Metallica: This Monster Lives

by Joe Berlinger

  CHAPTER 11

  VISIBLE KID

  09/25/01

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

  LARS: You want to talk about fears, I’ll talk to you about fears. My fear is not the first day that we sit here [with James] and walk through all the shit that has been building up, okay? I’m not worried about that. My fear is the first day that we’re in [the studio]. My fear is, what will the mutual respect level in that room be? What will be the creative thing happening at that time?

  KIRK: The chemistry.

  LARS: How will we feel about the dynamic and the chemistry and the respect? I know Bob really well, and I’m worried about how James and Bob are going to get along … I’m really shit-scared—talk about fear. (to Bob) I know this has hurt you, and I’m scared of that. I want to repair that—do you know what I mean? And I—maybe it will be okay, but those are my fears.

  PHIL: Thank you. Thank you for giving us your fears.

  BOB: Yeah.

  LARS: I’m worried about mine and James’s relationship.

  Some Kind of Monster is a film about a rock-and-roll band struggling with the interpersonal dynamics of a collaborative creative process, but it touches on something much broader and more universal. The dramatic tension revolves around whether Metallica can make a truly collaborative album, for the first time in their career, without falling apart. In a sense, the fact that these guys are world-famous musicians is incidental. The struggle to connect with the people around you, of making yourself vulnerable while maintaining a degree of personal autonomy, is something that anyone can identify with. Although I think Monster works because it portrays this struggle so dramatically, there are aspects of the struggle that aren’t so plainly visible.

  One of the subtexts of the films Bruce and I have made has been our relationship with our subjects. Just as Monster is about the guys in Metallica opening up to each other, it’s also about their struggle to open themselves up to the world, to show us the “real” Metallica behind the harsh metal facade. As the guys with the cameras, Bruce and I were emissaries from the world outside of Metallica’s protective cocoon, so Monster is also about Metallica learning to trust us. The struggle plays itself out most clearly with James, but it’s also visible, albeit less obviously, with Lars. If James provided Monster with its primary subject, Lars provided the subtext. Lars was always the band member most involved in the film, the person I interacted with the most. Lars was therefore the one who really dramatized our complicated relationship with the band and, by extension, the band’s evolving relationship with the world.

  Our relationship with Metallica—how we affected them, and they us—could certainly have played a more prominent role in the film. But although Bruce and I have been a presence in all our films, we’ve only done so when a situation organically arises that puts us in contact with our subject, such as when Mark Byers, the stepfather of a murder victim, handed us a bloody knife in Paradise Lost. Unlike great documentary filmmakers like Nick Broomfield, who has managed to make very engaging music-related documentaries about powerful figures like Tupac and Courtney Love; and Michael Moore, who hammers home the fact that his take on Columbine or 9/11 is his take, we’re not interested in drawing too much attention to ourselves. We want the audience to be aware of us and our connections to our subjects, but we don’t want to take the next step and actually become subjects.

  Our relationships with the members of Metallica—especially Lars—figured very prominently in the way Monster turned out, but mostly in ways too subtle to glean from just watching the movie. Lars’s off-camera attitude toward this film changed dramatically over the course of its creation. James learned to accept the camera, and I think that acceptance was part of his larger growth process. Lars, on the other hand, learned to love and respect the filmmaking process, setting aside issues of ego and vanity to help make Monster as good as it could be. He always believed in the film. But his ability to speak of it dispassionately, to critique it as a work of art on its own terms, became stronger as he began to understand what kind of film we were making. Lars’s gruff “Hey!” during the second week of production was all about his initial resistance to the process. His “take a leak” comment a few months later revealed that he was beginning to understand the steps necessary to make that kind of film. He also began to think about the events we filmed in terms of what would make a great movie—even if that meant including material that portrayed him in unflattering light.

  In fact, there were times when Lars felt strongly that we were pulling our punches. For instance, he thought we soft-pedaled the scenes of increasing tension in the studio in the weeks before James took off. When he saw a rough cut of the film in the fall of 2003, he had real issues with my decision to intercut scenes to compress some of the fights, and he wasn’t very keen on the way we emphasized fleeting glances and other nonverbal cues, rather than just a nonstop barrage of verbal invective. In one of the first semicomplete versions of Monster that we screened for Metallica and Metallica’s managers, we included a larger chunk of the argument between James and Lars that ends with James slamming the door and walking out of our lives. There was a point early in the argument when the subject of Phil came up. James said something to the effect that he wasn’t into the therapy and thought it was taking up too much time. Lars replied that he was really looking forward to the next session because he had some issues he wanted to raise with Phil. James told Lars he was being selfish.

  Lars was clearly stung. “Well, I just think that, out of respect for Phil, to cancel it right now wouldn’t be fair.”

  “That’s crap,” James replied, his voice rising. “He would completely understand.” There was a long uncomfortable pause. “If we don’t start earlier and end earlier, I’m not going to be in a good mood for the rest of this shit.”

  This particular cut of the film was more than three hours long, which meant we had to make quite a few deletions. We decided that the film’s pacing worked best if the first act—up to the time James returns—moved quickly, so we knew we needed to cut something from that section. The actual fight that culminated with James storming out lasted for about an hour, and there were a lot of ups and downs during that hour. A few people for whom we’d screened the film had remarked that the first part of the film had too much “whining.” I was sensitive to this criticism because I realized how easy it would be for audiences to get the false impression that what they were watching were merely the idle complaints of rich, spoiled rock stars. I knew we had to find a way to communicate the band’s steady dissolution in a way that kept them sympathetic as characters. So we excised the “selfish” exchange and picked up the scene with James’s “start earlier” line.

  A month after he saw a rough cut of the film, Lars called to ask us to send a DVD of the most recent version of the film to his dad’s house in Seattle, where Lars planned to screen it for some friends and family over Thanksgiving. In the weeks since he’d viewed the rough cut, I had sent him a few different versions, none of which contained the “selfish” part, but I had never bothered to point out that particular change (or any other editing changes, for that matter). Over the holiday weekend, I got a call from a testy and slightly drunk Lars. “Hey, what happened to the part where James calls me ‘selfish’ for wanting to see Phil that week? Are you trying to fuck me by doing that without telling me?” He sounded like he was joking but also not joking.

  Courtesy of Bob Richman

  Lars said he thought that section of the scene served a very important thematic purpose, by underlining the growing rift between James and Lars and establishing their sharply diverging attitudes toward therapy. He was right—it did. But I explained to him that the scene as it was currently constructed did serve that purpose, albeit in a more subtle way, and it was this nuanced approach that would keep the audience from being turned off. “A little whining goes a long way,” I said. We talked for an hour about this one deletion. As a documentary filmmaker who, as a rule,
doesn’t show unfinished films to his subjects (but was making an exception in this case because the subjects were footing the bill), the strangeness of the exchange wasn’t lost on me: a subject arguing for the inclusion of a scene that we both agreed made him look worse. Lars had clearly been thinking about the film a lot—he’d certainly done his homework, and his arguments were persuasive—but I told him I strongly believed that this part of the exchange should go.

  Lars said he saw my point, but he was a little annoyed that I had taken it out after the band signed off on the current version of the film. I pointed out that we’d actually cut the scene a few versions ago, but he didn’t believe me. Saying he’d call me back, he hung up the phone and called his wife, Skylar, at home in San Francisco. He asked her to pull out recent versions of the film to see if that part of the scene was there. He called me back an hour later. “Okay, you were right,” he said, laughing. “But I still think you took it out to fuck me!”

  That was one of many similar conversations I had with Lars about the finer points of Some Kind of Monster. These talks were bonding experiences. There were many late nights when my phone would ring, often waking me up, and Lars would be on the other end wanting to talk about an editing decision. Sometimes he convinced me to make a change, while other times I held my ground—but he never once forced us to implement any of his suggestions. Considering that network executives have often asked Bruce and me to make changes we don’t agree with, it’s amazing that Metallica never made any specific demands on us, since the band was paying for the film. Monster is almost wholly our vision, but Lars deserves credit for giving us a very useful perspective—and not once forcing us to abide by it. Lars told me once that he was always a little surprised—and grateful—that I would take his suggestions seriously, but I was always happy to do so. In fact, given Lars’s position as one of the people paying for the film, I was surprised that he would think I’d consider not listening to his suggestions. Of all the Metallica guys, he was the one I could identify with the most. We’re both overachievers, obsessive about details in ways that annoy our collaborators, and the guiding business force behind our respective ventures; we’ve both gone through periods of being vilified by the press—Lars because of his anti-Napster crusade, and me with the Blair Witch 2 backlash. I wasn’t always thrilled to get woken up in the middle of the night, but I always understood why Lars didn’t want to wait until morning.

  If Lars had inundated us with changes designed to make him look better, his obsessive interest in the filmmaking process would have been predictable (not to mention a nuisance). But since his proposals were rarely personally flattering and never mandatory, it’s worth asking what motivated his interest. During a difficult period when he had so many other Metallica-related things to worry about, including the possible demise of his band, why would he devote so much energy to making sure that a document of this period communicated just how difficult this period was?

  I think part of the answer is that Lars simply cared about making a great film. (If Lars weren’t a heavy-metal drummer, my guess is he’d be a movie producer.) A deeper reason is that he came to see Monster as not just one of the many ancillary projects that spin off from Metallica—part of the apparatus surrounding a multimillion-selling rock band—but rather a product of Metallica. As such, it was subject to the same rigorous self-examination that caused him to take months to edit his drum parts. Which raises another question: Where does this impulse for self-examination come from? Part of the answer to that question entered our lives a few months into the James-less period, in the form of a man who looked like a cross between Gandalf and a lost member of ZZ Top. He was Torben Ulrich, Lars’s father.

  The extraordinary scenes with the two Ulrichs almost didn’t happen in front of our cameras. A few days after Lars and I had our “take a leak” argument, he called us in New York to say that his father was coming to the Bay Area to look at some Marin County land Lars had recently purchased, on which he planned to build his dream home. Maybe we’d be interested in tagging along, Lars said. Frankly, we thought it sounded too tangential to make it into the film, but Lars was so clearly making an effort to be more accommodating to the filmmaking process that Bruce and I decided we couldn’t turn him down. We were both in New York trying to deal with the hundreds of hours of footage we’d shot so far, so we flipped a coin to see who would take one for the team and head back west to film the Ulrich men. I won. Bruce got on a plane.

  It’s a good thing one of us did. At the time, all we knew about Torben was that he had been some sort of tennis pro in Denmark. We had no idea he was such a character, or that Lars considered him such a confidant and valued his opinion of Metallica’s music.

  Bruce and cameraman Wolfgang Held met Lars and Torben at a gas station in the Marin County town of Tiburon. They all got in Lars’s car and drove up to one of the highest spots in Marin, far from any other houses. They got out of the car and split into two groups. Wolfgang stayed near the car with Phil and Torben, while Bruce followed Lars down a trail, filming him with the PD-150. Bruce was wearing headphones that allowed him to monitor the conversation that Wolfgang was filming between Phil and Torben. Hearing that the talk had turned to Torben’s relationship with his son, Bruce wisely steered Lars back to rejoin the others.

  When they got back to the car, Bruce suggested that Torben and Lars continue to talk about their relationship. Bruce was able to tell instantly that this was a conversation that the father and son had never really had, about things that had always remained unspoken. Bruce picked up on Lars’s nervousness and also on the intense love he had for his dad. Phil clearly latched onto the moment as well. When I first looked at the dailies of this scene, I was a little surprised by how aggressive Phil was being toward Lars, urging him to talk about his fears of pleasing his father. Standing in the hot sun on a mountaintop with your dad, talking about feelings in a language different from the one you heard at home as a kid, egged on by a therapist while a video camera hovers nearby—therapy doesn’t get much weirder than that.

  This was one of those times during the filming of Monster when I felt a little uncomfortable with Phil’s approach—not only because it seemed a bit too aggressive, but also because Phil was subtly adopting the role of “director” by attempting to create a moment that wasn’t evolving naturally I was ultimately grateful that he engineered such a powerful scene, but it could have been merely an awkward exchange that would have been of no use to the film. He certainly wasn’t grandstanding, but I did think he was placing a little too much faith in the cathartic nature of our cameras, as well as in his belief that they served to keep his clients “honest” and less likely to shy away from difficult subjects. Phil’s behavior in this scene is a good example of how his presence could be a mixed blessing, but in this case Phil’s methods resulted in one of Monster’s best scenes, and his therapeutic instincts paid off in one of my favorite lines from the film. As Torben looks down at the ground and strikes some yoga poses, Lars struggles to articulate why it’s hard for him to discuss his insecurities with his dad present. Cocking his head in Torben’s direction, he says, “Some of the fear of status quo comes a little bit from this direction over here.” Torben keeps staring at the ground.1

  It’s a line that reveals a lot about Lars’s character, and also reveals how different he is from James. Whereas James’s character and approach to music seems to be fueled by the absence of family—the attendant anger and resentment but also the guarded self-protective instinct—Lars is fueled in part by a desire to please his father, to measure up in his eyes. One of the many ways Monster humanizes the guys in Metallica is by showing how Lars, despite his massive success, pointedly seeks his father’s approval. Because Monster is a film about the son’s band rather than the father’s legacy, you don’t really get a sense of just how intimidating a figure the father has probably always been to the son. Torben was, first of all, a professional tennis player from the ’40s through the ’90s, competing at Wimbledon s
everal times. In 1976, he was the number-one ranked player on the seniors circuit. He has worked as a cultural journalist for Danish newspapers, made and acted in several films, and had his paintings exhibited in galleries. He was also a musician with strong ties to the jazz world. He played clarinet, flute, and saxophone in jazz bands; jazz luminaries would often crash at the Ulrich house while on tour. Lars told me that he can remember being eight years old and getting up in the morning to make himself breakfast because his parents were still sleeping after a night hanging out with jazz luminaries. Dexter Gordon, who often crashed on the Ulrich’s couch, is Lars’s godfather.

  The more you learn about Lars’s background, the more bizarre it seems that he became the world’s fiercest metal drummer and that he joined forces with a Southern California working-class guy like James Hetfield. If Monster had taken a different form, the film might have spent more time on Lars’s formative years. Bruce and I actually traveled to Copenhagen and filmed a guided tour by Lars. It was immediately clear that even in a socially progressive country like Denmark, the Ulrichs were part of the upper strata of society. Lars stood in front of his boyhood home (which is now a fertility clinic) and talked about how his European sensibilities contributed to Metallica’s unique musical alchemy. He even showed us the exclusive country club where he took private lessons, being groomed to follow in his dad’s footsteps. “Because of my last name, I was king shit around here,” he recalled. “Then I moved to L.A. and I was king dogshit.”