Metallica: This Monster Lives

by Joe Berlinger

  We weren’t disappointed.

  CHAPTER 7

  EXIT LIGHT

  05/03/01

  INT. ROOM 627, RITZ-CARLTON HOTEL, SAN FRANCISCO - DAY

  LARS: As we continue to push forward into uncharted [musical] territories, what is it that we’re scared of? It would be awesome if Phil could help us with that a little bit. What is the fear of?

  KIRK: Lack of originality. We don’t want anyone to accuse us of having a lack of originality. That’s the way I see it. I think we want to stand alone on our hill and be seen as an entity that’s completely original.

  LARS: It’s a lot of fucking pressure!

  PHIL: One of the things I hear you guys say every now and then is that you want to be different, not just original, and there is a difference there.

  LARS: Different from the groups of people that we get lumped in with, or different from what we’ve done before?

  PHIL: What do you think?

  LARS: I mean … I don’t know!

  PHIL: I think that one of the things that’s happened over the last few weeks or months is that there’s a greater respect and closeness, an appreciation of one another. You’ve been letting down your defenses, and therefore you’re feeling more open to the world. There’s less of a need to be different for the sake of being different, or different because you’re trying to be against something, or different because you feel like you don’t fit in somehow. So if we’re talking about what’s healthy, it’s nice for you to choose originality, because it’s something that comes from a creative gesture, as opposed to, “We want to preserve the sanctity of being different because we don’t know how to belong.”

  JAMES: I feel like there’s nothing wrong with [wanting to be different.]

  PHIL: It’s not a matter of right and wrong…. Part of my role is helping you clarify your motives. And I do believe that if you’re driven by fear, it does affect your creativity. When you’re trying not to be something, or trying to protect yourself against something, it tends to siphon energy. So I think it’s good for us to check out our fears. I mean, you guys respect your uniqueness, you respect your originality, you respect what you’ve come up with, which is very special.

  LARS: I think that if you look at the history of what we’ve done for the last twenty years, our originality doesn’t exist in its own vacuum. The originality is always the result of molding together a bunch of different things, and being fortunate to have our own X factor that somehow become a part of the things we’re molding together, which results in something unique. And that unknown X factor is something we’ve never been able to define, but when we make music together, there’s an unknown thing that creeps into all the things that we take inadvertently from other people, the things that inspire us. Whether it’s been this record or the Black Album or whatever, that’s always been true. Whether it’s been Diamond Head or Mercyful Fate or AC/DC, there’s always been something that’s sparked us into going in different places, and ending up in this beautiful original state. And I just think we should just be aware that that’s always been present in our lives and in our career to some degree.

  Whatever interpersonal problems the members of Metallica had—the departure of Jason Newsted and the crisis of conscience it engendered, the tension between James and Lars, James’s fear of opening up the writing process—were, in a sense, dwarfed by a larger existential question: Why did Metallica still exist? It’s worth pointing out that Metallica had done what very few bands ever accomplish: They had outlasted the genre that was their original niche and become something much more universal. By the end of the ’90s, the term “heavy metal” was pretty much put out to pasture, the relic of a bygone era. It’s closest offspring was the “nü metal” of bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit, which owed as much to hip-hop as hard rock. Metal was dead, but Metallica was very much alive.

  This is an even greater achievement if you consider that Metallica has never been very prolific. The 1991 Black Album made Metallica full-fledged rock stars rather than cult heroes of an enormous cult. It became one of the earliest records to receive Diamond certification by the music industry for sales of 10 million records or more. Rock radio, after years of ignoring Metallica, was forced to pay attention. Five years went by before the follow-up, Load, a rather self-conscious attempt to reposition themselves as an alt-rock band (they even cut their hair). Load wasn’t the huge smash its predecessor was, but it solidified Metallica’s place in the rock firmament. For Reload, which followed two years later, the band managed to squeeze another respectable, if not spectacular, album out of the Load sessions. The next few years saw the release of some interesting projects (S&M, a collaboration with Michael Kamen and the San Francisco Symphony) and compilations (Garage, Inc., a double album of cover songs, including the songs on Metallica’s super-rare “Garage Days” EPs), but no album of new original material. Metallica managed to remain relevant through steady touring, as well as the fact that the rock world was still trying to catch up to Metallica’s early innovations. A good comparison is Led Zeppelin, which continued to inspire bands even after its demise, in a widening arc of influence. Zep’s DNA is part of so many different kinds of music that it’s now weird to think about how much the band was originally shunned by all but the unwashed hard-rock hordes. Although Metallica’s albums were few and far between, each one felt like an event because Metallica still sounded ahead of its time.

  Metallica’s tenacity had never come easy for the band. Each record was, in its own way an ordeal to make, largely because the guys in Metallica are obsessive perfectionists and their own worst critics. As every Metallica fan knows, the Black Album was the result of hundreds of hours of recording; the entire process lasted well over a year. Bob Rock says it took them three months of work just to record the guitars. Editing the drum tracks took six months; legends abound regarding Lars taking weeks to find just the right snare-drum sound. Metallica’s huge investment of time and sweat was validated by the album’s massive success, but I think the Black Album has also become something of a burden for the band. The combined sales of Load, Reload, and St. Anger add up to less than 75 percent of what the Black Album has sold. In 2003, the year St. Anger was released and sold 1.6 million copies in the U.S., the Black Album added another million to its tally. Metallica is clearly a band that follows its own muse, regardless of commercial prospects, but it’s also a band that refuses to operate as though its glory days are over. It stands to reason that the Black Album’s legacy fuels Metallica’s collective fear of appearing irrelevant or unoriginal.

  The Black Album was the first time that Metallica worked with Bob Rock, and it’s easy to see why the band has continued to use him as a producer (though some early fans inevitably saw Bob’s continued presence as yet more evidence of selling out). He opened up the band’s sound, and he also made Metallica sound looser. There’s an unflappable air about him that puts everyone at ease. He has an uncanny knack for knowing when to push the band members to forego some of their obsessive tendencies and just cut loose. He also knows when to keep his distance and let them do their thing.

  Courtesy of Bob Richman

  It was hard to tell if Bob shared my rather dim appraisal of Metallica’s Presidio jams. There’s a shot in Monster of him sitting behind the mixing board, grimacing as Metallica plods through an early uninspired version of “My World,” but maybe he was just concentrating on the task at hand. To my ears, the music was getting worse. The new material had sounded somewhat stale before the break, but now it sounded like a pall had settled over the jams. Something just wasn’t right. While making an album, it was common for James and Lars to be at each other’s throats. Now it was hard to imagine them working up the passion and energy to scream at each other.

  One of the first noticeable breakdowns in Metallica’s fledgling democracy made it into Monster In a scene taken from the first therapy session after the break, James is telling the others about his Russian bear-hunting expedition. He mentions that he spent a lot
of time sitting in his camp with little to do. Lars asks him if he worked on lyrics.

  “Yeah, I really didn’t have anything else to do,” James says.

  Lars, off camera, lets out a strained guffaw. “Really? You were working on lyrics?” It’s only because I’ve spent so much time around Lars that I recognize that particular laugh as his nervous laugh. Remember, the agreement on this record was that all aspects of music-making, including the lyrics, were to be a collaborative affair. I think Lars saw, in James’s seemingly innocuous admission that he’d been penning lyrics, evidence that the experiment was already beginning to fail.

  Some of the lyrics James wrote in Russia wound up in “Temptation,” a song from the St. Anger sessions that did not make the album. The song is clearly a reflection of what James was experiencing. It was beginning to dawn on him that the crux of his problem was his inability to say no to the smorgasbord of rock-star entitlements. His solo Russian vacation, which caused him to miss his son’s first birthday, was both an example of the song’s “can’t say no” refrain and a sign of how much the “can’t say no” side of his personality was no longer working for him. I think his impulsive trip was a last-ditch effort to outrun the demons by looking for that elusive “excitement” he later said was destroying his life. Those lyrics were a cry for help, but I don’t think James yet understood exactly what problem he needed help solving.

  Although “Temptation” wasn’t on St. Anger, we knew we had to use a large chunk of it in Monster. The song almost became the last one James ever wrote as a member of Metallica, and was thus a fitting capstone to the era of the “old” James. The footage of him singing it at the Presidio was a milestone, the moment James hit rock bottom and announced (even if he couldn’t yet articulate this) that he was struggling with the excesses of rock stardom. On a more practical level, we created this scene for the benefit of people watching the film who know little about Metallica. Monster gives you a sense of Metallica as everyday guys, so we wanted to remind the viewer that these are some of the world’s biggest rock stars. That’s why we dissolve from a shot of James singing “Temptation” to a montage of mayhem from Metallica’s long career—the groupies, the drinking, and the all-around frenetic pace of traveling the world as a member of one of its most massive bands. The sensitive guys you see in Monster haven’t always been so sensitive.

  I could tell James was being pulled in different directions. He says at one point in Monster that because of all the turmoil in his family growing up—his parents’ divorce, his mother’s death, his strict Christian Science upbringing—music had always been the one thing he felt he could control. Now that control was being yanked away from him at the same time that his personal demons were really starting to overwhelm him. He was noticeably irritable and frustrated during the postvacation jams. One of my favorite scenes from Monster is when we see James ad-libbing lyrics over an early version of “My World.” He sings “motherfuckers in my head!” and you can see him notice the film crew out of the corner of his eye. He clearly looks uncomfortable. I imagine that at that moment he saw us as just another thing colliding with the wall he was putting up. (Maybe he also realized that the music just wasn’t cutting it.)

  During therapy sessions, James seemed even less engaged than before the break. Outside of the sessions, he began to air concerns that the therapy was impinging on time that could be better spent jamming and writing songs. We included an exchange between James and Lars in which Lars tells James he hopes that James sees the therapy as an essential part of the process of making the new album. James doesn’t reply His expression is hard to read, but it’s clear that he isn’t digging therapy—and not just because it was cutting into studio time. We didn’t know it yet—maybe he didn’t know it himself—but the therapy set him on a collision course, forcing him to deal with his deeper, painful problems.

  I could sense that Metallica was building to something dramatic. But I was also aware, even then, that this part of the film would be very difficult to put together. The therapy was slow-moving, and James said very little during the sessions, so there wasn’t much useful footage there. The studio jams were mostly notable for their dullness. There were fights between James and Lars, but they were drawn-out affairs, and somehow didn’t adequately communicate the complex range of emotions circulating within Metallica. We would have to use subtle moments, such as James’s nonreply to Lars’s question about the importance of therapy, to dramatize the slow and steady breakdown of the band. The problem was how to do so in a way that wouldn’t put viewers to sleep.

  Courtesy of Bob Richman

  My solution, more than a year later in the editing room, was to intercut between the bad music and the fighting to show how each fed the other. It felt like a real breakthrough at a time when we were struggling to wade through hundreds of hours of footage to tell the essential story of what we’d seen. Our editor, David Zieff, had done a great job of cutting stand-alone distillations of the jams and the fights, but it still felt like too slow a burn. By repeatedly cutting back and forth between two stand-alone scenes, we could shorten the screen time of each and heighten the overall tension.1

  The frustration over the directionless music led to more fighting, which in turn made it difficult for Metallica to work as a cohesive musical unit. It was a mutually reinforcing downward cycle. The intercuts also allowed us to isolate important moments that would fly right by an audience subjected to protracted fight scenes. As with any fight between people who love each other, what James and Lars didn’t say was as important as what they did. Like a married couple, their familiarity with each other was such that a mere look could speak volumes. For these scenes, we focused on subtle glances and nearly imperceptible changes in facial expressions. It was tedious work for David to tease out these moments, but I think it paid off by making the dissolution of the Presidio sessions feel much more palpable.

  The intercutting allowed us to increase the dramatic tension and lead the viewer into the exchange that almost ended Metallica forever. It began as a musical dispute, with James and Lars carefully attempting to critique the other’s playing. James thought Lars’s drumming was too loose, while Lars thought James’s guitar part was too “stock,” Metallica’s preferred term to describe anything deemed unoriginal.

  “Those things we throw out to each other are complete bullshit,” James said. “‘It sounds too stock, it sounds too normal to me.’ You know what I mean? You’re saying this shit so you can get your point across about doing a drumbeat. I mean, it doesn’t hold any water.”

  “I think it’s fucking stock! Which part of that is unclear to you? I think it sounds stock to my ears! Do you want me to write it down?”

  This scene is a perfect example of how digital video, the format we used to shoot Monster, has completely transformed documentary filmmaking. The cost of buying, exposing, and developing ten minutes of 16mm film is three hundred dollars. For twenty bucks, you can shoot an entire hour of digital video. The new technology makes it possible to adhere more closely to the cinema verité ideal. (The downside, as we found out when we began to edit, is that when you’re not worried about cost, you can find yourself drowning in footage.) It’s no exaggeration to say that Monster wouldn’t be the movie it is without digital video. As this scene demonstrated, it allowed us to be more honest, because we were able to use two cameras on most of our shoots. That meant we were able to capture more of those elusive moments and furtive glances without having to invent cutaway shots. (While making our other films, there’s always been a point where we’ve had to ask people to redo some motion so that we’d have a cutaway but we would never ask people to repeat words. Still, even when we make minor requests, it always feels a little like cheating.)

  James adds to the list of possible album titles. (Courtesy of Bob Richman)

  During this argument, Wolfgang Held, our cameraman on that shoot, operated one camera, and Bruce operated the other. Wolfgang, holding the main camera, focused squarely on James.
Bruce, sitting next to Kirk with his little Sony PD-150 (a portable digital video camera that gets surprisingly crisp footage) nearly invisible on his lap, was able to capture one of Monster’s most priceless shots, a moment where real life is more complex than anything a screenwriter could imagine.

  “TEMPTATION”

  Temptation, wreck my head

  Temptation, make you dead

  Temptation, sucks my soul

  Temptation, fill no hole

  Temptation, fuck you up

  Temptation

  No, no, no, I can’t say no, no, no, no

  I can’t let it go

  No, no, no, no

  Go away

  Leave me be

  Just leave me be

  The exchange was becoming tenser. Kirk, as he often did, tried to steer things in a more constructive direction. “Why don’t we just go in there and hammer it out, instead of hammering on each other?”

  Unfortunately, it was too late. James said he was in a pissy mood. Lars lambasted James for letting his mood get in the way. James said he was just being honest.

  Lars: “You’re just sitting here being a complete dick.”

  Kirk, unwittingly displaying perfect comic timing and an honestly exasperated expression, leaned back and slapped his forehead. It was one of those “worth a thousand words” moments.

  James got up and exited stage left. He slammed the door, abruptly drawing the curtain on the film’s first act. Nearly a year would pass before Bruce or I saw him again.

  EARLY WARNING

  “Temptation” was a perfect fit for us, because the song so clearly encapsulated the state of James Hetfield during this period. However, as any astute Metallica fan will instantly notice, “Temptation” isn’t on St. Anger. Why was the song so right for Some Kind of Monster but not apparently up to the standards of St. Anger? Setting aside the possibility that one or more members of Metallica simply didn’t like the song (all St. Anger selections required everyone’s vote), one possible answer reveals a lot about the difference between what we were trying to do as documentary filmmakers and what Metallica were trying to do as musicians.