Trip, a roadie for Metallica, is sent on a quick errand during a Metallica show that ends up becoming a wild adventure in 'Metallica Through the Never'.
Kirk Hammett yearns for the days of only nerds while promoting 'Metallica Through the Never'
Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich in a scene from the music-driven 3-D motion picture "Metallica Through The Never." (Photo: Carole Segal, Picturehouse)
He's been there to buy comic books and to promote his book of horror memorabilia, but Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett had a very simple reason for being at Comic-Con this year.
"Because this is where everyone takes their new movies!" he said with a laugh.
While the heavy-metal rock gods from San Francisco flirted with Hollywood with their warts-and-all documentary Some Kind of Monster, they go full bore with the 3-D IMAX hybrid concert/feature film Metallica Through the Never. The band conducted a panel for the film to a packed panel of 6,500 fans at Comic-Con Saturday evening before playing a secret show in downtown San Diego.
"Like anything else we do, every time we put something out there's a push to promote it as much as we can, and we've come to learn that San Diego Comic-Con is where one goes if one has a movie coming out this time of year.
"I'm all for it. This is my kind of place."
Directed by Nimrod Antal ( Predators), the film intersperses live Metallica concert footage with a dark fantasy narrative starring Dane DeHaan ( The Amazing Spider-Man 2) as a young roadie named Trip who's devoted to the band and is sent on a mission during the show.
Talking about the film in an interview setting and not on a stage, though, makes Hammett itchy to play his guitar.
"It's totally psychological," he said. "When I do have a guitar, I don't feel the burning need to play, but when there's not a guitar around, I always want to play."
"I always tell myself it's OK if I don't play it for a while," he added. "I've been playing for over 35 years. It's OK if I don't play for a week or something. But I get these feelings of guilt - like, ah, I need to stay on top of it, I need to be in shape and ready to just rip all the time, because that's what I used to think all the time."
He has other priorities as he's gotten older, but he's kept the same love for comics and monster-movie stuff since he was a kid. (Hammett's penchant for horror artifacts was large enough to fill his 2012 book Too Much Horror Business.)
Arguably no one rocked Comic-Con quite like Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo on Friday.(Photo: Imeh Akpanudosen, Getty Images)
In the 1970s and '80s, Hammett, 50, would hang out at comic shops and went to conventions in San Francisco, and "they were almost exclusively male, everyone was a dork or a nerd including myself, and it was a safe place for us dorks and nerds to be," he said. "We're convening - it's a gathering of the tribe and we were all safe and felt very normal in our geeky-ism."
However, seeing Comic-Con and its new mainstream popularity throws him a little bit.
"Most jarring of all is that there are females and some of them are actually kind of attractive, and it's very, very confusing for me," Hammett said. "Where's the room for the nerds now?! The nerds who used to come here are probably feeling alienated all over again.
"It used to be a bastion for people who were very uncool and unhip but now somehow the tables have turned."
While Comic-Con is old hat for Hammett, this weekend marked Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich's first at the pop-culture event. He couldn't get to stay and check out other attractions at the con - "When you're here working, you can't get into the grind of it as a movie geek like I am" - but loved the positive energy and appreciate people.
"It's not some bunch of 60-year-old jaded music journalists sitting here trying to find faults in what you're doing. Everybody here is really psyched," Ulrich, 49, said.
"That is something the rest of the world could take a (expletive) lesson from, instead of being on the receiving end of some (expletive) pseudo-intellectual critic somewhere in some obscure country smoking cigarettes with no filters and making you feel like a piece of (garbage) for trying something different."
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