Wild Western Australians

The Eighties and Nineties were spent between Paris, London, Brazil and Berlin, where he worked with another new-music cult figure, Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten, an original member of the Bad Seeds.

Since the mid-Nineties, Cave has collaborated with everyone from Kylie to Johnny Cash. His latest album, the hypnotically beautiful double CD Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, was released in 2004, followed by a compilation, B-Side & Rarities, last year.

While Cave has been busy with his music, Hillcoat, somewhat uncompromising in his tastes, has only managed to find backing for three feature films in 20 years. He made some of Cave's early videos (and is still doing them), but their first real collaboration was on Ghosts of the Civil Dead, a bleakly impressive film about a maximum security jail and its inmates. Cave - in his maniacal acting debut - played one of the latter, as well as writing the score. The film has since become a cult.

The Proposition, however, is aimed at a much larger audience - and seems to have found it in the one country (Australia) where it has so far been released.

"It was always meant to be more than a boys-and-guns film," Hillcoat says. "The female audience - particularly people that are against violence - tend to respond really well to it."

It's hard to get away from the question of violence with The Proposition, which more than nods to Sam Peckinpah. The titular deal is between policeman Captain Stanley (Winstone) and Charlie Burns (Pearce), one of two brothers he has captured in a shootout after their murderous attack on a local farmstead.

The deal is simple but deadly: if Charlie brings in their third brother, Arthur (Danny Huston), who escaped arrest in the attack, he will spare the life of his younger brother, Mikey. If not, Mikey - still in his early teens - will be executed. Charlie has until Christmas - a week away - to fulfil his side of the bargain.

"There are aspects of our history as Australians that we wanted to include, but without getting bogged down in it," Hillcoat says. "Nick brought those elements alive through the clash between the landscape and the European immigrants - and the conflict between the Irish and the British, and the British and the aboriginal community."

The Proposition was filmed in the 40C midsummer heat of northern Queensland - a barren, orange stretch of country. "The land had great beauty to it," Hillcoat says. "I think it's a kind of metaphor for the whole thing. It's quite appropriate in that it really is so harsh and extreme and brutally oppressive, and yet, when the sunsets come, it's just stunningly beautiful - takes your breath away. One extreme to another."

It is a story of brutal times, the director admits, but the violence, Cave insists, is never gratuitous. "There's no ritualistic violence, there's no fetishistic violence. There's no slow-motion." There are, though, I suggest, moments when our reaction to it is not that different to what it is in Peckinpah's films, where some of the violence bordered on the fetishistic. "Yeah," admits Cave, noncommitally. "Peckinpah's cool ... I think those people are leaving." The cigarette is already in his mouth.

The process of writing a screenplay, he says, once he has lit up, is so much easier than writing songs. And he can sit and watch the film and get excited or be moved like an ordinary member of the audience, whereas he never listens to his own songs.

"With music, it's best live. That's where you become reinvolved with what you do. A record is something that's done at a certain time, so why bother with it? When you come out after doing a show, you can always go, 'Ah, let's try it again tomorrow night, it's going to be fantastic,' or 'I had a bad voice,' or 'The guitarist was drunk.' There's always some excuse.

But the film is done. People either like it or they don't..

There was also the question of other people putting their oar in, which doesn't happen to Cave in the music business. The Proposition was hard to mount (there are 12 producers in the opening credits and a good few more mentioned at the end) and had a difficult post-production period.

When he's making music, Cave, says: "I'm allowed to do anything I like. I've never come up against resistance to what I do musically. We don't sell vast amounts of records, but we sell enough to keep our independence."

On Monday, he released a DVD documentary of a recent Bad Seeds tour and before The Proposition opens here in March, he sets out on a solo tour of mid-size UK venues (passing through the Victoria Apollo on 2 February).

He and Hillcoat are already planning their next collaborations. They have just finished another screenplay, this time written together. "It's set in Brighton - a contemporary seaside drama," Cave says. "It's more or less written for Ray Winstone."

The reason it's set in Brighton is because that's where both of them now live. Hillcoat moved there first; Cave came to visit and decided to move down with his wife and children. "I love the sea and the sense of decay," says Hillcoat. "Brighton is sort of like St Kilda [a fashionable suburb of Melbourne], but on a grand scale and not as trendy and stand-offish."

The next film from the Cave-Hillcoat partnership is already beginning to sound as singular - and hopefully every bit as beautiful - as The Proposition.

The Proposition is released on 10 March.