Metallica: This Monster Lives (35 page)

James smiled. “And you chose yours.”

“Yeah, and I chose mine. And I guess he’s not too satisfied with where his led.”

“Thanks for sharing what’s going through your head, man,” James said.

“No problem. Thanks for giving me the opportunity and, once again, thanks for yesterday. A truly historic Metallica day.”

Now that we’d been filming Metallica for nearly two years, we’d become accustomed to getting pretty much unfettered access. Anything involving Jason complicated matters, however. We already knew that Jason didn’t think much of Phil’s therapy. It was a good bet that he wouldn’t want to be filmed having to go through a version of it. Jason might very well approach this meeting as a trip into enemy territory. He had already been cool enough to let himself be filmed for this, a Metallica-sponsored documentary, but our presence at the meeting ran the risk of making him feel besieged, complicating the very problem Metallica hoped to address.

We knew that we had to tackle this problem now. Bruce and I waited until this session had begun to dissipate a bit. When Kirk began offering everyone minestrone soup (
"es muy bueno"
), I popped the question: “Do you guys have
a problem with us calling Jason to see if we can participate in that meeting?”

Kirk looked skeptical. “I don’t think he’ll be as much ‘Jason’ if there’s cameras.”

“I don’t want to make the call if you guys have a problem.”

“But what if
I
have a problem with the cameras being there?” Kirk asked.

“Then say it,” I said. “And we’ll respect that.”

James said to me, quite reasonably, “It’s possible that Jason would just think that we told you to call.”

“I’ll make it very clear that this is us calling, that you guys didn’t want to influence his decision one way or the other.”

“Well, if Kirk has a problem with it, let’s not proceed with that,” James said. “I mean it would be great to film, for sure …” This was further evidence that James was changing: He was beginning to think of this film more the way Lars did.

As it turned out, the debate was moot—sort of. On the day the meeting was supposed to take place, Metallica’s management decided it was important to convene a last-minute press conference in Los Angeles to announce the dates and supporting acts for Metallica’s Summer Sanitarium tour. I think that for Jason, this was the Raiders gig all over again, except for the fact that this time he was given a perfunctory last-minute heads-up. It looked to him like Metallica was brazenly blowing him off to do something that affirmed Metallica’s unity: officially launch a massive summer tour, something Jason presumably longed for. In any case, he was annoyed that it was canceled at the last minute. We know this because Bruce interviewed Jason around this time.

Courtesy of Joe Berlinger

THE LARS DOCTRINE

One day in the fall of 2002, Lars talked with Phil and us about his very “neo-con” approach to making records. A few months later, the United States launched a preemptive war against Iraq.

“I have this inherent fear in me. It’s one of the last unresolved things from the past twenty years. Whenever I get really excited about something, James purposefully doesn’t like it, just ’cause I like it. It becomes this weird thing where you’re walking around saying, ‘Yeah, it’s okay,’ and inside you’re just [thinking], UGGGH, fucking shit, it just rocks my world! I have to struggle a lot with what I bring to this, because I have noticed that I jump on that before it even happens. I think it’s going on before it’s even going on, so I’m guilty of instigating something because of my own weird … It’s the same thing as, let’s say you were the president of a country, and you thought another country was doing something that they were going to use against you later, and so you went to war with them. Do you know what I mean? So I still struggle with that. It’s one of the last unresolved things for me. It’s just really weird for me to have to contain my enthusiasm for something just because I’m afraid that if I like something too much, then he’s going to automatically reject it.”

As seen in
Monster
, Jason told us that although he harbored a few regrets about leaving Metallica, his overall attitude was: “All right, you did the right thing for yourself!” While our sense was that Metallica were overestimating Jason’s desire to rejoin the band, we also wondered whether Jason was really this content. One thing that definitely came out of this meeting, which did not make it into
Monster
, was that Jason was, in his words, “really fucking pissed” about the abrupt cancellation of the tête-à-tête with his former bandmates. He’d also heard a rumor that made him even angrier. Around this time, Jason was playing with reformed metal heroes Voivod, who were gearing up to tour that summer. They were scheduled to hit some of the same mammoth European festivals as Metallica. Word had reached Jason that Metallica was threatening to pull out of
any gig that also had Voivod on the bill. If this were true, it would effectively blacklist Voivod, since any promoter would choose to placate Metallica. Now, Metallica would not only be disrespecting him but also preventing him from starting a new professional life. Injury was being added to insult! Jason decided this was the absolute last straw and refused to reschedule his meeting with Metallica.

Yet again, Bruce and I were in the awkward position of deciding whether to be conveyors of information. We were dying to know whether Jason had in fact wanted to rejoin Metallica, but we couldn’t ask him without betraying the trust of the person, very close to Jason, who had given Metallica that message. We also weren’t sure if we should report back to Metallica about these Voivod rumors. As documentary filmmakers, it wasn’t really our place to pass on information between two feuding parties. But as people who (like Phil) had become close enough to Metallica to blur the line between professional and personal, we thought (like Phil) that it would be a good idea for these guys to have one more sit-down, even if we couldn’t be there to capture it. Also, the Voivod rumor seemed really sketchy, so we decided Metallica should know about it. Bruce and I had been in a similar position before with
Paradise Lost.
In talking to so many people about the murders in West Memphis, we uncovered some information that we felt the presiding judge should know about. We wondered if it was our place to get involved, since we prided ourselves on remaining impartial enough for each side to trust us, but we decided that with the stakes so high, and with the West Memphis 3 facing the death penalty or life in prison, we needed to break our own rules. We shared with the judge the new information we had uncovered.
⁵

As it turned out, Kirk asked Bruce directly how our Jason interview had gone. Bruce told Kirk that Jason was fuming about a trifecta of grievances: the Raiders gig, the meeting cancellation, and the Voivod smear. Jason’s anger about the Raiders show wasn’t news, of course, but his gripe about the last-minute cancellation was met with frustration; “I called Jason to tell him about the press conference before I even called my
wife
,” James said. As for the Voivod charge, this was a complete mystery. A call was immediately placed to Peter Mensch, the Metallica manager who had allegedly instituted the no-Voivod policy. His reaction was an incredulous snort: “I didn’t even know Jason was
in
Voivod!”

That final meeting between Metallica and Jason never did happen. Maybe it will someday. Maybe we’ll find out whether Jason really did want to rejoin
Metallica or whether Metallica was just wishfully thinking that Jason missed his old life and band enough to return. But back when it should have happened, in the spring of 2003, it was the issue that just couldn’t get resolved.

“I feel like he’s holding us hostage,” Kirk said when he heard about the Voivod rumors and Jason’s unwillingness to meet.

“This is such sandbox shit!” Lars said, growing more agitated. “It’s like when my kid argues with another kid about who gets to play with a light saber.”

“It’s up to him to mend himself,” Kirk continued, “and we’ve given him every opportunity to.”

I almost never interrupt a verité conversation to steer it in a certain direction. That happened maybe half a dozen times during the entire making of this film. But I really felt like everyone was missing the point about Jason, so I said, “But he’s wounded.” I wanted to get a reaction, and boy, did I.

Lars suddenly lost it. “HE FUCKING LEFT THE BAND! HE FUCKING LEFT THE BAND!” He got up and paced the floor. His face was the same mix of anger and astonishment that I’d seen when he confronted James during the “fuck” meeting. His eyes were wide. He looked distraught, like he might hit someone or something. “WHICH PART OF THAT IS FORGOTTEN? PERIOD. EXCLAMATION POINT!” He slashed his index finger through the air in a downward vertical and stabbed an imaginary point, miming an exclamation point. “HOW DID WE TURN INTO THE BAD GUYS? HE LEFT THE FUCKING BAND!” He furiously made the time-out signal with his hands, a favorite of Lars’s when he wants to get his point across. “HE FUCKING LEFT THE FUCKING BAND! JESUS CHRIST!”

He turned and stalked out of the room. He had definitely purged something. For us, it was yet another healthy baby we had to slay.

10/3/02

INT. KITCHEN, HQ RECORDING STUDIO, SAN RAFAEL, CA - DAY

LARS:
I got really annoyed at my wife this morning because she woke up really early, and I really needed to sleep.

PHIL:
What’s “really early” over there?

LARS:
Well, I was sleeping, so I don’t know, but it seemed really early. And so she decided to take the whole day off, as she does more and more frequently, and she decided to take Myles out of school. It’s just like, nobody does anything. Right when I woke up, she was like, “We’re all going to the beach,” and I’m like, “I’ve got to go spend the day at work. I’ve got forty-five minutes. How about you wait to go to the beach until I go to the studio?” No, she wouldn’t have it. So I saw my kids for like six seconds as they were walking out with shovels and pails, going to the beach with Mom, and I was there sitting, and she was all like, “All you do, anyway, when you wake up is just sit there and read the newspaper by yourself.”

PHIL:
About yourself or by yourself?

LARS:
By myself. So I’m-

KIRK:
Well, you can’t read the newspaper
with
someone!

LARS:
So the next forty-five minutes I spent deliberately
not
reading the newspaper, just so I could use that as ammunition.

PHIL:
No, I don’t think you’re using it as ammunition. I think what you’re doing is testing yourself to see if you could, indeed, fill those forty-five minutes.

LARS:
I brought the newspaper down here, so I could read it.

PHIL:
Right.

LARS:
Because there’s so much useless downtime.

PHIL:
Exactly, so that’s good. So what did you do with the forty-five minutes then?

LARS:
I think I read a magazine instead.

PHIL:
You know, reading a magazine versus the daily newspaper is a change, because you can’t be secure about current knowledge. You know when you read a magazine that it’s old stuff, so, therefore, you’re trusting more. It’s more of a trust exercise.

LARS:
Right.

PHIL:
And reading the daily newspaper, you have to be in control of everything, because you have to find out everything that’s current, in case something dangerous happens.

LARS:
Right.

PHIL:
So that’s pretty trusting. That was a really good thing, man. Nice work.

LARS:
That’s definitely worth your fee today.

PHIL:
Right.

LARS:
That was my day.

CHAPTER 18

THEIR AIM IS TRUJILLO