Caffeinated Clint
One of the year’s biggest success stories, “Anvil : The Story of Anvil” is the story of a promising Canadian heavy metal rock band (‘Anvil’) who, 36 years after they crashed-and-burned (and for most – to to be heard or seen of again), finally get a chance to play to the massive audiences they should’ve been playing in the Reagan-era.
Clint Morris caught up with director – and well-known Hollywood screenwriter – Sacha Gervasi and producer Rebecca Yeldham (“The Kite-Runner”) to ask what intrigued them both about capturing Anvil’s second – or is it first? – coming on film. (You can read my interview with Steve “Lips†Kudlow and Robb Reiner here)
Now before we kick off Sacha, can I just say your original screenplay – not talking about the movie, not that there’s anything wrong with it – for “The Terminal” is a real beauty.
SG : Thank you.
And I imagine you’re happy with how that turned out?
SG : Oh yeah! I mean, it’s [Steven] Spielberg and [Tom] Hanks. It doesn’t get much better than that.
My brother worked on their latest production, “The Pacific” – talks highly of them both, particularly Tom.
SG : Tom’s great. Such a nice guy. I was a big fan.
And you were a big fan of Anvil….
SG : Since 1982.
Jesus, really!?
SG : Hell of a long time.
So how did the neurotic fascination begin?
SG : I saw them at the Marquee [in the UK]. Got to meet them backstage. All these rock gods were there – [Def] Leppard, [Iron] Maiden – and basically, I went up to Robb Reiner and said ‘I’m England’s no.1 Anvil fan’. And I just went on about how much I loved the record ‘Metal on Metal’. He was impressed how well I knew the songs. It was amazing – amazing that Robb Reiner gave me the time of day actually. And the next day they were looking for someone to take them around so I took them around Carnaby street, Westminster Avenue, Abbey Road.
And then, they asked ‘Would you like to come out on the road with us?’!  I thought they were crazy! I couldn’t even fathom what they’d just asked me!
Anyway, at the time my parents were divorced and I was set to spend some time with my Dad. The last two weeks of being at my Dad’s I told him I was going to visit some friends in Toronto – he didn’t much care, he was busy doing whatever he was doing – so I joined the tour! And it was just great – it was the height of heavy metal; all those bands, like Motley Crue, were just beginning. So all these bands were out on the road. We would cross paths with them.
I think the highlight of touring with Anvil was on the second tour when they played ‘Metal for Africa’ – it was sort-of like Live Aid, and took place a year after that. It was all the stoned metal heads doing a charity single. They recorded a We are the World style song. Look it up on YouTube, it’s one of the funniest things!
I will!
SG : It’s one of the funniest things. It’s all these guys in metal doing a charity thing. I remember, one of the guitarists for The Scorpions came in to the dressing room and said ‘Who is Africa?’ [Laughs]. He thought Africa was a person! No one had any fucking idea what was going on.
Hilarious!
SG : So I was out on the road with Anvil when I was 16, then 18 or 19 – which was the last time. Â I would see them when I’d go to Toronto – we’d hang out, get in lots of trouble – but I sort of lost touch with them about 1986 or thereabouts. I went off to Law School and developed different interests. I didn’t see them for nearly twenty years.
RY : You went to Law school too!?
SG : Yeah! But didn’t quite make it..
RY : Drop out! Drop Out! Me too! [Laughs] But as you know, if you get into Law School in Australia you have to go.
SG : Anyway, I found this crazy Anvil website online – which you can still find. It’s not a very impressive cyber experience. I wrote to the website….
RY : We insisted after all this has happened that they keep the website exactly as it is.
SG : Anvilmetal.tk its got a  1991-era design. Anyway, so I found them and saw this discography I didn’t recognize, and songs like ‘hair pie’ and ‘show me your tits’, and I knew by those lyrics that they were still up to the same old thing. They obviously hadn’t changed direction too much. And about an hour after I emailed the website, I got one back from Lipps. And he came out to L.A and we hooked up. And it was amazing -he hadn’t changed a bit! He hadn’t changed his clothes, his attitude… nothing! He was exactly the same! As he is now…
RY : Smiling a lot more. As is Robb.
SG : Robb’s journey has been pretty dramatic.
RY : Even more dramatic.  He’s a ‘The glass is half-full’ guy and always has been. When we started this, Robb was like ‘Why would you want to do this?”. But Lipps always had the vision – and he took us all there, including Robb. And everyone wanted in because of Lipps’s vision. We had the cream of the crop, in terms of cinematographers, engineers, and so on, working on this movie, and they weren’t working on it because they were getting paid well – we weren’t offering much of a pay day at all – they just believed in the mission. They got it. These guys have been slogging it out for 36 years… trying to get to this magic moment.
Second coming..
SG : Or the first?
RY : A couple of weeks ago, when they played in the states, they played to more people in one week than they did prior.
SG : I’m just going to show you a photo here (gets out digital camera and passes it over). That’s Robb Reiner in his home country – taking a bow to 72,000 people!
Fantastic
SG : That’s the effect of the movie.
I hear, in terms of returns, its surpassed some other imminent well-known music docos….
SG : Certainly in England – we’ve beaten Some Kind of Monster. Â Not in America – but there’s still time. You see, before we even did the film, we decided it’d be a movie and a concert in one – you’d watch the film, and then they’d come out and play. We haven’t done that in America yet, but we’re actually going to do that in January [there]. And they’re pretty big venues. So you’ll see the film on a giant screen, then the screen will lift up and the guys will come out.
Like the movie says, if you hold onto the dream – you might just achieve it. As you have, Rebecca. You must be very proud of how far you have come…
RY : I am – even though I dropped out of Law School [Laughs]. I’m of the belief that if you follow your gut and your dream, then [the dream] can come true.
And I know Sacha feels the same. He had become a very successful screenwriter in Hollywood and was working on films – which will remain nameless – that didn’t really inspire him. But that was his thing. And what [Anvil : The Story of Anvil] presented was an opportunity to create something and own it.
SG : Yeah, own the experience, the end result…
RY : Yeah, at the end of the day, we owned the movie too – so we could dictate what course it took.
SG : If we had had a financier telling us we had to sell it, we would’ve sold it to the first [distributor] out of Sundance. And the movie would’ve been out on video a year-and-a-half ago.
RY : We’ve been around long enough to know this film has built-in challenges. On the outside it looks like a rock-doc metal film, and we knew it wasn’t that. We knew it was so much bigger than that, and that it had so much more sweep to it, and emotion to it. We wanted someone to release the film that got that. We were lucky here [in Australia] that we got Roadshow and Mushroom. It’s given the film a much better chance of finding an audience.
ANVIL : THE STORY OF ANVIL opens on Thursday
