Metallica: This Monster Lives (44 page)

EDITING THE MONSTER

“It was about as dark as it gets,” David Zieff,
Monster’s
supervising editor, says of the period when we attempted to turn what was then nearly a thousand hours of footage into six TV episodes, virtually overnight. “This business is funny. I have time and time again gotten jobs where I think, This is the mother of all train wrecks—there’s no way we can finish in time. But this time, we were so deep in shit, I remember marveling at how undoable this was. As the deadline got closer, I kept thinking, I hope something changes.”

David spent nearly two years working on
Monster
, beginning in late 2001, when we asked him to cut our first trailer. Though initially skeptical that long therapy sessions and longer jam sessions could be edited into something compelling, he soon hit on a strategy. “It’s the human comedy,” he says. “My whole goal with this thing was to maintain the self-deprecating humor. When I was immersed in hundreds of hours of footage, my mantra was, ‘Look for the moments that are real.’ Because otherwise it’s
Spinal Tap.
The only way to defuse that was to let the band members laugh at themselves.”

In the many hours we spent in the editing room, Bruce often served as a mediator between David and me as our sensibilities sometimes clashed. Bruce helped me realize that David’s tendency to gravitate toward humor counterbalanced my predilection for seriously emotional moments. There were other ways our different approaches to the material complemented each other. Whereas I have a keen eye for structure and ways to move back and forth between scenes, David is very skilled at assembling the scenes that make the intercutting possible. “We come it at from different points of view,” David explains. “I’m more into the minutiae. I’m sucking the statue from the stone. Joe saw the film [in his head] more than I did. I was down in the dirt. I didn’t watch scenes like he did— I edited them, and then I was sick of them. That’s where the success comes from. He could see it more globally than I could.”

Much of the assembling of
Monster
was a communal affair, an ongoing collaboration between me, Bruce, David, and the three other editors we hired. For example, it was my idea to do an opening montage that would show the band members aging over the span of their career. David pushed the idea further, suggesting the montage should be one song from various years, edited together to sound seamless, and that we use this as the opening title sequence. Bruce asked Lars which song from Metallica’s early days the band most continued to play throughout the years. Without hesitation, he named “Seek & Destroy.” The first clip we use is from one of the earliest Metallica shows, with Dave Mustaine on lead guitar. As we move toward the present, we see Metallica achieving stadium-godhood.

This was a tricky sequence to execute. We wanted the audience to hear Metallica growing in stature, but we discovered that some of the earlier clips actually sounded “bigger” than the later ones. David played with the sound mix so that the first clips sound excessively tinny. As the band moves into arenas, the mix explodes into full stereo. Making the sequence sound seamless proved to be more difficult than we thought. David, a musician himself (he plays bass), figured out that the band had played around with the key of the song and used different guitar tunings throughout the years. Even if you knew nothing about music, the effect of slamming these different versions together sounded weird and dissonant. To achieve our desired effect, David experimented with pitch-shifting the sound of some performances. The result sounds like the world’s longest version of “Seek & Destroy——twenty years compressed to less than two minutes.

If
Monster
had become a TV show, we wouldn’t have had the chance to be this creative, but I’m confident we would have somehow turned in a serviceable piece of work, despite the crazy deadline. David, however, begs to differ. “I’m not saying that I’m sure we wouldn’t have finished in time,” he clarifies. “I’m
positive.
”

We were saved by the fact that
St. Anger
sounds so weird. It turned out that mastering the album was a big headache (“too many subharmonics,” Bob explains), which necessitated various emergency procedures to make the recording workable. This kept the band in New York an extra day, which meant they would have to charter a plane back to the Bay Area. We were planning to go back there ourselves to shoot some “B-roll” footage of HQ for the movie, so I asked Lars if we could hitch a ride on their plane. Bruce and I had a plan.

Two days later, we met the band at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. I had with me a DVD of ninety minutes of prime material, our best scenes. Metallica had chartered a 727 owned by a wealthy televangelist. Besides a full bar, there were CD players and large TVs for every swivel leather seat. As I walked onboard, I flashed back to our time spent making
Brother’s Keeper
, sleeping in a neighbor’s dilapidated shack in Munnsville, warmed only by a wooden stove, filming people who survived on $8,000 a year from milking cows. I also experienced a moment of panic when I found that James had made alternate travel arrangements and wasn’t coming with us. Given how he felt about Metallica activities going on without him, we had to think twice about showing the rest of the band the footage. Bruce and I decided to take the chance, since everyone else was there (except Rob, who stayed in New York): Kirk and his wife, Lani; Lars and his wife, Skylar; and Bob. I was particularly nervous about what Lani and Skylar would think. Until now, the wives had really kept their distance from the film. They were always friendly but gave off a distinctive disapproving vibe, clearly concerned about the effect this film would have on their lives. They never wanted to participate in the filming (although Skylar let us film her in the art-auction scene).

About an hour into the flight, as casually as I could, I mentioned that I had some footage everyone should see. I put in the DVD. Thousands of feet above the Earth, they all stared at their individual monitors and watched highlights from the last two grueling years. Everyone had headphones on, so the only sound I heard was the roar of the plane’s engines. I couldn’t help noticing Lars’s reaction, and it worried me. Every five minutes or so, he’d leap up from his leather seat with an agitated expression, whip off his headphones, and pace around the cabin while muttering, “I can’t fucking watch this …” Then he’d return to his seat and try to watch some more.

When it was over, we got up the nerve to ask him what he thought.

He looked startled. “I can’t even talk to you now.” He said he’d have to watch the parts he missed in the privacy of his home.

I turned my attention to Bob. He looked thoughtful and finally said, “I think I prefer my memories.”

Our hearts sank. Did he hate it?

“No, no it’s
too
good. It’s so personal and real. I mean, will people really be into it?”

Kirk, for his part, was concerned that we focused too heavily on tension and negativity but thought it was pretty authentic, not to mention better than he thought it would be.

What really blew us away was how into it the wives were. For the first time in two years, they started opening up to us, thrilled and enthused at what we had captured. While the men sat shell-shocked in their seats, we talked with the wives in the back of the plane for more than an hour, listening to their thoughtful and intelligent critique of the footage. Skylar was a bit concerned about her husband’s image, but overall, she gave us a definite thumbs-up. “I never knew what went on in those band-therapy sessions,” she said. “I had no idea.”

“The footage could not have been more real,” Lani said. She paused, glanced toward the front where the guys sat slumped in their seats, and added, “Wow, they’re really going through with this.”

The last hour of the flight was quiet. Everyone seemed emotionally drained. Bruce walked by and squeezed my shoulder. I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until just before we landed.

The next day, while shooting B-roll at HQ, I ran into James. He had spoken with his wife, Francesca, who had heard from Skylar that we’d shown footage on the plane. I braced myself, expecting his next words to be “you asshole …” But he was actually cool with it and asked us to send Francesca a copy of the DVD.

The weird thing about all of this is that Metallica never gave us a definitive answer about the revised VH1 offer. I figured that they’d probably made their decision even before we jumped on the plane. Anyway, Metallica had more pressing concerns and was soon immersed in preparations for the Fillmore shows and the Summer Sanitarium tour. I submitted a budget for filming the first leg of the tour in Europe. When the budget was approved by Q Prime, I knew our project was finally safe. On June 6, the day
St. Anger
debuted at No. 1 in thirty countries (including the U.S.), we were in Paris, filming Metallica signing autographs at the Virginw Megastore on the Champs-Elysees. The album was officially out, with no TV show to support it. Showtime, VH1—they were all distant memories.

Now all we had to do was put together a movie.

CHAPTER 21

MONSTER
, INC.

The intimate access Metallica granted us while making
Monster
still amazes me.
It wasn’t just the therapy and the fights; there were also more mundane moments that it’s safe to say most celebrities would insist remain private. We were privy to business meetings where large sums of money were discussed. There was the scene where Rob becomes an instant millionaire, of course, as well as many others that didn’t find a place in the finished film.

For instance, there was the meeting where Metallica and Bob Rock discussed how much Bob would be compensated for his bass-playing and song writing duties on
St. Anger.
(Considering that Bob had for so long just been Metallica’s producer, it’s amazing that this meeting took place two years after work on
St. Anger
began.) There was the conference call with manager Cliff Burnstein over accepting a financial settlement and apology in Metallica’s lawsuit against Napster as the file-sharing company slipped into bankruptcy. “I don’t care if it’s no money,” James said, insisting that a public apology was more important to him. Lars gloomily added, “We’ve been fucked for so long on this thing in terms of public perception. I have a hard time thinking we’ll walk away from this anything other than fucked.”

What’s even more incredible than the trust Metallica showed us in allowing us access to their money moments is the trust they showed us in allowing us access to so much of their money. By the time we were deep into editing
Some Kind of Monster
, our budget had ballooned to $4 million. By our standards, this was a huge sum. Each of the
Paradise Lost
films had cost about $1 million. But we’d also shot about one tenth as much footage for those films as we did for
Monster.
In any case, Q Prime never objected to our continuing to film even as the budget skyrocketed.

I also owe Q Prime thanks for lighting a fire under our collective ass. The near-impossible task of turning our material into a television show helped us manage the enormous amount of footage as we tried to assemble a theatrical film. If we hadn’t hit the ground running like that, I really doubt we would have finished
Monster
in time to submit it to Sundance. After the TV-show idea was abandoned, we decided to keep using three editors, but we were really under the gun. Each editor had an assigned task. David Zieff, the supervising editor, was in charge of everything up until James’s return from rehab. Doug Abel handled the events after James’s return. Miki Milmore was the utility player, given miscellaneous problem-solving tasks. Kristine Smith, the assistant editor, would also take on various experiments.

It was a grueling summer. We were constantly trying to strike a balance between our desire to be creative and our need to get this monster under control. During the first few weeks of summer, Bruce and I left the editing room to document the start of Metallica’s Summer Sanitarium tour. We were somewhat alarmed to discover that Metallica had integrated only two songs from
St. Anger
into their set: the title song and “Frantic.” For obvious reasons, we had envisioned ending the movie with Metallica playing “Some Kind of Monster,” but they demurred, saying they hadn’t had time to rehearse it, and after a few dates we stopped asking. Since the “St. Anger” video shoot at San Quentin prison happens near the end of the film, it felt redundant to see the song played again. By default, we had to use “Frantic.” As it turned out, the universe had kind words for us once again. Our cameras had followed the evolution of “Frantic” in the studio more than any other song, so ending with Metallica playing it live emphasized that this was the end of the journey. And of course, the song’s lyrics neatly encapsulate some of the major themes of
Monster.
Especially that opener: “If I could have my wasted days back, would I use them to get back on track?”