To the Shock of Absolutely No One, Nick Cave Really Likes Wake in Fright

The gothic grasshopper spilled the beans re: his favourite movies, with the 1971 classic coming in at #1.

“Nick Cave likes Wake in Fright” is a phrase that ranks alongside “water is wet” and “the sky is blue” in terms of obviousness. But hey – at least now its official. Through the medium of his Red Hand Files blog, Australian music’s spookiest elder statesman fielded a few filmic questions from fan Danielle of Houston, Texas, in the process naming Ted Kotcheff’s blistering 1971 classic as his number one movie.

This is, in fact, not a new revelation. Saint Nick rather famously called the adaptation of Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel “the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence” way back in the day. And while a quick scout around the hinterlands of the internet didn’t turn up the original source, it’s been a go-to quote for well over a decade.

Now, Wake in Fright is, of course, an absolute banger, and much on our minds this week, what with the recently announced Wake in Fright Development Initiative and Umbrella Entertainment’s imminent 4K remaster (my birthday’s coming up, by the way). And it makes perfect sense that grim and gritty ol’ Nick would dig it – it’s a perfect double feature with The Proposition (might wanna hide the cutlery first, though).

But there are more intriguing tidbits of Cave arcana in the lead Bad Seed’s answers.

For one thing, he’s not a fan of Stanley Kubrick’s cold war satire Dr. Strangelove, naming it a film for which he has “an irrational hatred for that you cannot explain”. For another, Disney’s Bambi makes him cry, while Tom DiCillo’s cine-satire Living in Oblivion is guaranteed to make him laugh. We’d bet folding money he’s specifically referring to a very young, pre- Game of Thrones Peter Dinklage’s rant against how dwarfs are used in film.

But the big news is that the man behind Murder Ballads has a guilty cinematic pleasure, and that film is none other that Love Actually. Yes, Richard Curtis’s love-it-or-hate-it, unabashedly sentimental ensemble rom com. Now that we didn’t see coming.

Oh Nick, you old softy.