“20,000 Days on Earth,” the new Nick Cave film introduced at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, is not your typical music documentary. Instead of the acclaimed musician chatting with filmmakers off-camera, he's “interviewed” by a psychoanalyst. Instead of introducing archival material during a third-person retrospective voice-over, Cave gets a rundown of his own past by archivists. Instead of a face-to-face chat with collaborators from his past like Kylie Minogue and Blixa Bargeld, their perspectives are explored from sitting in the back seat of his car.
Of course, there's plenty of music all around — with new score pieces from Cave and his Bad Seeds, as well as behind-the-scenes clips of their creative process during the making-of “Push the Sky Away” and two key performances. As mentioned during my interview with Cave and “20,000 Days on Earth” filmmakers Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, there's a melding of the man and myth, which is really what the man does with his music anyway.
The first trailer for “20,000 Days on Earth” is now available, stream it below. This extraordinary film heads to theaters on Sept. 19. Check out a full clip from Drafthouse below that, and the interview from Sundance beyond that. Cave is on tour now.