The Man Behind the Grunge
by Daniel Nemet-Nejat
November 4, 2006
In recent years, Kurt Cobain has been reduced to two oversimplified ideas: the icon of Grunge era and the tragic tabloid figure. But, with Kurt Cobain: About A Son, which premiered with much buzz at this year's Toronto Film Festival, documentarian AJ Schnack sought a more complete perspective on the late Nirvana front man. For Schnack, whose previous effort was Gigantic, the deadpan ode to They Might Be Giants, the key was gaining access to twenty-five hours of exclusive interviews that noted music journalist Michael Azerrad conducted with Cobain for his biography Come As You Are — and then stuck on a shelf after Cobain's suicide. Instead of delivering the default ingredients of a Cobain documentary — wall-to-wall Nirvana music, archival footage and talking heads — Schnack, in collaboration with Azerrad, uses these never-before-heard interviews to allow Cobain to speak for himself about his childhood, his ambivalence about his rock star status, politics, marriage and drugs. Cobain's posthumous "narration" is supplemented by a soundtrack of artists that influenced him, like David Bowie, R.E.M. and the Melvins, a score by Nirvana producer Steve Fisk and Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard, and evocative original footage of Aberdeen, Olympia and Seattle — the three cities where Cobain spent his life — to create a revealing and intimate look at the man behind the music. The movie "is not the big rock star portrait," says Schnack. "It's the portrait of the artist as a young man." He spoke to Nerve from Los Angeles, shortly after the film's completion. — Daniel Nemet-Nejat
What was your reaction when you first heard the tapes?
In August of 2003, I went to Michael's apartment in New York. It was the first time he had heard anything from the tapes in over ten years. Kurt was such an engaging personality and displayed so much of himself: his humor, his anger, everything else. The thing about the tapes was, because it took places over so many days — there are like nine or ten sessions — and as they went along, it was much more just friends talking. There was this intimacy to their conversations. It was much less like a question and answer session than this privileged opportunity to hear how this guy really talked and how he sounded with his friends. And that was I think the thing that surprised me the most, how unguarded much of it was, how he really displayed so many different facets of his personality.
Cobain was known to keep a diary in which he would often make up things about himself. What was his motivation for doing these interviews, for being so unguarded?
It was in the aftermath of the Vanity Fair article and a couple of other articles, in which he felt that what was being written about him was not presented the way he wanted it to be presented. While Michael was not writing an authorized biography, I think that they trusted that Michael would want to tell the whole story — which included negative things. Kurt said to Michael something like, "the best truth is the whole truth." A lot of the stuff that was being written set up this dynamic that, unfortunately, still exists today, in which Kurt is portrayed as this naïve, angelic figure and Courtney as this devilish interloper. I think that he just wanted people to see the whole picture — whether it was about Courtney or his drug use or his family. He just wanted to get it off his chest how he felt about the situation. Some of his responses, particularly about the drug use, are kind of deluded.
Deluded in what way?
He thinks he has total control over when and how he uses drugs — or at least that's what he says on the tapes.
You've referred to him as "an extraordinary ordinary man." What do you mean by that?
He was fucked up on one level, but on another level he was really normal. There was an ordinariness to him that was palpable — how he talks about things, his unguardedness in his discussion of things, and how things make him angry or piss him off. There's something that's completely unaffected about that. He responded to things with a really gut reaction. He would get angry about things regarding the press. I suppose someone would look at that and go, "Oh, he could have responded more diplomatically than to call up journalists and leave threatening messages on their answering machines." It isn't the smartest response, but it's a really human response: You're fucking with my family and with me and with our livelihood. It's not planned, it's not strategic. Maybe it's because he was a younger guy, but he just spoke his mind.
He said at one point that punk rock saved him. What did he mean by that?
He says in the film that he grew up wanting to be a rock star, but that punk rock and, later, the musicians he was exposed to in Olympia, told him, "You don't have to be a rock star. You can just make music. You don't have to be this larger-than-life figure." He says finding punk rock saved him, but I also think it helped create this conflict in him over what he really wanted. Whether he wanted to aspire to the rock stardom he imagined as a child or aspire to what he wanted after discovering punk rock and moving to Olympia — aspiring to more of a Sonic Youth level, somewhere where he could make it and have an audience and pay his rent and go on tour.
Do you think he came to some kind of resolution on that?
Given what happened, I don't think you could say he came to a resolution on anything.
It seems like you were deliberately trying to undermine what people would expect from a documentary about Kurt Cobain. What was the reason for that?
I tried to pay attention to Michael's desires that it be unusual, not the typical cut-and-paste piece about a band. What was interesting to me was the tapes being the single source for the narrative. There would be no other interviews, no tracking down his childhood friends, nothing else. I thought that the visuals should sort of have this dreamlike quality, because you're intimately observing someone who's no longer with us. So I thought that the visuals should display that and shouldn't look like grunge or early '90s stuff. They shouldn't be locked into a particular time or place, because then you're constantly reminded of his absence. Instead, you should have this experience where you're kind of sucked into what he's saying, and his voice even more so, because you're looking at these very beautiful images of the places he lived and of the stories he's telling.
This film sounds like it's be structured like a poem.
When I first talked to my director of photography, Wyatt Troll, he said, "We're doing sort of a death poem for Kurt." And, without being presumptuous, we are doing that to a certain extent.
What interested you about Kurt Cobain as a subject, beyond being this iconic figure?
One of the things that was interesting about him is that he did have a very ordinary kind of life. His parents had divorced, he had a kind of unhappy adolescence, he had been put on Ritalin, he felt like an outsider in high school. He talked about those things and people identified with him on that level. Even though he was becoming this huge rock star, a lot of people saw him in a very personal way. And that has been lost now because a lot of people can only see him as an icon. At that was the reason for my whole approach to the film, to strip away all remnants of the icon — the music, the videos, the grunge-wear, the archival [footage], so you could just relate to him as a voice, quietly, sometimes humorously, sometimes painfully recounting his experiences in his short life. That to me was just all about getting back to who that was and the easiest way was to sort of remove from the audience anything they could hold onto that was connecting them to the bigness of him. Because the film isn't about the bigness of him, it's about the humanity of him. The film is not about what it was like to write "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or be on the road with Tad in Europe. It's about who this one particular man was.
Michael said that the film is not easy to watch. Do you agree with that?
It's an emotional experience. It's certainly emotional for Michael and people who knew Kurt. It reminds them of who he was and makes him very real. And the story doesn't end well. Even those these interviews stop in March of 1993, there is the foreshadowing of what's coming. Without revealing too much, he talks about where his story's going in ways that maybe he doesn't even realize. That's certainly not a light and jubilant idea, but I think that it's still hopeful, maybe because, I hope, it's a different and more complete understanding of him in some way.
What should we understand about him?
I don't want to do what I'm trying to prevent other people from doing, which is to sum him up in one sentence. The whole point of the film is to give him an hour and a half to lay out all of his different shadings.
©2006 Daniel Nemet-Nejat and Nerve.com