CHAPTER 15
MADLY IN ANGER
Intercutting “Fan Day” (pictured) with the “Fuck” meeting helped create a third meaning: Metallica showing solidarity in public while crumbling in private. (Courtesy of Niclas Swanlund)
05/20/02
Int. Kitchen, HQ Recording Studio, San Rafael, CA - Day
PHIL: Try this simple way of looking at things: We don’t have any intensity about people we don’t give a shit about. There is so much intensity in here now, it fills up every corner of the room. I don’t have that same intensity about the grocer. I don’t have [to worry about] him rejecting me if he’s pissed off at me because I don’t like his fruit or something, you know? The relationships that are the most intense are the ones where we have the most to lose. And there’s a huge opportunity here, you guys. If you broke up, you would carry with you all this unresolved stuff. This is a special, unique relationship that deserves a higher standard. The reason why it’s so painful is because you guys haven’t had the courage to get to the treasure that’s there. You’ve been trying really hard to bury it. It’s almost like you do everything you can to not see the love. Every time you try to avoid it, the pain gets worse. The degree of pain you feel is the degree of love that’s not being enjoyed. I stand on that, on the record.
JAMES: Yeah, it’s easier for me to care about the grocer.
James was back, and our film was still happening, but there was still quite a bit of turmoil in both the Metallica and filmmaker camps. After limiting our shoots to once every four to six weeks for the past year, we threw ourselves back into filming, rolling our cameras every other week—more often, if circumstances dictated. Unfortunately, they rarely did. When I heard about James’s return, I had thought our leap of faith in sticking with this project had paid off, but the future of this film—still officially a promotional vehicle—remained in doubt. There just wasn’t much going on.
We were all elated to have James up and running, but after a week or so of sunny vibes between James and the rest of Metallica, the honeymoon was clearly over. James’s guitar playing on his first day back was, as Bob Rock puts it in Monster, “the best sound I’ve ever heard in my life,” but the band as a whole wasn’t making much noise. Instead of hitting the ground running by picking up where they’d left off with the Presidio songs, they began their new chapter by working on some Ramones covers for a tribute album that Rob Zombie was putting together. The mood in the studio was icy. There was a lot of seething resentment toward James that had not yet found an outlet. It looked to me like Lars and James were having trouble even being in the same room together. If Phil wasn’t around as a buffer, they barely spoke.
The therapy sessions were just as listless. Despite the new homey locale, the move from the Ritz-Carlton to HQ seemed to increase the tension. Metallica had sunk a lot of money into HQ, and each session was a reminder that their investment wasn’t paying any dividends in new music. For the first time, I wondered if too much of Phil was a bad thing for these guys. With the luxury of having as much therapy as they wanted, they were spared the need to hunker down and really work things out. Bruce and I like to think that our films transcend their subject matter in order to shatter stereotypes, but unless the Metallica guys stopped bickering and started getting healthy, we feared that this Metallica project might merely confirm stereotypes of spoiled rock stars.
That is, if there was even a band when we were through. All this inertia did not bode well for Metallica’s future: After weathering so much turmoil, it seemed like Metallica was withering away. Never mind whether they’d finish the album—it seemed to me like they might be finished as a band. Nowhere was this dissolution more visible than in the demeanor of James Hetfield. Everything about him seemed different. He carried himself like he was beaten down, with all the life sucked out of him, and he adopted an oddly bookish air. Most of the rock-and-roll facial hair was gone, and he’d taken to wearing thick-rimmed glasses. Who would have guessed that James Fucking Hetfield would make himself look like a math teacher?
As the band chose fading away over burning out, the real drama was happening on the other side of the camera. I said earlier that I feel like the filmmaking gods consistently smile upon Bruce and me by providing us with great situations to film. These deities also extract a heavy toll. Each of our films has had its own health issues. Making verité films requires a considerable physical commitment. You need to be prepared to stand around for long periods under less-than-ideal conditions, dragging your equipment and yourself around in search of a story that may not reveal itself for hours or days or weeks. Over the years, Bruce and I had fully immersed ourselves in whatever subject matter we happened to be filming. We once worked on a piece about homeless people in New York for a now-defunct ABC newsmagazine show called Turning Point. One day I interviewed someone who, in the course of the interview, mentioned that he was HIV-positive and had tuberculosis. At the precise moment he informed me of his condition, a piece of spittle flew out of his mouth. Time slowed as I watched it travel through the air and land right on my lips. I willed myself to maintain composure for the sake of the interview, but inside I was freaking out. I’m germaphobic even under the best conditions, so I was convinced I’d just condemned myself to death.
Bruce’s health problems have actually been quite serious. He was diagnosed with diabetes while we were editing Brother’s Keeper. I’ve always felt a little guilty about that, because I suspect that the process of making the film may have exacerbated the onset of the disease. During the time we spent in upstate New York, we ate a lot of greasy food and both gained weight. With Paradise Lost, it was the postproduction process that nearly did us in. We ran ourselves ragged trying to complete the film in time to be shown at the Sundance Film Festival. On a rain-soaked gloomy New York day, Bruce went to pick up the film from the negative cutter. He had to take it across town to do a film-to-tape transfer, but the rain made getting a cab impossible, so he wrapped the film canisters in garbage bags and trudged to the subway. Ten days later, two days before we were supposed to leave for Sundance, Bruce began feeling extremely congested and also experienced searing back pains. He went to the doctor, who diagnosed Bruce with pneumonia, prescribed antibiotics, and suggested he delay leaving for a couple of days. I traveled to Utah for the festival without him. Over the next few days, Bruce’s pain became unbearable and he checked himself into a hospital. He was losing weight and sweating profusely. Bruce underwent a painful procedure in which a hole was drilled through his back to remove a buildup of pus, but he continued to get worse. The doctors were stumped, even suspecting that Bruce might have tuberculosis or HIV. Those tests came back negative, but by this point Bruce was in such bad shape that they hooked him up to an IV to receive antibiotics intravenously. His condition finally stabilized, and after eleven days, the doctors told Bruce he could recover at home, just in time for him to miss the entire festival. The best diagnosis they came up with was that Bruce had picked up an airborne virus from someone coughing in the subway on that rainy day (which is why Bruce, to this day, refuses to take the subway). The day before he left the hospital, I called to tell him Paradise Lost hadn’t won any Sundance awards. Bruce spent the next two weeks at home hooked up to a portable IV but he emerged from his ordeal fully recovered.
Bruce developed a more mysterious ailment during the filming of Monster. Around the time of James’s return, he began to feel a pain in his leg that erupted when his leg touched anything else. Even drawing bed sheets over it was an excruciating experience. Again, doctors were mystified. Although they suspected a diabetes-related condition, tests were inconclusive. I was convinced that Bruce was experiencing circulatory problems common to diabetics and would eventually be forced to have his leg amputated. I was concerned that he was eating too much sugar and generally not taking care of himself. His doctor prescribed Percocet for the pain, and I was certain he was too dependent on it. I talked about Bruce’s condition with his wife, Florence; my wife; and Bob Richma
n. We all agreed he should stop coming to shoots until he felt better and should perhaps try to cut back on the painkillers.
Bruce and I typically do all our shoots together. On Monster, the unusually large number of shoot days (180) meant that we were each scheduled to do about twenty shoots on our own. Bruce absolutely refused to miss any of the shoots, no matter how bad the pain became. I wanted to cover Bruce’s shoots, but his absolute commitment was complicated by some of my own work commitments. Just before James’s return, before we knew he was coming back, I got fed up with turning down so much work and took on an HBO project about the parole system. The idea was to follow inmates who were up for parole from various prisons around the country and document the result of their parole hearings. The project dragged on for several months longer than I thought it would, which meant I was often shuttling between Monster and the HBO film.
Bruce went to all his shoots but tried to stay off his feet as much as possible. That’s why he was sitting on the couch on a day when I was in L.A. and things with Metallica got a lot more interesting. It was the day the simmering resentment boiled over.
I can honestly say without exaggeration that every shoot we did for Monster yielded at least one moment that we couldn’t believe we were lucky enough to get. The problem with turning the 1,600 hours of footage into a film had nothing to do with finding diamonds in the rough; the challenge was finding a sack big enough to carry all of them. More to the point, the problem was figuring out how to string hundreds of disparate moments together, since there was no obvious structural device, such as a murder trial, on which to build the film. Some shoots yielded an inordinate number of diamonds, and these presented a particularly vexing challenge. A good example was the scene that many people who see Monster reflexively call the “fuck” scene, because of the amount of times Lars utters that particular epithet.
One condition of James’s recovery after rehab was that he work only four hours a day. Requiring that all recording take place between noon and four was bound to be the proverbial camel’s-back-breaking straw, the thing that would make all the seething resentment explode out in the open. It would have been one thing if James had simply said that he wasn’t available before noon or after four, or even that this period should be the only time when anyone laid down any musical tracks. Although you can see, in Monster, Lars’s skeptical reaction when James tries to explain how this new rule might actually make the band more productive, the edict might have been allowed to stand—after all, everyone wanted James’s transition back into Metallica to go as smoothly as possible. No, the real problem was that James wanted anything related to the making of the new Metallica album to cease when he wasn’t around. Clearly, this was not going to fly.
The debate over the conflict boiled down to an issue of control. James felt that any progress made on the album in his absence meant that decisions were being made without his input. Even the act of listening to rough mixes, if done without James there, was a form of exclusion. To the others, especially Lars, James’s draconian rule felt like his way of exerting inordinate control over the process. So the stage was set for a battle over who got to control the making of Metallica’s new album. After a few days of snide remarks and pointed asides, the argument came to a head during a therapy session. This is what you see in Monster:
JAMES: I felt like it was an agreement. We were gonna work from twelve to four, and then we would not work.
BOB: If Lars and I sit and listen to something, or go through the Presidio stuff, it’s not because we want to do something behind your back. It’s for you. And basically what I heard is, no, I can’t do that.
LARS (under his breath) What the fuck is that?
JAMES: In my mind it gets lopsided. The more it goes in a different direction, the harder it is to get that back.
PRIL: What is it you have to get back?
JAMES: Some control, some sense of involvement in the band.
LARS: When I was running this morning, and thinking about seeing you today, I was thinking how the word “fuck” comes up so much. It’s really true.
JAMES: Is that in anger?
LARS: Fuck … fuck … I just think you’re so fucking self-absorbed, and what makes it worse is that you always talk about … you always talk about me, and you use the words “control” and “manipulation” a lot. I think you control on purpose and I think you control inadvertently. I think you control by the rules you always set. I think you control by how you always judge people. I think you control by your absence. You control all this even when you’re not here. I don’t understand who you are. I don’t understand the program. I don’t understand all this stuff. I realize now that I barely knew you before. All these rules and all this shit-man, this is a fucking rock-n-roll band, I don’t want fucking rules. I understand that you need to leave at four. I respect it. But don’t tell me I can’t sit and listen to something with Bob at 4:15 if I want to-what the fuck is that? I don’t want to end up like Jason, okay? I don’t want to be pushed away. I don’t want it to happen twice. So let’s do it, and let’s fucking do it full-on, or let’s not do it at all. Fuck … See? Fuck … Fuck … (He walks over and gets in James’s face) FUCK!
At this point, the film cuts away to a Metallica fan-appreciation day. We see Metallica playing “Seek & Destroy” Then we cut back to the therapy session:
JAMES: We’re not anywhere near getting any issues resolved.
PHIL: Well, let’s get ’em. That’s what we’re here to do.
JAMES: I don’t know, I guess the playing part, being in the room, and mainly being in the room with Lars, playing music together. I guess I had higher expectations, and— I don’t know, maybe I’m disappointed in myself, maybe … I don’t know …
PHIL: Wanna talk about that? What’s that mean?
JAMES (to Lars): I’m not enjoying being in the room with you, playing.
The film cuts back to the fan-appreciation concert …
LARS (to James): If you’re not having fun, let me let it be known to you that I’m certainly not having a lot of fun, either. But I’m not interested in playing music with you if you’re not happy in there. I just don’t want to become a fuckin’ parody. Okay, so if you’re not happy playing music with me … (Lars makes a “get the fuck out” gesture)
Once more, we see Metallica playing “Seek & Destroy.”
LARS: Is there enough that connects us to hold on for a way through this? I don’t know. There are moments when I really doubt it.
JAMES: I’m glad you said that. ‘Cause I really, deep down, feel sometimes that it’s just … that there’s some empty … just an ugly feeling inside. I don’t know … How much work are we gonna put into this?
Seeing this series of exchanges on paper doesn’t do justice to all the nuances of human interaction that a verité film can communicate. You wouldn’t know, for example, that Lars, after saying the line “I’m not having any fun,” had a fatalistic smile on his face while he made the “get the fuck out” gesture with his thumb. But even the “fuck” scene as it appears on the screen doesn’t give the viewer the events as they happened chronologically. For one thing, it’s a couple minutes of screen time culled from a session that was several hours long. It barely scratches the surface. It’s difficult for any scene that involves a lot of talking to last more than a few minutes without the audience losing interest. As we did in other parts of the film, I recommended using intercutting here as a way to collapse a large amount of material. We could create some dynamic pacing by cherry-picking the best moments of a situation without having to present them as a single coherent scene. Alternating between the session and the fan-appreciation concert also serves a thematic purpose. We see them arguing, expressing the honest state of Metallica, and then we see them putting on a brave face for the public. The fan day actually happened a few months after the “fuck” session. We juxtaposed the two because it was a way to portray what we saw as the “emotional truth” of what was going on with Metallica, even if it
wasn’t chronologically accurate. I thought it was important to show Metallica struggling with the divide between their private and public personas, and this juxtaposition fit the bill.
The manipulation of “reality” in this sequence doesn’t stop there. We edited the exchanges between Lars, James, and Phil for clarity and conciseness. We also changed the order of what was said. Lars’s “fuck” monologue actually happened toward the end of the session. The more calm lines, the ones intercut with “Seek & Destroy,” were actually spoken much earlier in the session. Again, this reordering made sense to us thematically and felt emotionally truthful. The first part is the raw, guttural articulation of the emotions running through Metallica. The second part focused on a more precise problem: Metallica trying to figure out how to hold it together as public rock stars while privately their relationships with each other are crumbling.
The “fuck” scene is a perfect example of our approach to verité filmmaking, which emphasizes a creative and nuanced interpretation of real life as opposed to a literal approach that emphasizes chronological accuracy. We find that a seemingly “straightforward” presentation of facts often has the paradoxical effect of seeming less real to viewers, who can’t watch all the dailies to find out the complete context of what they’re viewing. In other words, strict adherence to chronology often obscures more than it reveals. Filmmakers need to make order out of chaos, to see the connections and present them to the audience. Bruce and I don’t pretend the version of reality in our films is anything other than the emotional journey we experienced while covering the story. We’re storytellers as much as journalists. Any filmmaker who had spent as much time with Metallica as we had might have told a different story, one no more or less correct than ours.
Metallica: This Monster Lives Page 19