Metallica: This Monster Lives (2 page)

LARS:
So, if that happens, you can let the other person make the decisions?

JAMES:
No, I would trust that they’d ask, “What do you think about this?” I guess that’s part of it.

KIRK:
You want a true collaboration.

JAMES (to Lars):
What do you think trust is?

LARS:
I don’t know. I’m not the one throwing it around all the time. You use that word so much. I think that part of what has to happen is–

JAMES:
Do you believe in trust? Do you think it’s important?

LARS:
It’s not about me right now. It’s about you.

PHIL:
No, it’s about the both of you.

LARS (to James):
You come in here and throw this “trust” thing around. Part of my problem with you is that I don’t understand … Okay, I have a reality, (points to
Kirk
) he has a reality, we all have our different realities. I have never in my life felt as disconnected from you as I do at this moment. So part of getting more connected to you is me understanding your realities. What goes on in your head? What do these things mean to you? Since we hooked up again in February, you’ve used the word “trust” more than you have in the first twenty years of our relationship. What does it mean to you? It’s not what it means to me. I would like to be able to ask you that question without having to answer what it means to me.

JAMES:
Why?

LARS:
‘Cause I’m curious.

JAMES:
I know you’re curious, and so am I. I think we should go around the table and put it out: What does trust mean to everyone? What does commitment mean? What does love mean? All these words we throw around …

LARS:
But I don’t throw it around, so I don’t know why I have an obligation to tell you what it means to me. You’re the one that throws it around.

JAMES:
Because it’s something that I lack in my life, that I’m trying to get a hold of. I don’t trust people.

LARS:
Right.

JAMES:
I’m trying to.

LARS:
So, I’m trying to get closer to you by finding out what these things mean to you, okay? You were away for nine months. I realize now that a very key moment was when we started this process in February, and I told my wife that we were going to get to know each other again, and she said, “Did you ever really know James to begin with?” And that, to me, is one of the core questions. So in order for me to trust you, respect you, I have to understand what all these realities are in your life…. So, you are a different person. No, I will take that back–you’re trying to be a different person than you were when you went away last year, and to understand that person and to enlarge the area that we share, I need to understand some of those things.

JAMES:
Do you think you understand me less than, say, Kirk, or Bob, or Jason, or Phil?

LARS:
I think I have a different … I think I have a … I think I have a higher level of … I might want something deeper from you than they do.

JAMES:
I guess I don’t get that.

PHIL:
Explain a little more…. You think you have a deeper level of need with James–

JAMES:
–than with anyone else?

LARS:
Probably, yeah.

PHIL:
That’s very powerful.

JAMES (tentatively):
Yeah …

PHIL (to James):
No?

JAMES:
It doesn’t hit me right…. I don’t know …

PHIL:
Doesn’t hit you right, meaning, you think he’s bullshitting you?

JAMES:
Sure.

BOB:
What do you guys gain by all of this, by this lack of trust? What’s up for grabs here? Is it control? Are you guys fighting for the control of Metallica? Isn’t this supposed to be a cooperative effort?

PHIL:
That’s a good question. Let them answer that. What’s the payoff for not trusting?

BOB:
Right, because, I’m sorry, but you wanna talk “reality?” Even though you’re unhappy, I see “reality” when you guys play. That is the reality. The reality is that you two–the three of you–you’ve stuck it out. You’re meant for each other. There is something there.

JAMES:
Right. What is the payoff for not trusting? Absolutely nothing. I mean, it sucks. I hate not trusting. I would like to trust people, but I know the question within that question is: Why is there such a lack of trust between us? What is it we’re not trusting the other person with? That’s the question.

BOB:
Is it the past? (to
James
) I mean, are you seeing the changes he’s made? (to
Lars
) Are you seeing the changes he’s made? Because I’m in the middle, Kirk’s in the middle. We both see the beauty in both of you, but you guys don’t want to see it.

JAMES:
I guess it’s really hard to see, because there’s been twenty years of mistrust. I want to feel it, but it’s not there, (to
Lars
) Like, when I walked in, I wanted to hug everyone in the room, but I didn’t want to hug you. That’s how I felt. It’s not a lack of love. I didn’t feel like touching you that way. I was carrying some of that ugliness, and it’s not good for me.

PHIL:
And when he reached out for you, did you feel it was genuine? Or would you prefer to believe it wasn’t, so you could feel safe?

JAMES:
Sure, that’s the safest way to go, for sure.

PHIL:
So mistrust is a defense against being hurt. I mean, the more we find a reason not to trust somebody, the safer we feel. The closest relationships have the most difficulty with trust.

JAMES:
Uh-huh.

KIRK:
That’s, uh, pretty amazing.

JAMES:
Because there is so much more to get hurt with, or so much to lose.

KIRK:
I’ve never really looked at it like that, but you’re absolutely right.

JAMES:
So when there is total trust …

KIRK:
You feel more vulnerable, because you’re opening yourself up. You’re literally, like, an open wound. You’re more vulnerable to the slightest thing, the smallest slight. Now, is it a question of toughening ourselves up?

BOB:
You guys have been toughening yourselves up for twenty years.

KIRK:
Yeah, and you know, frankly, I don’t have the energy for that anymore.

JAMES:
Nor do I, and I guess that’s what scares me.

PHIL:
That’s good, in my opinion. It’s good you don’t have the energy for that. But you apparently still have some energy….

JAMES:
Enough to hang on and not want to leave….

INTRODUCTION

THE LIVING MONSTER

04/21/01
INT. ROOM 627, RITZ-CARLTON HOTEL, SAN FRANCISCO - DAY

LARS:
We were talking the other day about whether we wanted to do this film or not…. I was wondering whether the intimacy that’s between us now, and the complete lack of barriers, whether having these guys (gestures to documentary film crew) here will affect that. There’s an intimacy that you get when it’s just a few people in the room, and I’m wondering if that’s going to get lost, if we’re going to go back to, like, battling each other and trying to be all strong and–

JAMES:
What intimacy? What the fuck are you talking about? (Everyone laughs.)

KIRK:
We’ll just edit it out later, anyway. (laughs) I mean, if there’s anything bad.

PHIL:
No, let’s not edit anything out. You know what I mean? Really, I think it’s not going to be a matter of whether the cameras are in play, but whether or not that level of intimacy you’re talking about–whether you guys are free enough to risk having it seen by other people.

It seemed like a simple enough job at the time.

In the early months of 2001, Metallica, the biggest hard-rock band of the last twenty years, arguably the biggest band in the world, got together in their hometown of San Francisco. They rented a converted bunker in the Presidio, a former U.S. army post near the Golden Gate Bridge; assembled a makeshift studio with their longtime producer, Bob Rock; and got down to the business of recording their first collection of new songs since 1997’s
Reload.
The project carried the burden of a lot of firsts. It would be the first album since 1986’s
Master of Puppets
to be recorded without bassist Jason Newsted, who had just recently quit the band. (Uncertain about a replacement, Metallica asked Bob to play bass during these sessions.) It was the first time Metallica was trying to make an album as an equal collective, after twenty years of singer-guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich bringing nearly finished songs to the studio and telling the others what to play. It was the first time that anyone but James was allowed to contribute lyrics. It was the first time they tried to write and record an album completely in the studio. It was, in fact, the first time Metallica showed up at the studio with nothing—no lyrics, titles, or riffs, only the ideas each one had in his head.

When the Presidio sessions began, Metallica was a decade removed from its 1991 self-titled album (aka the Black Album), the record that had done more than anything else to make them international rock legends. The same sessions that produced the follow-up,
Load,
in 1996, also provided the bulk of the material for
Reload,
a year later. Since those sessions, Metallica had written and recorded a grand total of two original songs. In 2000, they alienated many of their fans by coming out strongly against the file-sharing software Napster. Now, as they gathered at the Presidio, the members of Metallica were all closing in on their fortieth birthdays. They were men struggling to remain relevant playing a youthful music they had largely invented.

Nobody could have predicted it, but that bunker setting foreshadowed the long, hard slog that would result, more than two years later, in
St. Anger,
Metallica’s eighth full-length studio album. I was there from the fragile beginning to the bittersweet end, including the catastrophic middle. I was there at the behest of Metallica. The band had hired me and my filmmaking partner, Bruce Sinofsky, to shoot a promotional film about the making of a Metallica album. Compared to some of the situations Bruce and I had found ourselves in,
this one seemed pretty straightforward. For my part, I was just glad to be working. The year before, around the same time as Metallica’s Napster debacle, I was busy alienating Berlinger-Sinofsky fans and becoming a Hollywood outcast to boot. I had made the sequel to
The Blair Witch Project
. Taking into account the scorn heaped upon this sequel and the high hopes following the massive success of the original, my film was one of the biggest disasters in recent Hollywood memory. First it sank a potentially lucrative franchise, and then it effectively killed the studio that made it.

By the end of 2000, if you had to guess who would have the easier time ever making a successful work of art again—Joe Berlinger or James Hetfield—the smart money would have been on James. If you were to guess which creative partnership—Berlinger-Sinofsky or Metallica—was in the healthiest state, you’d have to go with the metal-heads. Thanks in part to my inability to deal effectively with long-standing tensions in our creative partnership, I had nearly destroyed my relationship with Bruce. Making the Metallica movie represented a tentative détente for us, but there were a lot of unresolved issues still festering.

As it turned out, our cameras were rolling during the most turbulent period Metallica has ever experienced. And these were guys who knew a thing or two about turbulence. This was a band so driven that when original bassist Cliff Burton died in a van accident while on tour in Europe in 1986, Metallica’s three surviving members held auditions for his replacement the day after the funeral. Metallica has done more than any other band to make heavy metal “respectable” without blunting the music’s intensity or sacrificing the band’s own integrity Through sheer talent and stubborn will, Metallica has remained relevant even as its original metal contemporaries bloated to excess and bit the dust. Metallica survived the grunge onslaught of the early ’90s, the final nail in the coffin for many of the bands that were part of Metallica’s generation. More recently, the group has weathered the rise of rap-flavored “nü metal.” Metallica was a band of elder statesmen, but they’d emerged from their turbulent two decades as one of rock’s fiercest bands.

What Bruce and I discovered during those early days at the Presidio was that Metallica, whose members had always united against the world, was threatening to collapse from its own internal divisions. Beaten down by years of being “Cliff Burton’s replacement” and ticked off that James wouldn’t let him tour with a side band, Jason Newsted became the first person in twenty years to defy James’s proud rule that “the only way you leave Metallica is in a body bag.” Jason’s departure cast a glaring light on James’s and Lars’s deteriorating
relationship, as well as underlining guitarist Kirk Hammett’s own perceived backseat status. Metallica had kept going through sheer momentum for many years. Like a meteor that breaks up as it hits the Earth’s atmosphere, real life was catching up with these guys. “When they became people who got married and had serious relationships, they realized they didn’t have relationships with each other,” says Bob Rock, who, after ten years on the front lines, has probably the most intimate and objective view of Metallica of any outsider. “You become the biggest hard-rock band in the world, but you forget about the person you’re with.”

Metallica’s huge fan base and personal fortunes notwithstanding, maybe Bruce and I weren’t so different from Metallica after all. We were all guys who were around the same age, who made our living making art in collaboration with other people, and who were now finally confronting hard truths about just what it means to work closely with these people who play such large parts in our lives. For this early insight, I largely thank Phil Towle. Phil is a therapist (he prefers the term “performance-enhancement coach”) whose specialty is working with creative types and pro sports teams. When the Jason Newsted problem began to reach a crisis point, shortly before we began filming, Metallica hired Phil to mediate the dispute. He zeroed in on the deeper problems plaguing the group, and Metallica asked him to stick around and conduct (rock) group therapy sessions. Amazingly Phil and Metallica welcomed our cameras. And that’s perhaps the oddest and bravest of
St. Anger’s
firsts: It’s the first rock record in history recorded with a documentary film crew
and
a therapist in almost constant close proximity.