Metallica: This Monster Lives (5 page)

As we filmed journalists speaking with members of Metallica about the
events of the last two years—Jason Newsted’s departure, the group therapy, James’s time in rehab—a lightbulb went on in my head: these people were asking about things that we had thoroughly covered in real time. With each question posed by a reporter, I kept saying to myself, “Man, we filmed that!” It immediately occurred to me that this footage of Metallica being interviewed by the rock press could be our framing device. We could open with the interviews, and then flash back to the beginning of the recording and therapy sessions, with more of the journalists’ questions interspersed throughout the film. The interviews would be the glue holding the movie together.

This simple idea was a real breakthrough for us. Besides giving our film a skeletal structure on which to build, the journalists’ questions allowed us to condense basic information that we wanted to convey to the audience without relying on narration (which we hate) or straight-to-camera talking-head interviews (which we try to use sparingly). I also liked that Metallica’s answers to the questions had a “hindsight is 20/20” quality that belied the depth and complexity of the events they described (and that we filmed). One theme that runs through all the films Bruce and I have made is that the reality of any given situation is much more nuanced and complex than the black-and-white media sound bites that you see on the news. So contrasting the somewhat perfunctory nature of the journalists’ questions and Metallica’s answers with the scenes as they unfolded was a perfect structural device.

Although this was one of the last ideas we had while filming
Some Kind of Monster,
I mention it now, at the beginning of my story, not just because this is how the film begins, but also because that epiphany quietly brought me full circle as a filmmaker. It allowed me to pay tribute to the people who got me started. In order to explain this, I need to give you a quick history of my professional life, rendered as briefly as I can, since I know this is not really what we’re here to talk about. Bear with me—I promise Metallica will reenter these pages very soon.

In 1986, at the age of 25, I was working at the big New York ad agency Ogilvy & Mather. My job was to produce TV commercials for American Express. I had recently returned from a two-year assignment at the agency’s Frankfurt office, which I’d gotten because I spoke fluent German. I came back to New York ostensibly to advance my advertising career, but I secretly wanted to get out of the ad business and into the film world. I didn’t have much of an idea of how I’d enter that world, or what I’d do when I got there, but I knew I couldn’t do it in Germany. One day, at a client meeting, I suggested hiring the
legendary documentary duo of Albert and David Maysles—otherwise known as the Maysles Brothers—to create documentary-style TV commercials for American Express. I’ve always been a huge fan of
Gimme Shelter,
the Maysles Brothers’ (and Charlotte Zwerin’s) landmark film about the Rolling Stones’ disastrous free concert at Altamont, so when we started tossing around ideas about how to make our American Express spots different, the Maysles Brothers and
Gimme Shelter
came to mind.

The Maysles Brothers were pioneers of “direct cinema,” the American counterpart to the French cinema verité movement. The basic idea of cinema verité is that a filmmaker can capture real-life drama as it unfolds in front of the camera, without scripts, sets, or narration. In an age when “reality TV” has invaded every nook and cranny of human experience, it may be hard to understand that
Monster
’s style is rooted in a cinematic revolution launched in the early ’60s. Although today pretty much anyone can grab a video camera (or webcam) and capture real life, this sort of filmic documentation wasn’t possible until the Maysles Brothers—along with Robert Drew, Robert Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, and Frederick Wiseman—devised ways to capture images and synchronous sound (that is, audio that is in synch with the images) in the field with portable, handheld equipment. (Did you ever wonder why old newsreel footage has no sound other than the narration and sound effects added during post-production?) The synch-sound breakthrough led to an even more important philosophical shift: a filmmaker could now make a documentary that transcended mere news reports or history lessons. The term “nonfiction feature film” was coined to describe this new world of storytelling.

Most TV commercials use actors and scripts that are approved by the client. My idea was to have Albert and David do unscripted, spontaneous commercials. This has become an increasingly common method for commercials over the past decade or so, but it was quite rare when we asked the Maysleses if they’d be interested in deploying their signature style for these American Express spots. We wanted them to do a variation of American Express’s long-standing “Do You Know Me?” campaign. Instead of tightly scripted commercials, we would make unscripted minidocumentaries about various famous and semifamous cardholders.

Albert and David liked the idea. During the production of these commercials, David (who suffered a fatal stroke a year later) and I hit it off. I told him that I wanted to get out of the ad business and into film production. He let me know that they’d love to get more commercial work to help fund their films. I
quit my job and went to work for the Maysles Brothers as their executive producer in charge of TV commercials. My job was to use my knowledge of the ad business to get commercial work for them. In the five years I worked at Maysles Films, Inc., I treated it like my own personal film school. I tried to learn everything I could about how documentaries were made. I became obsessed with verité filmmaking, from Wiseman’s
Titicut Follies
to the Maysles Brothers’ own
Salesman
and
Grey Gardens.
¹

It was during my tenure at Maysles Films that I met Bruce Sinofsky He had been working there for eight years as an editor of TV commercials. In 1989, I decided to make my first short film, “Outrageous Taxi Stories,” a humorous look at New York City cab drivers. I called in a lot of favors to get the film made with virtually no budget. I talked Bruce into editing the film for free. Bruce and I really bonded in the editing room—not just as friends but also as zealots of classic cinema verité films. In the editing room, we lamented the fact that Albert and David were so busy doing paying gigs that they were no longer making the kind of nonfiction feature films, like
Gimme Shelter,
that had made them famous (perhaps I was doing the world of cinema a disservice by doing too good a job at getting the Maysleses commercial work). We were also inspired by Errol Morris’s
The Thin Blue Line,
which had just been released theatrically Although Morris’s film was not a verité film (because it relied heavily on dramatic re-creations), we were excited that people were starting to go to the theater to see documentaries, a rare occurrence in those days. (Michael Moore’s
Roger & Me
wouldn’t appear for another year.) Bruce and I made a pact to find a human drama to film in the spirit of the classic ’60s verité films like
Salesman
and
Gimme Shelter,
and vowed to get it released in movie theaters.

It took us almost a year to find the right story. One morning in June 1990, I noticed an article in
The New York Times
about Delbert Ward, a barely literate elderly man in upstate New York who was accused of murdering his ailing brother, Bill. The Wards seemed like they were from another era. Bill and Delbert lived with their two other brothers Roscoe and Lyman, in a dilapidated shack with no running water or heat, except for a portable kerosene stove, and they never changed their clothes. Delbert, who had an IQ of 72, had allegedly smothered Bill with a pillow in the bed that they shared. The town was rallying to Delbert’s defense, even raising the money for him to fight the charges, which grew to include a bizarre theory of incest gone bad. The townspeople believed Delbert, with his low IQ, had been coerced into signing a false confession. As soon as I read the article, I knew this was the story we had been waiting for.

When Bruce got to work that morning, he burst into my office, excitedly waving the same article in my face. He had read the piece that morning and had come to the same conclusion. Before we had a time to change our minds (and encouraged by the positive reception that “Outrageous Taxi Stories” had received from film festivals during the past year), we threw ourselves into making what would eventually be
Brother’s Keeper.
A few days later, with no budget and little filmmaking experience, we drove four hours to the tiny town of Munnsville to see if there was a film there waiting to be made. We spent a year shooting
Brother’s Keeper,
holding down our full-time jobs at Maysles Films while spending weekends in Munnsville, often crashing on the floor of people’s homes (or, sometimes, their incredibly frigid cabins). We maxed out a dozen credit cards between us and took out second mortgages on our homes to get the film in the can. Just as the case was going to trial and we had run out of money, the now defunct PBS series
American Playhouse
came to our rescue, giving us $400,000 in funding to complete the film. We quit our jobs at Maysles Films and set up our own production company Creative Thinking International. With real money from a real broadcaster, we were able to film the trial, giving us the story arc and climax we needed.

Bruce and I took turns operating the second camera. Our constant use of two cameras allowed us to get true reaction shots. (Courtesy of Annamaria DiSanto)

Making
Brother’s Keeper
turned out to be quite a Cinderella story for us. The film won the Audience Award at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. It also garnered Best Documentary honors from the Directors Guild of America, the National Board of Review, and the New York Film Critics Circle. Comparing the film to “fine fiction,” the late Vincent Canby of
The New York Times
called
Brother’s Keeper
“a remarkably rich portrait of a man in the context of his family, his community, the law, and even the seasons.” As budding documentary filmmakers who considered ourselves storytellers as much as journalists, there was no higher compliment.

Bruce and I were now officially documentarians by profession. As much as we loved the acclaim for
Brother’s Keeper,
I think what really hooked us was the adventure of capturing the unknown. Verité filmmaking requires a huge leap of faith: following a story as it unfolds means not knowing how—or even if—the story will end. The payoff isn’t just a compelling story; a great verité film reveals larger emotional truths about the human condition that are rarely the domain of straightforward news reports or historical documentaries.

Gimme Shelter,
for instance, is so much more than just a brilliant concert film that captured the Stones in peak form. The Maysles Brothers followed the Stones on their 1969 American tour as it led up to the Altamont concert. On the advice of the Grateful Dead, the Stones hired the Hells Angels motorcycle gang to provide security This was a tragic mistake. The bikers had no idea how to handle the job. During the opening sets by the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Jefferson Airplane, the Angels—strung out on acid, speed, and who knows what else—began beating up people in the crowd. By the time the Stones went on, things were out of control. “People, people,” Mick Jagger implored the crowd, “who’s fighting, and what for?” But it was too late. By the time the show was over, four people were dead. One of them was stabbed by an Angel, caught on film by the Maysleses’ cameras. In part due to the film, Altamont became legendary as a symbol of the flameout of the ’60s utopian dream. Through a keen eye and a groundbreaking editing technique, the film gives a sense of the context this all occurred in—the tumultuous period that led up to the band’s ill-fated attempt at a hippie utopia. The point was not merely to “let the music speak for itself,” which seems to be the point of a typical rock concert film, but to show what this music—how it was performed and how it was received—revealed about the environment in which it was created and consumed.

Some Kind of Monster
allowed us to pay subtle tribute to the people who got us started in the business. Our film really is an homage to
Gimme Shelter.
Just as
Gimme Shelter
was originally intended to be just a document of the Stones’ 1969 American tour,
Monster
began as a simple making-of-an-album promo film. Like
Gimme Shelter, Monster
transcends its putative subject by providing a window into our times. As the critic Rob Nelson put it,
Monster
tackles “the incestuous relationship between psychology and creativity.” If
Gimme Shelter
is about the death of a mass movement’s communal dream,
Monster
is about struggling to maintain a similar dream within the microcosmic context of our families and loved ones. Put it this way: Can you imagine a film about a metal band undergoing group therapy appearing thirty years ago? Or even ten years ago?