Metallica: This Monster Lives (26 page)

We all made small talk for an hour or so, waiting for James to emerge from the back, signaling that the meeting could begin. Bruce and I had a quick huddle before we started. We agreed on two major points we wanted to communicate to the band: we would only continue filming if we still had the same complete access, and we wanted to make it clear—especially to James—that we didn’t want to do anything that would interfere with Metallica making their
record, even if that meant we had to shut down the film. We basically told the guys that the ball was in their court. It was difficult to stand in front of them and float the possibility of packing it in. When people think of the laborious process of making a documentary, they tend to focus on the Sisyphean task of starting the process. But just as any serious climber will tell you that getting down the mountain is always more difficult than getting up, a big challenge of documentaries is knowing when to quit reaching for a higher filmmaking summit, because there’s always the possibility of something amazing happening. When Mark Byers, the stepfather of one of the murdered children, handed us a bloody knife during the filming of
Paradise Lost
, we decided we had a moral obligation to inform HBO of this apparent smoking gun, even though we knew the network might tell us this was a natural point to stop filming and we weren’t sure we wanted to shut down. After a few months of filming
Brother’s Keeper
, it looked like Delbert Ward was about to plead guilty in exchange for no jail time, and we had to make a decision whether to keep spending time and money making what would have been a much less compelling film. We took the risk, and it paid off.

Our state-of-the-film address to Metallica also paid off, of course. We filmed the entire proceedings—including Metallica watching our trailer—but we ultimately decided that most of the scene was just too self-referential to include in the finished film. We did, however, feel it was important to include the two of us speaking very frankly about the possibility of shutting down filming if that was in the best interest of the band. But that was only a small part of an incredible exchange that stopped being just about the film itself and became a sort of metadiscussion about the state of Metallica.

Since it was clear that James was the one who would need the most convincing, Lars, the film’s biggest advocate in the band, anticipated James’s concerns while appealing to everyone’s sense of band solidarity. “I’m not particularly thrilled by the cameras,” he said. “My take on this film is that if [anyone] wanted to make a film about a band that’s different from other [rock] films, it should be us. Are the cameras in the way? A little bit. But we can make a better film than anyone else if we want to. If Metallica collectively decides to do this, we can make that happen.”

“I understand that having a camera shoved in your face isn’t the easiest thing,” I said. “On
Paradise Lost
and
Brother’s Keeper
, Bruce and I were always amazed that people let us into their lives. God forbid, if a tragedy happened to us, I’d never let a crew into my life. But I think we have an important film here.”

James took a deep breath. “A lot of this stems from me not being honest
with myself for a long time and not wanting to stand up and express what I’m feeling or rock the boat and look like an asshole. I definitely want to do this. I think this film is important. There are messages in it that are helpful to people. But when Lars talks about Metallica as a different person, that scares me. Metallica is three individuals and three individuals have to decide what to do. I’m pretty tired of putting the band first instead of our personal feelings. That’s where I disagree with you, Lars.”

Courtesy of Bob Richman

Lars didn’t meet James’s eyes. He just looked straight ahead and nodded.

Bob Rock said he didn’t think that’s what Lars was saying, and asked James to clarify.

“I guess it just doesn’t feel right anymore to sacrifice my time and my sanity for Metallica. I’ve done it for a long time. It scares me that this beast …” He struggled for the words. “You might look at it as a friend—to me, it’s a beast. I’d like to be James Hetfield instead of ‘James Hetfield of Metallica.’ I’d like us to be three individuals instead of us all feeding the beast for the benefit of Metallica.”

“In other words, finding a balance,” Kirk the peacemaker said.

“Maybe the fifth member of Metallica used to be the beast,” Bob said. “But I don’t think it’s like that now. The three of you can control the beast. Lars’s point is that you have to recognize that the beast is there.”

“As I look at the great achievements of society,” Phil said, “they come out
of people trusting tension. If there is tension in the moviemaking process, it’s because we don’t know how to harness it yet. If someone sticks a camera in my face and makes me self-conscious, like someone is doing now—” Phil swerved to look directly into Bob Richman’s camera “—why don’t I look at and see what this self-consciousness is all about, rather than saying, ‘Get out of my face’?”

“An important question for all of you is, why do you want to film?” I said. “What do you expect? Remember, Cliff Burnstein’s original idea was that this was supposed to be a corporate infomercial.”

“The bigness of Metallica is there,” Bob Rock said, turning to James. “The question is do you accept it? Or do you accept it on different terms? You have so much to say, more than you ever have. You guys aren’t Pink Floyd; you’re a new generation, and you’re not gonna accept that bullshit where the machine is bigger than your personal lives.” Maybe for James, Bob suggested delicately, Lars represents the beast.

Phil said, “The beast is the mythical projection of the unresolved issues in the group.”

Lars, who’d been uncharacteristically silent for a while now, let out a quick snort of laughter. Phil looked taken aback. “What …?” As Phil struggled to form a question, Kirk broke in: “The beast has trampled over all of us and brought us places we don’t want to go, but we’ve never talked about how we felt about that. What you said is great, Bob, it puts things in perspective. The beast has been a savior and a guide, a giver as well as a taker. But there have been some casualties of the beast, and some damage done.”

Lars, perched on the couch, was looking agitated. He shook his head. Bob asked him, “What’s wrong?”

“This is what we do for a living, so of course there are moments when it’s not fun,” Lars said. “The thing I’m missing here is there seems to be a complete disregard for the word ‘team’ or the collective. This has been a career. We’ve made the most of it, better than most people ever have.”

“This is what we latched onto as youths,” James said. “I didn’t say to my career counselor, ‘I want to be a rock star.’ This is the thing I’ve chosen, and we’ve made it strong. This is what we were meant to do.”

There was a silence in the room for a few seconds. Kirk was the first to speak. “I can’t do anything else.” Everyone collapsed into laughter.

The tension seemed to break, so we suggested that we all watch the trailer. “We usually don’t like to show footage to people in our films,” Bruce said. “But this time we thought we should.”

We put the tape in the VCR and hit Play. Without trying to be too obvious about it, I kept sneaking glimpses at how everyone was reacting. James started looking completely impassive, almost rigid, but he broke into a big smile when Kirk appeared on the screen, doing his nails with a buffer Bob Rock had given him for impromptu guitar effects. When Lars saw himself talking about band relationships, the thing that got Cliff Burnstein worked up, he hung his head and nervously played with his hair. He laughed at the scene where James adlibs goofy lyrics about Frankenstein during a writing session for “Some Kind of Monster.” He
really
laughed when Jason appeared onscreen to say that he was the exception to Lars’s “everyone in Metallica has had crabs and ‘drip-dick’” rule. (Jason’s comment did not make it into
Monster.)
The part where Lars calls James a dick, which the Q Prime managers found very amusing, made everyone in Metallica stop laughing.

When it was over, Lars said, “It’s hard to watch some of that. Which is good. It should be hard to watch.”

James looked a little shell-shocked. “I saw myself being pretty real,” he said. “And it was good to see that.” He paused, looking relieved. “I’ve spent the last year thinking this would be a lot worse.” He looked at Bruce and me. “You should go even deeper.” My jaw hit the floor. That was what Cliff had told us, but I never expected to hear it from James. “Be truthful,” he added. “Just get the camera out of my face.”

And that was all the encouragement we needed. There was never any explicit permission for us to keep going, but we understood that we were still wanted. Driving back to the city late that afternoon, I remember thinking that I’d really dodged a bullet. Ambushing James with our camera had been a calculated risk; it could have been the last time our cameras were ever trained on Metallica. But James wound up telling us to make our material go deeper emotionally, as long as we didn’t intrude too much physically Maybe one positive effect of that ambush was that it got everything out in the open. Phil was always big on the idea that if you encounter something that scares you, you should “move forward” into it and see what happens. If you’re afraid of monsters, then stare into the eyes of a monster. The “beast” that James feared would prevent him from remaining healthy and sane wasn’t ambiguous or esoteric, some vague manifestation of the pressures of fame. The beast was real. It had just taken the form of a camera and attacked him when he walked in the door on his first day back. This monster was living. And from what he told us, it sounded like James was willing to live with it.

SHOOTING THE MONSTER

“There are so many things that people don’t understand about what it takes to be a good documentary cameraman,” Bob Richman says. “Like if you’re up for a documentary Emmy, you’ll be up against a
National Geographic
special. You’ll see this lush footage shot in 35 mm [film], and then you’ll see this gritty verité thing. It’s like, Well, who’s gonna win that?”

What makes Bob a great documentary cameraman is as much what he doesn’t do as what he does. “My thing is, when I come into a room, I find a space that’s the one spot where I can sit there and get everything without moving around,” he says. “Sometimes it’s not immediately apparent, but there’s usually one spot. The minute you move, you draw attention to yourself.”

Bruce and I have worked with Bob for so long now that he can usually guess what kind of shot we want without us telling him. He’s practically a third director on our shoots. Bob also shares our philosophy that documentary filmmakers are participant-observers, often affecting the actions they chronicle. Since Bob is the guy who actually gets in people’s faces (though Bruce and I often operate a smaller camera ourselves), this belief takes on an added resonance. “I believe it’s a collaboration between the filmmakers and their subjects,” he says of the ideal verité film. “It’s a form of communication, and they’re communicating through you. They understand that you’re there, that they’re being filmed. They don’t change their behavior, but they accept that you’re there. And once they’ve accepted you, it’s more natural. It’s like any other human relationship—you can sense when there’s trust. Like James: Once he accepted that [our film] was something he was communicating through, he was more natural.”

In Metallica, Bob found worthy collaborators. “We were creating a film about watching them create. They were working on a collaborative effort, and so were we, so we mirrored them and they mirrored us. They were all for as much honesty as we were. They demanded that of us. We never asked them to do anything [for the cameras], because the alarm bells would’ve gone off for them. That’s the real respect I have for them: the creative integrity that they bring to their own work and that they brought to us.”

Bob actually thinks of himself as almost an actor on the scenes he shoots. “A good actor reacts,” he explains. “It’s not just about delivering lines—
it’s also about responding to someone who’s saying something to you. The camera is a character, a silent observer.”

Having to spend much of his time on
Monster
shooting three-hour therapy sessions posed a special challenge. “It was physically difficult, and I had to remember to keep myself tuned in to what’s important. Your brain can tune out. When you shoot film, you’re shooting ten-minute loads, so you sit around waiting for a great moment and then you shoot it. It’s like poker: you ante up, and if you don’t have good cards, you get out of the game. When you shoot tape, the moments all bleed into one another, so you have to remain mentally aware of what you’re going for.”

As for our less-than-successful ambush of James, Bob took it in stride. “It’s not unusual for celebrities to be extremely wary of the camera. It can be their friend and their enemy.” Over the years, he’s learned several strategies for dealing with celebrity reticence. “I filmed the making of the soundtrack album to
The Producers
, so I had to shoot Mel Brooks. The first thing Mel Brooks said to me was, ‘You can’t shoot me.’ The director was freaking out, but I said, ‘Don’t worry, I have a plan.’ So I very obviously filmed everyone
but
Mel Brooks. Within ten minutes, he was unconsciously begging to be filmed.”