Documenting the Self: Art, Celebrity and Storytelling in '20,000 Days on Earth'

Legendary Australian musician Nick Cave crafts his own legacy in Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's formally unconventional music documentary, one that exchanges the genre's standard talking heads and archival material for the songwriter's own poetic musings and scripted exchanges. Through its fluid approach to reality and mythology – further complicated by its subject's dual role as author and muse – the film has much to say about the process of artistic creation, writes Anthony Carew.

Additional keywords:
Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard, The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Part, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, And the Ass Saw the Angel, The Death of Bunny Munro, The Proposition, Lawless, Skeleton Tree, Mrs Dalloway, One More Time with Feeling, Arthur Cave, Ray Winstone, Blixa Bargeld, Kylie Minogue, Holy Motors, Lolita, PJ Harvey, Warren Ellis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Nina Simone