Lars Ulrich revealed that Metallica actually jokes about who would portray them in a biopic. During a chat with Collider, the drummer was asked whom he would like to play him in a movie, to which Ulrich laughed and said, “Yeah, well, they’d need a five-foot-seven, small, balding. . . I mean, we sort of joke about this all the time. We use to have kind of the standard answer back in the day, just because you’d get asked that every three months in interviews. James Spader would play me, the 'Cowardly Lion' from The Wizard Of Oz would play (James) Hetfield, and we’d joke about how Carlos Santana would play Kirk (Hammett).”
He went on to say, “The question would beckon, what time period are we talking? Is it Metallica in their youthful times, or now? There’s so many incredibly talented people out there, and it’s incredible how some actors can just transform. I think what Taron (Egerton) did as Elton John (in Rocketman) stands out as just being incredible casting, an incredible fit.”
Although Metallica has proven themselves to be cinematic gold with the success of its 2004 documentary, Some Kind Of Monster, Lars Ulrich is hesitant about a scripted film on the band: “The biopic thing. . . I’m not sold on the idea. The idea of writing an autobiography I think is challenging, because I think you would have to be completely truthful, and to be 100 percent truthful, it’s hard to tell the stories without bringing other people into it, and then you sort of get into that whole thing where maybe the protagonist in that particular story wouldn’t want the story told. So to me, it’s kind of a dilemma of, these stories deserve the truth if you’re going to talk about them, but at the same time, you can’t take for granted that everybody who’s involved in those stories wants those stories out there.”
When pressed about how long he sees Metallica continuing to perform, Ulrich said, “I can tell you last weekend that I was watching a Rolling Stones tour documentary on YouTube from their 1976 tour in Europe, and the whole theme of the documentary — there’s like 45 minutes in Belgium and it’s 1976, so most of the dudes in the Stones were probably 32 or 33-years-old, give or take a year or two — and at that time, the main question being asked of all of them was, 'how long do you plan to keep doing this? You’re 32-years-old, leave it to the youngsters.' That was 44 years ago, and the Stones are still out there loud and proud, and making audiences feel good. So I’d say that health issues and pandemics aside, we hopefully still have a good run, and (we) can’t wait to get back to making another record. Maybe our best years are still in front of us, hopefully.”
Metallica's critically acclaimed 2004 documentary, Some Kind Of Monster actually started life a a completely different type of project all together. The band's record label, which initially funded the movie, wanted to re-edit it into episodes for a reality series. Lars Ulrich told us why the band ended paying for the film itself: “They felt that the movie should be used as a promotional tool for the St. Anger record, and we felt that it should not be used as a promotional tool, because this had potential to just go to a place that very few films about rock n' roll bands have gone. So we felt that the only way we could control it was to basically buy it back from our record company. So we wrote the record company a check.”