Metallica: This Monster Lives

by Joe Berlinger

  A few minutes before showtime, Gio told me James had given his assent. As James was coming out, I jumped inside the vehicle, a sleek Mercedes van. I had been asked to sit in the back row of the van, instead of my requested camera position in the front passenger seat. I was concerned that all I would get is the back of James’s head. As he positioned himself into the middle row of the van, he turned around to see who else was there. For a second, I thought he was turning around to give me a “what the fuck?” glance that would result in me getting thrown out, but he was just drawn to the camera’s light, which illuminated the van’s interior. The next guy to step into the van was Phil Towle. I did a double take: what was he doing in here? Phil had agreed to travel with the band members for the first few weeks of the tour, to help them ease back into their role as the world’s biggest rock-and-roll band, but I didn’t think he’d actually follow them to the stage in the van. Phil stepped on my foot and knocked my camera as he climbed over me. I twisted in my seat to make room for him. James watched Phil take his seat, which actually gave me a better shot of James. Given the complicated relationship between Metallica, Phil, and Berlinger-Sinofsky over the previous two years, it seemed suitably metaphorical that Phil’s presence made the shot I wanted harder to achieve but ultimately better than what I’d planned. Last into the van was Rob Trujillo and James’s bodyguard. My camera was knocked yet again.

  We drove alongside the barricades that separated the crowd from the backstage entrance. I got a few quick shots of each of the band members as they exited their vehicles and then followed James on foot as he walked to the wings of the stage and greeted the crew. I kept bracing myself to be pulled back at any moment by the crew, since none of them had been told that I was allowed to follow James. I walked to the edge of the stage, where I could see the massive crowd. Now I was really pushing it, since a cardinal rule of Metallica on the road is that anyone backstage in a position visible to the audience must wear a black T-shit, which I lacked. More than 100,000 fans had waited all day in 105-degree heat to see Metallica, the last of six bands. The air had cooled slightly, but not much. The sun was setting, giving the open sky the beautiful hue of the “magic hour.” When we reached the stage, a synthesizer hum rose from the speakers and the crowd began to roar. The fans went wild and began to sing along as the sound system played “Ecstasy of Gold,” Ennio Morricone’s wordless tune from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which Metallica fans worldwide know is the last thing they’ll hear before their heroes take the stage. This was the most pumped audience I’d seen on the tour—or in my life, for that matter. I had never before felt an energy like this.

  It was important to me to capture James’s preshow rituals prior to taking the stage on his first tour after recovery, which ultimately led to the final sequence of the film. (Courtesy of Joe Berlinger)

  Trying to keep our cool in Imola until Metallica came onstage, during the extremely hot summer tour (Courtesy of Bob Richman)

  James, just barely out of the audience’s sight line, was also singing along. As he howled along with the fans, it sounded like he was leading a battle call. Instinctively, I crouched down and shot him from a low angle; he seemed downright heroic. I kept pushing my access, creeping in closer and closer as he sang and went through his rituals: picking out his black sleeveless T-shirt for the first set, wiping the sweat from his face, retrieving his guitar from his tech, doing chin-ups. James walked up to Rob, and they pressed their fists together in solidarity. Buzzing with adrenaline and dehydration, I felt like I was floating out of my body, observing the scene through the camera in my hand but with someone else’s eyes.

  I took a quick sip of water and crept out from the wings. To the right of me, James continued to pump himself up; to the left, I could see the vast audience. It was intoxicating, the amount of love the crowd was throwing Metallica’s way. As I watched James getting ready to hit the stage, I felt something I’ve never felt in a filming situation before: I was proud of him. I’d spent so much time sitting in a room with these guys, listening to their internal squabbles and thinking about how they were just like me in so many ways that I’d forgotten how they can roll into Bologna or Tokyo or Kansas City and attract the kind of idolizing crowds that are the domain of fantasies for most of us. And yet, despite that ego trip, or maybe because of it, they had the courage and strength to explore their pain and come to terms with it, to wrestle the monster.

  Courtesy of Bob Richman

  Lars always stared me down whenever I filmed him onstage. On our final shoot day, he jumped off the riser and said, “Don’t you have enough shit? It’s time to go home!” (Courtesy of Joe Berlinger)

  Watching James ready himself for his triumphant return, I suddenly flashed back a year and a half to March 2002, when we showed Q Prime our first trailer. At the end of the screening, Cliff Burnstein had a really interesting appraisal of Metallica’s situation. “When you’ve got a certain amount of success, money in the bank and all that, the next thing you do doesn’t change your life much. The Black Album changed [Metallica]’s lives enormously. It changed how they lived and how people thought of them. Now, to make another album doesn’t change things. When you’ve accomplished so much, you think, Why should I get up in the morning? I’ll stay in my bathrobe, play catch with my kids, read the paper. I’ve got a beautiful house, millions in the bank. What’s my motivation to do anything? That’s what’s gonna catch up with this band soon. I think this ten months off is gonna give us ten more years. It will provide a new motivation.”

  This was an astonishing monologue, not the least because it came after the screening of the trailer, which had clearly alarmed Burnstein and his colleagues. It was also extraordinary because Cliff saw a coherent theme for this film at a time when there was no guarantee that in ten months there would be a Metallica, let alone a film about Metallica. And his appraisal turned out to be pretty accurate, both about the band and the film. I think that Metallica’s harrowing emotional journey did buy them as many years as they want to keep playing. As for the film, I think Monster is, as Cliff says, a movie about what makes us get up in the morning. For most of us, not getting up really isn’t an option: we have bills to pay, families to support, lives to hold together. We don’t always examine why we get up in the morning because we’re too busy making ourselves do it.

  For that reason, as I filmed James just before he hit the stage, I was proud of what Bruce and I had accomplished. We had really pushed ourselves, in a way we never had before, nurturing and shaping a lasting social document out of a run-of-the-mill promo assignment. We had figured out how to work in a way that pushed egos aside for the collective good. We had learned how to integrate and appreciate (in fact, root for) each other’s individual careers while also cultivating the collective vision of the Berlinger-Sinofsky filmmaking team.

  And I was proud of myself. Two weeks of persistence had gotten me to this point, onstage with James. But I felt like it was also the culmination of two years of work that Bruce and I did together to reach this position of absolute trust with our subjects. Thank God I crashed and burned on Blair Witch 2. If I hadn’t, I don’t think the Metallica film would have ever happened, and this has been the greatest professional and personal experience of my career.

  Once the concert began, I entered a narrow corridor, about ten feet deep, in front of the stage. Security guards and police barricades held back the front-row crowds. (I’d been in this position at a show in Germany a few nights earlier, where Eddie O’Connor, one of our sound recordists, had his headphones literally blown off his head by a pyro explosion.) Every few minutes, a guard would nab a new, often bloodied stage diver, making him wince in pain by dragging him out in an armlock. Other fans were fainting in the oppressive heat, their bodies flopping over the metal barricades in exhaustion while first-aid workers lifted them out to safety. It felt like the whole scene might erupt into violence at any minute. More emergency teams rushed past me, wheeling gurneys piled high with bags of water that they wou
ld slit and toss into the sea of sweaty flesh as it hammered up and down to the rhythm of the music.

  I wanted to get really tight close-ups of the crowd (many of these were used in Monster’s closing sequence). Bob Richman and another cameraman, Don Lenzer, worked the stage for close-ups of the band and reverse shots of the audience, while Bruce was in the middle of the field getting the full-stage and audience shots that we used to emphasize the enormity of the crowd. At the end of the show, as the last notes of the final encore song, “Enter Sandman,” echoed across the arena, one of those bags of water flew through the air and exploded against my camera. I felt a cool splash against my sweaty cheek and heard an electronic fizzle. Then the viewfinder went dark. Fuck! This could not be happening. …

  While I pondered my fate, Phil Towle was experiencing an altogether more reflective moment. As Metallica took its final bows, he stood by the side of the stage, watching his charges, feeling a potent mixture of pride at how far they’d come and regret that his role in the journey was coming to an end. “They were on four corners of this large stage, and they came together at the end and hugged,” he remembers. “And I just broke down crying. It was sort of like, ‘Wow, that was what it was all about.’ That told me all I needed to know about me. I finished my job.”

  After the show, the film crew met back at the production vehicles. I was completely freaked out and still vibrating from being so close to the gigantic speakers. Convinced that the footage I’d shot of James had been ruined by the water, I told Bruce what I’d captured and probably lost. He looked at me skeptically, doubting that anything shot with such a small camera in this massive environment could be as good as I thought it was. We dried the camera, removed the battery, and inserted a new one. The camera whirred to life. I was more concerned about the footage than I was about the camera, and I didn’t want to risk playing it back on potentially damaged equipment, so I ejected the cassette, inspected it with a flashlight, and popped it into another PD-150 that we’d brought with us as a backup. We rewound the tape and played back the footage—it was intact! Bruce immediately recognized what I was talking about and said, “Stop playing it—it’s a master and you’ll damage it! We gotta use that for the end of the movie.” And that is indeed how Monster ends.

  We shot a few more shows when the tour hit the U.S. later in the summer. At Giants Stadium in New Jersey, we were filming fans in the parking lot for the closing title sequence when a dark van pulled up next to us. I sighed, thinking it was security about to bust us for filming in the parking lot. “Hey, Joe” someone stage-whispered. I turned around to see Lars peeking out of the passenger-side window, trying not to draw attention to himself. He laughed. “We can’t find the backstage entrance. Do you know where it is?” I pointed the way, then sat down on the curb and laughed at the absurdity of the situation.

  As the summer tour came to a close, I could definitely sense a subtle change in Metallica’s attitude toward us. It almost felt like they were ending the phase of their lives that involved Bruce and me. The doors that had been opened as wide as they could for us were now closing. Of course, the guys were still very friendly, but I think they, like us, felt it was time to wrap things up. When Metallica played the Los Angeles Coliseum, I was standing onstage in front of the drums, filming Lars, when he spotted me and jumped down from his drum riser. In front of 90,000 people, he came over to me and got in my face. “Don’t you have enough shit?” he said, dripping with sweat. He smiled warmly (or as warmly as you can smile in this situation), put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye, and said, “You need to let go. It’s time to go home.” I filmed him as he turned around, climbed back up onto the riser, took his seat, and resumed the show.

  Opening night at the Sunshine Cinema in New York City. Monster was shown on two screens, and all the evening shows sold out. Ironically, there were midnight shows of This Is Spinal Tap. (Courtesy of Joe Bellinger)

  The next day was our final shoot and the final day of the 2003 Summer Sanitarium Tour, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, Metallica’s hometown. I was backstage with Bruce and Bob Richman when we bumped into James as he was walking to his dressing room. We said hello and talked about the vacations we were each about to take. His attention was suddenly distracted by some friends of his who’d stopped by. We all began to walk to the private preshow reception area near the dressing rooms, reserved for friends and family. James and his friends went through the metal gates that separate backstage access from the true inner sanctum. As we followed them, a burly guard put his arm out, motioning us to stay on the other side. I looked down and realized our backstage credentials weren’t the same as what we’d been given throughout the rest of the tour, the kind that allowed us to get the full all-access treatment. I was about to protest (Do you have any idea how much time we’ve spent with this band?), but the three of us just looked at each other and shrugged. James kept walking and didn’t notice that we were no longer beside him. From the gate, I watched him head for the belly of the beast. It felt really good to let him go.

  APPENDIX: THE OSLO INTERVIEWS

  In December 2003, I traveled to Oslo, Norway, to let Metallica reflect on the last two and a half years of their lives spent under the glare of our cameras. Some Kind of Monster began and ended with Metallica’s cooperation, so it seems only fitting to give them the last word.

  Lars: In February and March of 2001, when we started talking about how Metallica was going through an interesting and unusual and potentially challenging time, we told you guys to grab your shit and come out to the West Coast without really having any idea what we were getting ourselves into—number one, what the band was getting itself into, and number two, what you guys as filmmakers were getting yourselves into. In retrospect, the unknown quality was great. It’s daring, it’s challenging, and I think that’s what maybe connects us to each other, what allows us to throw around precious words like “artists” or whatever we selfishly call ourselves. To be honest, I’m not sure I ever had a vision so much as a faith in the project itself. Between you two as filmmakers, and the four of us who form the entity known as Metallica, with a couple of the Q Primers floating around, I had faith that there was a great film of some kind here. Or, if not great, then unique and unusual, which to me is always in the direction of greatness, [laughs]

  Kirk: When we agreed to do this, we had no idea what was on the horizon. Jason was still in the band, and the whole project was in a more embryonic stage. It was business as usual. It was extremely fortunate from your perspective that the cameras were there when all this stuff started raining down. After the first two or three weeks, there was so much interpersonal shit we had to deal with that I just forgot about the cameras. I was too busy thinking about what was right in front of me—the health and welfare and future of my band. After a while, the cameras just became invisible, because I was dealing with all the other situations that were being thrown at us.

  James: This film is sending a damn good message—that you can overcome things, you don’t have to feel stuck. You don’t have to stay the way you are, no matter how comfortable you think you are. Myself, I didn’t think I could change: “I don’t know anything else, I don’t know any better. What if it’s worse?” It’s amazing, how scary the unknown can be.

  Lars: This is not just another fuckin’ run-of-the-mill glorified look at how cool we are in our little rock band, playing in front of 20,000 people a night while you capture us walking into a dressing room with a towel around our neck, going [whines], “Oh, this is so difficult, we’re bleeding for our audience and our art!” All that bullshit that most of these films end up being.

  James: You know, it took my family saying good-bye to me, throwing me out of the house, for me to realize what I was doing, who I was, how dependent I was on certain things, and how unhealthy that was. You know, I wanted to be back with my family because I needed someone to show me how to live. [laughs] But now I love being with my family, because I can show them some things. You know, we nee
d each other, but we’ll be okay without each other. That’s progress, you know?

  Kirk: Now that the film is done, I realize that we’re showing a side of ourselves that a lot of bands don’t usually show. We’re just tearing ourselves open and exposing our raw emotions to the audience. And, you know, I have a little bit of reservations about that, but ultimately I’m okay with it, because it’s the truth. It’s who we really are. I mean, there’s no script. The only script is the script of our own lives. I just think it’s fortunate that you guys were there. It almost felt like it was meant to be. I think it was just a stroke of luck, really, that you guys were there to film it all. You know, film us in our darkest hour, because we’re used to being filmed during our brightest, most glamorous hours, and for some reason I feel like this film balances everything out. You know, all the glamorous side of Metallica, of being one of the biggest bands in the world—I mean that’s great and everything, but there is a flip side, the darker side of the band that no one else sees. And this film captures the darker side of Metallica. And it balances it out. I never felt self-conscious, and after a while it just wasn’t an issue that the cameras were around. You can clearly see that in the movie. I mean, I hardly ever address the cameras fully. And it’s warts and all. Through half of the movie, I look like crap, like I just woke up. [laughs] None of us look like roses. This isn’t a film that will transform us into some sort of glamorous or elegant band. The reality of it is that we’re just as human as anyone else. None of us look particularly good, none of us look particularly bad. We’re just human, you know?