Dominic’s 2016 documentary on Cave Streams collaborative excerpts today on MUBI India
Dominic’s 2016 documentary on Cave Streams collaborative excerpts today on MUBI India
Australian director-screenwriter Andrew Dominic has been in the news ever since the teaser release of his much-awaited film Marilyn Monroe biopic, White, a few weeks ago. But that’s not the reason the 54-year-old temperamental filmmaker is trending. His new documentary, That’s all I know to be true, Longtime friend and colleague, at Aussie musicianNick CaveAfter its worldwide release in May, it came to India last week.
A companion piece to the documentary on Dominic’s 2016 cave, one more time with the feeling — created in the wake of the death of the latter’s teenage son Arthur — that much i know… Mainly about the creative partnership between Kev and musician Warren Ellis who have been in a band together.
It’s clear that Kev relied heavily on the filmmaker, and over the course of two documentaries, Dominic stood by his friend and watched the musician change. “His grief seems to have involved him more deeply in life and opened his heart. He used to be a much more difficult character than he is now,” Dominic says.
instant connect
The pair had a somewhat awkward introduction when Dominic was dating Cave’s ex-girlfriend, about whom Cave wrote the 1988 hit song ‘Dina’. Kev will call his ex and talk to Dominic. “We used to talk and have always been able to talk,” says the filmmaker, admitting that he has always been a fan of Cave as a performer. “Nick’s music has been the soundtrack of my life,” he says. Eventually, Kev and his bandmate Alice composed Dominic’s 2007 score. Thin layer, The Assassination of Jesse James by Cowardly Robert Ford,
Andrew Dominy (left) and actor Brad Pitt on the set of ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Cowardly Robert Ford’ (2007)
Dominic says that he admires the cave’s “relationship with the unknown”. In that much i know…, we get to see Kev’s unique creative collaboration with Alice. Previously, Cave would never sit in the room with anyone else to make music, but now Alice just starts playing some music, and Cave tries to sing over her. “What they do is have a lot of fun: getting into this marginalized state where they don’t know what’s going on, and where stuff happens,” says Dominic. Kev and Alice also scored Whitestarring Cuban-Spanish actors ana de armaso as Monroe. The film is based on the eponymous novel by Joyce Carol Oates, a fictionalized history of Monroe’s inner life.
Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in ‘Blonde’
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maybe thinking about your longtime passion project White (He first wrote the screenplay in 2008), Dominic compared his style of documentary filmmaking to climbing a mountain without ropes. “You get up fast, but if you put the wrong foot, you fall to your death. It’s exhilarating,” he says. How does that translate to on set? “I just turn and my I try to reveal the truth in front of me.”
Thus, for example, in the first documentary, we see Cave “trying to take a step forward in the shadow of her grief; trying to be positive but failing,” says Dominic. , in the new film, he embraces loss in his life. He wants to carry on what he has learned; that “we will all find ourselves losing everything at some point.”
finding a balance
Director Andrew Dominic at the 73rd Venice Film Festival in September 2016 | photo credit: Getty Images
According to the filmmaker, while Gufa is focused on his music, there has been a healthy change in his priorities. Cave’s sense of self is tied not to his work, but to the people he loves. “It’s ironic that as soon as he stops taking his work so seriously, it gets better,” laughs Dominic, “but in the end, how important is work really?”
Interestingly, when he was asked about his life beyond work, Dominic declined. “I’m nobody.” He says he finds himself at the end of an awkward working situation for the past three years and staring at “this empty life stretching to the horizon”, he is terrified. “I’m not where Nick is. I’d like to be there.”
Making these films, along with another film on the cave and during the pandemic, seems to have taught Dominic a lot about loss and grief. He thinks that if we don’t react to loss with bitterness, it makes us realize that we are all in “a kind of compassionate embedding in the world” together. Like Cave, Dominic suggests that more people should try to find meaning in the loss. “Because loss is one of the basic conditions of the human experience, and we have no choice in the matter, but we have a choice in how we respond to it.”
The author is a Mumbai-based journalist.