Much of the assembling of Monster was a communal affair, an ongoing collaboration between me, Bruce, David, and the three other editors we hired. For example, it was my idea to do an opening montage that would show the band members aging over the span of their career. David pushed the idea further, suggesting the montage should be one song from various years, edited together to sound seamless, and that we use this as the opening title sequence. Bruce asked Lars which song from Metallica’s early days the band most continued to play throughout the years. Without hesitation, he named “Seek & Destroy.” The first clip we use is from one of the earliest Metallica shows, with Dave Mustaine on lead guitar. As we move toward the present, we see Metallica achieving stadium-godhood.
This was a tricky sequence to execute. We wanted the audience to hear Metallica growing in stature, but we discovered that some of the earlier clips actually sounded “bigger” than the later ones. David played with the sound mix so that the first clips sound excessively tinny. As the band moves into arenas, the mix explodes into full stereo. Making the sequence sound seamless proved to be more difficult than we thought. David, a musician himself (he plays bass), figured out that the band had played around with the key of the song and used different guitar tunings throughout the years. Even if you knew nothing about music, the effect of slamming these different versions together sounded weird and dissonant. To achieve our desired effect, David experimented with pitch-shifting the sound of some performances. The result sounds like the world’s longest version of “Seek & Destroy——twenty years compressed to less than two minutes.
If Monster had become a TV show, we wouldn’t have had the chance to be this creative, but I’m confident we would have somehow turned in a serviceable piece of work, despite the crazy deadline. David, however, begs to differ. “I’m not saying that I’m sure we wouldn’t have finished in time,” he clarifies. “I’m positive.”
We were saved by the fact that St. Anger sounds so weird. It turned out that mastering the album was a big headache (“too many subharmonics,” Bob explains), which necessitated various emergency procedures to make the recording workable. This kept the band in New York an extra day, which meant they would have to charter a plane back to the Bay Area. We were planning to go back there ourselves to shoot some “B-roll” footage of HQ for the movie, so I asked Lars if we could hitch a ride on their plane. Bruce and I had a plan.
Two days later, we met the band at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. I had with me a DVD of ninety minutes of prime material, our best scenes. Metallica had chartered a 727 owned by a wealthy televangelist. Besides a full bar, there were CD players and large TVs for every swivel leather seat. As I walked onboard, I flashed back to our time spent making Brother’s Keeper, sleeping in a neighbor’s dilapidated shack in Munnsville, warmed only by a wooden stove, filming people who survived on $8,000 a year from milking cows. I also experienced a moment of panic when I found that James had made alternate travel arrangements and wasn’t coming with us. Given how he felt about Metallica activities going on without him, we had to think twice about showing the rest of the band the footage. Bruce and I decided to take the chance, since everyone else was there (except Rob, who stayed in New York): Kirk and his wife, Lani; Lars and his wife, Skylar; and Bob. I was particularly nervous about what Lani and Skylar would think. Until now, the wives had really kept their distance from the film. They were always friendly but gave off a distinctive disapproving vibe, clearly concerned about the effect this film would have on their lives. They never wanted to participate in the filming (although Skylar let us film her in the art-auction scene).
About an hour into the flight, as casually as I could, I mentioned that I had some footage everyone should see. I put in the DVD. Thousands of feet above the Earth, they all stared at their individual monitors and watched highlights from the last two grueling years. Everyone had headphones on, so the only sound I heard was the roar of the plane’s engines. I couldn’t help noticing Lars’s reaction, and it worried me. Every five minutes or so, he’d leap up from his leather seat with an agitated expression, whip off his headphones, and pace around the cabin while muttering, “I can’t fucking watch this …” Then he’d return to his seat and try to watch some more.
When it was over, we got up the nerve to ask him what he thought.
He looked startled. “I can’t even talk to you now.” He said he’d have to watch the parts he missed in the privacy of his home.
I turned my attention to Bob. He looked thoughtful and finally said, “I think I prefer my memories.”
Our hearts sank. Did he hate it?
“No, no it’s too good. It’s so personal and real. I mean, will people really be into it?”
Kirk, for his part, was concerned that we focused too heavily on tension and negativity but thought it was pretty authentic, not to mention better than he thought it would be.
What really blew us away was how into it the wives were. For the first time in two years, they started opening up to us, thrilled and enthused at what we had captured. While the men sat shell-shocked in their seats, we talked with the wives in the back of the plane for more than an hour, listening to their thoughtful and intelligent critique of the footage. Skylar was a bit concerned about her husband’s image, but overall, she gave us a definite thumbs-up. “I never knew what went on in those band-therapy sessions,” she said. “I had no idea.”
“The footage could not have been more real,” Lani said. She paused, glanced toward the front where the guys sat slumped in their seats, and added, “Wow, they’re really going through with this.”
The last hour of the flight was quiet. Everyone seemed emotionally drained. Bruce walked by and squeezed my shoulder. I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until just before we landed.
The next day, while shooting B-roll at HQ, I ran into James. He had spoken with his wife, Francesca, who had heard from Skylar that we’d shown footage on the plane. I braced myself, expecting his next words to be “you asshole …” But he was actually cool with it and asked us to send Francesca a copy of the DVD.
The weird thing about all of this is that Metallica never gave us a definitive answer about the revised VH1 offer. I figured that they’d probably made their decision even before we jumped on the plane. Anyway, Metallica had more pressing concerns and was soon immersed in preparations for the Fillmore shows and the Summer Sanitarium tour. I submitted a budget for filming the first leg of the tour in Europe. When the budget was approved by Q Prime, I knew our project was finally safe. On June 6, the day St. Anger debuted at No. 1 in thirty countries (including the U.S.), we were in Paris, filming Metallica signing autographs at the Virginw Megastore on the Champs-Elysees. The album was officially out, with no TV show to support it. Showtime, VH1—they were all distant memories.
Now all we had to do was put together a movie.
CHAPTER 21
MONSTER, INC.
The intimate access Metallica granted us while making Monster still amazes me. It wasn’t just the therapy and the fights; there were also more mundane moments that it’s safe to say most celebrities would insist remain private. We were privy to business meetings where large sums of money were discussed. There was the scene where Rob becomes an instant millionaire, of course, as well as many others that didn’t find a place in the finished film.
For instance, there was the meeting where Metallica and Bob Rock discussed how much Bob would be compensated for his bass-playing and song writing duties on St. Anger. (Considering that Bob had for so long just been Metallica’s producer, it’s amazing that this meeting took place two years after work on St. Anger began.) There was the conference call with manager Cliff Burnstein over accepting a financial settlement and apology in Metallica’s lawsuit against Napster as the file-sharing company slipped into bankruptcy. “I don’t care if it’s no money,” James said, insisting that a public apology was more important to him. Lars gloomily added, “We’ve been fucked for so long on this thing in terms of public perception
. I have a hard time thinking we’ll walk away from this anything other than fucked.”
What’s even more incredible than the trust Metallica showed us in allowing us access to their money moments is the trust they showed us in allowing us access to so much of their money. By the time we were deep into editing Some Kind of Monster, our budget had ballooned to $4 million. By our standards, this was a huge sum. Each of the Paradise Lost films had cost about $1 million. But we’d also shot about one tenth as much footage for those films as we did for Monster. In any case, Q Prime never objected to our continuing to film even as the budget skyrocketed.
I also owe Q Prime thanks for lighting a fire under our collective ass. The near-impossible task of turning our material into a television show helped us manage the enormous amount of footage as we tried to assemble a theatrical film. If we hadn’t hit the ground running like that, I really doubt we would have finished Monster in time to submit it to Sundance. After the TV-show idea was abandoned, we decided to keep using three editors, but we were really under the gun. Each editor had an assigned task. David Zieff, the supervising editor, was in charge of everything up until James’s return from rehab. Doug Abel handled the events after James’s return. Miki Milmore was the utility player, given miscellaneous problem-solving tasks. Kristine Smith, the assistant editor, would also take on various experiments.
It was a grueling summer. We were constantly trying to strike a balance between our desire to be creative and our need to get this monster under control. During the first few weeks of summer, Bruce and I left the editing room to document the start of Metallica’s Summer Sanitarium tour. We were somewhat alarmed to discover that Metallica had integrated only two songs from St. Anger into their set: the title song and “Frantic.” For obvious reasons, we had envisioned ending the movie with Metallica playing “Some Kind of Monster,” but they demurred, saying they hadn’t had time to rehearse it, and after a few dates we stopped asking. Since the “St. Anger” video shoot at San Quentin prison happens near the end of the film, it felt redundant to see the song played again. By default, we had to use “Frantic.” As it turned out, the universe had kind words for us once again. Our cameras had followed the evolution of “Frantic” in the studio more than any other song, so ending with Metallica playing it live emphasized that this was the end of the journey. And of course, the song’s lyrics neatly encapsulate some of the major themes of Monster. Especially that opener: “If I could have my wasted days back, would I use them to get back on track?”
It’s a question I thought about a lot that summer, as Some Kind of Monster gradually became a real film. Did James have to go through hell to reach a brighter place? Did I have to make one of the biggest bombs in recent Hollywood history in order to make a film as dear to me as Monster? That summer, looking back at the more than two years spent on this project, I realized that I was glad that the horrible experience that preceded it gave me the attitude I needed to do this one right. My wasted days weren’t wasted.
By early September, we had whittled down a mammoth six-hour, very rough cut into a still intimidating three-and-a-half-hour version. We summoned Metallica and the band’s managers to see the film at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, in a walnut-paneled, state-of-the-art screening room. Bruce and I were extremely nervous about showing them the film. We had a lot riding on it. Q Prime had not seen anything since the trailer we’d cut a year and a half earlier. This was where we’d justify making a film vastly different from the one we were originally hired to make. We chose to show them a cut with such a long running time because we wanted to include every scene that had any chance of making the final cut, so that if anyone had any reservations about anything, they could voice it now, since we’d have to lock a rough cut for Sundance in just four weeks and didn’t want to have to gather the troops for another screening before we finished. Over the prior two years, every time we’d broken our rule about not showing works in progress to our subjects—the trailer we cut soon after James left for rehab, the footage we showed them when he returned, the material we showed on the airplane that saved this film from becoming the next Osbournes—Metallica had come through for us. But now that we had produced something approaching a finished film, the band would naturally imagine an audience viewing it. When they actually saw themselves up on the big screen, would they regret ever letting us into their lives?
I felt like I was holding my breath through the entire screening. It occurred to me that these guys weren’t just reliving what they’d each individually been through; each of them was also discovering what the others had experienced. There was very little laughter or any other sounds coming from the audience, so it was impossible to tell what they thought. Each band member had decided to sit in a different corner of the room. The Q Prime guys sat near the back; throughout the screening, they cringed and laughed louder than anyone else. They obviously knew what Metallica had gone through over the previous two years, but it sounded to me like the film really made them grasp the day-to-day reality of the band’s recent turbulent period. When the film ended, there was total silence—no applause, no quips, nothing. Everyone stood and stretched, wearing smiles that seemed to communicate a mixture of bewilderment, bemusement, and shock. I figured they’d have some immediate questions or comments, but everyone just headed for the door. When Lars walked by me, he paused briefly to pat me on the back, and say, “Gee, you guys are really good at this” (which I took as a compliment, but I wasn’t 100 percent sure). Then he kept walking.
Courtesy of Joe Berlinger
We decided to make the half-hour drive back to HQ to talk in more detail about the film. Bruce and I, alone in a car together, grimly recalled various horrible experiences we’ve had getting notes from network executives over the years and wondered if this would be our worst experience yet. Once everyone was seated around the table at HQ, we asked for everyone’s comments. It was interesting to me that most of the immediate concerns Metallica had involved the film’s treatment of the band’s economics. Even for people as candid as these guys were, money seemed to be a sensitive subject. James, for instance, was uncomfortable with the scene where the band offers Rob a million dollars. "I think it’s a little out of context,” he said. What he meant was that the scene might confuse people into thinking that money was some sort of “signing bonus” rather than an advance. The word “advance” is in fact invoked in that scene, but James was probably right that the concept is too subtle for many viewers. Anyway, that was the consensus of most of the people in that room, who echoed James’s concerns. “An average kid hears ‘a million dollars’ and thinks, Wow—instant millionaire!” Marc Reiter pointed out.
“They want to demonstrate that they’re not going to treat Rob the way they treated Jason,” I said.
Reiter replied that if the purpose of the scene was to show that Rob was going to be an equal partner, not just a hired hand, then that was made clear by the scene in which Metallica brusquely insist to their lawyer that Rob’s equal status be codified. Marc had a valid point, except that the lawyer scene, more than the million-dollar scene, was filled with legal jargon that was sure to baffle the “average kid.”
Kirk expressed similar worries regarding Metallica’s image. “Do we really want to show all this stuff about money?” he asked, referring to Phil’s fee, Rob’s advance, and Lars’s art-auction bonanza. Besides the money issues, Kirk was also concerned that any scene depicting tensions within Metallica (that is, most of Monster) compromised his and his bandmates’ privacy But it was the money stuff that really bothered him. “I don’t want to seem like spoiled rock stars here. We have always—”
“Kirk, I think you’re not being realistic,” I said, cutting him off. “Your fans know you have money. You’d be killing an important theme in the movie that—”
Cliff Burnstein quickly came to Kirk’s defense. “I don’t like your overly defensive thing, Joe. Kirk has a legitimate concern.” His voice went up a notch. “Why can’t he fuckin’ say it without
you saying it’s an attack on the whole goddamn movie?”
I was taken aback, though I had to admit Cliff had a point. I let my emotions get the better of me. I had been so nervous about showing the film to everyone that I was still a little keyed up. I quickly backed off, but it turned out James felt much the way I did. “Look, people already know these kinds of things,” he said. “They know our tour made $40 million. They already think, What a bunch of rich-ass rock stars. But maybe when people see what we do with our money, that’ll help a little with that perception.”
I thought James was tapping into something crucial. Make no mistake: Even compared to most rock stars, Metallica is a wildly successful band. According to Rolling Stone, the only musical acts to gross more than Metallica in 2003 were the Rolling Stones, the Eagles, Bruce Springsteen, and the Dixie Chicks. Kirk is probably right that Metallica’s fans think of the band as a bunch of regular, working-class guys, not so far away from the guys’ grease-stained mechanics’ getups on the cover of Garage, Inc. But just think about the winking title Garage, Inc. for a second and you’ll realize that band and fans are clued into what’s really going on. If anything, the typical Metallica fan likes that their heroes are a bunch of rich-ass rock stars who still seem like regular guys, the kind of dudes for whom the money is just a nice fringe benefit of being the planet’s most kick-ass rock band. Metallica are similar in this way to R.E.M. and U2, bands that don’t downplay their hugeness but make a certain effort to keep the rock-star excess under wraps. Let’s face it—it’s safe to say the average adolescent Metallica fan—stuck in a dull suburb, alienated from parents, siblings, teachers, and most fellow adolescents—dreams of getting rich one day and telling all these people to go fuck themselves. Metallica seem like kindred spirits because they can pluck a fellow traveler like Rob Trujillo out of relative obscurity, a guy just like anyone else, and make him a millionaire overnight. Lars summed it up nicely: “I’m really proud that we gave Rob a million dollars,” he said. “I’ll shout it from the fucking rooftops. I’m really proud that I set the record for selling a Basquiat. I’ll shout that from the fucking rooftops.”
Metallica: This Monster Lives Page 31