Nick Cave may now be seen as an elder statesman of rock, but back in the early ‘80s, he was far more uncompromising. Ian White’s new documentary Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party tells the story of Cave’s legendary first band. We asked Mark Perkins to track down Ian for a chat about the film. Even though Ian was travelling by train to Melbourne, through the wonders of WhatsApp, Mark was able to speak with him about the project.
Mutiny in Heaven is certainly a fascinating film.
I tried to make it as immersive as possible. With a film like this, I think it’s important to put the audience in the front row – both during the live performances and with interviews featuring the surviving band members. They’re all really lucid, intelligent people who know how to tell great stories. A lot of music documentaries are heavily curated by the band or their management, but I was never told “you can’t say that” or “you can’t go there”. I had complete freedom to tell their story as I saw fit. In fact, what the band cared most about was the sound mix.
How did you come to work on this project?
It came out of an earlier project that guitarist Roland Howard and his producer started around 2005. I’m not sure if it was meant to be a film about Roland or The Birthday Party – I wasn’t involved at that stage. But Roland fell ill and sadly passed away, so nothing was done with the footage. Then, somewhere around the pandemic, Lindsay Gravina, Roland’s producer, called me and asked me to stop by his studio. Mick Harvey, the group’s other guitarist, was there, and we discussed what could be done with all this footage that had been sitting on a hard drive for about 15 years. It really came from that.
Once you agreed to work on the film, I assume you interviewed the surviving members of the band?
No, I didn’t. I’m not a big fan of sitting people down in front of a camera and lights, then firing questions at them. If you go down that route, you tend to ask standard questions, and you get standard answers. I tried a different approach. I gave the band members talking points, and they’d just chat to each other. For example, Mick would call Nick, and they’d discuss various things, each recording their side of the conversation. I pulled a lot of great material from that, which I think worked well. When people who have known each other for decades talk about shared experiences, it’s bound to be more interesting.
Is this something you’ve done before when making films?
No, but I’m always looking for alternative ways to do things. I think it’s easy for films these days to become generic. Too often, there’s a standard way of doing things – they look and are structured in a particular way. I’m always pushing back against that idea. I didn’t reinvent anything, but I wanted the film to look distinctive, rough, and almost analogue. When I started putting it together, I received boxes of archival material from various sources, and when you open these boxes, there’s this wonderful smell of ‘old stuff’. Looking through postcards, aerograms, photos, maps – you realise these things and textures are from another time, as everything is now online. I wanted to fold all these elements into the fabric of the film to capture the look and feel of that era. Alongside that, I looked for archival interviews from the band’s lifespan. If I had two options, I’d always choose something recorded while the band was still active. I hope we captured the essence of The Birthday Party and their chaos.
The way you used animation was particularly effective and gave parts of the film a distinctive style.
That’s thanks to Reinhard Kleist, a Berlin-based illustrator and graphic novelist. We’re all big fans of his work, so we contacted him and asked if we could use it. He was very gracious and came on board. I think it worked well because The Birthday Party’s story is like a crazy comic cartoon – like they’re a demented boy band. Part of the idea was to give the film that graphic novel look, as though they were cartoon characters in their own comic book.
How involved were you in the final edit?
I did a rough cut to figure out what went where. Then I worked in the studio with Aaron March for a couple of months to fine-cut it and nail the storytelling. Aaron did a fantastic job, especially on the live sequences, making them look really good. One thing about The Birthday Party is that, playing live, they never went through the motions. Everything they did was heartfelt, and they were always striving to innovate. Their career was built on not being stale. As soon as they felt they were losing that edge, they called it a day.
I found it interesting that when they relocated from Australia to London, they found bands like Echo & The Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes boring.
A lot of those bands had only been together for a short time when they became famous. In the UK at that time, you might appear in the music press like NME or Melody Maker, and soon get picked up by management or a label. You’d record a single and get put on the road quickly, often without much live experience. In Australia, that didn’t happen. You had to work your way up through hundreds of live shows. So, by the time The Birthday Party got to the UK, they’d played two or three nights a week for years. Their live show was honed. Another thing that shocked them was how musicians only hung out with other musicians, photographers with other photographers, and so on. In Melbourne, there was cross-pollination between writers, painters, filmmakers, playwrights, and musicians. That was a key part of the band’s formation. Berlin, which they moved to later, was more like Melbourne, with its creative energy and diversity.
Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
