While the rock biopic trend continues with Queen‘s Bohemian Rhapsody, Elton John‘s Rocketman and Mötley Crüe‘s The Dirt, plus the upcoming Ozzy Osbourne movie, Lars Ulrich isn’t exactly psyched about the idea of a Metallica film.
“The biopic thing, I think that’s more of a cautionary tale,” Ulrich tells Collider. “I’m not sold on the idea.”
Ulrich likens making a biopic to writing an autobiography, which the drummer feels hinges on being “completely truthful.”
“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,” Ulrich says. “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.”
Metallica has ventured into film before with their infamous 2004 documentary Some Kind of Monster and the 2013 movie Metallica: Through the Never, which blended live concert footage with an original narrative.
“I would love to throw myself out into what Metallica would look like in the medium of film,” Ulrich says. “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.”
He adds, “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.”
By Josh Johnson
Copyright © 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
