>>PREVIEW
THE PROPOSITION
STARRING Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone and Emily Watson
DIRECTED BY John Hillcoat
Opens Friday, June 23
Uptown Screen
A lean, lyrical and often brutal western set in a thoroughly godforsaken corner of the Australian outback in the 1880s, The Proposition marks the screenwriting debut of an artist whose flair for the dark stuff is already very well-established.
Rock music’s most literary reprobate, Nick Cave, contributed both the admirably economical script and the eerie score. By doing so, he continues a collaboration with filmmaker John Hillcoat that includes Hillcoat’s several videos for Cave’s band, the Bad Seeds, and Cave’s onscreen role as a psychotic convict in Hillcoat’s harrowing 1988 prison flick Ghosts… of the Civil Dead. (This October, Hillcoat is set to shoot another original script by Cave, a black comedy named Death of a Ladies’ Man.)
The story of a lawman who presents a deal to an outlaw with catastrophic results, The Proposition marks a triumph for both men. As they explain in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, the project was a long time coming. Says Cave as he rolls himself a cigarette, "As long as I’ve known John, which is 20 years, he’s been banging on about doing an Australian western."
"The day came when Nick had enough of just thinking about the scoring…," says Hillcoat.
Cave jumps in. "And I say, ‘Right, I’ll write the fucking thing.’ And there you go."
This wasn’t the first time Cave had tried to write a script – his 1989 novel And the Ass Saw the Angel was originally intended for the screen but soon grew out of his control. This time he found the task "extraordinarily easy." In fact, Cave says, "I’d never done any work that’s so fucking easy. I mean, any fucking idiot can do it and obviously they do."
"That’s part of the problem," says Hillcoat when the laughs subside.
"You don’t have to know how to write," says Cave. "You basically have to know how to operate a computer, which I didn’t actually know."
Adds the director, "Half the time was spent on formatting and sorting out the margins."
That might be so, but the film’s sophistication belies the hastiness of the script’s creation. Especially impressive is how closely it parallels the respective dilemmas faced by Ray Winstone’s reluctant lawman and Guy Pearce’s haunted outlaw.
"They’re two sides of the same coin," says Hillcoat. "That’s a tradition in the western. What we deliberately tried to explore is the moral compromises of those positions, as opposed to one man being victorious and righteous and the other being not. And it’s more Australian as well – failure and these fatalistic antiheroes are something embedded in our culture.
"It’s a history built on failure, isn’t it?" Cave wonders.
"In fact," says Hillcoat, "the bigger the failure, the bigger the celebration. Look at Gallipoli."
"There was a part of the Ned Kelly story where his gang went to rob a bank and no one had the key to let them in," adds Cave. "And they had to then go round to the police chief’s house, hold him up and get the key off him. It’s just a series of follies."
For Cave, that’s one element that separates The Proposition from its American equivalents.
"Things are done fast and sure and cool in those stories," he says. "You know who the bad guy is and who the good guy is."
"There’s a moral righteousness that’s clear," says Hillcoat.
"And I really like films like that – I like films where you don’t have to think too much." Cave laughs. "But we wanted to do something that was Australian, which is a society riven by incompetence. This is an environment so difficult to survive in, morality becomes a luxury."
Marked by abrupt and shocking moments of violence, The Proposition illustrates how an effort to "civilize" a society may call for tactics even more vicious than what came before.
"Most westerns don’t look at the moral compromises created by the type of violence that people were involved in," says Hillcoat. "That’s what I love about the westerns of Peckinpah and Leone and their reinvention of the west. We wanted to be truthful about the levels of conflict and who was involved and how it affected people. What was interesting to us was the aftermath of violence as opposed to the actual event. On screen, the event is very chaotic and brutal and quick and messy. Then it’s the consequences you have to deal with, and I believe they do ripple through the centuries."
To which Cave adds a lusty "Amen!" |
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