Metallica: This Monster Lives Read Online Free PDF

for each other, and our common goals. We’re channeling that huge force into the music, and just making, you know, a beautiful, beautiful thing. I think it’s gonna have a huge voice, a bigger voice than ever, because it’s gonna be all of us singing, man.
    PHIL: Oh, wow!
    KIRK: It’s gonna be like a huge choir.
    JAMES: Got enough mics for that?
     
    Some Kind of Monster begins almost where it ends. Before the opening credits, we see members of the international rock press file into HQ, Metallica’s recording studio, in the spring of 2003 to preview their new album, St. Anger, on the eve of its release. We then see a montage of these journalists interviewing the band about the events of the previous two years. The Metallica guys look nervous, perhaps even a little shell-shocked. This was their return to the public eye, after two harrowing years of recording the album. It had been six years—since the release of Reload —since they’d done this sort of press juggernaut. Two hours and twenty minutes later, the film ends just a few weeks after this rock-critic confab, just as St. Anger is coming out, with the band taking the stage for the first leg of their Summer Sanitarium tour in support of the new album. The body of the film, then, is a series of flashbacks to the turbulent two years leading up to the birth of St. Anger.
    From a narrative standpoint, this was a bigger decision than it might seem on the surface. Much of the dramatic tension in the film revolves around whether or not the band will get it together to make the album, and whether they’ll implode in the process. By opening with Metallica talking about St. Anger, we risked killing much of the suspense by telling the viewer that the band survived to complete the album. We decided to take that risk because we knew that much of the initial audience for Some Kind of Monster would be Metallica fans. These people would all know about St. Anger, and many would even be familiar with the album’s backstory including James’s rehab stint and the band’s lengthy hiatus. Because we had captured so much human drama, we decided it was okay to telegraph the ending. The challenge was creating suspense that wasn’t built around what happened, but how it happened and why.
    When we made this decision in the spring of 2003, after two years of filming, we still had only a vague idea of how we would structure our material. I had been advocating some sort of flashback approach, but we weren’t sure how to pull it off. We talked about using the summer tour as the framing device of the film, flashing back to the events leading up to it. The problem with that idea, however, was that we really did not want to make a concert film. The primary experience of a concert is seeing a live band in the flesh; the primary experience of a film is being immersed in the story. A concert film really is the worst of both worlds. Besides, our material was too intimate, and our access too unusual, to waste time on concert sequences. So we were a little stumped.
    As with many aspects of this film, the solution to the structuring problem arose spontaneously. When we heard that rock journalists from around the world would be converging at Metallica’s studio to interview the band, we thought we’d film some of these interviews for a scene that would hint at the business machine kicking into gear as St. Anger ’s release date neared. We envisioned a montage sequence depicting the final weeks of frantic activity, from package design to music videos to touring arrangements. (We did create such a montage but never used it in the finished film.)
    As we filmed journalists speaking with members of Metallica about theevents 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,