The first time the subject came up in front of our cameras was during James’s rehab stint. Bob Rock and the two remaining members of Metallica were in a therapy session with Phil. They were talking about James’s recent lyrics. Kirk brought up “Temptation.” “Those lyrics are so clear now,” he said. “[The song will] have so much more impact now that it’s more fact than fiction.”
Bob nodded. “It’ll probably never make the album, but—”
“That song has to make the album,” Kirk said.
“The interesting thing about ‘Temptation’ is that James wrote it off the top of his head,” Bob continued. “In other words, it was not thought-out. And listening to the music that’s been created so far [at the Presidio], there has to be some stuff that’s thought-out more.” This was probably Bob’s delicate way of saying that when (or if) the time came for Metallica to regroup, the band would have to find a way to focus its creative energies.
Today, Bob still remembers the “Temptation” session. “James just made it up as he was going along,” he says. “There was something magical about it. But there was no way management or the record company would let it come out.” Why not? “It was just too raw.”
Like Bob, we saw the magic of this rawness, and it was just the sort of magic we were looking for. As verité filmmakers, we want to capture those times when human behavior is at its most unvarnished. We live for the moments when people let down their guard. When I saw James letting those words pour out of him, I knew right away that it was one of those moments. I wasn’t even thinking about whether that song would be on the album. I just knew I was watching something powerful.
Whatever you think of St. Anger, it’s definitely Metallica’s most “verité” album. It’s Metallica’s attempt to present an honest sonic document of the band—and James’s attempt to portray the honest state of his psyche—without worrying about making the music sound polished or “perfect.” You could really feel them struggle with this when it came time to assemble a tentative song list for St. Anger in late 2002. We used a bit of this meeting in the film, but it’s worth highlighting the larger discussion about “Temptation.”
James, Lars, Kirk, and Bob all brought a short list of songs each thought should make the cut. James and Kirk each had “Temptation” on their list. Bob thought that “Temptation” was more a “vibe” than a song, and suggested that maybe a bit of it could be used as a lead-into or fade-out of another song. James said he agreed that it wasn’t a complete song, but he was reluctant to abandon the idea of turning it into one. “It really does sum up all the lyrics that are in this new project. It was done long before [my] recovery, so it was kind of [anticipating] all of this coming to life.”
“I like it for what it represents to me,” Bob said. “I will always listen to it because it represents a point in time [and] everything we’ve been through.” But he wondered if maybe it was too much of a personal statement, too disturbing, and too different from anything Metallica had ever done, to fit cohesively into the album. James said that he liked the song precisely because it was different and disturbing. He wasn’t suggesting it was a classic “like ‘Master of Puppets,’” but he was having trouble letting it go. “I remember writing that thing—it came out, it flowed, totally, instantly.”
Bob asked Lars what he thought. Lars said it sounded more like a jam than a song, and said he envisioned an album where “every piece of fat” was trimmed.
Kirk again voiced his support. “I think the great thing about ‘Temptation’ is that it has such a mood and a lot of atmosphere. I hear the emotion in your voice,” he said to James. “I can tell you’re singing your heart out…. It’s just total raw emotion, and I don’t think we’ve ever caught a moment so completely.”
In the end, James was torn. On the one hand, if “Temptation” was such a great moment captured on tape, why couldn’t they whip it into a song? On the other hand, “whipping anything into shape” was the MO on Load and Reload, and something they wanted to avoid this time. James eventually conceded Lars’s point that the song wasn’t meant for St. Anger. We used that bit of dialogue in the film, because both James and Lars later commented that the consensus they reached showed how far they’d come in learning to communicate with each other.
Kirk had one more thing to say about “Temptation.” “If I listen to it twice in a row, and I’m in a certain mood, it just brings me straight back to the Presidio. And I’m just like, ‘Whoa.’ I get kind of freaked out, you know?”
Sometimes, when it cuts too close to the heart, there’s such a thing as too much verité.
CHAPTER 8
ENTER NIGHT
08/15/01
INT. ROOM 627, RITZ-CARLTON HOTEL, SAN FRANCISCO - DAY
LARS: Are you saying that the party line at the [treatment facility] is that James cannot get better unless he gives up music?
PHIL: No, I wouldn’t say that. I would say that the party line there is [that you do] whatever it takes to get healthy, and if you feel you can’t control yourself around certain situations …
KIRK: Isn’t that a self-fulfilling prophecy, though?
PHIL: Well, I don’t share their belief, myself. I believe that whatever problems we have, it is to our advantage to be put in situations where we have to expose the issues so that we can work through them. If you have a fear of heights, you shouldn’t spend a lot of time on the ground, you know?
LARS: The point I was trying to make is that when I saw James, he had been away from us for forty-eight hours. Now it’s been [almost two months]. So it’ll be interesting to. see how the return to the world that the rest of us inhabit, how that is going…. Like I said before, I’m prepared for the worst.
PHIL: Now, if you prepare for the worst, I don’t want fear to dictate your energy.
LARS: I have a certain calmness about it.
PHIL: I think you do, too, okay? [But] if you’ve shut down, to some extent, because it’s easier to think there won’t be a future for Metallica, then a side effect is that you won’t put in the energy to keep it alive. There may not be a Metallica, but [you] have a choice about how to approach that [possibility]. Maybe it’s a bit dramatic to put it that way, but …
KIRK: I, in my heart of hearts, don’t think that he’ll walk away. I’m definitely not denying that could happen, but in my heart of hearts, I don’t think he’ll walk away.
LARS: I don’t think that he will willfully walk away, but I think that what could potentially happen is that it’ll become too difficult for him to–
KIRK: I don’t think that will happen. I just don’t think that will happen.
LARS: I don’t think it would ever be so cut-and-dry that he would call up and say, “I’m out, later, good luck.” I think it would be more something that would show its signs [gradually]. When we sit down and make music again … who knows what lyrics are gonna come out of him. Who the fuck knows? Is it still gonna have that … “AAARRGHH”? Will there still be a kind of nerve or fire? I don’t know. Gotta admit, you saw him at the [treatment facility]. Did he look like a guy who was gonna go up onstage and fucking stand in front of the red light and sing “The Thing That Should Not Be”?
KIRK: No, not at all.
LARS: It looked beaten out of him. I’m not saying he’s not gonna come back; I’m just saying, I don’t know what’s gonna happen tomorrow. But I know … where we are right now, and right now, it doesn’t look like it’s there. You can’t argue with that.
When James slammed the door and walked out of our lives, we thought we had a great dramatic moment, the kind of cinematic realism that verité filmmakers live for. We all figured it was a climax of sorts, but not a final act. We soon discovered, of course, that James had checked himself into rehab for an indefinite period. Again, this seemed like a momentary setback for the band, and possibly even a boon for the film. It never crossed our minds that we might have just witnessed the last time James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich ever made music together. Or that our film was coming
dangerously close to disintegrating in front of our eyes.
We couldn’t know it at the time, but that slammed door would throw Metallica and Monster into a maddening limbo. James was very private about whatever problems and addictions had led him to rehab, and Kirk, Lars, and Bob were very guarded with us about what they knew. Their silence on this subject was the first wall Metallica put up between them and us. We didn’t have to avoid it entirely but they made it very clear that they would not discuss the details of what James was going through without James’s permission, and he wasn’t around to give it. This was an understandable response to a situation that, as time went on, seemed to herald the death of Metallica, but it made our jobs much more difficult. Not once, however, did Lars or Kirk ever tell us the film project was dead. Through deductive reasoning, we figured out that James was being treated for alcohol abuse, as well as other temptations commensurate with being Metallica’s most visible member—behavior that would put a strain on even the best of marriages. It was also clear that James’s solo trip to Russia marked the death throes of the “old” James Hetfield. What the “new” James would look like was now anyone’s guess. I just hoped we’d be around to film him when he emerged from his self-imposed exile.
Since Lars was the member of Metallica who felt strongest about our film, we wanted to find out whether he thought the film had a future. Two months after James’s departure, Bruce and I cobbled together some of the footage we’d shot so far, flew back to San Francisco, and drove over to Lars’s house. Before we got down to business, he ushered us into his home theater, and said he had something cued up to show us. It was an experimental, non-narrative film shot by his father, the wonderfully eccentric Torben Ulrich. The film was like a European version of something filmmaker Stan Brakhage would’ve made under the influence of mushrooms (and if you’re familiar with Brakhage’s work, you know many of his films already seem like they were influenced by mushrooms). It was interesting, but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to watch a nonlinear film, because I was feeling distinctly linear myself: I had one thought on my mind, and that was whether Lars would give us his blessing to continue. So I paid Lars a quick compliment, even though I had been unable to concentrate on his father’s film.
The footage we showed Lars was roughly divided into three parts. There was a bit of the first couple of weeks, when everyone was getting along and there were plenty of good vibes; some footage about James’s reservations about democratizing the songwriting process; and the fight that sent James packing.
The lights went up. I felt a knot in my stomach. I wanted to communicate to Lars that we assumed the project was still alive, but that we were ready to roll with the punches. So I got right to the point: How far could we push this? Where did we go from here?
Lars stared straight ahead for a few seconds before speaking. “I only have one rule: no cheap shots. If it’s just voyeuristic, or does nothing but hurt or embarrass our wives, it’s out. But anything that helps move the story along is fair game.”
Bruce and I looked at each other, relief written all over our faces. Bruce said, “I think that’s totally fair.” And we spoke of it no more.
We were both impressed by Lars’s commitment to the project, despite the crumbling of his band. It demonstrated bravery at a time of extreme vulnerability and it showed he trusted us. It also revealed Lars’s cinematic sensibility. Even in the midst of a severe crisis, he was thinking that this project could become much more than a promotional vehicle. He understood that this film could tell a gripping story, albeit one that might make Metallica look bad, or have an unhappy ending. There might not even be an ending: Maybe Metallica was destined to remain in metal purgatory an indefinite limbo. This would be bad for us, but much worse for him. Lars was thinking like a verité filmmaker, moving forward without a guaranteed resolution. He was willing to take that risk.
Which left Bruce and me facing one burning question: Were we?
The moment Lars made it clear that we weren’t banished from his world, somewhere in the back of my mind, somewhere behind the relief, I remember thinking, yet again, about the innate hypocrisy of what Bruce and I do. If I was in Lars’s position, if what I’d been doing for fully half my life was in danger of disappearing forever, there is no way I would let some guy with a camera follow me around. I’d like to think this hypocrisy is at least partially offset by the care we put into telling our subjects’ stories, as well as our willingness to turn our own lives upside down to get our films made. We were about to enter one of those personally chaotic periods. We were, of course, ecstatic that the Metallica movie was still alive and starting to coalesce into a story worthy of something grander than a promotional vehicle, but we were also in an awkward position. This project was still officially a promotional piece, something to be used to hawk the album once it was released. As the weeks—and then months—went by without James returning, and it looked like there might not be an album, now or ever, the prospect of this even becoming a standard promotional project seemed increasingly remote; our footage was most likely headed for a vault somewhere at Elektra Records, never to be seen again. We could conceivably make a film about a band’s last days—a compelling subject for fans, perhaps, but one that would be hard to turn into something that many people would want to see: Metallica ending its career not with a bang but a whimper. Besides, who would pay to finish this film, and would Metallica ever let it be shown?
Courtesy of Bob Richman
The possibility of making a compelling verité film tends to be in inverse proportion to how well things are going in the lives of the documentary’s subjects—at least that’s the case for the types of films Bruce and I are drawn to (I’m sure Phil would have a field day with that one). For a long time, it was hard for us to admit to this formula, because it makes us sound like ambulance chasers. There is, however, an important corollary: As things get worse for the subjects, things get riskier for us, in terms of investing time and money If, after Bruce and I had spent several months with the Wards, Delbert had pleaded guilty in exchange for a sentencing deal, this would have been awful news for the Wards and Munnsville, and our film would have been anticlimactic. By the same token, if the prosecutors had dropped their charges, there would have been joy in Munnsville, but our film would have been, at best, the document of a poorly conceived investigation that ended before things got out of control—a different sort of anticlimax. Fortunately for us, the situation struck a perfect balance: neither side blinked, the case went to trial, and our film had a cliffhanger ending.
There reaches a point where things can get too dire for a film’s subjects, leaving you with no film whatsoever. The longer we waited for James to come back, the more our lives were in limbo. We submitted a budget to cover this extended period, reducing the frequency of shooting days and keeping our fees low as a gesture of good faith. Meanwhile, other potential film gigs piled up. Bruce and I agreed that we would only take on jobs that could be dropped immediately if James were to return. Obviously, there weren’t many gigs that qualified. The USA Network approached us about doing a TV movie about the actor Robert Blake, who was accused of murdering his wife. They envisioned something that combined scripted material with documentary footage. We would have a decent budget and access to Blake himself. It sounded like an interesting project, an opportunity to be really creative with the interplay between fiction and nonfiction. But to do it we’d have to commit to a tight shooting schedule that we couldn’t alter just because the singer from Metallica decided to bless us with his presence.
Other lucrative work was thrown my way I got sent several scripts for feature films, especially gory horror movies. My Blair Witch debacle had apparently not ruined me as much as I’d feared (or maybe it had, considering the dreck I was being sent), but I had no intention of being pigeonholed as a slasher director. Still, it was nice to know that I could get a second chance, and I wanted the industry to see that I was still on someone’s short list of directors, so it was with som
e reluctance that I didn’t pursue any of these offers. Even more difficult to turn down were the offers to direct commercials. Like many documentary filmmakers, commercial work is our bread and butter. Making commercials is extremely lucrative. Most commercial shoots last only a week but also require a few weeks of preparation. Once you commit to a commercial, it’s basically all you do for a month, so those were out. Each time we turned one down, and then saw the time we would’ve spent making it come and go with no sign of James, we would think of the forty grand that could’ve been ours.
As the months wore on, and my family’s bank account dipped lower and lower, I really started to wonder what the hell I was doing. If it weren’t for the support of my wife, I might have walked away entirely. Just as she reminded me, after Blair Witch 2, that Bruce and I had made some great films, she now assured me that there was a potentially great film here.
Bruce and I were also fortunate that we had each other to lean on and support our mutual decision to keep going, which affected more than just us and our families. For our commercial work, we’re represented by @radical.media, the world’s largest television commercial production company. My company, Third Eye Motion Picture Company, also has an “overhead deal” with @radical.media. I agree to use @radical.media’s infrastructure for my productions and put the company’s name on my films (which helps it continue to grow its presence in the film world), and @radical.media, in turn, gives me office space and production support. @radical.media could have complained about our lack of activity but was nothing but supportive.1
Metallica: This Monster Lives Page 10