Kirk Hammett is waiting for Martin Scorsese or David Cronenberg to make film based off a Metallica album

Posted by on April 20, 2017

Metallica’s latest album Hardwired to Self-Destruct was recently certified platinum by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) for selling at least 1,000,000 copies. When the album was first released, it sold  291,000 copies and after tickets went on sale for their North American tour, it jumped to #2 on Billboard charts and sold another 100,000 copies a week later.

Guitarist Kirk Hammett was recently interviewed by Andy Hall of the Des Moines, Iowa radio station Lazer 103.3 and they reflected on the album’s overall success. Asked about who got the ball rolling:

“That would be Lars, he’s the guy. He kind of gets the ball rolling. I can only speak for myself, I’m a major procrastinator and then something clicks inside of me that goes from major procrastination to major determination. And that happens with all of us. Once we get the ball rolling and we get momentum, that momentum builds over the course of months. The next thing we know, we have a batch of songs. We’re putting the finishing touches on them and we have a clearer picture of what the album sounds like, looks like, the tone of the album. It’s all about getting the ball rolling and then getting momentum behind the ball. That’s what’s really important.”

The conversation continued discussing “Hardwired” being their shortest track since “Motorbreath” off of their 1983 debut Kill ‘Em All. Later, Lazer discussed the band releasing a music video for each song leading up to the album’s release and asked Hammett if he was happy about its turn out. Turns out he was: 

“Oh, yeah. Some of the videos that we made, I think, are some of the best videos we’ve ever made. The video for ‘Dream No More’, I think, is just totally amazing and reminds me of a Kenneth Anger film that was filmed in maybe the ’50s or ’60s. From an artistic point of view, I think it’s really cool. And also, it really gives us an knee up on all the situations where a band puts out a new album and someone hears a track, a new track, and decides, ‘Oh, I’m gonna make a YouTube video around this track,’ and then, all of a sudden that becomes the predominant YouTube video for that song. That happens; that’s a pretty common thing that happens in the YouTube world, and we were aware of that. And so we wanted to take matters into our own hands and make sure that the video that we made for the song was the predominant video that everyone saw for that song, rather than someone else’s vision of the song itself.”

Hammett was also asked if there were any older Metallica songs that he thought would make cool videos for:

“It’s interesting that you say that, because it’s so much more inexpensive now, it’s so much cheaper now, to make videos. It’s crazy how much cheaper it is. Okay, I’ll go back to 1988. The ‘One’ video cost us a lot of money — six figures — and we were just blown away by the cost. You couldn’t figure it out, why it would cost so much. Okay, so you jump to 2016, 2017, a typical video that we made for ‘Hardwired’ nowadays cost between fifteen to twenty grand. It’s totally amazing how much cheaper it is. And a lot of that is because of digital technology, things are smaller, things are more lightweight, more stealth. You can even use your iPhone to make a video if you really wanted to. Which leads me to the fact that since videos are so inexpensive these days, it would be interesting for us if we just retroactively decide to make a video for a track that we never made a video for — say, ‘Carpe Diem Baby’ off ‘Reload’. It’s a possibility these days, because it’s so cheap to make videos. I don’t know if we would actually find the inspiration to do something like that, but who knows? Maybe people will start doing retroactive videos.”

Lazer chimed in:

“You could make a short film out of your albums as a whole. You could do a short film and it’s Master of Puppets and it tells a story like the Wall did.”

Hammett replied:

“That’s what we’re waiting for. We’re waiting for Martin Scorsese or David Cronenberg or someone to call us up and say ‘hey we have this crazy idea, what do you think?’”

Check out the full interview below:

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