Andrew Dominik’s career has been crossing paths with Nick Cave’s since 2000’s Chopper, which was scored by original Bad Seeds member Mick Harvey. Seven years later, Cave wrote the music for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, assisted by another bandmate, Warren Ellis. The next step in this decade-long friendship and partnership was the 2016 film One More Time with Feeling, in which Cave chose to present his album “Skeleton Tree”, having withdrawn from all promotional tours and interviews after his son’s death. In 2021, Cave once again found himself unable to perform live on stage, only this time he shared his predicament with musicians everywhere who were also obliged to give up audience contact on account of the pandemic. And so, for the second time, cinema becomes the preferred means of breaking the vocal and instrumental silence. Besides snippets of conversations and musings between the musicians and the director, Dominik’s enveloping cameras capture an intense studio session with Cave and Ellis (with a Marianne Faithfull cameo) featuring piano and string-dominated tracks from the latest albums, 2019’s “Ghosteen” and 2021’s “Carnage”.
