‘Blonde’ director Andrew Dominik shines spotlight on friend and music collaborator Nick Cave in ‘This Much I Know To Be True’

The companion piece to Dominik’s 2016 documentary on Cave streams on MUBI India today

Australian director-screenwriter Andrew Dominik has been in the news ever since the teaser release of his highly-anticipated Marilyn Monroe biopic,  Blonde, a few weeks ago. But that’s not the only reason the 54-year-old maverick filmmaker is trending. His new documentary,  This Much I Know To Be True, on longtime friend and collaborator, the Australian musicianNick Cave, came to India last week after a worldwide release in May.

A companion piece to Dominik’s 2016 documentary on Cave,  One More Time With Feeling — made in the wake of the latter’s teen son Arthur’s demise —  This Much I Know... is largely about the creative partnership between Cave and composer Warren Ellis who have been in bands together.

It is apparent Cave put a lot of faith in the filmmaker, and over the course of the two documentaries, Dominik has stood alongside his friend and watched the musician transform. “His grief seems to have embedded him more into life and opened up his heart. He used to be a lot more of a difficult character than he is now,” says Dominik.

The pair had a somewhat strange introduction when Dominik was dating Cave’s ex-girlfriend, about whom Cave wrote the eponymous 1988 hit song ‘Deanna’. Cave would call for his ex and end up talking to Dominik. “We used to talk and have always been able to talk,” the filmmaker says, confessing that he has always been a fan of Cave as an artist. “Nick’s music has sort of been the soundtrack to my life,” he says. Eventually, Cave and his bandmate Ellis scored Dominik’s 2007 film,  The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Dominik says he admires Cave’s “relationship with the unknown”. In  This Much I Know..., we get to see Cave’s unique creative collaboration with Ellis. Earlier, Cave would never sit in a room with someone else to make music, but now Ellis just starts playing some music, and Cave tries to sing on top of that. “It’s very playful what they do: getting into this liminal state where they don’t know what’s happening, and that’s where stuff seems to happen,” says Dominik. Cave and Ellis have also scored  Blonde, starring Cuban-Spanish actor Ana de Armas as Monroe. The film is based on the eponymous novel by Joyce Carol Oates, which is a fictionalised chronicle of Monroe’s inner life.

Perhaps thinking of his long-time passion project  Blonde (he first wrote the script in 2008), Dominik compares his style of documentary filmmaking to climbing a mountain without ropes. “You get up to the top fast, but if you put a foot wrong, you fall to your death. It’s exhilarating,” he says. How does that translate on set? “I just turn up and try to reveal the truth that’s in front of me.”

Thus, for instance, in the first documentary, we see Cave “trying to take a step forward in the shadow of his grief; trying to be positive but failing,” says Dominik. Whereas, in the new film, he has integrated the loss into his life. He wants to pass on what he has learnt; that “we are all going to find ourselves losing everything at some point.”