Metallica: This Monster Lives

by Joe Berlinger

  After about six months of waiting for James, we decided he might be gone for good, so we began to take on some other projects. I worked on two HBO shows, Virtual Corpse (about a death-row inmate whose body, which he donated to science, was sliced into thousands of pieces, photographed, and put online as the first three-dimensional map of the human body), and Judgment Day (which followed the parole hearings of people convicted of violent crimes). Bruce worked on a film about Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company and made Hollywood High, a documentary about drug use in the movies, for the AMC network. I also began a more personal film. I read an article about the city of Vienna burying eight hundred preserved brains of mentally and physically handicapped children who were victims of Nazi medical experiments conducted by an Austrian doctor named Heinrich Gross. Vienna was one of about thirty “killing centers” that the Nazis created for their so-called “euthanasia program,” which was basically a means to eliminate the handicapped population. Gross was particularly brutal. He would allegedly torture handicapped children until they died, tabulating every aspect of their deaths. He would then remove their brains and use them to publish papers about brain malformations. After the war, he became one of Austria’s most prominent forensic psychiatrists; he testified in many criminal trials and bragged about having the world’s largest collection of brain specimens, which he continued to study throughout his career. The Austrian legal establishment, which relied on his expert testimony, didn’t seem to mind his horrible past and in fact protected him from prosecution. But after an Austrian journalist uncovered more evidence of Gross’s complicity with the Nazi euthanasia program, the Austrian government, deeply embarrassed and trying to come to grips with the resurgence of far-right neo-Nazi political parties, agreed in the spring of 2002 to lay the brains to rest.

  Courtesy of Bob Richman

  In my youth, I had been obsessed with the Holocaust. Recognizing an actual living link to these horrors, I decided to make a film about Gross called Gray Matter I dropped everything and personally financed a shoot to cover the burial of the brains. I spent several months juggling Gray Matter and Monster, which meant living a very schizophrenic existence. I had a minuscule budget for Gray Matter and was receiving very little cooperation from the Austrian government. (Unlike Germany Austria has generally been very slow to acknowledge its complicity with the Nazis’ atrocities.) Although Gross has attempted to clear his name by giving a few interviews over the years, my attempts to get him to tell his story on camera were futile. Meanwhile, back in the Bay Area, I was getting plenty of financial support and had the full cooperation of my subjects, but I couldn’t help wondering if the problems of rock stars were a bit trivial compared to the horrible suffering of Gross’s young victims. With James gone and the band slowly disintegrating, it took a lot of effort to remain excited about the Metallica movie. I was beginning to face the fact that we had no film without James coming back and the band getting its shit together, recording and releasing an album, and going on tour—all of which now seemed about as likely as Austria formally apologizing for giving the world Hitler.

  The money notwithstanding, I was beginning to wonder if we even had Metallica’s “full cooperation.” It wasn’t enough to just sit around waiting for James to walk through the door. We also had to be poised to capture any event that seemed significant to Metallica’s unfolding story. The band wasn’t in the studio, which meant that anything the guys did outside the studio was potentially of interest to us, but it was becoming more difficult to get them to return our calls right away As we see in Monster, Phil urged them during this period to keep thinking of themselves as a band, lest they become “coproducers of the process slipping off the planet.” That’s exactly what it felt like was happening to our film.

  Finally, after about ten unreturned phone calls, I left a message on Lars’s voice mail, saying that if we didn’t hear back from him, we would assume the film was dead, and we’d be moving on to other projects. A few hours later, he called me back. “Look, Lars,” I said, “during this period that James is away, it’s really important that you guys stay in touch with us so that we know what you’re going through during this difficult time. So please either return my calls or check in with me from time to time.”

  Courtesy of Bob Richman

  He was immediately defensive. “I’m living my life here, Berlinger. I’m trying to hold my band together. I don’t have to tell you every time I take a leak.”

  “Actually, Lars, yes, you do. You have to tell us about everything.”

  He sighed, mumbled something about seeing us soon, and hung up.

  Disrupting people’s lives is an occupational hazard that every documentarian accepts, but it’s still unpleasant. It’s a central paradox of verité filmmaking that capturing someone’s life as it’s lived means inserting yourself into that life in a most unnatural way. You have to convince people to remember you when it’s time to take a leak. Still, there was a silver lining to my latest run-in with Lars. Last time, this sort of argument hadn’t been worth more than a “Hey!” on his part, a knee-jerk reaction that preempted any farther discussion. Now, as defensive as he seemed, he was at least recognizing what it took to make the sort of film he insisted he wanted us to make. There was a band to save, a film to make, and leaks to be taken. It was a small bit of progress, but at that point I was willing to take what I could get.

  THE ROCK

  Bruce and I weren’t the only people in Metallica’s orbit affected by James’s indefinite absence. Bob Rock also found himself in professional limbo. During the break, he worked on the occasional producing project, but he was mostly forced to bide his time. Like us, he wanted to be able to rejoin the project whenever it might resume. “I took myself out of the game for two years,” he says. “That’s why I’m not so busy now, for the first time in twenty years. People offered me all kinds of records, which I had to turn down because I was doing Metallica.”

  Why, then, did he decide to stick around? “For me, music is all-consuming and mysterious and wonderful, so for me to work with a band as good as them, it’s almost like a life thing. You don’t always get to work with Led Zeppelin or U2 or Metallica. Those kinds of bands don’t come around five times in your life. Metallica are the real deal.”

  CHAPTER 9

  THE BOOTS THAT KICK YOU AROUND

  08/15/01

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

  PHIL: With our help, James can come through this experience and still be part of the team. This is the stage where he heals himself and we’re healing ourselves, and as a consequence, we have another message, one that must be [communicated] with greater passion. So you’ll still have the same kind of music. I see the same hard-driving, passionate, powerful music, with lyrics that have already begun changing. There’s a lyric [from one of the new songs] that emphasizes the resolution….

  KIRK: I know the lyric: “All those kids have hell to pay.” That was the beginning of it. I mean, that was the beginning of what you were just speaking about. He’s already beginning to channel that into the lyrics. That, in a nutshell, has everything to do with what he went through in his past….

  PHIL: Don’t we have a responsibility to remind James that he has a responsibility to take his new message to the world?

  BOB: I believe [James will] become … less of that emptiness that Lars saw.

  PHIL: He will do that. My postscript to everything that I’ve said is, we have a responsibility to help him [do] that. We have to flush out the doubts; don’t run from them, face them, look at them hard, see what they’re all about, convert them into fuel. Return to the home base of what Metallica started from. If Metallica had doubted [itself in the beginning], it never would have gotten off the ground. This is a chance to prove it at a new stage. The new direction is right here in front of us.

  “The new direction is right here in front of us.” How could Phil be so sure? He seemed so confident in the face of what the rest of the band saw as an
increasingly likely scenario: In order for James to get better, he would have to turn his back on Metallica. It wasn’t that Metallica was the source of James’s problems, just that the band was, by some calculations, a barometer of James’s mental and emotional well-being. Despite Phil’s confidence, the band feared that James’s health would increase in inverse proportion to the musical strength and interpersonal sturdiness of the band. The version of Metallica beloved by millions depended on an intricate combination of binge-and-purge emotional honesty and laugh-in-the-face-of-death cocksureness. From what Lars had seen of James in the immediate aftermath of his current emotional crisis, James wasn’t laughing anymore. During the first weeks of recording, when the band was still intact, Lars had predicted that Metallica’s unprecedented commitment to soul-searching would yield music that was darker and more “fucked up” than ever, that swinging the pendulum harder in one direction would, in effect, make it swing back harder in the other direction. The pendulum’s arc—and the music created within it—would be staggeringly large. Now he had his doubts.

  Phil, however, was sure. But in noting his unbridled optimism, it’s easy to miss something even more extraordinary. The world was wide open to “us,” Phil said. Not “you”—“us.” This inclusive language helped Phil get the point across that therapy was a collaborative effort between therapist and patient. But there’s more going on with that statement: it seemed to us that Phil was admitting that he does indeed consider himself to be “one of them.” Phil, to his credit, was not unaware that the role he had been hired to play was subtly mutating as Metallica fell deeper into a crisis situation. He was becoming less of a mediator and more of a participant.

  Phil was letting himself feel the band’s pain. And it was pain—however difficult it may be for some people to feel sympathy for multimillionaire rock stars forced to take a potentially indefinite vacation, I think Monster connects with audiences precisely because the film shows that these sorts of struggle are universal. Wealth and fame are no protection from the dread that comes from life forcing you to question how you live it. “Having you guys sit here and listen to me really helps,” Lars said one day during a room 627 chat. “One thing I’ve realized in the last couple of weeks is that I feel powerless. If there’s one thing I’d like to walk away with today, it’s being able to feel less powerless. Or, should I say, more powerful.

  “That’s good, I like that,” Phil said, and then unexpectedly turned his gaze inward. “My risk is being able to just say the things that I believe very strongly, that are very intimate to me, in front of the cameras. And I appreciate the opportunity to do that. I mean, I know my role as a facilitator, and I know I overstep that boundary when I say things like this, but I believe that James is still passionate. What you describe as vacuous, empty, soulless, spiritless, I think—I know—that’s temporary. And if healing is taking place—and I truly believe it is—then music will naturally become a vehicle for his newer message.”

  Note Phil’s reference to the film crew. It’s interesting the way he describes the camera as almost a gatekeeper. He seems to suggest that if it weren’t for the camera, he wouldn’t have to justify the jettisoning of his objectivity. Consistent with his philosophy that a camera used in therapy can keep people “honest,” Phil was suggesting that we were bearing witness to his increasing closeness to his patients. Which I thought was interesting, because of the flack Bruce and I have gotten over the years because of our tendency to forge relationships with our subjects. For many in the documentary community, the fact that we socialized so much with the Ward brothers before we turned on our cameras—and continued to do so once the cameras were on—was as unorthodox as Phil getting close to his patients. Some therapists would find Phil welcoming of our cameras to be as problematic as his blurring of the lines between therapist and patient. From a traditional therapy standpoint, the presence of a camera—which implies the presence of someone behind it—disrupts the sanctity of the therapist-patient relationship. From a traditional documentary standpoint, a camera without someone behind it, someone who is instead mingling with the people in front of the camera, disrupts the “honest” world that a documentary is supposed to capture.

  I’m not qualified to judge the ethics or efficacy of Phil’s methods, but his success with the band speaks for itself. I could also identify with some of what he was going through. I completely reject the idea that our hanging out with subjects destroys the objectivity of our films, in part because I don’t recognize the idea of pure cinematic objectivity in the first place. Bruce and I take our journalistic responsibilities very seriously—we never stage events or coach our subjects on what to say—but we also feel it’s important to acknowledge our subjectivity: to our subjects, by not pretending that we’re not affecting their lives; and to our audience, by putting ourselves in our films at points when we naturally become part of the story. To accomplish both these objectives, we need to come out from behind our omniscient cameras; we can’t pretend that we, ourselves, are omniscient. Like Phil, we’re just trying to keep things honest. It just so happens that we and Phil go about this in a way that some in our respective professions may think compromises the authenticity of what we do.

  In any case, Phil doesn’t need me justifying his methods. He freely admits that he got closer to the Metallica guys than any of his previous clients. He says that this was partly a conscious move on his part. He made a decision, way back when he started work on the day that Jason announced his departure, to personalize these sessions as a way of getting Metallica to trust him. “Nobody in my profession—or very few—would have this kind of opportunity to impact the process and participate on that sort of deep and ongoing level,” Phil said a few months before Monster opened in theaters. “I never felt like I was in the band. I never wanted to be in the band. But what I did want was to be part of the process. I didn’t feel like [Metallica] would relate to someone who was remote. So if I had something on my mind, I would talk about it. I never wanted to disguise my humanness, and part of my humanness is being deeply attached to them. I don’t apologize for that.” Phil adds that he thinks some of the discomfort at this process felt by “certain individuals” (James, most likely though he won’t say) had to do with their “uncomfortableness with intimacy.”

  Whether or not it was a good idea for him to get so close, I think it’s indisputable that Phil saved Metallica. Having been there, I just can’t imagine them holding it together without him. He didn’t work with James when James was in rehab, so Phil was as cut off from him as they were, but he found a way to keep Lars, Kirk, and Bob from drifting away from James completely, when James was showing no signs of coming back himself. Phil really was the anchor.

  We struggled in the editing room to figure out how to portray this period. The band was experiencing a lot of powerful emotions, but it was hard to communicate them onscreen. That’s why, even though we usually like to avoid using talking-head interviews because they’re not very “cinematic,” we show Kirk and Lars talking about the situation at their homes. We finally decided in the editing room to compress this period in the film much more than the actual amount of time would suggest—not just because the emotions of this period were difficult to capture on film, but also because there was just too much great material from the time before James left and from when he came back. I think the movie still gives you a good idea of how glum things were, but at least one of the people in Monster disagrees somewhat. Bob Rock thinks audiences don’t realize the extent to which Metallica as we know it ceased to exist. “You come away thinking the band was fragmented, but there really was no band,” Bob said after he saw the film. “I think people don’t realize that in the middle it was over. It was absolutely over.”

  “This is the stage where he heals himself and we’re healing ourselves.” It’s clear that Phil was doing more than just giving a pep talk to the troops. He was also urging them to reassess their relationships with each other, and especially their individual relationships wi
th James. Phil’s thinking seemed to be that in order for Metallica to be reborn, everyone would have to experience some of what James was going through: rethinking things about themselves that they took for granted. In putting their relationships with one another under the microscope, a lot of stuff was being dredged up. As some of the band’s immediate anxiety about James subsided a bit, resentment toward him began to set in. Some of the resentment was directed at the immediate situation, the limbo caused by James’s departure. Kirk professed to have infinite patience, seeing the break as an opportunity to work on his surfing skills, but Bob and Lars disliked the inactivity almost immediately. Phil did his best to direct these hurt feelings in a positive direction.

  “As long as I can remember, I have never wanted to work more than these days right now,” Lars said a few weeks into the James-less era. “Coming back to San Francisco and not having anything to do—it’s been a strange week. I’ve gotten really drunk, twice, and just walked around and wondered what to do with myself.” Bob concurred. Even Kirk responded by saying that he really felt “there was work to be done.”

  Phil’s reply was a careful display of tact. “I think it might make a difference to James’s mentality if he knows that each of us, as individuals, is working on our shit. If he knows that the way you’re handling it is—and I’m just using this as an example—that you’re gonna get drunk, or you’re gonna get depressed, or you’re gonna go surfing, he’s less likely to be interested in returning to the group than if he sees that we are using the experiences he has provided to grow … If he feels he’s become healthier and his bandmates haven’t, then in his mind it becomes, ‘Why should I go back into a situation that’s risky?’ If the situation is just deteriorating—and I’m not suggesting that’s what’s happening, all right?—then he’s less likely to—”