In a new interview with Collider, Lars Ulrich was asked whom he would like to see play him in a hypothetical METALLICA biopic. He laughed and said: “Yeah, well, they’d need a five-foot-seven, small, balding… I mean, we sort of joke about this all the time. We used to have kind of the standard answer back in the day, just because you’d get asked that every three months in interviews. James Spader would play me, the Cowardly Lion from ‘The Wizard Of Oz’ would play [James] Hetfield, and we’d joke about how Carlos Santana would play Kirk [Hammett]. We had all kinds of fun, but the question would beckon, what time period are we talking? Is it METALLICA in their youthful times, or now? There’s so many incredibly talented people out there, and it’s incredible how some actors can just transform. I think what Taron [Egerton] did as Elton John stands out as just being incredible casting, an incredible fit.
“But the biopic thing, I think that’s more of a cautionary tale, which kind of falls in under the whole thing with autobiographies. I’m not sold on the idea. The idea of writing an autobiography I think is challenging, because I think you would have to be completely truthful, and to be 100 percent truthful, it’s hard to tell the stories without bringing other people into it, and then you sort of get into that whole thing where maybe the protagonist in that particular story wouldn’t want the story told. So, to me, it’s kind of a dilemma of, these stories deserve the truth if you’re going to talk about them, but at the same time, you can’t take for granted that everybody who’s involved in those stories wants those stories out there.
“It’s a little bit like, you and I take a picture together, and then I put it up on my social media without asking you. So there’s something about that I haven’t quite figured out yet, but obviously as a creative undertaking, I would love to throw myself out into what METALLICA would look like in the medium of film. That’s one of the main reasons we did ‘Through The Never’ six or seven years ago, but if it’s going to be more of autobiography, I think that’s going to be way more challenging because there’s so many biopics where you kind of sit and roll your eyes. I guess somewhere I’m just kind of a stickler for the truth, for some reason, so if you’re not gonna tell the truth, then maybe you shouldn’t say anything at all. That’s where it gets a little complicated for me, but let’s see how it plays out.”
METALLICA‘s 2004 documentary, “Some Kind Of Monster”, followed the band 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 while making their “St. Anger” album. The band’s second film, 2013’s “Through The Never”, weaved a postapocalyptic narrative (featuring the actor Dane DeHaan) through METALLICA concert footage.
Late last month, METALLICA broadcast a show to hundreds of drive-in and outdoor theaters across the U.S. and Canada, as part of the “Encore Drive-In Nights” series. The concert was filmed nearly three weeks earlier, on August 10, at the Gundlach Bundschu winery, about a 30-minute car ride from the band’s headquarters in San Rafael, California, and was subsequently edited and mixed by the band’s award-winning production team to the highest standards possible.
