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COBAIN: MONTAGE OF HECK
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don’t know if Mick Jagger would know
who
Speed Racer
and
H.R. Pufnstuf
are,
but when I saw those in Kurt’s drawings,
I was filled with joy. The scene in Tracy’s
house, where Kurt is writing all of his
music, that’s a seven-minute sequence
of the film in which you never see a
photograph of Kurt, nor any film footage
of Kurt, yet you feel... I feel closer to him
in that sequence than anywhere else in
the movie, and that scene’s constructed
over the course of two months of cutting
nothing but audio. So we belt out this
audio montage and for the longest time
it was just against black. I didn’t want to
animate it because I like just sitting in a
dark room listening to it; I felt so close to
Kurt in those moments because they’re so
unfiltered and they’re so intimate, and he
seems so happy. It’s more exciting to me
as a filmmaker to cut audio first and then
explore the canvas and explore how we
can bring it to life visually and embellish it
and create this immersive experience. So
the challenge of this film was not choosing
what to see, it was really trying to figure
out how to create what to show.
When did the more crucial elements of
the story reveal themselves?
I listened to a story of Kurt talking about
losing his virginity; suddenly it was like the
end of
The Usual Suspects
: everything
came into focus. That word, ‘ridicule’ – ‘I
couldn’t handle the ridicule so I went
down to the train tracks’ – everywhere
I looked, it started to emerge.
Floyd the
Barber
: “I was shamed/I was shamed/I
was shamed.” Kurt was ashamed by the
divorce, really. Then the narrative – that
subtext – really came into focus. The first
cut of the movie, the first real
edit of this movie, was the
movie that we did. There was
no director’s cut. The movie
that I saw for the first time in
August is this movie without the
animations, 20 minutes longer
but with the same scene count.
The film is extremely intimate,
because Cobain documented
so much of his life. Was it a heavy
responsibility?
The movie does not even come close to
encapsulating the iceberg of documenting
Kurt’s childhood. The Super 8 film of
his childhood was so revelatory, I was
conflicted...there was all of this ephemera.
Wendy saved ticket stubs from the first
time Kurt went to see a football game,
aged three. Everything was saved and
collated: I think Kurt got some of that
MONTAGE OF HECK
Review
An exhaustive, intimate portrait of the beloved
and iconoclastic musician.
Kurt Cobain was the lead singer of Nirvana, a band that seemingly came out of nowhere to
become the biggest rock act in the world, capturing the angst and rage of an entire generation.
Then he took his life at 27… but just who was he, really? With much hoopla and anticipation
of a new flick on a most misunderstood rock icon, from the director of the Rolling Stones’ doco
Crossfire Hurricane
and the Oscar-nominated bio of Hollywood producer Robert Evans,
The Kid
Stays in the Picture
, it’s almost impossible to distance yourself from
an emotional connection to the never-seen home vids, candid pics,
illustrations and audio offerings in this exhaustive portrait. Executive-
produced by Cobain’s daughter Frances Bean, it’s refreshing to see
there’s certainly no homogenisation or punches pulled. Perhaps even
the opposite, as we see the bare tragedy of an artist lost in popularity,
escaping via isolation amidst a bubble of comfort with wife and
child. Clever manipulation via smart use of stock footage, incredible
cinematography, clever graphics and an aural onslaught of stimuli
mirroring the mindset of our subject, it’s hair-on-the-arm raising to
feel so intimate and voyeuristic. Presented without judgement and
merely offering the materials available is the secret to this engrossing
last word on a troubled man struggling to be emotionally satisfied.
Chris Murray
from her. He kept a diary of his life: it
just wasn’t necessarily the journal. The
diary of his life was his art. This is not a
movie from the outside looking in – it’s
a movie from the inside looking out. It’s
Kurt’s interior journey: the only reason we
were able to achieve that is because he
was so expressive in different forms of
media, visually and aurally. I felt, here’s
this guy who’s so, sort of, pure in his
forms of expression artistically, but always
feels a little uncomfortable talking to the
press. And he’s either deceptive, or he’s
aggro, or he’s withdrawn, or he’s overly
earnest. But I rarely ever heard Kurt...
the voice of Kurt I heard when he was by
himself. I could not have made this film or
this approach visually or stylistically with
anybody else I’ve ever experienced.
Listen to Nirvana on