Metallica: This Monster Lives (28 page)

BOB:
If Lars and I sit and listen to something, or go through the Presidio stuff, it’s not because we want to do something behind your back. It’s for you. And basically what I heard is, no, I can’t do that.

LARS (under his breath)
What the fuck is that?

JAMES:
In my mind it gets lopsided. The more it goes in a different direction, the harder it is to get that back.

PRIL:
What is it you have to get back?

JAMES:
Some control, some sense of involvement in the band.

LARS:
When I was running this morning, and thinking about seeing you today, I was thinking how the word “fuck” comes up so much. It’s really true.

JAMES:
Is that in anger?

LARS:
Fuck … fuck … I just think you’re so fucking self-absorbed, and what makes it worse is that you always talk about … you always talk about me, and you use the words “control” and “manipulation” a lot. I think you control on purpose and I think you control inadvertently. I think you control by the rules you always set. I think you control by how you always judge people. I think you control by your absence. You control all this even when you’re not here. I don’t understand who you are. I don’t understand the program. I don’t understand all this stuff. I realize now that I barely knew you before. All these rules and all this shit-man, this is a fucking rock-n-roll band, I don’t want fucking rules. I understand that you need to leave at four. I respect it. But don’t tell me I can’t sit and listen to
something with Bob at 4:15 if I want to-what the fuck is that? I don’t want to end up like Jason, okay? I don’t want to be pushed away. I don’t want it to happen twice. So let’s do it, and let’s fucking do it full-on, or let’s not do it at all. Fuck … See? Fuck … Fuck … (He walks over and gets in James’s face) FUCK!

At this point, the film cuts away to a Metallica fan-appreciation day. We see Metallica playing “Seek & Destroy” Then we cut back to the therapy session:

JAMES:
We’re not anywhere near getting any issues resolved.

PHIL:
Well, let’s get ’em. That’s what we’re here to do.

JAMES:
I don’t know, I guess the playing part, being in the room, and mainly being in the room with Lars, playing music together. I guess I had higher expectations, and— I don’t know, maybe I’m disappointed in myself, maybe … I don’t know …

PHIL:
Wanna talk about that? What’s that mean?

JAMES (to Lars):
I’m not enjoying being in the room with you, playing.

The film cuts back to the fan-appreciation concert …

LARS (to James):
If you’re not having fun, let me let it be known to you that I’m certainly not having a lot of fun, either. But I’m not interested in playing music with you if you’re not happy in there. I just don’t want to become a fuckin’ parody. Okay, so if you’re not happy playing music with me … (Lars makes a “get the fuck out” gesture)

Once more, we see Metallica playing “Seek & Destroy.”

LARS:
Is there enough that connects us to hold on for a way through this? I don’t know. There are moments when I really doubt it.

JAMES:
I’m glad you said that. ‘Cause I really, deep down, feel sometimes that it’s just … that there’s some empty … just an ugly feeling inside. I don’t know … How much work are we gonna put into this?

Seeing this series of exchanges on paper doesn’t do justice to all the nuances of human interaction that a verité film can communicate. You wouldn’t know, for example, that Lars, after saying the line “I’m not having any fun,” had a fatalistic smile on his face while he made the “get the fuck out” gesture with his thumb. But even the “fuck” scene as it appears on the screen doesn’t give the viewer the events as they happened chronologically. For one thing, it’s a couple minutes of screen time culled from a session that was several hours long. It barely scratches the surface. It’s difficult for any scene that involves a lot of talking to last more than a few minutes without the audience losing interest. As we did in other parts of the film, I recommended using intercutting here as a way to collapse a large amount of material. We could create some dynamic pacing by cherry-picking the best moments of a situation without having to present them as a single coherent scene. Alternating between the session and the fan-appreciation concert also serves a thematic purpose. We see them arguing, expressing the honest state of Metallica, and then we see them putting on a brave face for the public. The fan day actually happened a few months after the “fuck” session. We juxtaposed the two because it was a way to portray what we saw as the “emotional truth” of what was going on with Metallica, even if it wasn’t chronologically accurate. I thought it was important to show Metallica struggling with the divide between their private and public personas, and this juxtaposition fit the bill.

The manipulation of “reality” in this sequence doesn’t stop there. We edited the exchanges between Lars, James, and Phil for clarity and conciseness. We also changed the order of what was said. Lars’s “fuck” monologue actually happened toward the end of the session. The more calm lines, the ones intercut with “Seek & Destroy,” were actually spoken much earlier in the session. Again, this reordering made sense to us thematically and felt emotionally truthful. The first part is the raw, guttural articulation of the emotions running through Metallica. The second part focused on a more precise problem: Metallica trying to figure out how to hold it together as public rock stars while privately their relationships with each other are crumbling.

The “fuck” scene is a perfect example of our approach to verité filmmaking, which emphasizes a creative and nuanced interpretation of real life as opposed to a literal approach that emphasizes chronological accuracy. We find that a seemingly “straightforward” presentation of facts often has the paradoxical effect of seeming
less
real to viewers, who can’t watch all the dailies to find out the complete context of what they’re viewing. In other words, strict adherence
to chronology often obscures more than it reveals. Filmmakers need to make order out of chaos, to see the connections and present them to the audience. Bruce and I don’t pretend the version of reality in our films is anything other than the emotional journey
we
experienced while covering the story. We’re storytellers as much as journalists. Any filmmaker who had spent as much time with Metallica as we had might have told a different story, one no more or less correct than ours.

The fact remains, however, that this therapy session was an amazing ride in its entirety. You wouldn’t want to watch the complete session on the screen, but it’s worth stepping back a bit to examine some things we didn’t use, as a way to contextualize what you see in the film. The following excerpts do not comprise the entire session verbatim (that would be about as interesting as watching our unedited dailies from start to finish), and they don’t include every line that we used in the actual scene, but they do form a good outline of what went down and when. To give you an idea of how we picked out parts to use, and the chronological context of those parts, lines that wound up in the finished film are in bold type. (The sequence that forms this book’s preface was also culled from this same session.)

The discussion was actually a continuation of one that had begun the day before, during which James had tried to explain why it upset him when he felt like work continued after the time he was required to go home. He says that he doesn’t like walking into a situation where he thinks things have already been decided. James eventually walks out, slamming the door behind him. We see Zach Harmon, HQ’s studio manager, follow James to see if he’s okay, but what you don’t see is that Lars also followed James, for the same reason. (This was a prudent move on their part, considering that the last time James slammed a door on Metallica, he didn’t walk back in for nearly a year.)

Early in the next day’s session, James haltingly tried to explain his actions from the day before. “I got pretty scared when I walked out there,” he admitted. Turning to Lars, he said, “I’m glad you came out and I’m glad Zach did, too. It was nice. I know I want people to follow me out there, and I hate the part of me that wants to walk out and leave, and make a dramatic exit…. I felt really suffocated then, really trapped. It was like I was battling again. I was putting out there some pretty vulnerable things, and I got some static back, and that scared me.”

He said that the prospect of living a more structured life also frightened him. “I should feel good when I walk out that door, and not feel like I’m letting
people down…. I’m starting to realize that I’m not as obsessed with this band as I was before, and I’m not as all-consumed by it. That’s healthy for me, but there are some things that go with that. I can’t stay here until whatever hour I like and work on stuff, because there are other things in my life that are as important.”

He turned to Kirk. “You helped me yesterday when you said this is what you’ve been feeling like for fifteen years. You do your part, and then when you leave, we sit there and fiddle with stuff and make decisions. I couldn’t do that. I can’t live like that, I can’t feel healthy in that.”

In the annals of Metallica, this was a historic speech. It was probably the first time either James or Lars had acknowledged the frustration that Kirk (and by extension Jason) had to accept as a condition of being in Metallica. Kirk, ever gracious, said that he had learned to “go with the flow of things.” He pointed out, quite astutely, that what James was experiencing was somewhat different, because it involved his relationship with Lars, an ongoing competitive back-and-forth between equals.

At this point, James said,
“In my mind it gets lopsided. The more it goes in a different direction, the harder it is to get that back.”
Phil asked him to explain what he meant. “You know, I almost feel like a science project right now,” James said. “I walk out of here and it’s, like, Oh, how did it go today with ‘the project'? I don’t like that feeling…. I want to ask people if they feel like they’re treating me like a science project, or if they feel like they’re treating me like a human being, a person that wants to be involved. I don’t know, I guess I have fears of not being a part of stuff that goes on.”

Out of the hundreds of great things we couldn’t find room for in
Monster
, James’s “science project” analogy was one of the more difficult ones to let go, because it so eloquently sums up what he was going through at that point. His fear was not merely that the others talked about Metallica when he wasn’t around, but also that they talked about
him.
In his fragile state, he was a work in progress, and it made him painfully self-conscious. The ongoing project of Metallica, which had occupied so much of his life for so long, was slipping through his fingers. At the same time, he felt like the others now viewed his very existence in the band as a sort of experiment, the outcome of which was far from certain.

So, was he a science project or a human being? Bob had a lot to say on that subject. “Because of the lack of communication during the time that you were away, all we really had was the four of us and speculation,” he told James.
“If you want to use that science project analogy, yeah, it turned into a bit of that. But the more time I spend with you, that just totally goes out the door. Just seeing you play guitar with the other guys makes it less of that. I mean, I think we all commented to each other that it felt like the next day, how stupid we were for all those months. But I’m not going to take all the blame—there was a lot of noncommunication, which you had to do, it’s understandable. I’m just saying it left the feeling of, like, What the fuck is going on? What happened to our friend? I’m not even in the band, but I’ve seen these two guys—” He pointed to Kirk and Lars. “—as well as you, go through the worst fuckin’ time of their lives. You were, but they were, too. We’d sit there and just fucking dream up all these wild things, ’cause we didn’t know what the fuck was going on. So the ‘science project’ kind of built out of that. But I’m here to say, fuck that shit. I don’t want to look at you as something different from anybody else, ’cause it’s not true. You’re still James Hetfield, you’re still the guitar player, you’re still the vocalist, you’re still the songwriter, you’re still an equal partner in this fuckin’ band.”

Bob’s voice rose with emotion. “We love you, we care about you,” he continued, “but at a certain point you have to stop and go, I love this guy, but fuck—what about me? I told you that I was going to listen to the stuff from the Presidio, and basically what I heard yesterday is: No, I can’t do that. And I’m going, so I have to just sit there, because James is paranoid that I might do something? I have so much respect for you, Kirk, and Lars, I would never do anything without you being a huge part of it. As a matter of fact, we fucking hated doing the Swizz Beatz thing without you. There was a part of it that we all loved and enjoyed, but the whole time, we were going, ‘Where is James?’ Because we only had each other. We had to speculate, and it was really uncomfortable. So
if Lars and I sit and listen to something, or go through the Presidio stuff, it’s not because we want to do something behind your back. It’s for you. And basically what I heard is, no, I can’t do that.
I would never make a decision without you. It’s your band.”

Lars had been fairly silent for a while. After some more talk about the meaning of trust, Phil tried to draw Lars out further, asking, “What are you thinking about?”

“Right now, the way I’m feeling goes between anger and pity.” Lars turned to James. “You know, I don’t think you want pity, but I feel really sad for you for some reason. That’s probably the reason that it’s so hard for me to say a lot of these things, ’cause the effort you’re making to deal with things is valiant, and so pure. But I just think you’re so fucking self-absorbed and selfish. There’s a
complete lack of respect for others’ point of view, or sacrificing your own needs, or caring about what I feel or what anybody else in this room feels…. I see, inside your eyes and inside your mind, a fucking thunderstorm, a hurricane that you’re trying to control. I can tell Bob how I feel about you, I can tell Phil how I feel about you, I can tell Kirk how I feel about you, but it’s really hard for me to look you in the eye and tell you how I really feel. I feel so much sadness that it’s come to this point, but when I’m not with you, I feel a lot of anger and resentment. I know that you and I want the same thing—it’s just that we are further apart than we’ve ever been before.