Andrew Dominik’s new film, One More Time With Feeling, marks new territory for the director on two counts: it's in 3D and it's in black and white.
Screening globally from September 8, the documentary chronicles the recording of Skeleton Tree, the new album from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
"When Nick approached me about making a film around the recording and performing of the new Bad Seeds album, I’d been seeing quite a lot of him as we rallied around him and his family at the time of his son’s death," said Dominik, whose credits include Chopper, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Killing Them Softly.
"My immediate response was 'Why do you want to do this?' Nick told me that he had some things he needed to say, but he didn’t know who to say them to. The idea of a traditional interview, he said, was simply unfeasible but that he felt a need to let the people who cared about his music understand the basic state of things. It seemed to me that he was trapped somewhere and just needed to do something – anything – to at least give the impression of forward movement."
Dominik went away and listened to the album, trying to figure out how to approach a film about it.
"In the end I agreed to do it if I could shoot it in black-and-white and 3D," Dominik said.
"Nick’s response was 'I fucking hate 3D' or something like that. I showed him old black and white photos viewed through a stereopticon from the 50s. I told him I wanted to make a film where these sorts of photos came slowly to life. I felt that the stark black-and-white and the haunted drama of these 3D images perfectly addressed the disembodied sound of the record and the weird sense of paralysis that Nick seemed to exist in at the time."
"To achieve this effect we built a special camera, a massive, lumbering piece of equipment that’s almost comic lack of mobility added to the eerie drift of the film itself. No one has ever seen a 3D black-and-white non-animated feature film in modern times – for as far as I know, no such thing exists. It is both modern and from a distant age – much like the new record, actually."
"Nick came to Los Angeles and watched the film. His response was obviously conflicted. How could it not be? In the end he said, 'leave it as it is' – which we did. He said that it was obviously 'made with love' – which it was."