While the world of cinema is no stranger to Nick Cave, the antipodean singer-songwriter who released brilliant and brooding songs such as The Mercy Seat and Where the Wild Roses Grow, it is pretty strange to see him be part of the Hollywood engine that churned out Gladiator. This week it was revealed that Cave wrote a sequel to the sword-and-sandal hit, at the behest of fellow Ozzie Russell Crowe.
Many would be confused at how a sequel was possible considering the end of the original, but Cave, obsessed with the afterlife (his Lyre of Orpheus album is one of his best), sets the story in the Roman afterlife, as our hero Maximus is reincarnated in an attempt to find his son, and ends up living well into the 21st Century. Sounds strange? Well, it is, so much so that the script was rejected and the film will never be made, despite Crowe’s positive response to the story and Cave’s writing. For more details on the story, including sample dialogue, head here.
In other news relating to Nick Cave, John Hillcoat (director of the Cave-written The Proposition) is also set to direct Cave’s next script, Death of a Ladies’ Man.
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Here’s some more good news for those of us with hopes for the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s bleak novel The Road. In an interview with the LA Times, Nick Cave has spoken about his current project of scoring the movie.
Nick Cave (and his Bad Seeds) have been around for 25 years, writing music that pitches between paranoiac, frenzied delusions, and tragic, desperate ballads, with an occasional break (e.g. his new Grinderman group) to rock out. His lyrics are polished and literary. But he has also delved into soundtracks, including the beautiful laments of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Cave has also worked with The Road director, John Hillcoat, before, providing music for and scripting the nasty Oz Western The Proposition (which is currently being remade for Hollywood) and Ghosts… of the Civil Dead.
With Cave’s reliable tunes, and Hillcoat’s direction, which so far has displayed a habit of never relenting from the disturbing, not to mention the book having been penned by the man behind this year’s Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, The Road is gearing up to be one of the highlights of the year.
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