METALLICA's LARS ULRICH Reflects On 'Some Kind Of Monster' Documentary: It 'Became A Hit Or Go-To Movie Within The Mental Health Community'

On March 11, METALLICA‘s Lars Ulrich joined Apple Music‘s global creative director and Apple Music 1 lead anchor Zane Lowe at SXSW (South By Southwest) conference and festivals for a session at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas titled “Breaking The Fourth Wall”. Lars and Zane explored how the band is continuing to use revolutionary technology to connect more deeply with fans, bringing them truly inside their dynamic live performance. In this candid chat, attendees heard from Lars how METALLICA has leaned into technology throughout their career to the present day, to reinvent storytelling and redefine the fan experience that ultimately breaks the fourth wall.

During the chat, Lars talked about METALLICA‘s 2004 documentary “Some Kind Of Monster”, which ended up becoming an honest examination of one of the world’s most successful heavy metal bands. Originally intended to be a promotional video paid for by Elektra Records to document the members of METALLICA going back into the studio for the first time in five years, “Some Kind Of Monster” ended up following METALLICA through the three most turbulent years of their long career, during which they battled through addiction, lineup changes, fan backlash, personal turmoil and the near-disintegration of the group during the making of their “St. Anger” album.

After Lowe noted that “Some Kind Of Monster” brought fans “closer” to METALLICA, Lars said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Some say too close [laughs] along the way. I remember when the movie came out [in] 2004, there was not a lot of reality TV at the time. There was not a lot of, of that economy and the creator economy and all these different things. It was like a different thing at the time.

“I don’t know if you guys know this, but originally it started out as a… We were making a new record, and these wonderful filmmakers who had done a movie called ‘Paradise Lost’, which was absolutely groundbreaking and phenomenal about these hard rock kids that were in all sorts of trouble in Arkansas and getting mixed in and accused of murders and all this crazy stuff,” he explained. “Anyway, we provided our music for the soundtracks and we got a relationship with these filmmakers. We asked ’em to come in and film us making the next METALLICA record, but our intent was to do something along the… Remember the Ginsu knives and all those like late-night infomercials: ‘But you also get another one and then you get another one and then you get six more Ginsu knives. And if you order before midnight, then…’, all that shit. So that was a thing at the time. ‘So the new album, if you order the new album before midnight…’ Anyway, so they came in to film the process of making the next record, and then all hell broke loose and meltdowns. And we kept filming, and then they filmed all the crazy shit that happened. And then the record company at the time who was financing the filming said, ‘Wait a minute. What is this?’ And so we had a conversation with the filmmakers and we said, ‘We trust you guys. If there is the film in here that you still envision, why don’t we buy the rights to the movie from the record company?’ So, no disrespect to the record company, but we got them out. And then we controlled it. We gave it to the filmmakers, and then they turned that into ‘Some Kind Of Monster’. And we were game for it. We didn’t exactly know how it was gonna play out… It was all about trust, trusting the filmmakers. And then it became that movie, and we kind of had to sit there and go, like, ‘Holy shit. That’s a lot of access and a lot of transparency.’ But we had sort of gone along for the dare, and so we figured that we should stick with it.”

Regarding how “Some Kind Of Monster” was received at the time of its release, Lars said: “A lot of music fans and a lot of music critics felt that maybe it was too much of a peek behind the curtain and there were things in there that maybe fans shouldn’t see. But in the film world, in the film community, it was received really, really well, really positively and got glowing reviews, because as a film, there was this natural dramatic arc to… I don’t need to go into the details of it. Documentaries don’t always have dramatic arcs to them, and this film kind of had this organic thing that played out… Subsequently it became a hit within the movie community. It kind of became a hit or go-to movie within the mental health community and for a lot of psychologists and psychiatric sort of approaches and in the spirit of team building and seeing how teams sort of work under pressures, under creative pressures and so on. And I think eventually it kind of came around to the music fans and the music community to appreciate that kind of unprecedented — at that time — access to the inner workings of a band and the creative processes and all the ups and downs that human beings who play music go through in a collective setting at that point in their career. And so thank God that we had, I guess, the belief in the material and the belief certainly in Joe [Berlinger] and Bruce [Sinofsky], our directors, to hand them the project and say, ‘Do with this what you like. We trust you.'”

While initially helping METALLICA towards restoring band harmony, “Some Kind Of Monster” shows “performance coach” Phil Towle, a former psychotherapist who was brought into the picture in January 2001 to help James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett and Ulrich repair their relationship with then-METALLICA bassist Jason Newsted, attempting to increasingly insert himself into the band’s creative process, submitting lyrics for the album and even attempting to join them on the road.

“The presence of the cameras helped keep the process on track,” Ulrich told The Wrap in a 2014 interview. “There was another set of eyes and ears there. Sometimes when somebody else is in the room, you watch your p’s and q’s a little more. I think it kept the whole thing from derailing in some peculiar way.

“We were at a crossroads,” Ulrich added. “We had been really good at being able to compartmentalize a lot of this stuff. Suppress it with drinking or other extravagances. This was the first time we had to talk to each other, get to know each other and work stuff out … The cameras were there catching all of it.”

“Some Kind Of Monster” also documented Hetfield‘s spiral into alcoholism and decision to check himself into a rehab facility. Hetfield‘s re-emergence from rehab is when the film really gets into gear, with the chief worry in his mind whether or not he could do METALLICA sober.

“Hetfield went away, but we said, ‘Why don’t we keep filming? Because we think it’s interesting,'” Ulrich said. “We said, ‘We trust you guys.’ And they ended up being another set of eyes and ears in those rooms for the next 18 months as we dealt with the aftermath of Hetfield going away and all of the subsequent domino issues that came in the wake of that.”

According to Ulrich, METALLICA had no idea how fans would respond to seeing footage of the band’s touchy-feeling therapy sessions that ultimately healed the group and kept METALLICA from splitting up.

“As much as you want to control how people react, there are always things that throw you for a loop,” Ulrich explained. “The fact that the music world was a little bewildered by it and the fact that the movie world sort of embraced the film was not something we would’ve predicted.”

METALLICA released a tenth-anniversary two-disc Blu-ray edition of “Some Kind Of Monster” in November 2014. The new edition of the film was made available digitally and via VOD for the first time. It also contained a new bonus feature, “Metallica: This Monster Lives”, a 25-minute follow-up segment filmed at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival during the premiere of the band’s second film, “Metallica Through The Never”. The segment featured interview footage with the band and Berlinger and Sinofsky in which they all looked back at the decade since the release of the film.