Inside The Documentary That Turned Metallica Into Mental Health Trailblazers

In March 2003, I was called to Northern California for an exclusive interview with Metallica. It's been more than two years since the world's best-selling metal band appeared in the media for a Playboy article, and the tensions and rifts that threaten their existence are already starting to show. In the months that followed, the task of completing the long-awaited new album became increasingly complicated by personal differences and volcanic eruptions.

As I nervously walked the corridors of the group's headquarters in San Rafael, I was approached by a man who introduced himself as Joe Berlinger . For the past two years, I'm told, he and co-director Bruce Sinofsky have been shooting the set for the project, which has yet to be finalized. He said it could be an Osbourne-style series that was popular at the time. Then it was whispered to me that in an ideal world the tape would become artistic. I was asked if I would agree to have my interview filmed by a three-person camera crew. "A feature film, huh?" – I said, raising my eyebrows, my voice went up a few notches. - And I will be there too? Berlinger thinks so, yes.

This week, the film celebrates ^{the 20th} anniversary of its public premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. But even though it went on for over two hours, not a single Metallica photo captured my presence. In retrospect, it was probably unwise of me to spend every second of every day telling everyone I knew, and many strangers, that I would be playing a major role in an upcoming production. To wake up a tired band.

To Metallica's credit, despite having to pay for the films themselves, spending $4.3 million to acquire the rights from their record label Elektra in the first place, the band duly handed over full editorial control. Berlinger and Sinofsky. Over 715 days of shooting, the filmmakers amassed 1,602 hours of footage, plus seven miles of DAT footage. A total of 428 people were filmed signing permission forms for their photos to be used in the film. I guess I can at least take solace in the fact that I'm the only aspiring movie star left on the hallway floor.

Some monsters can tell their stories with such skill that it makes my articles look like contemplative snapshots in the dark, amplifying the ugliness of my damaged ego. But in reality, when Metallica went to the press to talk about St Anger, an album they had been working on for years, the band had already become their best-selling new album. Of course, they detail the difficulties and delays, but the main thing they want to convey is that things are better now. And since the standard of music journalism is to focus on the positive, that's enough for a lot of people.

When I went to San Francisco, I learned that the band had been sailing their ship without a guitarist for two years after Jason Newsted left in 2001. I knew that lead singer and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield had checked into rehab. I sense a very complex relationship between drummer Lars Ulrich (whose vision and leadership in and out of the studio paved the way for global dominance) and Hetfield (the man responsible for many of the riffs that make up their backbone). Metallica song is playing). No doubt I was right in assuming that I already had the outlines of the feature film I wanted to write. But I barely know half of it.

The film turned out to be a vehicle to tell the bittersweet story of Metallica's descent into mass madness. It shows their dysfunction relentlessly, with searing clarity. When the band's relationship was at its lowest ebb, Ulrich and guitarist Kirk Hammett left the camera, and James Hetfield went to rehab for several months, allowing many viewers to see just how close the union really was. Disappears. I'm going. Twenty years later, the question remains: How did he achieve this?

How could a band that revolutionized the heavy music scene more than any other suddenly enlist the help of Phil Towell, a friendly performance coach hired for $50,000 a month to help his members bond? How are adults? "I'm asking questions. What do Metallica need now and how can I help them achieve what they need now," Towell said in 2016. “Is there progress tomorrow? In its complexity, the Metallica situation is unlike anything I've seen before or since. And I don't expect to see anything like that again."

It's bad, it's good. "I've been in Metallica since I was 19, which would be a very unusual environment for someone with my personality," Hetfield told me during my trip to the band's headquarters. "It's a very intense environment. It's easy to find that you don't know how to live outside of that environment, which is what happened to me. I didn't know anything about life. I haven't known that since I was 19. I can live my life is different than a band, which is very excessive and very intense.

Given that my interview with James Hetfield took place in a room whose walls were painted with cartoon images of racing cars and their drivers, this halting of events is not surprising. However, the selfishness of it all amazes me. Hatfield does what he wants, when he wants and with whom he wants. Something has to give. His decision to prefer a hunting trip to Siberia (where vodka was part of the breakfast menu) over celebrating his son's first and second birthdays got him kicked out of the house. The catalyst for change has finally arrived.

"Finally my wife said to me, 'I'm not one of your fans on the street. Go away,'” he recalls. During his recovery, he learned the importance of priorities. He said, "I really had to believe that I would survive without Metallica and that my health, well-being and family were the most important things...Basically, I knew that [the band] was my passion." I would no longer let it control me in my thoughts and in my reality. "It's taken a while to get to this point and I can't go back until I get there."

But while the rock star's predicament over his personal habits is now well-documented, the band's desire to rev the engine wasn't all it was cracked up to be. When he eventually returned to the band, Hetfield insisted that the band only work four hours a day so he could spend more time at home. Well, good. But his subsequent request that the rest of the group agree not to listen to the results of their work during the afternoon in his absence caused confusion. At times, Some Kind Of Monster asks the viewer to choose between Ulrich's and Hatfield's teams. Arguably, the film is most interesting when it explores the limits of the drummer's tolerance for working practices that I believe were detrimental to the band and his work.

"I don't understand who you are," Ulrich tells Hatfield in a key scene of the film. “All these rules and regulations, man. This is one hell of a rock and roll band. I don't want any rules... I don't understand the [Recovery] program. I don't understand any of this. " Then the drummer uttered the sentence of destruction so quietly that ripples rippled through the water. "Now I realize that I hardly knew you before," he said.

In fact, it's no surprise that the band members are crushed by the weight of their work. In the 1980s, Metallica's early mix of street crime and music attracted a large following who became soldiers in a civil war against the forces of hair and pop metal. When they finally released their self-titled LP, known to all as The Black Album, which has sold over 36 million copies to date, they did so with an authority that made the mainstream heavier and darker. The cover, with the bold and justified slogan "Birth of the School of Metallica Death", is a testament to their status as gods.

But if their music is groundbreaking work, so are some of Monster's videos. Ten years after Kurt Cobain's suicide, Metallica proved that happiness doesn't always come from commercial success, allowing Joel Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky to tell the story of a band whose success in their quest for world domination drove them crazy. Some Kind Of Monster deserves praise for being the first direct documentation of collective and individual mental illness. These are the first words in the conversations of musicians, which have become commonplace today.

"He [James Hetfield] was a shining example of mental health," Phil Towell told me. "We have to remember that this was a time when people didn't admit that they had started such intensive treatment. Of course, there were rehabilitation centers where people stopped drinking and taking drugs, but that was all that was accepted. James went to rehab before learn how to be a different person. Good guy, good guy... He shows it to people. 'Hey, if I can admit these things and get help for them, why can't you?'

Of course, not everyone in the metal world sees the band's decision to shine a light on its darkest crevices as an honorable act. "I'm a Metallica fan [but] I don't want them to go to therapy," says Slayer guitarist Kerry King. “I'm not going to watch this movie because I don't want to think like that. I want to think about [songs like] f-king Battery and Damage Inc. and Ride the Lightning. I don't want to. Look at those damn weak old men who can't drink another cocktail because they're afraid of what they're going to become. Hell."

However, the film was a huge success. With its ability to command the attention and respect of people who not only didn't like Metallica, or at least thought they didn't, but also suspected that metal itself was a worthless subculture, Some Kind Of Monster reaped the rewards. Otherwise, the gift is not available. The film overnight changed the perception of its subject in the eyes of outsiders. The fact that the band was more than just cheap entertainment was finally accepted by those who previously considered Metallica to be just a bow.

Six months before the film's release, in the summer of 2003, I was sent to Dallas to assess whether the group's still fragile infrastructure could withstand the pressure of the streets. In order for James Hetfield to learn to operate in an environment that caused him endless pain, Metallica played three consecutive stadium concerts each week of their North American tour before returning home on a private jet for a four-day vacation. Twenty-one years later, the question of balance remains. Today, during the tour, the band takes a break every two or three weeks.

At Texas Stadium, minutes before going on stage, I saw Metallica revving their engines and the Battery playing in the Dallas Cowboys locker room. Despite his painful rebirth, his anger remained. By the end of the evening, James Hatfield had returned to his home in the suburbs of San Francisco.

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Metallica - The Unnamed Feeling (Official Music Video)