3. The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford - Nick Cave And Warren Ellis
Nick Cave, whose sort-of documentary film 20,000 Days on Earth is released this month, has been interested in working with film throughout his career. His songs have appeared in a great variety of movies from various Wim Wenders productions to Batman Forever, for which he contributed the song There Is A Light, to Scream, which used Red Right Hand frequently enough that Cave recorded a reworked version for the third instalment. Having penned two novels, Cave has also written for film with screenplays for John Hillcoat's The Proposition and Lawless. A strong collaborative partnership with Hillcoat has led to scores composed not just for The Proposition and Lawless, but also other Hillcoat films The Road and Triple Nine, by Cave and beardy multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, Cave's bandmate in both The Bad Seeds and Grinderman. Cave's work with Hillcoat explores western-style themes of lawless frontiers and remote environments, but it is the one traditional western on which the Aussie goth rocker has worked that provided his best work for film. Andrew Dominik had used Release the Bats, a song from Cave's early band The Birthday Party, on his breakthrough film Chopper and the Australian director was interested from the start in bringing Cave along for his long gestating US debut: contemplative western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The film barely made half its budget back at the box office, but received kinder critical notices with Mark Kermode later describing it as: "one of the most wrongly neglected masterpieces of its era". Much of this praise was down to the quality of Roger Deakins elegiac cinematography and Cave and Ellis' score which perfectly fit the mood of the piece.
