Smells like hard work
It took filmmaker Brett Morgen eight year’s labour to compile his documentary about Kurt Cobain, writes James Croot.
DESCRIBED BY Rolling Stone magazine as ‘‘the unfiltered Kurt Cobain experience’’, US director Brett Morgan’s new film is not your typical music documentary.
Screening in select New Zealand cinemas for a limited time from May 7, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck is less pointy-headed pontificating about the musician’s craft and reasons for his early demise, and more a piecing together of the Nirvana frontman’s short life via his art.
‘‘ Montage of Heck is not something that has a lot of brethren in the music doco genre. It’s much closer in spirit to [Richard Linklater’s] Boyhood than The Last Waltz,’’ the New York-based filmmaker, whose previous credits include The Kid Stays in the Picture and the ESPN documentary June 17, 1994, says down the phoneline from Amsterdam where he’s currently promoting the movie.
That Boyhood comparison also applies to the length of time the Cobain-family approved Montage has taken, from initial concept to finished product. ‘‘Someone pointed out to me that I’ve spent almost a third of Kurt’s life (81⁄ years) trying to bring this story to the screen. When I started work on this film, I had a four-year-old, two-year-old and my third child wasn’t born. They’re now 12, 10 and 7. I’ve raised a family. It is been quite a haul.’’
Featuring candid interviews with most of the not-exactly tightknit Cobain clan, Montage’s development was really only made possible thanks to the involvement of Kurt Cobain’s daughter Frances Bean as executive producer. ‘‘Once she came onboard everyone else came along,’’ Morgen says. That included allowing Morgen to gain access to a vast amount of ephemera from Cobain’s childhood, including his journals, paintings and home movies, some which had never been seen publicly before. But while Morgen says he expected to find plenty of examples of Cobain’s art, what surprised him was the ‘‘treasure chest’’ of sound recordings the family had kept. ‘‘There was a box that contained 200 hours of audio that became the foundation for the film. In amongst that I found the score for the film, Kurt’s narration and most of the sound design elements.’’ Intent on not shooting any interviews until he had a first cut completed, Morgen spent two months layering audio with just a black screen. ‘‘I lived with that for a while and would just sit there in dark playing with it. I was so reticent to cut any visuals in and when I tried putting in his monkeys or artefacts it just felt incongruous, so we decided to simply animate some sequences so we could embrace the stories he was telling via audio.’’
A firm believer that it was Cobain’s ability to articulate his experience of life in a way that really resonated with people, Morgen says he was undeterred that Cobain had been the subject of previous documentaries.
‘‘There have been a lot of them around the fringes, but none around the very reason we talk about Kurt – his art and music. If someone had done another movie with the same material I had, I wouldn’t have done this.’’
He admits there were moments when the film wasn’t coming together as smoothly as he would have hoped, but the fear of someone else coming in and doing a better job kept him on track.‘‘That would have been debilitating. It also wouldn’t be in my nature to walk away. I’m a fighter and I like to embrace and welcome challenges.’’ Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (M) screens at selected cinemas across New Zealand for a limited time from May 7.