The following report is courtesy of Eyeweekly.com:

ANVIL have just flown home from the Sundance Film Festival, where Anvil!: The Story of Anvil — a documentary about the Toronto speed-metal band’s tenacity — has been screening to packed theatres all week, in time for a Friday night gig at the Bovine Sex Club.

But frontman Steve "Lips" Kudlow can’t quite make it to the phone right now.

“Delta Airlines just shredded his guitar,” reports director Sacha Gervasi on the phone from Park City, Utah. “He’s just sick about it — and probably shouting at the top of his lungs at them as we speak.”

Rather than waiting to hear the reverberations from Pearson International Airport, best to catch up with the filmmaker, who first met Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner — who formed the band in 1978 under the name Lips, before changing to Anvil upon signing to Attic Records — at London’s Marquee Club following a concert in Sept. 1982, when Gervasi was 15 years old. Anvil were building momentum with their album Metal on Metal, touring the festival circuit in Europe and Japan, and making fans who grew up to be ANTHRAX, METALLICA, MEGADETH, SLASH and SLAYER.

“They kind of adopted me as their mascot,” says Gervasi. The following summer, restless while visiting his economics professor dad in New York City, Gervasi was hopping on a train to see some friends and ended up playing roadie and selling T-shirts for Anvil’s tour of Canadian hockey rinks, then went back for two more tours. Anvil drummer Reiner also helped Gervasi learn his way around a kit.

From there, Gervasi did the usual things a teenage metalhead would wont to do: got a degree in Modern History from King’s College, worked for British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, put together a band with Gavin Rossdale, left to write a few scripts (including The Terminal), fathered Geri Halliwell’s child, etc. etc. etc.

He figured that the members of Anvil had split up or suffered some other fate that wouldn’t earn any press attention. In fact, Kudlow and Reiner had weathered several line-up changes, performing in trio or quartet formations. Somewhere in the midst of it, Gervasi happened upon their website and discovered they were still plugging away, playing shows at places like at Etobicoke sports bar Heads or Tails on Brown's Line, and the occasional classic-metal festival around the globe.

Kudlow hadn’t forgotten the kid they called “Tea Bag” — only because he drank lots of tea, assures Gervasi. “We thought you were either dead,” wrote Kudlow, “or become a lawyer.” Same difference in the realm of Anvil, where Kudlow and Reiner’s pact to stick together in pursuit of musical glory hadn’t diminished a bit — even if the singer spent days making deliveries for Choice Children’s Catering in Scarborough while the drummer was building porches and working in demolition.

Gervasi flew Kudlow out to Los Angeles, and in the course of hanging with Schindler’s List and American Gangster screenwriter Steven Zaillian, discovered that Anvil shrieker’s passion hadn’t diminished one bit.

“He had just not given up,” said Gervasi. “He was just as enthusiastic, had the same amount of passion, same amount of drive, and I realized there was something crazy and magical about his determination.”

The cameras then became part of Anvil’s life, with their teenage protégé along for the ride as they deliberated about whether to take a 13th stab at making an album, pressing their luck by calling it This is Thirteen.

The Story of Anvil documents this period of time (which included a tour of Eastern Europe) as well as with archival footage for a film that — at least on paper — sounds like a counterpoint to Metallica’s filmed document of their group therapy process, Some Kind of Monster. Gervasi hastens to make a distinction though.

“Metallica had become incredibly successful by that point in time,” he says, “they were a billion-dollar corporation. This movie is about going inside the lives of two guys who have blue-collar jobs, who can barely even afford gas for their car, but are completely committed to their friendship.”

Read more here.