, despite not really knowing what Cave wanted, beyond coming up with something that would enable him to avoid doing press for the album and thus having to answer a succession of journalists’ questions about his late son.

I wanted to be around him; I was worried about them and it was an opportunity to kind of do something Andrew Dominik

“The primary thing that everybody feels in a situation like that is helplessness, and for him to ask me to do something was sort of a way for me to help,” says Dominik. “It wasn’t your usual motives for making a film; it wasn’t: ‘We’re going to make a work of art.’ There were a lot of things about the circumstances of the film that I wouldn’t usually get involved with, like (a) we don’t really know what the film is, and (b) I don’t have control over the final cut of the movie; that was down to Nick. But I was looking at it as trying to help him out, I wanted to be around him, I was worried about them and it was an opportunity to kind of do something.”

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Nevertheless, One More Time With Feeling emerged as one of the most compelling, acclaimed documentaries of recent years; a film that is, in its depiction of loss and grief, simultaneously visually sumptuous and almost unbearably stark. The sumptuousness comes from Dominik’s idea to shoot in black and white and 3D, inspired by his collection of stereoscopic photographs (“The basic idea was that the 3D was involving and the black and white is distancing and it gives you a way to kind of see the world with new eyes”), while the actual nature of the film shifted and changed as it was shot. It began life as straightforward footage of the Bad Seeds recording overdubs and performing the songs from Skeleton Tree; expanded to include an impressionistic, improvised voiceover from Cave that, as Dominik puts it, “gives you a sense of what was going on in his internal world, while the world’s going on around him, this kind of maelstrom of confusion and pain, but also a gratitude for the people around him”; then finally encompassed the frank, harrowing interviews with Cave and Bick that appear in the final part of the film.

“I did feel like I was intruding at times,” says Dominik. “There’s no two ways around it. I was intruding … but he comes up, you know, Arthur comes up. If you run a camera for long enough, Arthur comes up and that’s what I did: I just ran the camera. I mean, there were times where I would try to get them to talk about it, and those moments always backfired. You’ve got to allow them to approach the subject. You can’t sort of hammer them with it. And as soon as you do … they physically start to shake; you can literally see the amount of distress that it causes them when it’s sort of foisted upon them. And those moments, for me, they didn’t feel right. My criteria for including stuff about Arthur was whether they had something to say about the process of grieving, as opposed to just displays of emotion. I mean, every time they talk about it, I think they give you some insight into what grieving is like, and from that point of view, it manages to avoid being, you know, grief porn.”

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The film’s shattering conclusion, which features Arthur Cave singing a song he had co-written with his father and brother, was in part suggested by his parents. “Susie sent it to me on the first Mother’s Day after Arthur died. She said that she hadn’t actually been able to listen to it herself and she hadn’t told Nick she was sending it to me. Then, it’s a really weird thing, about three months later, Nick sends me the same song. So I got the sense they wanted it in the film. We tried it in various spots in the film, but it worked at the end, kind of as a way of giving Arthur the last word. I think that Susie, out of all of us, was the one that saw the film could serve as a kind of memorial for Arthur. You can hear him in the song, he’s completely unselfconscious: he used to make films, he was really into magic, he had more front than a barn. He was the kind of person that I’m sure we would have heard more from in life. And I think Susie felt on that basis that Arthur would not have disapproved of the film. I mean, it’s one thing to hear about Nick Cave’s son, it’s another to really get a sense of him. It’s not some abstract concept. He was a person.”

Nick was concerned about certain things. Does the film exploit the situation? Does the film diminish the situation? Andrew Dominik

He felt he had to warn Cave and his wife about the use of the song, when it came to showing them the film. Dominik says he was terrified, more terrified even than when he showed Chopper to the man it was based on: no small boast given that the man Chopper was based on claimed to be involved in the killing of 19 people and was famed for divesting his victims of their toes with a blowtorch. “Nick was very concerned about certain things. Does the film exploit the situation? Does the film somehow diminish the situation? So they came in and they sat and watched it, and it was fucking terrifying, just imagining how they would react to it. And they came out, and Nick was happy, but he didn’t like the last third of the movie; he hated all the interview stuff, he didn’t think it was moving, he thought it was just some guy waffling. And Susie hated all the stuff with her. But Susie liked Nick and Nick liked Susie, right? So they decided to show it to Warren [Ellis, Cave’s main musical foil in the Bad Seeds], and he said: ‘No, you’re both wrong, it’s all good.’” Eventually, Cave decided to relinquish authorial control over the film. “He decided he couldn’t, if I was going to have to go out and take responsibility for it. I mean, the whole idea of making the movie was so that he didn’t have to answer questions like these ones again; so I had to ask them, and therefore he let me release the film that I wanted to release.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Click here to watch the video for I Need You by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

Dominik is justifiably proud of the end result: he talks about how he thinks the experience of making it might influence his approach to feature films in future, how making a film without really knowing what he was supposed to be doing, or where it was heading, has taught him that “if you’re focused, you can rely on your instincts”. And he thinks it had a positive effect on the Cave family, too. One thing that Cave objected to before relinquishing control was the film’s use of footage of the cliff where his son died; Dominik chose to include it after visiting the spot on the day of Arthur’s funeral, and noting that not only had someone painted a picture of an angel on the footpath where the teenager had fallen, but that “when you stood at the top of the cliff and looked out, it was this beautiful view of the sea and the sky, something that suggested eternity, or continuum, or perhaps the insignificance of us all. I wanted to use it as a beautiful thing, as opposed to a horrible thing.”

Cave, understandably, disagreed. “He hated it,” says Dominik. “He has to drive past it, sometimes four times a day, because his studio is on the other side of town. He said he gets a feeling, like a constriction in his gut, every time he does. And Susie was unconsciously speeding up every time she drove by it; she didn’t even know she was doing it, but she got caught on the speed cameras, she actually got fined. But he said that, since the film came out, he drives past there and he gets a kind of warm feeling. I think that’s kind of beautiful, that the movie could have changed his associations.”

One More Time With Feeling is in cinemas on 1 December; Skeleton Tree is out now