Nick Cave‘s list of all-time favourite films is as eclectic as you’d expect from a man who was spotted on the London Tube in the early 1980s, writing a letter with a syringe filled with blood.
Writing on his Red Hand Files blog, the Australian alternative rock legend responded to a straight-up question on his favourite movies, sliced and diced for genres and periods of his life.
It’s a wild, weird and wonderful lineup.
His favourite film of all time? Ted Kotcheff’s fish-out-of-water tale from 1971, Wake in Fright, a flick that launched the career of Jack Thompson and, to this day, freaks out viewers with his brutal depiction of a kangaroo slaughter.
Cave’s favourite childhood film goes to William Dieterle’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame from 1939, featuring Charles Laughton in the titular role.
Warracknabeal’s finest also revealed the movies that make him laugh (Living in Oblivion from 1995), cry (Bambi from 1942), the one he can recite by heart (Brian De Palma’s bloody Scarface from 1983), his guilty pleasure (the 2003 British rom-com Love Actually), and favourite documentary (Shoah from 1985).
Perhaps the most unexpected choice of the lot is the film for which he holds unexplainable, “irrational hatred” – Stanley Kubrick’s revered 1964 satire, Doctor Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
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For the record, Jean Becker’s One Deadly Summer from 1983 is the top of the pile for Cave’s wife, Susie.
Cave, an ARIA Hall of Fame inductee, is worshipped in the UK, Germany, and beyond, for his remarkable and constantly-evolving music career, both as a frontman with the Birthday Party, the Boys Next Door, the Bad Seeds, and Grinderman, through his collaborations with Kylie, Warren Ellis, the late Chris Bailey and others, and, of course, as a solo artist.
Now aged 67, the prolific creative has also penned a collection of fictional books and composed music for the screen, including John Hillcoat’s harrowing post-apocalyptic film from 2009, The Road.
His screenplay credits include Hillcoat’s Australian western The Proposition (2005) and prohibition-era gangster film Lawless (2012), plus the 2014 doco-drama 20,000 Days on Earth, in which he stars as himself.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ most recent studio album, 2024’s Wild God (via Play It Again Sam), is shortlisted for Alternative Rock Record at the 2025 Libera Awards, the US independent music community’s annual ceremony.
