At the Tribeca Festival this week, Metallica stepped into the spotlight not just as rock legends, but as a lifeline. Their new documentary, Metallica Saved My Life, premiered to a packed crowd at the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center on Thursday — offering an emotional tribute to the global community that surrounds the band and the lives touched, shaped, and sometimes literally saved by their music.
Directed by Jonas Åkerlund, the film paints an intimate portrait of Metallica’s impact across continents — from the streets of Japan to the heavy metal scene in Botswana — told entirely through the voices of fans. But the band themselves had their own truths to share.
Following the screening, all four members — James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett, and Robert Trujillo — joined New Yorker writer Amanda Petrusich for a candid post-screening conversation. It was James, ever the reluctant frontman turned open-hearted veteran, who set the tone with raw honesty.
“When I get up on stage, I feel so much more comfortable up there than I do in regular life a lot of the times,” he said, before adding, “I feel like I’m so easily able to be me with these fans, and the more I’m me, the more they like it. It’s just so opposite of how I was brought up. Being yourself wasn’t always welcomed for some reason.”
Reflecting on their decades-long bond as a band and as individuals, James acknowledged how far they’ve come. “Speaking my truth up there and other people understanding that truth, the four of us have gone through so much together, and we care about this a lot because a lot is still happening for us even into our fourth decade as a band. It’s gotten better every decade,” he said.
Now 61, James also credited his personal evolution — including recovery and reflection — with shifting his relationship to music. “I’ve learned so much about myself and other people, on how to live life better and to not take things completely seriously and to be on stage and be yourself. We get to do that. I got the best job in the world. The end,” he said.
While the film centers on the fans, the band made it clear that it’s not just a one-way connection. “It’s been brewing for a few years,” said Lars, 61, at the premiere. “There’s such an incredible diversity among the fans and so many different stories and so many different worlds that they all come from and that they all inhabit. We thought to share that diversity would be a lot of fun, and to celebrate the fans and to scream from the rooftops about who they are and kind of turn the spotlight a little bit away from us and onto them because they’re Metallica as much as we are,” he added.
For bassist Robert Trujillo, 60, the power of those stories resonated deeply. “For me, I’m touched by a lot of almost everything in there. There are some highlight moments in there that are more on the international level and how we’re touching people in areas of the world that you can’t imagine. Again, the fans mean as much to us as the music, as everything we do. We’re interconnected and that goes to certain parts of the world and it’s a very powerful thing to have in our lives actually,” Robert said.
Even the conversation after the film reflected a kind of vulnerability not often associated with one of the world’s biggest metal acts. Kirk, 62, spoke about staying grounded in the aftermath of touring: “I like to put myself in situations and around people where it’s like an instant equalization and it just knocks me off the pedestal that I might’ve been on for the last three or four weeks. That’s usually putting a surfboard in the water, going down the beach, surfing, getting beat up by the ocean. [It] instantly just puts me down to earth and just brings me back down to instantly feeling that I’m just like everyone else.”
Despite 44 years as a band, Metallica shows no signs of slowing down. Their M72 World Tour is already slated to continue through next year, with new European dates recently announced. And yet, they still prioritize connection over spectacle.
“We got older and so did our fans and our fans started having kids,” James said. “We see three generations at a show. When you’re as fortunate as we are to have been going for decades, you’re going to see a huge plethora of different fans. It wasn’t on purpose. The one thing that is purposeful is [that] we want to be as intimate as possible when we’re on stage with the crowd. That’s what has always been number one with every show we do,” he said.
