Report: Global Metal - A Serious Look At Headbanging Garners Canadian Filmmakers Respect
June 20, 2008, 16 years ago
The Toronto Sun's Liz Braun reports:
Heavy Metal has been good to Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen. The filmmakers behind the hugely successful Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, are back with a second documentary called Global Metal, which opens in Toronto and Vancouver today.
The new film offers an insider's look at such global variations on a musical theme as Indonesian death metal, Chinese black metal, or Iranian thrash metal. The movie reveals how metal evolves and flourishes in different cultures. Their fans can't get enough.
"People have already been asking about a (part three), but until we find evidence of metal on the moon or Saturn, there isn't much room left," says Dunn, during an interview he and McFadyen did earlier this week. "For now, we're focusing on the specific bands." (The filmmakers are currently working on documentaries about IRON MAIDEN and RUSH.)Friends since their undergrad days 15 years ago at the University of Victoria in B.C., both Dunn and McFadyen have lived in Toronto for several years. One of the results of Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, says McFadyen, is that Sam Dunn is now recognized everywhere they go in the world. Dunn says, "It's surprising, but I guess what happened with Headbanger's Journey is that we represented metal in a way the metal fans could identify with. We tried to relate the world of metal to people in a different way. We wanted to do something respectful of the genre, rather than a parody, or something from the outside of the genre."
The success of Metal: A Headbanger's Journey has opened doors for them, say the filmmakers, and let them be recognized within the community as the documentarians of metal. "At least for now," says Dunn, modestly. The wife of SLAYER's Kerry King is a fan, say the filmmakers; she explained that Headbanger's Journey helped her parents understand her lifestyle.
"And Lars Ulrich of METALLICA, he was really helpful," says McFadyen. "We sat down with him and he found us that footage from Indonesia (in Global Metal) that nobody'd ever seen before. One of the first things he said to us was, 'Never do a documentary without us again.' "Read the full story at this location.
