Metallica: This Monster Lives (39 page)

In February 2003, Metallica decided they wanted to write the rest of that history on their own. Phil had done such a good job that he made himself obsolete. The scene where James and Lars tell Phil they want to end the therapy sessions is one of the harder scenes to watch in
Monster.
It has a very uncomfortable voyeuristic quality, perhaps even more so than any of the therapy scenes. The scene just feels different; it has an awkwardness that sets it apart from the rest of the film. From a filmmaking perspective, that awkwardness, like much of
Monster
, was equal parts luck and preparation. We had no idea what was coming that day. We thought we were about to film one more session of soul-baring therapy, and I, for one, was getting a little bored. I wanted to shake things up a bit. Every HQ therapy scene up to that point was shot from the same perspectives: Bob Richman, running the main camera, would position himself so that the conference table was in the foreground, with the couch and the studio door in the background; Bruce or I would shoot with our PD-150 off to the side, near the eating bar of the kitchen, looking in the opposite direction as Bob. On this day, we decided to trade places, so that Bob was shooting away from the couch. By the time Metallica and Phil were all in the room, we were still screwing around with lighting and camera angles. We actually missed the beginning of the meeting and managed to get our act together just a minute before things got interesting.

We turned on our cameras literally seconds before James began talking about Metallica’s concerns about Phil’s role and the band’s desire to phase out the therapy sessions. Bob was shooting very close to James. I had a moment of panic because I couldn’t tell if Bob was in the right place or if he’d been too surprised by the moment to set up the shot. He could sense my concern and subtly motioned to me to let me know he was getting everything. As it turned out, Bob had framed a perfect two-shot, with James in the foreground and Phil in the background, allowing Bob to do what’s called a “rack focus” (quickly refocusing so that at any moment either the foreground or background subject is in focus) and to pivot between the two. Bob’s shot had a really intimate effect. The viewer is almost seeing Phil’s shocked reaction through James’s eyes and can almost feel James’s growing discomfort. The tension is heightened even
further when James abruptly gets up, loudly scraping his chair back, and moves to the kitchen to put his dishes in the sink. When he made this sudden motion, he passed within inches of me. I was able to get shots of Lars and Phil, both looking distressed, which we used as cutaways in that scene.
¹
Like so many other moments in
Monster
, fate dictated that we were in the right place at the right time.

James says in the scene that he wants to gradually phase out Phil’s therapy, not stop it immediately, but I’ve noticed that a lot of viewers miss that subtlety and consequently wonder why Phil appears in the film after this scene. Phil continued his sessions for the next two months, and then accompanied Metallica during the first week of the Summer Sanitarium tour. Bruce and I decided that we didn’t want Phil to exit the film via this kind of confrontational scene. If his departure from Metallica was going to be gradual and smooth, we didn’t want his departure from
Monster
to be abrupt and awkward. We were determined to end the Phil portion of the film on a positive note, with Metallica acknowledging all he’d done for the band. But we couldn’t be sure such an encounter would occur, so rather than rely on luck, I tried to engineer a scene, which reminded me why that’s usually a bad idea. In May we filmed Metallica’s Fillmore gigs, which was the band’s way of warming up for the summer tour and breaking in their bass player. Truth be told, these shows were not so great, which is one reason they didn’t make it into
Monster.
(Another reason, as with the Raiders gig, is that we wanted to save the live performance for the summer tour, when James would take the stage at a huge stadium rather than at a relatively small club.)

After the last show, Bruce and I went backstage with our crew. We found the band members gathered together, talking very critically about the various mistakes they’d made onstage. Phil walked in, and the mood actually lightened a bit. I decided to lob a few questions.

“So, this is it, you guys, next time you’ll be on the road. How do you feel about all the guidance Phil has given you?” I got a few noncommittal grunts, since they were busy critiquing their own performances. “So, Phil, what do you think of how far Metallica has come?” Phil, usually not at a loss for words, looked like he wasn’t sure what to say Lars, drenched in sweat, shot me a puzzled look, as if to say, “You’ve never forced us to have a conversation before—why now?”

My attempt to force a reconciliation scene between Metallica and Phil didn’t work because the situation wasn’t developing organically. The band
members were disappointed in their performance and were in no mood to get sentimental. Phil actually called me the next day to say that my attempt to get them to acknowledge one another had made him uncomfortable, and he felt like he hadn’t said the right things.

The funny thing was, we already had the scene we wanted—we just didn’t know it. A few days before the Fillmore shows, Metallica convened at HQ to say good-bye to Phil and Bob Rock. As you can see in
Monster
, it was a momentous gathering of the troops. Besides being Bob Rock’s exit from the film, the scene wound up being the send-off Phil deserved, with James, near tears, thanking Phil for laying out the “tools” that had helped make Metallica stronger. This was the end of our very last day of shooting at HQ, and we were all preoccupied with closing up shop. We figured the HQ part of our film was already in the can. Bruce and I were out of the room at the time, loading out our equipment. Bob Richman was still in the room, but his camera was on the floor. When it became clear what he was witnessing, Bob quickly threw the camera on his shoulder and took up a position behind Lars’s shoulder. “I remember thinking, man, this is a great scene and I’m not in the best position,” Bob recalled a year later. “You always want things perfect, but the beauty of this kind of filmmaking is that it never is.”

After the shoot, Bob mentioned to us what he’d just filmed, but since Bruce and I were both out of the room when it happened and since Bob is generally low-key when he discusses what he’s filmed, it never really registered with us what a great scene Bob had captured, so it faded from our memories. A few days later, while we were getting ready to go to Europe to film the opening of the summer tour, Bruce and I were lamenting the fact that we had never really gotten a decent scene that showed the band reconciling with Phil. Bob reminded us about the scene he’d shot, but we couldn’t find the tape. Bob was worried that it had been lost, but we didn’t have time to dwell on it, since we were leaving for Europe the next day. A few days into the tour, we called our assistant editor, Kristine Smith, in New York. After doing a massive search, she called us a few days later to tell us she couldn’t find it. When we returned, Bruce figured out that the tape had never been labeled in the field and managed to locate it. He called me, sounding like he’d found the Holy Grail. When I watched it, I realized he had. Bob Richman was right. Just another example of the perils of having 1,600 hours of footage.

One quality that all our films share is a fundamental ambiguity. Most people who see
Brother’s Keeper
think Delbert was innocent, but a sizable group (including Bruce and me) aren’t so sure. Once
Paradise Lost
aired for the first time, we discovered that none of the families of the victims or the accused thought their points of view were presented strongly enough. I’m proud that our films generate so many different responses and generally don’t tell viewers what to think. The difference between a verité film and a historical documentary is that verité films portray the complexity of the human condition, which is never reducible to black-and-white sound bites. We like to operate solidly in the gray.

So it didn’t surprise me that Phil had some problems with
Monster.
I expected
everyone
in the film to have some problems with it. But Phil had more criticisms than the others. Some I agree with, some I don’t. But I think it’s interesting to put aside questions of whose view is “correct” and look at how Phil’s take on the film differs from my own, because these differences reveal how our films engender so many different interpretations. The differences also perfectly illustrate the power dynamics of the three-headed monster and how they became more intense as the film neared completion. Phil, as the band’s therapist, exerted a certain power over his clients, who had an emotional dependence on him. The band, as the clients, had a certain power over Phil because they were paying his bills. Bruce and I, as filmmakers, enjoyed a certain power over all of them, the result of being behind a camera and invading people’s lives. Metallica had a certain power over us, because they were paying the bills (and by this time we were increasingly hinging our future on
Monster
being a theatrical release, so we had to balance a desire to present events “objectively” as we saw them with the fact that we needed Metallica’s approval). This all amounted to a delicate system of checks and balances.

Our final shoot day for
Monster
was August 15, 2003. We went to the final stop of the Summer Sanitarium tour, which ended in the Bay Area. We figured it would be nice to film the hometown finale. I bumped into Phil when I ran backstage to grab some more tapes. He had heard that we’d finished a cut of
Monster
and asked when he could see it. I told him there would be a screening in a few weeks for Metallica but that he’d need the band’s permission to attend. Phil said he assumed he’d get to see it. I told him that we generally don’t like to show works in progress to our subjects, but if Metallica said it was okay, Phil
was welcome to attend. But he’d have to ask them—it was out of my hands. The conversation suddenly became awkward. There was a very pregnant pause, and then each of us said a hasty good-bye.

When I got back to New York, I was still thinking about my encounter with Phil. I felt like he was confused and deserved a more detailed explanation from me. I called him, told him I thought our conversation had been a bit strained, and reiterated that I was contractually prohibited from showing the film to anyone without Metallica’s permission. Phil said he understood, and that he’d speak to the band. That was the last I heard about the subject until early December, when
Monster
was accepted at Sundance. Phil read the description of the film in the festival catalog, which mentioned that the Metallica guys “get testy with each other and even fire their round-the-clock shrink,” and called me, now very nervous about how
Monster
depicted him. Again, I told him that if he wanted to see the film, he’d have to speak with Metallica, and suggested he call Lars. A few more weeks passed. At Lars’s birthday party in late December, Sean Penn, who had seen
Monster
a few months earlier, pulled Phil aside and told him he thought the film was really impressive but that Phil did not come off well. Phil called me again, this time very upset. I finally intervened, called Lars myself, and encouraged him to set up a screening for Phil.

Lars showed the film to Phil, who promptly called me. In the kind, soothing tones he used to administer therapy, he told me that he thought the film was “brilliant” but that he was also “devastated” by it. He thought he came off as not emotionally connected to the band, and he felt that the film didn’t do justice to how his therapeutic process worked. He saw much less of the genuine warmth of the sessions, and thought we concentrated too much on conflicts. As he saw it, the film focused too much on the interpersonal battles of Metallica and not enough on reconciliation. He would have liked to see more supportive moments during the therapy scenes, and he wished we’d have shown James and Lars hugging each other.

I could understand why Phil was disappointed that there wasn’t more screen time devoted to the therapy scenes, but that was the reality of making a film like
Monster.
To get the emotional breadth of any one session, we’d have to show
a lot
of it, which from a cinematic standpoint just wasn’t a realistic option. The sessions often lasted several hours; even showing as little as five minutes of one was pushing it, given the time constraints of a film and the limits of what a viewer will tolerate before tuning out. As we found out when we tried to cut our first trailer, group therapy, even when it includes lots of emotional strip-mining,
is still not very interesting to watch if it goes on for too long. Too many long stretches of therapy would have disrupted the film’s fundamental rhythm. Besides,
Monster
is not a film about therapy. It’s a film about personal growth, with therapy being one of the catalysts of that growth. What’s more, the therapy scenes are not solely about James’s growth. They’re also the story of how Phil brought Metallica closer together and, in the process, went a little too far.

When I mentioned this to Phil on the phone, he asked me what I meant by “a little too far.” Before I could answer, he added, “You’ve never actually put it that way before. I’m curious what that means to you.”

“It means that you wanted the therapy to go on longer,” I said.

Phil disagreed, saying he never lost perspective and never got “too close to the process.”

This exchange reflected a tension that Bruce and I often encounter. As I said earlier, I think there’s a similarity between how Phil conducts therapy and how we make films. Phil believes in forming relationships with his clients, and
we believe in forming relationships with our subjects. But as far as I’m concerned, the relationships we form with our subjects aren’t open-ended; there are boundaries that need to be maintained. In the early days of the Metallica project, I chastised myself for agreeing to sit for a private therapy session with Phil, because it left the door open for Phil to assert too much control over this project. I thought I was seeing a little bit of the fallout from that decision in Phil’s baffled reaction when I said I couldn’t show him
Monster
without Lars’s permission. Phil probably felt, somewhat understandably, like an equal participant when it came to the film. That’s the danger of Phil’s approach: You form a relationship with your client and then feel a little jilted when you discover the limits of that relationship.