Metallica: This Monster Lives (50 page)

It was important to me to capture James’s preshow rituals prior to taking the stage on his first tour after recovery, which ultimately led to the final sequence of the film. (Courtesy of Joe Berlinger)

Trying to keep our cool in Imola until Metallica came onstage, during the extremely hot summer tour (Courtesy of Bob Richman)

James, just barely out of the audience’s sight line, was also singing along. As he howled along with the fans, it sounded like he was leading a battle call. Instinctively, I crouched down and shot him from a low angle; he seemed downright heroic. I kept pushing my access, creeping in closer and closer as he sang and went through his rituals: picking out his black sleeveless T-shirt for the first set, wiping the sweat from his face, retrieving his guitar from his tech, doing chin-ups. James walked up to Rob, and they pressed their fists together in solidarity. Buzzing with adrenaline and dehydration, I felt like I was floating out of my body, observing the scene through the camera in my hand but with someone else’s eyes.

I took a quick sip of water and crept out from the wings. To the right of me, James continued to pump himself up; to the left, I could see the vast audience. It was intoxicating, the amount of love the crowd was throwing Metallica’s way. As I watched James getting ready to hit the stage, I felt something I’ve never felt in a filming situation before: I was proud of him. I’d spent so much time sitting in a room with these guys, listening to their internal squabbles and thinking about how they were just like me in so many ways that I’d forgotten how they can roll into Bologna or Tokyo or Kansas City and attract the kind of idolizing crowds that are the domain of fantasies for most of us. And yet, despite that ego trip, or maybe because of it, they had the courage and strength to explore their pain and come to terms with it, to wrestle the monster.

Courtesy of Bob Richman

Lars always stared me down whenever I filmed him onstage. On our final shoot day, he jumped off the riser and said, “Don’t you have enough shit? It’s time to go home!” (Courtesy of Joe Berlinger)

Watching James ready himself for his triumphant return, I suddenly flashed back a year and a half to March 2002, when we showed Q Prime our first trailer. At the end of the screening, Cliff Burnstein had a really interesting appraisal of Metallica’s situation. “When you’ve got a certain amount of success, money in the bank and all that, the next thing you do doesn’t change your life much. The Black Album changed [Metallica]’s lives enormously. It changed how they lived and how people thought of them. Now, to make another album doesn’t change things. When you’ve accomplished so much, you think, Why should I get up in the morning? I’ll stay in my bathrobe, play catch with my kids, read the paper. I’ve got a beautiful house, millions in the bank. What’s my
motivation to do anything? That’s what’s gonna catch up with this band soon. I think this ten months off is gonna give us ten more years. It will provide a new motivation.”

This was an astonishing monologue, not the least because it came after the screening of the trailer, which had clearly alarmed Burnstein and his colleagues. It was also extraordinary because Cliff saw a coherent theme for this film at a time when there was no guarantee that in ten months there would be a Metallica, let alone a film about Metallica. And his appraisal turned out to be pretty accurate, both about the band and the film. I think that Metallica’s harrowing emotional journey did buy them as many years as they want to keep playing. As for the film, I think
Monster
is, as Cliff says, a movie about what makes us get up in the morning. For most of us, not getting up really isn’t an option: we have bills to pay, families to support, lives to hold together. We don’t always examine why we get up in the morning because we’re too busy making ourselves do it.

For that reason, as I filmed James just before he hit the stage, I was proud of what Bruce and I had accomplished. We had really pushed ourselves, in a way we never had before, nurturing and shaping a lasting social document out of a run-of-the-mill promo assignment. We had figured out how to work in a way that pushed egos aside for the collective good. We had learned how to integrate and appreciate (in fact, root for) each other’s individual careers while also cultivating the collective vision of the Berlinger-Sinofsky filmmaking team.

And I was proud of myself. Two weeks of persistence had gotten me to this point, onstage with James. But I felt like it was also the culmination of two years of work that Bruce and I did together to reach this position of absolute trust with our subjects. Thank God I crashed and burned on
Blair Witch 2.
If I hadn’t, I don’t think the Metallica film would have ever happened, and this has been the greatest professional and personal experience of my career.

Once the concert began, I entered a narrow corridor, about ten feet deep, in front of the stage. Security guards and police barricades held back the front-row crowds. (I’d been in this position at a show in Germany a few nights earlier, where Eddie O’Connor, one of our sound recordists, had his headphones literally blown off his head by a pyro explosion.) Every few minutes, a guard would nab a new, often bloodied stage diver, making him wince in pain by dragging him out in an armlock. Other fans were fainting in the oppressive heat, their bodies flopping over the metal barricades in exhaustion while first-aid workers lifted them out to safety. It felt like the whole scene might erupt into violence at any minute. More emergency teams rushed past me, wheeling
gurneys piled high with bags of water that they would slit and toss into the sea of sweaty flesh as it hammered up and down to the rhythm of the music.

I wanted to get really tight close-ups of the crowd (many of these were used in
Monster
’s closing sequence). Bob Richman and another cameraman, Don Lenzer, worked the stage for close-ups of the band and reverse shots of the audience, while Bruce was in the middle of the field getting the full-stage and audience shots that we used to emphasize the enormity of the crowd. At the end of the show, as the last notes of the final encore song, “Enter Sandman,” echoed across the arena, one of those bags of water flew through the air and exploded against my camera. I felt a cool splash against my sweaty cheek and heard an electronic fizzle. Then the viewfinder went dark.
Fuck!
This could not be happening. …

While I pondered my fate, Phil Towle was experiencing an altogether more reflective moment. As Metallica took its final bows, he stood by the side of the stage, watching his charges, feeling a potent mixture of pride at how far they’d come and regret that his role in the journey was coming to an end. “They were on four corners of this large stage, and they came together at the end and hugged,” he remembers. “And I just broke down crying. It was sort of like, ‘Wow, that was what it was all about.’ That told me all I needed to know about me. I finished my job.”

After the show, the film crew met back at the production vehicles. I was completely freaked out and still vibrating from being so close to the gigantic speakers. Convinced that the footage I’d shot of James had been ruined by the water, I told Bruce what I’d captured and probably lost. He looked at me skeptically, doubting that anything shot with such a small camera in this massive environment could be as good as I thought it was. We dried the camera, removed the battery, and inserted a new one. The camera whirred to life. I was more concerned about the footage than I was about the camera, and I didn’t want to risk playing it back on potentially damaged equipment, so I ejected the cassette, inspected it with a flashlight, and popped it into another PD-150 that we’d brought with us as a backup. We rewound the tape and played back the footage—it was intact! Bruce immediately recognized what I was talking about and said, “Stop playing it—it’s a master and you’ll damage it! We gotta use that for the end of the movie.” And that is indeed how
Monster
ends.

We shot a few more shows when the tour hit the U.S. later in the summer. At Giants Stadium in New Jersey, we were filming fans in the parking lot for the closing title sequence when a dark van pulled up next to us. I sighed, thinking
it was security about to bust us for filming in the parking lot. “Hey, Joe” someone stage-whispered. I turned around to see Lars peeking out of the passenger-side window, trying not to draw attention to himself. He laughed. “We can’t find the backstage entrance. Do you know where it is?” I pointed the way, then sat down on the curb and laughed at the absurdity of the situation.

As the summer tour came to a close, I could definitely sense a subtle change in Metallica’s attitude toward us. It almost felt like they were ending the phase of their lives that involved Bruce and me. The doors that had been opened as wide as they could for us were now closing. Of course, the guys were still very friendly, but I think they, like us, felt it was time to wrap things up. When Metallica played the Los Angeles Coliseum, I was standing onstage in front of the drums, filming Lars, when he spotted me and jumped down from his drum riser. In front of 90,000 people, he came over to me and got in my
face. “Don’t you have enough shit?” he said, dripping with sweat. He smiled warmly (or as warmly as you can smile in this situation), put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye, and said, “You need to let go. It’s time to go home.” I filmed him as he turned around, climbed back up onto the riser, took his seat, and resumed the show.

Opening night at the Sunshine Cinema in New York City.
Monster
was shown on two screens, and all the evening shows sold out. Ironically, there were midnight shows of
This Is Spinal Tap.
(Courtesy of Joe Bellinger)

The next day was our final shoot and the final day of the 2003 Summer Sanitarium Tour, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, Metallica’s hometown. I was backstage with Bruce and Bob Richman when we bumped into James as he was walking to his dressing room. We said hello and talked about the vacations we were each about to take. His attention was suddenly distracted by some friends of his who’d stopped by. We all began to walk to the private preshow reception area near the dressing rooms, reserved for friends and family. James and his friends went through the metal gates that separate backstage access from the true inner sanctum. As we followed them, a burly guard put his arm out, motioning us to stay on the other side. I looked down and realized our backstage credentials weren’t the same as what we’d been given throughout the rest of the tour, the kind that allowed us to get the full all-access treatment. I was about to protest (
Do you have any idea how much time we’ve spent with this band?
), but the three of us just looked at each other and shrugged. James kept walking and didn’t notice that we were no longer beside him. From the gate, I watched him head for the belly of the beast. It felt really good to let him go.