Filmmaker: 'METALLICA Are Anything But Greedy'

In a brand-new interview with The Onion A.V. Club, Joe Berlinger, one of the filmmakers behind the METALLICA documentary "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster" spoke about Lars Ulrich's war with Napster. "I gotta be honest with you," Berlinger said. "First of all, I think Lars unfairly has a reputation for being a greedy-motherfucker rock star. It is not about the money. These guys, first of all, were incredibly generous with us. This is a long way of answering the Napster thing, but these guys are anything but greedy, and they don't deserve that reputation. When we first started making this film, it was classified as some sort of promotional thing, and nobody knew what it was going to be. But Elektra [Records] was paying the bill. The price tag started escalating, because Lars — and everyone, but especially Lars — kept saying, 'Keep filming, keep filming, even though Hetfield's away, because we're on to something, let's not stop filming.' When the band came back and was making music together, Elektra came swooping in. We kept saying that this was much more special than just a promo film, and Elektra said, 'We agree. It is more special. We want to take your guy's footage and turn it into an Ozzy-style reality-TV series — we'll air eight episodes, and the last episode will air the day the album drops in June.' We were horrified to think that this was going to be turned into that, when it had so much more potential. Without missing a beat, the band stood up to their record company and said, 'Fuck you, Elektra. Here's $4 million, go away. We're now paying for this. We believe in these guys, and we want them to make the movie that they want to make.' That is a hugely risky proposition that they undertook." Read the entire interview here.