And Finally

Metallica turned down Kill Bill soundtrack, Ulrich reveals

By | Published on Tuesday 18 October 2011

Metallica

Lars Ulrich turned down the chance for Metallica to soundtrack Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’ movies, the drummer has revealed in a new column for Newsweek, a decision he calls “probably the single biggest mistake I’ve made in the creative department”.

He explains: “One of the most surreal 30 minutes of my life was having QT six inches from my face, eyes dancing, intensely animated, explaining in intricate detail how he had written and choreographed the two main fight scenes in the film to the Metallica songs ‘Enter Sandman’ and ‘Sad But True’. Fists would impact faces on accents. Kicks would land on cymbal hits. Bodies would twirl along with the rhythm of the music. Tarantino’s next-level movie magic married to Metallica music, all turned up to eleven”.

However, he goes on to say that once he’d received “all 180 pages” of the script he “wasn’t capable of appreciating its brilliance”.

“Page by page, I realised that most of this was written in a language that was outside of my realm of understanding”, he says. “I had never encountered a narrative like this, set in, to me, a very foreign culture of martial arts and Asian myths. I just couldn’t wrap my thick Danish head around it … Then I started overthinking it. ‘Do it, do it’, my gut screamed, but my head was confused. Cautious. I experienced a rare inability to pull the trigger”.

Finally, he says: “Over the next few weeks the whole thing fizzled out as I continued not trusting my instincts. In the end, I never got back to him. Probably the single biggest mistake I’ve made in the creative department”.

Read Ulrich’s article in full here.



READ MORE ABOUT: | |