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About halfway through Andrew Dominik’s new film about Nick Cave, This Much I Know to Be True, something remarkable happens: Nick Cave laughs. Making an offhand joke about his longtime collaborator Warren Ellis, Cave breaks into boisterous laughter, and suddenly that long, gaunt, stern face of his becomes a warm, round, giggly fountain of joy. It’s not that Nick Cave can’t be a funny guy — he’s written some of the most archly hilarious songs of all time — but cinematically speaking, this laughter feels like a long time coming.

Screening as a global one-night only event on May 11, This Much I Know to Be True is the second of Dominik’s films with Cave. The first, 2016’s One More Time With Feeling, was shot just months after the tragic and shocking death of Cave’s 15-year-old son, Arthur. That picture, ostensibly about the album Skeleton Tree, wound up being an unusually forthright look at grief. Grief is also present in This Much I Know to Be True, but we see how Cave has channeled it, not just into his work, but also his interactions with fans, his collaborators, and even Dominik’s camera. After the unbearable sadness of One More Time With Feeling, This Much I Know to Be True feels like a promise of hope for a world on the other side of tragedy and grief, with Cave serving as both guide and avatar. [Editor’s note: Days before the film’s release, Cave’s eldest son, Jethro Lazenby, passed away. The following interview was conducted before then.]

The emotional journey charted by these two films is breathtakingly powerful, and they represent a singular achievement in the world of music documentaries, in terms of not just subject matter but also of form. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have an unusual, improvisatory dynamic, fiddling with and riffing on each other’s ideas to create these songs, which don’t have typical structures; Dominik, in his own way, improvises around them. We see cameras swirling around on dolly tracks. We see the director barking out instructions and ideas. There seems to be no boundary between the frame and the set, the same way that in Cave and Ellis’s songs there doesn’t seem to be a boundary anymore between the song and the process.

In some ways, this is not new for Dominik, whose narrative features — Chopper, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Killing Them Softly, and possibly the upcoming Blonde — tend not to adhere to linear narrative logic or cinematic convention, sticking instead with their own oddball rhythms and dreamy digressions. But the director says that he found the experience of working with Cave (whom he’s known for years, ever since he dated Cave’s ex, the subject of the rocker’s famous song “Deanna”) to be liberating, shaking up his own ideas of how to make movies — ideas that he appears to have subsequently taken into Blonde, his upcoming film about Marilyn Monroe starring Ana de Armas. Blonde won’t be out until later this year, but the Netflix production has already courted controversy thanks to its NC-17 rating, as well as rumors of shocking, explicit scenes and post-production disagreements.

Watching This Much I Know to Be True, it’s hard not to think of it and One More Time With Feeling as almost like one movie. It all feels like a portrait of Nick Cave’s journey through grief. And there are moments in the new film that feel like payoffs of things we saw in the first. Was that part of your conception?
It’s just one long film, I think, but with the six-year break in the middle. That’s how I look at it. I didn’t conceive them. I was asked to do both of them by Nick. And I never would normally do something like that. The first one was really just crisis management. Nick had gone into a news agency in Brighton and seen the cover of Mojo magazine and felt physically sick because he realized he was going to have to promote Skeleton Tree. And how was he going to promote Skeleton Tree without the context under which it was finished, which was after Arthur’s death? He had a nightmare about all these hundreds of journalists flashing before his eyes. So he came up with the idea: Well, let’s shoot all the songs on the record. They do this thing in England where you go and see a band play or record live in cinemas, and that’s sort of where the idea came from. Obviously there was a need to address what was going on. But it was a subject that you could only approach very softly. You see at the beginning of the movie, they won’t talk about it. You had to sort of creep up on it. But it was the only subject there was. So there was no getting away from it.

That must have made it pretty hard for you as a filmmaker to approach the project — to know that the real subject matter of the film was something that you might not be able to talk about or address.
From my point of view, I’m not turning up there with a film in my head that I want to make, or something that I want to say. I’m just there in the corner. I’m kind of an encumbrance, really, on the making of the record. Which is not really the main thing that’s happening. The main thing that’s happening is trying to take steps forward in the face of a tragedy.

But it was incredibly liberating to just not matter. You’re doing it on instinct because you’ve got no other choice. It’s the opposite of how you make a film, normally. People want to know the answer to everything before you start, because there’s so much money involved and everybody is terrified.

The constant concern was just, is it grief porn? Is it exploitative? Where’s the line? And we didn’t know where the line was. But Nick knew there was no getting around it. He had to do the state of the union about where he was because everyone cared about that. There’s such an outpouring of love toward Nick. I think he wanted to acknowledge that.

I think for Nick, whatever happens in his life, he can cast his feelings into song and he can tell himself a story about what happened. He can turn it into a narrative and that enables him to encapsulate it, put parentheses around it, and put it up on the shelf and let it go. But I think with Arthur, there was no way of doing that. It was the first time he wasn’t able to do it. He was living in a world without narrative, a whole lot of fractured bits and pieces. He’s realized that life is chaos and there’s not much he can do about that except how he responds. So he’s done a lot of work to find his way back to solid ground within the unknown. I’ve seen people deal with grief before, but I’ve never seen anyone do it as well as Nick has. As responsibly as Nick has.

And that’s another way that the two films seem inextricably linked. We see in the new one scenes of Nick reading the comments about grief that people have sent him through his website, and responding to them. It feels like a way out of the emotional ruin that he is in the first film, and it’s also a portrait of someone using the public nature of his life — his celebrity — for good.
It’s a positive use of the internet. It allows nuance. A lot of people reached out to Nick and passed on their own experiences and I think that was incredibly helpful for both him and Susie [Bick, Cave’s wife]. I think he also wants to pass that on to the other grievers because there’s just a lot of us out there. Most of my movies, they end on an unhappy note. It’s great to do something that’s so positive, that has such good intentions and such a generous spirit.

A scene from the filming of This Much I Know to Be True.Photo: Trafalgar Releasing

Do you feel like audiences have changed over the years? Chopper was a huge hit in Australia when it came out, but it’s such a strange, nonlinear movie. Do you think that if it were a new film being released today, audiences would embrace it the same way?
Probably more so now, because I think they might be more used to something that was like that. I don’t know that there’d ever been a movie that had a protagonist who was so out of control. It’s like, usually you’ve got Henry Hill to kind of keep you a bit stable around Joe Pesci. Making Goodfellas from Joe Pesci’s point of view would’ve been pretty interesting, I guess. But I think the reason that Chopper was successful is because it’s funny. The other films I’ve made aren’t that funny.

Killing Them Softly is kind of funny.
I think it’s funny. But not as funny as Chopper. I mean, in Australia, Chopper plays … they roll in the aisles kind of thing. You know? The only country where they didn’t laugh was Germany.

Why is that?
Because they’re German.

You cast Eric Bana as the lead in Chopper, and he was a comedian at the time. What possessed you to cast him? Was it the comic background or was it something else?
He could do Mark. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Mark “Chopper” Read, the real guy? It’s unbelievable how close Eric is to that guy. His own father thought that in some parts of Chopper, it was actually Mark. Usually, the problem with most films is they’re miscast. Not most films, but it can happen. It’s the same problem with Blonde. You have to cast somebody that you buy as Marilyn Monroe. She’s amazing, that girl. You’ve got no idea, dude. You’ve got no idea how good Ana is. She’s as good as James Gandolfini.

Blonde was supposed to come out in 2020, alongside all these other movies, including No Time to Die. It was going to be the year of Ana de Armas. 
There’s going to be many years of Ana de Armas. It wasn’t just that one year. The secret’s got out, mate. The word’s out.

You’ve been wanting to make Blonde for a long time. How has your approach to that story changed over these years?
With Blonde, the big idea initially was to imitate images that we’d already seen of her life. So if you Google Image search “Marilyn Monroe,” you’re going to see scenes from Blonde that we’ve imitated. The idea was to take stuff that we’re familiar with, imagery that we’re familiar with, and change the meaning of it in accordance with her drama. So it’s like this uncomfortable déja vù thing where you’re seeing stuff you’ve already seen before, but the meaning of it is wrong. The meaning of it’s the opposite of what you think. A simple example would be “Bye Bye Baby” becomes a song about abortion. That’s the most prosaic way to put it, but it was an attempt to sort of use the collective unconscious, the collective visual memory, to try and harness that.

Did you assume you were going to get an NC-17, or was that a shock?
I was surprised. Yeah. I thought we’d colored inside the lines. But I think if you’ve got a bunch of men and women in a boardroom talking about sexual behavior, maybe the men are going to be worried about what the women think. It’s just a weird time. It’s not like depictions of happy sexuality. It’s depictions of situations that are ambiguous. And Americans are really strange when it comes to sexual behavior, don’t you think? I don’t know why. They make more porn than anyone else in the world.

I think maybe the fact that Marilyn Monroe is such an iconic figure probably feeds into their trepidation, no?
I don’t know. It’s dangerous to do other people’s thinking for them. Who knows? On the one hand, I think if I’m given the choice, I’d rather go and see the NC-17 version of the Marilyn Monroe story. Because we know that her life was on the edge, clearly, from the way it ended. Do you want to see the warts-and-all version or do you want to see that sanitized version?

It’s an interesting time for Blonde to come out. If it had come out a few years ago, it would have come out right when Me Too hit and it would have been an expression of all that stuff. We’re in a time now, I think, where people are really uncertain about where any lines are. It’s a film that definitely has a morality about it. But it swims in very ambiguous waters because I don’t think it will be as cut-and-dried as people want to see it. There’s something in it to offend everyone.

I know there was some talk of getting a director’s cut of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Is that still a possibility?
I mean, it’s not something that I think about day to day. Maybe, if I have a success at some point, I’ll try and talk Warner Bros. into doing it. But it’s a Brad Pitt movie that made nothing. What cinephiles on the internet feel and the reality of the business, the two things, they’re different universes. I’m always surprised and delighted when people like it, I love all that. It seems to be more and more liked as time goes by.