Metallica: This Monster Lives

by Joe Berlinger

  “It’s great to see you so excited about somebody,” Phil said. “It seems like, musically, he’s moving you to another level.”

  “I was really surprised by how good it sounded—not just him, but the band,” Lars said. “No disrespect to his predecessors, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard Metallica sound that good offstage, without being doctored or anything. Forget about guitar sounds or whatever—just in terms of performance.”

  “He knows that,” Phil said. “To use his word, he knows this is a ‘crushing’ sound. He knows he’s brought you to another level, and he says that not in some kind of false bragging way.”

  “He probably feels it like we do,” Kirk said.

  “As a witness,” Phil said, “it was really exciting to be a part of it. You could just feel the difference, like getting to this point was worth the wait.”

  Metallica’s managers suggested a way to convince Rob to leave Ozzy for Metallica: offer him a lot of money up-front. In a scene that we thankfully did get to film, Metallica show their commitment to Rob by offering him a cool million-dollar advance. That did the trick, but I think Metallica had other reasons for making such a grand offer. They had learned from their mistakes with Jason. This time around, their new bassist would truly be accepted as a member of Metallica. A million-dollar check was Metallica’s way of telling Rob that he was definitely their man. (“I could see him struggling with the words ‘a million dollars,’ “James later told the others. They all joked about giving Rob one of those oversize checks that sweepstakes winners receive.)

  A few minutes later in Monster, we see all four members meet with Peter Paterno, Metallica’s lawyer. Paterno outlines the general financial arrangement for Rob. It’s a little difficult to parse Paterno’s legalese the first time you see the scene, but the gist of it is that he had prepared an arrangement where Rob would get a 5 percent ownership in Metallica, with an equivalent vote in decisions affecting the Metallica organization. James and Lars immediately insist that Rob get a vote equivalent to theirs, as a symbol of the band’s new solidarity. Without missing a beat, Paterno restates the terms.

  Once he was a full-fledged Metallica member, Rob jumped into the fire. “I couldn’t allow myself to get freaked out,” Rob said after he’d been with Metallica for several months. “But the moment I joined the band, it was like Lars said: ‘We’re a train leaving the station, and we’re not slowing down.’” Rob began wearing his Discman at all times, hoping to imprint Metallica’s catalog on his memory. Within just a few weeks of Rob’s hiring, Metallica shot a “St. Anger” music video at San Quentin Prison, was honored by MTV’s show Icon (“You’re in the band five minutes, and already you’re an icon,” a reporter says to Rob in Monster), played some free shows at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, and began the European leg of the Summer Sanitarium tour. In the midst of all this frenzied activity, Metallica found little time for rehearsals—Rob’s Discman became a lifeline. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, totally,” he says of getting up to speed those first few weeks.

  Perhaps the best thing about being Metallica’s bass player in 2003, as opposed to, say, 1993, is the absence of hazing. Rob is clearly well liked throughout the rock world. When word spread that he was joining Metallica, there was widespread concern that he’d have to “eat the wasabi,” so to speak. Thankfully, that has not been the case. “A lot of people ask if they’re treating me right,” Rob says with a laugh. Launching into a killer Ozzy impersonation, Rob reveals his former employer’s parting words of support: “I’ll kill ’em if they mess with you! I’ll kill’em!”

  Metal fans and Monster viewers know that Ozzy tapped Jason Newsted to play bassist for that summer’s Ozzfest. Jason and Rob actually bumped into each other when Rob dropped by one of Jason’s first rehearsals with Ozzy’s band. Rob says there was no ill will. “I have the utmost respect for Jason. I don’t think of it as me replacing someone. I think of it as a new beginning.”

  CHAPTER 19

  THE BELL TOLLS

  Getting releases was a major effort and a major hassle. Sometimes we had no choice but to just put up signs, like at the Fillmore shows. (Courtesy of Annamaria DiSanto)

  09/18/02

  INT. KITCHEN, HQ RECORDING STUDIO, SAN RAFAEL, CA - DAY

  PHIL: We’re getting more confident. We’re gaining more confidence as a group, and in our ability to approach conflict and use it as fuel. And we’re not as frightened of those moments when we’re tense with each other. We’re confident that we can break through those areas and convert them into something positive. There’s a great deal more trust. Human beings, in general, have a lot of difficulty with tense moments. There’s a tendency to contract, and in the creative world you can’t contract. You gotta expand.

  JOE: How did you get to this point?

  PHIL: They got there by talking things out. Whenever a problem comes up, we talk about it, work it through, and blame it on Lars. (laughs) Then we go from there.

  LARS: I think the main thing that’s changed in the last month or two is Phil’s involvement, in that he’s now at the point where he’s running the band. (laughs) He’s writing music, writing lyrics, playing instruments. You know the song “Master of Puppets?”

  PHI: Wasn’t that inspired by …

  LARS: It’s weird, because “Master of Puppets” was sort of like one of those anticipatory things where you have flashes about the future.

  PHIL: Hmmm …

  LARS: I can see now that James Hetfield actually wrote about where we’d be in 2002, about the new “master of puppets” coming in. [Our managers] and our accountants have dissipated and sort of become null and void. It’s pretty much, you know, “Phil Towle and special guest Metallica.”

  JOE: So Phil Towle is the new face of metal?

  LARS: I would say that Phil Towle pretty much is metal.

  PHIL: I couldn’t have said it better.

  LARS: You know, not just the face, but also the body.

  Metallica had a nickname for Phil Towle—“Health Tornado”—because of the way he forced them to confront things they’d rather avoid, to “stay with the fog,” as he told Lars during the “fuck” session. Phil considered moments of fear to be unique opportunities to discover why these feeling provoke such a strong response, which meant facing the fears head-on. “I always err in the direction of moving into the issues,” he once told me. There were definitely times when I felt Phil was pushing a little too hard, like when he urged Lars to confront his father on the mountaintop, an encounter that I thought was great for the film but also put the two Ulrichs in an awkward position. But Phil was also someone who made the band members hug each other before every session, and made each of them name a word that described the session afterward—slightly corny practices, perhaps, but definitely conducive toward creating an atmosphere of love and trust among guys who had avoided showing either for two decades. He saved the band, there’s no question about it. He made them strong enough to leave him and begin a new chapter in Metallica history.

  In February 2003, Metallica decided they wanted to write the rest of that history on their own. Phil had done such a good job that he made himself obsolete. The scene where James and Lars tell Phil they want to end the therapy sessions is one of the harder scenes to watch in Monster. It has a very uncomfortable voyeuristic quality, perhaps even more so than any of the therapy scenes. The scene just feels different; it has an awkwardness that sets it apart from the rest of the film. From a filmmaking perspective, that awkwardness, like much of Monster, was equal parts luck and preparation. We had no idea what was coming that day. We thought we were about to film one more session of soul-baring therapy, and I, for one, was getting a little bored. I wanted to shake things up a bit. Every HQ therapy scene up to that point was shot from the same perspectives: Bob Richman, running the main camera, would position himself so that the conference table was in the foreground, with the couch and the studio door in the background; Bruce or I would shoot with our PD-150 o
ff to the side, near the eating bar of the kitchen, looking in the opposite direction as Bob. On this day, we decided to trade places, so that Bob was shooting away from the couch. By the time Metallica and Phil were all in the room, we were still screwing around with lighting and camera angles. We actually missed the beginning of the meeting and managed to get our act together just a minute before things got interesting.

  We turned on our cameras literally seconds before James began talking about Metallica’s concerns about Phil’s role and the band’s desire to phase out the therapy sessions. Bob was shooting very close to James. I had a moment of panic because I couldn’t tell if Bob was in the right place or if he’d been too surprised by the moment to set up the shot. He could sense my concern and subtly motioned to me to let me know he was getting everything. As it turned out, Bob had framed a perfect two-shot, with James in the foreground and Phil in the background, allowing Bob to do what’s called a “rack focus” (quickly refocusing so that at any moment either the foreground or background subject is in focus) and to pivot between the two. Bob’s shot had a really intimate effect. The viewer is almost seeing Phil’s shocked reaction through James’s eyes and can almost feel James’s growing discomfort. The tension is heightened even further when James abruptly gets up, loudly scraping his chair back, and moves to the kitchen to put his dishes in the sink. When he made this sudden motion, he passed within inches of me. I was able to get shots of Lars and Phil, both looking distressed, which we used as cutaways in that scene.1 Like so many other moments in Monster, fate dictated that we were in the right place at the right time.

  James says in the scene that he wants to gradually phase out Phil’s therapy, not stop it immediately, but I’ve noticed that a lot of viewers miss that subtlety and consequently wonder why Phil appears in the film after this scene. Phil continued his sessions for the next two months, and then accompanied Metallica during the first week of the Summer Sanitarium tour. Bruce and I decided that we didn’t want Phil to exit the film via this kind of confrontational scene. If his departure from Metallica was going to be gradual and smooth, we didn’t want his departure from Monster to be abrupt and awkward. We were determined to end the Phil portion of the film on a positive note, with Metallica acknowledging all he’d done for the band. But we couldn’t be sure such an encounter would occur, so rather than rely on luck, I tried to engineer a scene, which reminded me why that’s usually a bad idea. In May we filmed Metallica’s Fillmore gigs, which was the band’s way of warming up for the summer tour and breaking in their bass player. Truth be told, these shows were not so great, which is one reason they didn’t make it into Monster. (Another reason, as with the Raiders gig, is that we wanted to save the live performance for the summer tour, when James would take the stage at a huge stadium rather than at a relatively small club.)

  After the last show, Bruce and I went backstage with our crew. We found the band members gathered together, talking very critically about the various mistakes they’d made onstage. Phil walked in, and the mood actually lightened a bit. I decided to lob a few questions.

  “So, this is it, you guys, next time you’ll be on the road. How do you feel about all the guidance Phil has given you?” I got a few noncommittal grunts, since they were busy critiquing their own performances. “So, Phil, what do you think of how far Metallica has come?” Phil, usually not at a loss for words, looked like he wasn’t sure what to say Lars, drenched in sweat, shot me a puzzled look, as if to say, “You’ve never forced us to have a conversation before—why now?”

  My attempt to force a reconciliation scene between Metallica and Phil didn’t work because the situation wasn’t developing organically. The band members were disappointed in their performance and were in no mood to get sentimental. Phil actually called me the next day to say that my attempt to get them to acknowledge one another had made him uncomfortable, and he felt like he hadn’t said the right things.

  The funny thing was, we already had the scene we wanted—we just didn’t know it. A few days before the Fillmore shows, Metallica convened at HQ to say good-bye to Phil and Bob Rock. As you can see in Monster, it was a momentous gathering of the troops. Besides being Bob Rock’s exit from the film, the scene wound up being the send-off Phil deserved, with James, near tears, thanking Phil for laying out the “tools” that had helped make Metallica stronger. This was the end of our very last day of shooting at HQ, and we were all preoccupied with closing up shop. We figured the HQ part of our film was already in the can. Bruce and I were out of the room at the time, loading out our equipment. Bob Richman was still in the room, but his camera was on the floor. When it became clear what he was witnessing, Bob quickly threw the camera on his shoulder and took up a position behind Lars’s shoulder. “I remember thinking, man, this is a great scene and I’m not in the best position,” Bob recalled a year later. “You always want things perfect, but the beauty of this kind of filmmaking is that it never is.”

  After the shoot, Bob mentioned to us what he’d just filmed, but since Bruce and I were both out of the room when it happened and since Bob is generally low-key when he discusses what he’s filmed, it never really registered with us what a great scene Bob had captured, so it faded from our memories. A few days later, while we were getting ready to go to Europe to film the opening of the summer tour, Bruce and I were lamenting the fact that we had never really gotten a decent scene that showed the band reconciling with Phil. Bob reminded us about the scene he’d shot, but we couldn’t find the tape. Bob was worried that it had been lost, but we didn’t have time to dwell on it, since we were leaving for Europe the next day. A few days into the tour, we called our assistant editor, Kristine Smith, in New York. After doing a massive search, she called us a few days later to tell us she couldn’t find it. When we returned, Bruce figured out that the tape had never been labeled in the field and managed to locate it. He called me, sounding like he’d found the Holy Grail. When I watched it, I realized he had. Bob Richman was right. Just another example of the perils of having 1,600 hours of footage.

  One quality that all our films share is a fundamental ambiguity. Most people who see Brother’s Keeper think Delbert was innocent, but a sizable group (including Bruce and me) aren’t so sure. Once Paradise Lost aired for the first time, we discovered that none of the families of the victims or the accused thought their points of view were presented strongly enough. I’m proud that our films generate so many different responses and generally don’t tell viewers what to think. The difference between a verité film and a historical documentary is that verité films portray the complexity of the human condition, which is never reducible to black-and-white sound bites. We like to operate solidly in the gray.

  So it didn’t surprise me that Phil had some problems with Monster. I expected everyone in the film to have some problems with it. But Phil had more criticisms than the others. Some I agree with, some I don’t. But I think it’s interesting to put aside questions of whose view is “correct” and look at how Phil’s take on the film differs from my own, because these differences reveal how our films engender so many different interpretations. The differences also perfectly illustrate the power dynamics of the three-headed monster and how they became more intense as the film neared completion. Phil, as the band’s therapist, exerted a certain power over his clients, who had an emotional dependence on him. The band, as the clients, had a certain power over Phil because they were paying his bills. Bruce and I, as filmmakers, enjoyed a certain power over all of them, the result of being behind a camera and invading people’s lives. Metallica had a certain power over us, because they were paying the bills (and by this time we were increasingly hinging our future on Monster being a theatrical release, so we had to balance a desire to present events “objectively” as we saw them with the fact that we needed Metallica’s approval). This all amounted to a delicate system of checks and balances.

  Our final shoot day for Monster was August 15, 2003. We went to the final stop of the Summer Sanitarium tou
r, which ended in the Bay Area. We figured it would be nice to film the hometown finale. I bumped into Phil when I ran backstage to grab some more tapes. He had heard that we’d finished a cut of Monster and asked when he could see it. I told him there would be a screening in a few weeks for Metallica but that he’d need the band’s permission to attend. Phil said he assumed he’d get to see it. I told him that we generally don’t like to show works in progress to our subjects, but if Metallica said it was okay, Phil was welcome to attend. But he’d have to ask them—it was out of my hands. The conversation suddenly became awkward. There was a very pregnant pause, and then each of us said a hasty good-bye.

  When I got back to New York, I was still thinking about my encounter with Phil. I felt like he was confused and deserved a more detailed explanation from me. I called him, told him I thought our conversation had been a bit strained, and reiterated that I was contractually prohibited from showing the film to anyone without Metallica’s permission. Phil said he understood, and that he’d speak to the band. That was the last I heard about the subject until early December, when Monster was accepted at Sundance. Phil read the description of the film in the festival catalog, which mentioned that the Metallica guys “get testy with each other and even fire their round-the-clock shrink,” and called me, now very nervous about how Monster depicted him. Again, I told him that if he wanted to see the film, he’d have to speak with Metallica, and suggested he call Lars. A few more weeks passed. At Lars’s birthday party in late December, Sean Penn, who had seen Monster a few months earlier, pulled Phil aside and told him he thought the film was really impressive but that Phil did not come off well. Phil called me again, this time very upset. I finally intervened, called Lars myself, and encouraged him to set up a screening for Phil.

  Lars showed the film to Phil, who promptly called me. In the kind, soothing tones he used to administer therapy, he told me that he thought the film was “brilliant” but that he was also “devastated” by it. He thought he came off as not emotionally connected to the band, and he felt that the film didn’t do justice to how his therapeutic process worked. He saw much less of the genuine warmth of the sessions, and thought we concentrated too much on conflicts. As he saw it, the film focused too much on the interpersonal battles of Metallica and not enough on reconciliation. He would have liked to see more supportive moments during the therapy scenes, and he wished we’d have shown James and Lars hugging each other.