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Features
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Heavy Metal Monster
Filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky got a lot more than they bargained for when they hunkered down with Metallica to document the recording of “St. Anger.”
Thursday, July 15, 2004
By Pam Grady
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When Robert Trujillo first auditioned to replace longtime Metallica bassist Jason Newsted, he was told that the prere~quisite for joining the band was to underwrite a documentary about the group.
“They told me I had to take all the money out of my savings and pay for it,'" Trujillo explains with a laugh during a satellite press conference held in conjunction with the premiere of Metallica: Some Kind of Monster at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. Now playing in limited release, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's documentary charts America's heavy metal supergroup through the making of their album “St. Anger,” a sojourn that included group therapy, a months-long suspension of recording when frontman James Hetfield went first on a Russian bear-hunting vacation and then into rehab, and the near implosion of the band.
In the end, the hiring of Trujillo turns out to be one of the film's happier moments, a sign that the rift that came close to ringing down the curtain on one of rock music's great success stories was finally healed.
Trujillo may have been joking, but it's true that the band did buy back the documentary from their record company, Elektra, when they objected to the label's plans for the film. One of the unintended consequences of Hetfield's long absence from the group was that it coincided with the rise of reality TV.
By the time Metallica’s lead singer came up for air, The Osbournes was a smash and Elektra was all in favor of promoting “St. Anger” with a six or eight-part series culled from Berlinger and Sinofsky's footage. With the company footing the bill for the documentary, the film was theirs to do with they would.
"We were freaking out,” Berlinger remembers. “Elektra wanted to take this beautiful sincere footage and bastardize it."
By that time, the label had already invested some two million dollars in the project. While drummer Lars Ulrich admits that it could be seen as a conflict of interest when Metallica purchased the documentary, given that they themselves are its subject, he is adamant that they allowed the filmmakers full creative control. "We really let Bruce and Joe run with this thing and we tried to stay the f*ck out of the way as much as possible."
“This was being paid for by the record company,” Ulrich continues. “They felt that the movie should be used as a promotional tool for the “St. Anger” record when it came out and we felt that it should not be used as a promotional tool, because there was so much more there.”
“This had the potential to just go to a place that, maybe in our selfish way or maybe the way Joe and Bruce were planning it, to a place where very few films about rock 'n' roll bands have gone. We became very protective of the material and the potential film."
It was a strange confluence of events that put Berlinger, Sinofsky, and Metallica in this position. When the duo respon~sible for the acclaimed documentaries Brother's Keeper and Paradise Lost first came aboard, it was simply as hired guns for a glossy making-of video. The pair originally met Metallica and became friends after they asked to use the band's music for Paradise Lost.
"We always had a sincere interest in making a film about them as real people,” says Berlinger. “But they always – especially James who was like 'No f*cking way' – looked at us as if we were crazy." So when the opportunity arose to document the “St. Anger” recording sessions, no matter how narrow the parameters, Berlinger and Sinofsky jumped at it.
By the time the East Coast-based filmmakers flew to the San Francisco Bay Area in February 2001 to start work on the project, the genteel promotional product that Elektra Records no doubt envisioned was rapidly morphing into something else. In November 2001, as Ulrich remembers it, Metallica's then bass player Jason Newsted called a band meeting, specifically requesting that they hold it after the upcoming holidays.
Three years after the fact, the sarcastic venom still drips from Ulrich's voice as he relates the conversation. "He didn't – quote - want to meet before Christmas because he didn't want spoil anybody's Christmas,” the drummer recalls. “Gee, I wonder what the meeting's going to be about."
The unhappy Newsted went on to announce to his band mates in January 2001 that he was leaving the group. A month later, Berlinger and Sinofsky arrived on the scene to start filming and realized that a sea change had taken place.
"The first shoot was, like, whoa, we're in a therapy session with Metallica," Berlinger recalls.
Newsted's departure brought long-simmering tensions within Metallica to the surface, prompting them to book group sessions with therapist and ‘performance enhancement coach’ Phil Towle, which ran in tandem with the recording sessions. Given the narrow scope of Berlinger and Sinofsky's project, the band could have banned them from the therapy sessions. Instead, those meetings became the backbone of the film, continuing even during Hetfield's long absence, providing frank discussions where the band mates flay and dissect themselves and each other.
"They trusted us implicitly, which you don't usually get,” says Sinofsky admiringly. “We could never expect that, at this one time in their lives, which was the most vulnerable, those two-and-a-half or three years, that [could've been] the time that they could close up ranks, pull the curtain back, and not let anybody look.”
“It was such fertile territory for us to look into with no stumbling blocks, no edicts, no, 'You can't film this, leave the room.' Never. Nothing was taboo for us."
For the film~makers, there was also a side benefit they never anticipated. As shooting wore on, they found themselves responding to Towle's therapy along with the band. Although the tensions between the co-directors may not have been as critical as those between the members of Metallica, their first collaborative effort in two years still proved to be a difficult time.
Berlinger calls it a period of growing pains and maintains that it was in the lessons they learned filming the band's therapy sessions that the partners reconnected. "We were blocked with a whole bunch of negative issues between us,” he insists. “So to be sitting in a room with these people, who are by anyone's measure, incredibly successful, dealing with the same issues, creative issues, existential issues, the kinds of things I personally was going through, collaborative issues, the things that we were going through together, it was just incredibly inspiring to make this film. It gave our partnership a whole new lease on life."
Sinofsky concurs, adding, "In the therapy, we were listening to what Phil was telling them, we had never addressed these issues that we sort of swallowed. I don't want to be like Lars or James and hold it inside for 20 years, that would be a terrible mistake.”
“But we would come back to the hotel and we would talk out what had happened during the day, because it reminded us of a situation or something that was going on,” he adds. “There were a number of tears, I'm sure people heard us in the hallway screaming, but we cleared the air and we both grew exponentially because of it."
Berlinger and Sinofsky now admit they took a big risk when they kept filming after Hetfield had disappeared down the rehab rabbit hole. Neither the band nor the filmmakers knew when or even if the volatile singer would return.
In the meantime, continuing with the film meant that the partners couldn't take on new work and had to face long separations from their families back east. But much like an extended drum solo, Berlinger and Sinofsky felt they had no choice but to keep banging away at the project.
"It took a lot of courage to stick that out,” says Berlinger. “[Hetfield] might've come back and flushed the film down the toilet."
So, when Hetfield finally reappeared, the documentarians' hearts nearly stopped when he started talking about placing restrictions on them or perhaps scuttling the film altogether. To counter his objections, they showed him scenes from the film so that he would understand where they were going with it.
| "He watched what we did and how we did it and he understood, I think, where we were going with the movie,” Berlinger explains. “What he said to us was, 'Let's move ahead, but just go deeper, make it more honest, as truthful as possible.' He said, 'If you do that, then I'll never have an issue with you at all.'"
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With Hetfield's questions addressed, Berlinger and Sinofsky continued, capturing the final recording sessions for “St. Anger,” the hiring of Trujillo, a warm-up concert at San Quentin Prison, the band's return to arena touring, and the end of the group's therapy. After teetering over the ledge of disaster, Metallica roars back stronger than ever, prompting Berlinger to comment, "One of the reasons we stuck with it, I think, is that strangely enough, through the lens of the poster children of macho aggression, this is a very spiritual film about human growth and creative potential."
On the band's side, Hetfield now admits, "I'm really glad that that moment in our careers and as people is captured on film." Ulrich agrees, enthusing, "I'm so f*cking proud of this film."
| Then the charismatic drummer recalls a conversation he had with Berlinger during the editing of Some Kind of Monster: "Joe said the sort of the mantra of this film was that this is not really a film about Metallica. This is a film about relationships and the people that are having these relationships and having to live and breathe and play music in a band called Metallica." | |
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