by SARAH ROWLAND

“He’s just the coolest guy in the world, isn’t he?” That’s Guy Pearce gushing about Nick Cave, singer/songwriter legend, respected novelist and now accomplished screenwriter. He’s also the guy who convinced Pearce to take the lead role in John Hillcoat’s The Proposition, a beautifully intense Australian western.

By the time Cave’s script reached Pearce (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, L.A. Confidential and Memento), the Aussie actor was taking a much needed break after nearly working himself into the ground with back-to-back projects.

“I remember reading this Nick Cave thing and thinking, ‘Oh fuck, that would be great if I was interested in doing anything at all.’ I said no, but they kept contacting my agent and my agent kept saying, ‘Leave him alone, just leave him alone.’”

And so they did—for the better part of a year anyway.

“I was at home with a friend of mine when I heard this voice on the answering machine: ‘Oh hi, it’s Nick Cave calling. They seem to think that if I call you, it will make some sort of a difference.’ My friend and I were listening to this and going, “That’s Nick Cave, that’s Nick Cave!’ So after that I jumped on board.”

If it sounds like Pearce is awestruck, he is. But that wasn’t always the case.

“I’m no intellectual,” admits Pearce. “I never read much as a kid. I had really bad eyesight and reading was such hard work. So I never really appreciated words. But when I discovered Nick, I was blown away by his lyrics. They’re so poetic and they invoke such clear images. Now that I think about it, being in this film feels like being in a Nick Cave song.”

History over Hollywood

He’s right. Moody and morally ambiguous, the story follows Charlie (Pearce), the middle brother of an outlaw gang. After he and his younger, somewhat dim brother Mikey are captured by Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), Charlie is offered a deal that would save Mikey from a public hanging. All he has to do is hunt down his ruthless older brother (Danny Huston) and turn him over to the authorities.

Cave was initially hired to come up with the idea and then move on. But, as Hillcoat explains, it didn’t work out that way.

“We were both getting frustrated with how long the script was taking,” says Hillcoat, referring to the previous screenwriter, who shall go unnamed. “There was another attempt at writing it. It was wonderful but it didn’t work out…”

“He wrote an American Western,” interrupts Cave, who has been good friends with Hillcoat for more than 30 years. “And we both wanted to do something that was Australian entirely. So John asked me to help and I did.”

So what is the difference between an Outback and an Hollywood shoot ’em up?

“I think in an American Western, people basically do things right and it’s about competence, individual heroes and looking good with your guns,” says Cave. “Australian Westerns are the opposite of that: people do things wrong and everything’s steeped in a kind of incompetence and failure, which is what our history is all about.”

With that in mind, Cave set out to outline these finer points in yet another version of The Proposition before once again handing it over to a pro screenwriter. And, as he explains, the experience was totally different from when he first co-wrote 1988’s Ghosts... of the Civil Dead.

“Back then, I had absolutely no idea how to write a script,” says Cave. “My early drafts were just these overly-scripted passages. I mean it was just these endless pages. But since then I’ve read a lot of scripts and see how it’s done.

“So as soon as I sat down to write this story, I started adding a bit of dialogue here and there and then I thought, ‘Oh fuck it. I might as well do the whole thing.’”

Wound-up and heat resistant

For Hillcoat and Cave, Pearce was always the obvious choice to play the brooding lead.

“Charlie is the one character who doesn’t say much and Guy has an incredibly intense presence…” says Hillcoat.

“He’s so tightly wound,” adds Cave. “You can see that in the good films that he’s made. He’s got a sort of clenched jaw and it’s all happening in his face.”

“I mean he’ll act casual, but yeah he’s really tightly wound,” concurs Hillcoat.

Since Cave and Hillcoat had the advantage of being interviewed together at Toronto’s Intercontinental hotel—while an unsuspecting Pearce waited his turn in another room—it’s only fair that Pearce get a chance to respond to this rather unflattering personality description.

“Gee, I guess it makes sense,” says Pearce. “I’ve always got people saying, ‘You should relax, calm down.’ I guess I just can’t be flippant about stuff and that obviously shows on some level.”

Apparently, this need to always be in control of his surroundings came to the surface during rehearsals.

“I kept asking, ‘Why is he doing this and what’s his motivation?’” says Pearce of Charlie. “And Nick would jokingly say, ‘I don’t fucking know, I just wrote it.’”

Cave’s teasing really drove home the point to Pearce that he doesn’t have to know every single detail about his character’s backstory.

“It was like in Memento, there was so much information to take on, I got myself in a real knot,” he says. “And then suddenly it dawned on me, I was playing a guy who forgets everything. So I had to remember to forget everything.”

Say what you want about Pearce. But the man can take the heat, quite literally. Shot in Queensland’s remote and unforgiving elements, the flies were relentless and the temperatures reached as high as 49 degrees.

“It was quite excruciating at first, but then it was like, ‘bring it on,’” says Pearce, who remembers one hotter than hell scene where he and John Hurt (renowned senior citizen English thespian) were filming inside a makeshift mud hut that was more than 55 degrees. “We would shoot something and then we’d all run outside to get a bit of 45-degree fresh air. I was fine. But we were all really aware of John. I mean he’s a really robust guy, so he was probably okay, but we were like, ‘It’s John Hurt, we can’t have him catching fire on set.”

The Proposition opens Friday, May 26

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