https://www.gq.com/story/the-love-and-terror-of-nick-cave
And consequently I got the sense that I was still, at best, a ridiculous distraction to be tolerated. One night I ate with him and the Bad Seeds at an Athens restaurant, a fairly long and drunken evening. Eventually, perplexed and exasperated by the way I continued to take notes, he began dictating to me what I should write:
"... and I looked into his face and saw a world of true sadness that, being a mere journalist, I don't have the power to express. But it was there, believe me. A sadness from every pore. The Sad Man. Man of Sadness. And he raved on, and I saw that his tears were not only for himself, but for everyone. Especially me. And he put down his glass and wept openly, unashamedly, and with great... greatness. And then he belched. The saddest belch. A belch so full of sadness that I too wept, and cannot write anymore..."
At that point, he stopped dictating.
"There you go, mate. Wrote the fucking thing for you. Go home now."
The next day, he writes to me again, just a paragraph, ostensibly about why we are drawn to butterflies:
"Some say why waste your time believing in God when there is so much natural beauty and awesomeness around us. Some say that there is more beauty and wonder looking at a butterfly and I agree, butterflies are beautiful things, but if you get a human being to look closely at a butterfly, to look very closely and get some more human beings to look at that butterfly so that there is a collective of people all peering intently at the butterfly they will ultimately fall to their knees and worship that butterfly. It's the way humans are put together. I don't think that makes them stupid. I think it's kind of sweet. Until someone says well my butterfly is the true butterfly and yours is not and flies a plane into the twin towers."
He says now that even as he was writing [the script], he knew it would never get made, so he resolved to enjoy the process.
