Nick Cave and director John Hillcoat are developing quite the symbiotic relationship: Cave wrote the script for (and scored) Hillcoat’s The Proposition (one of our favorite movies here at 24b) and scored Hillcoat’s upcoming The Road. Now the pair are working on two new projects: bringing The Death of Bunny Munro to the telly and new film The Wettest County to the big screen.

Cave mentioned to Spinner last month that he’d be interested in taking his latest book, The Death of Bunny Munro, from the page to the screen:

“I want to do a TV series or at least like a three-part TV series. You can go deeper with TV in a way, within actually creating a character. You have more time to live with the character.”

When Nick Cave isn’t dropping new Grinderman records, scoring films, writing novels, or erecting gold statues of himself, he likes to dabble in screenwriting. Most notably, Cave wrote the fantastic John Hillcoat-directed film The Proposition and a totally insane sequel to Gladiator, in which Russell Crowe’s “Maximus meddles with Roman gods in the afterlife, is reincarnated, defends early Christians, reunites with his son, and ultimately lives forever – leading tanks in the second world war and even mucking around in the modern-day Pentagon.”

Now Cave is teaming up with Hillcoat again (though he did write the soundtrack to Hillcoat’s new film The Road): “I’ve written another film script for John Hillcoat for a new movie,” Cave told Exclaim’s Vish Khanna. “It’s from a book called The Wettest Country in the World and it’s set in the depression. It’s about… well, it’s a new film and he’s trying to get that together.”

And sure enough, Variety confirms (via Movieweb) that Red Wagon and Columbia Pictures are backing Hillcoat’s project, which is based on Matt Bondurant’s novel about Depression-era bootlegging.

Nick Cave may not believe in God, but he’s got no problem with a bit of idolatry. In a Q&A with Time’s Claire Suddath, Cave said his hopes to build a gold statue of himself in his hometown of Warracknabeal, Australia didn’t quite work out according to plan.

“Although I do have a small model of it that’s a foot high,” Cave said. “It’s gold. I’m naked on a rearing horse. I have a modest loincloth on. It’s this rather wonderful homoerotic work of art that I was hoping to put in the middle of this tiny little town where I was born. Unfortunately the fortunes of Warracknabeal are so grim at the moment with the recession and this chronic drought that’s going on that it feels a little in bad taste to erect a giant gold statue. But one day…”

Damn that economy for squashing Nick Cave’s decadent dreams. I propose that instead of a gold statue, we erect a Mt. Rushmore with the faces of Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and Iggy Pop. If these guys truly need to be memorialized in statue form, I think the most apt medium would be rock.

Between promoting his new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, a new Grinderman album on the way, and these upcoming film scores, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis are having quite the prolific year. As a member of Dirty Three, Bad Seeds, and Grinderman, Ellis has been working with Cave for almost two decades and now the pair are releasing White Lunar, a collection of their compositions for film, which also includes one of the clips below.

The first stream is from the much-hyped The Road, John Hillcoat’s directorial follow-up to the excellent Cave-penned The Proposition. The film, which stars Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, and Robert Duvall, is an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by the same name.

The latter instrumental is from The Girls of Phnom Penh, a film about three girls growing up in Cambodia amid the country’s rampant sex industry. Stream the clips here and here or embedded below:

The Road OST

The Girls of Phnom Penh OST

One look at the subject matter of Nick Cave’s oeuvre and you certainly wouldn’t peg him as a God-fearing man. Take, for example, the title character of his second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, who neglects his son in favor of a “relentless pursuit of sex, alcohol, and drugs.” In fact, Cave is so notoriously intrigued by hedonistic characters like Bunny Munro that it seems he really can’t help himself from sublimating his own cynical view of human nature into his work. With that in mind, Cave’s response to Claire Armritstead of the Guardian’s question on whether he’s religious isn’t too surprising:

No. As a person sitting here now, no i’m not, but I do write songs and I have, over the years, I have a kind of community that I look over, which are the characters that come crawl out of my largely narrative songs. And within that environment, I think some kind of god exists and sometimes it’s malevolent and sometimes it’s kind and sometimes it’s just there by it’s absence in some kind of way. But do I personally believe in a personal god? No, I don’t.

Cave may love to tell the stories of depraved characters, but as a narrator, a tinge of belief in right and wrong often comes out as a kind of revenge plot. Bunny Munro, for example, ultimately realizes “that the revenants of his world—decrepit fathers, vengeful ghosts, jealous husbands, and horned psycho-killers—lurk in the shadows, waiting to exact their toll.”

Nick Cave has a lot more in store for the release of his second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, than a few creepy dramatic readings. Along with an e-book, audiobook, and video of Cave narrating his new “bizarre road trip” book to you, the iPhone app store is now stocked with a full soundtrack to his follow-up to And the Ass Saw the Angel, NME reports.

“The fact that the reader can choose his or her own experience is interesting because the true meaning of a book lies in the reader’s own interpretation and the circumstances of that interpretation,” Cave said of the multimedia Bunny Munro experience.

Cave teamed up with his The Proposition collaborater Warren Ellis, as well as Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard for the project. Forsyth and Pollard, an artistic duo who are presumably not in charge of marketing the soundtrack, dropped the project’s best selling point to date: “We’ve not heard anything like this before – the result sits somewhere between a film soundtrack, a radio play and an hallucination.”

It’s been two decades since Nick Cave published his first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, and now Cave is finally putting out the follow-up. Just a quick glance at the publisher’s synopsis of The Death of Bunny Munro and you can see that author Nick Cave is obsessed with the same themes as songwriter Nick Cave:

Bunny himself seems to have only a dim awareness of his son’s existence, viewing his needs as a distraction from the relentless pursuit of sex, alcohol, and drugs.

When his bizarre road trip shades into a final reckoning, Bunny realizes that the revenants of his world—decrepit fathers, vengeful ghosts, jealous husbands, and horned psycho-killers—lurk in the shadows, waiting to exact their toll.

To promote the fall release of the novel, Cave is doing a reading/Q&A at the iTunes festival in Camden next week and there’s a promo website with videos of Cave reading excerpts from the book. Check out chapters 3 and 17 here, but I must warn you that Nick Cave reading to you in a dimly lit room with a blurry projection of a rabbit in the background can be a bit creepy.