Metallica: This Monster Lives (45 page)

It’s a question I thought about a lot that summer, as
Some Kind of Monster
gradually became a real film. Did James have to go through hell to reach a brighter place? Did I have to make one of the biggest bombs in recent Hollywood history in order to make a film as dear to me as
Monster?
That summer, looking back at the more than two years spent on this project, I realized that I was glad that the horrible experience that preceded it gave me the attitude I needed to do this one right. My wasted days weren’t wasted.

By early September, we had whittled down a mammoth six-hour, very rough cut into a still intimidating three-and-a-half-hour version. We summoned Metallica and the band’s managers to see the film at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, in a walnut-paneled, state-of-the-art screening room. Bruce and I were extremely nervous about showing them the film. We had a lot riding on it. Q Prime had not seen anything since the trailer we’d cut a year and a half earlier. This was where we’d justify making a film vastly different from the one we were originally hired to make. We chose to show them a cut with such a long running time because we wanted to include every scene that had any chance of making the final cut, so that if anyone had any reservations about anything, they could voice it now, since we’d have to lock a rough cut for Sundance in just four weeks and didn’t want to have to gather the troops for another screening before we finished. Over the prior two years, every time we’d broken our rule about not showing works in progress to our subjects—the trailer we cut soon after James left for rehab, the footage we showed them when he returned, the material we showed on the airplane that saved this film from becoming the next
Osbournes
—Metallica had come through for us. But now that we had produced something approaching a finished film, the band would naturally imagine an audience viewing it. When they actually saw themselves up on the big screen, would they regret ever letting us into their lives?

I felt like I was holding my breath through the entire screening. It occurred to me that these guys weren’t just reliving what they’d each individually been through; each of them was also discovering what the others had experienced. There was very little laughter or any other sounds coming from the audience, so it was impossible to tell what they thought. Each band member had decided to sit in a different corner of the room. The Q Prime guys sat near the back; throughout the screening, they cringed and laughed louder than anyone else. They obviously knew what Metallica had gone through over the previous two years, but it sounded to me like the film really made them grasp the day-to-day reality of the band’s recent turbulent period. When the film ended, there was total silence—no applause, no quips, nothing. Everyone stood and
stretched, wearing smiles that seemed to communicate a mixture of bewilderment, bemusement, and shock. I figured they’d have some immediate questions or comments, but everyone just headed for the door. When Lars walked by me, he paused briefly to pat me on the back, and say, “Gee, you guys are really good at this” (which I took as a compliment, but I wasn’t 100 percent sure). Then he kept walking.

Courtesy of Joe Berlinger

We decided to make the half-hour drive back to HQ to talk in more detail about the film. Bruce and I, alone in a car together, grimly recalled various horrible experiences we’ve had getting notes from network executives over the years and wondered if this would be our worst experience yet. Once everyone was seated around the table at HQ, we asked for everyone’s comments. It was interesting to me that most of the immediate concerns Metallica had involved the film’s treatment of the band’s economics. Even for people as candid as these guys were, money seemed to be a sensitive subject. James, for instance, was uncomfortable with the scene where the band offers Rob a million dollars.
"I think it’s a little out of context,” he said. What he meant was that the scene might confuse people into thinking that money was some sort of “signing bonus” rather than an advance. The word “advance” is in fact invoked in that scene, but James was probably right that the concept is too subtle for many viewers. Anyway, that was the consensus of most of the people in that room, who echoed James’s concerns. “An average kid hears ‘a million dollars’ and thinks, Wow—instant millionaire!” Marc Reiter pointed out.

“They want to demonstrate that they’re not going to treat Rob the way they treated Jason,” I said.

Reiter replied that if the purpose of the scene was to show that Rob was going to be an equal partner, not just a hired hand, then that was made clear by the scene in which Metallica brusquely insist to their lawyer that Rob’s equal status be codified. Marc had a valid point, except that the lawyer scene, more than the million-dollar scene, was filled with legal jargon that was sure to baffle the “average kid.”

Kirk expressed similar worries regarding Metallica’s image. “Do we really want to show all this stuff about money?” he asked, referring to Phil’s fee, Rob’s advance, and Lars’s art-auction bonanza. Besides the money issues, Kirk was also concerned that any scene depicting tensions within Metallica (that is, most of
Monster
) compromised his and his bandmates’ privacy But it was the money stuff that really bothered him. “I don’t want to seem like spoiled rock stars here. We have always—”

“Kirk, I think you’re not being realistic,” I said, cutting him off. “Your fans
know
you have money. You’d be killing an important theme in the movie that—”

Cliff Burnstein quickly came to Kirk’s defense. “I don’t like your overly defensive thing, Joe. Kirk has a legitimate concern.” His voice went up a notch. “Why can’t he fuckin’ say it without
you
saying it’s an attack on the whole goddamn movie?”

I was taken aback, though I had to admit Cliff had a point. I let my emotions get the better of me. I had been so nervous about showing the film to everyone that I was still a little keyed up. I quickly backed off, but it turned out James felt much the way I did. “Look, people already know these kinds of things,” he said. “They know our tour made $40 million. They already think, What a bunch of rich-ass rock stars. But maybe when people see what we
do
with our money, that’ll help a little with that perception.”

I thought James was tapping into something crucial. Make no mistake: Even compared to most rock stars, Metallica is a wildly successful band. According
to
Rolling Stone
, the only musical acts to gross more than Metallica in 2003 were the Rolling Stones, the Eagles, Bruce Springsteen, and the Dixie Chicks. Kirk is probably right that Metallica’s fans think of the band as a bunch of regular, working-class guys, not so far away from the guys’ grease-stained mechanics’ getups on the cover of
Garage, Inc.
But just think about the winking title
Garage, Inc.
for a second and you’ll realize that band and fans are clued into what’s really going on. If anything, the typical Metallica fan
likes
that their heroes are a bunch of rich-ass rock stars who still seem like regular guys, the kind of dudes for whom the money is just a nice fringe benefit of being the planet’s most kick-ass rock band. Metallica are similar in this way to R.E.M. and U2, bands that don’t downplay their hugeness but make a certain effort to keep the rock-star excess under wraps. Let’s face it—it’s safe to say the average adolescent Metallica fan—stuck in a dull suburb, alienated from parents, siblings, teachers, and most fellow adolescents—dreams of getting rich one day and telling all these people to go fuck themselves. Metallica seem like kindred spirits because they can pluck a fellow traveler like Rob Trujillo out of relative obscurity,
a guy just like anyone else
, and make him a millionaire overnight. Lars summed it up nicely: “I’m really proud that we gave Rob a million dollars,” he said. “I’ll shout it from the fucking rooftops. I’m really proud that I set the record for selling a Basquiat. I’ll shout
that
from the fucking rooftops.”

The “Basquiat” Lars is referring to is a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist who electrified the Downtown art scene in New York in the early ’80s and died of a drug overdose before he reached thirty. The “shout that from the fucking rooftops” refers to the scene where we watch as Lars auctions off much of his collection of contemporary art, including a Basquiat painting, which sells for $5 million, a record for a Basquiat. It’s no exaggeration to say that
everyone
in the Metallica camp advised Lars to ask us to delete that scene—his band-mates, managers, and lawyers, even his wife. It’s remarkable that Lars had the courage to let us keep the scene, since his anti-Napster campaign had been such a PR disaster: he had been accused of being a moneygrubbing asshole who had forsaken the very people who had put him on top. Bruce and I had made a decision not to make
Monster
appear to take sides on the Napster issue. Since the imbroglio had come and gone by the time we began filming, we probably wouldn’t have mentioned it at all, except for the fact that Lars had clearly been emotionally affected by it, and the
St. Anger
song “Shoot Me Again” was inspired by his Napster experience.

Some Kind of Monster is
a long film, but it’s also very tightly constructed.
Many of the scenes contain multiple intercuts, which means that if you delete one element, several others will unravel. From an editing standpoint, the auction scene would have been easy to lose, because it’s somewhat vestigial to the overall physical structure. But although it’s one of the few parts of the film that could be removed without creating collateral damage, it just seemed like a shame to cut such a great scene. In fact, it seemed pointless to lose a scene that shows real footage of a high-powered art auction, since prestigious auction houses like Christie’s generally do not allow anyone to film the auctions. Bruce and I had to jump through a lot of bureaucratic hoops to get Christie’s to make an exception for us.

I think Lars wanted the scene left in because of what it represented for him. As his personal assistant explains in the movie, Lars associated his art collection with an earlier period of his life. Now that he had become a husband and father of two, he wanted to open a new chapter in his life, so auctioning off all of his art represented a symbolic rebirth. That’s what Lars intended, and that’s the message we wanted to communicate in
Monster
, but we actually had to manipulate the film’s sequence of events fairly significantly to do so. Of all our films,
Monster
is the one that takes the most liberties with the chronology of the events it depicts. Lars’s art auction is the most extreme example. The auction actually occurred just a few months into the James-less era. We decided to put the scene much later in the film because we felt that Lars, as much as James, was going through a real renewal. He had been making a lot of progress in dealing with some problems he was having with his marriage. Like James, Lars was moving on, so we needed a scene to serve as a corollary to what James was experiencing. We wanted to communicate this change in Lars, but we didn’t have any material from that period that effectively did that. The auction scene also fits the general tone of that part of the film, as we see Metallica begin to shake off the lethargy and emotional limbo of the preceding months.

Still, from a verité standpoint, I felt a little uncomfortable with manipulating time as much as we did with this scene. We ultimately decided we weren’t being dishonest here, because
Monster
is as much the story of emotional development as plain narrative development. It was more important to communicate this personal growth as we saw it, even if that meant toying with time. Also, its appearance in the film’s final act is a reminder that these guys, whom we’ve spent the last couple of hours learning to see as people with the same problems as the rest of us, are also rock stars who operate in a different economic
and social orbit than most of us. Although Lars wanted to keep the scene, he did ask us to reconsider the way we depicted the auction. Even he felt like our first cut of the scene focused too much on the money. We originally ended it with Lars saying, “Five million for a Basquiat—that’s beautiful!” Lars didn’t want it to look like he was just rejoicing over netting himself a few million dollars for a painting. He explained that a Basquiat painting had never fetched more than $2 million at an auction. He had high hopes for breaking that record because he wanted to raise Basquiat’s stature among collectors. The price Lars got for his Basquiat was actually big news in the art world, and Lars was really proud of that.

We weren’t sure how to soften the focus on money while still communicating the frenetic spirit of a well-heeled art auction. It was Lars who reminded us, a few weeks after the Skywalker screening, that we had shot footage of him in the preview gallery the evening before the auction. “If you use that, it’ll show that I have an emotional connection to this art,” he told us later. He was right. By working that footage into the scene, we show how hard it is for Lars to say goodbye to these paintings, the bittersweet feeling of wiping the slate clean (especially when he says that he feels pretty good about his decision to let these works go and then accidentally drops his wineglass). “It doesn’t matter if one of these paintings sells for a dollar or a hundred million dollars,” he says. “What matters is that these are all great paintings.” After hearing Lars’s concerns, we created a more lyrical montage that revolved around Lars getting drunk “to numb the pain,” which further demonstrated that this was not just about the money for him.