Kathleen Collins: You could have the convention where the camera was swinging around and nobody was there, or one could use special effects and make him appear as a disembodied person.
Nick Cave: I mean, this sounds crazy, but I was worried about him. I never met him unfortunately.
Collins: That’s your answer.
Cave: Yeah. I suddenly couldn’t tour.
Collins: That is, of course, part of a unique ability not to take oneself too seriously.
•••
Cave: You can arrive at things, you can find things out about yourself.
Collins: You have to approach it from inside of yourself.
Cave: So you have this feeling of arrival, but I don’t think you ever really arrive. There’s an excitement around talking openly about ideas and so forth.
Collins: That’s right. You excuse all of your technological inefficiencies by making a philosophical statement about the nature of reality, like that’s a part of the reality of the situation.
Cave: Well, of course, of course it does.
•••
Collins: It all depends on what one wants.
Cave: Angels are one of those things, for sure.
Collins: They’re not real people but rather people who are mythical and whose solution to life's problems are big, bold solutions, so the novel spoke to me personally.
Cave: Just something different. People just won’t have it.
Collins: Film looms as the nemesis and we have not faced it for what it means.
—Raymond Cummings has contributed to Splice Today for 13 years.