Game Of Thrones co-creator D.B. Weiss is a longtime metalhead who got Mastodon to pop up on the show twice. So it makes some sense that his new movie Metal Lords — directed by Peter Sollett, with Weiss as writer-producer and Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello as executive music producer — is a comedy about two high schoolers who start a metal band and a recruit a girl who plays cello to be their bassist for an upcoming Battle Of The Bands competition.
Weiss and co-producer Greg Shapiro had actually been wanting to make this movie since the early 2000s. “When David [Benioff] and I started working on the Thrones process around 2006, I figured the plan was, if and when Thrones fell apart — which seemed likely — I’ll go and do my metal movie with Greg,” he tells Billboard. “Thirteen years later, I was talking to Greg and he said, ‘Let’s do Metal Lords.’ In the interim, he had won an Academy Award for The Hurt Locker and had produced Zero Dark Thirty and all the Harold And Kumar movies. He had done everything from art house stuff to action to comedy, and I was like, ‘You have an Academy Award, dude. You don’t have to produce movies about metal kids.’ But he wanted to make it anyway, so we took it to Netflix’s Lisa Nishimura. Lisa worked for Island Records for years and is a serious music person, so she got it right out of the gate.”
“I grew up in a small, cloistered, conservative suburb where my musical tastes ran against the grain of almost everybody else in school and certainly all of the teachers, so this is something I can very much relate to,” says Tom Morello, who bonded with Weiss over metal while waiting in the pickup and dropoff line at their kids’ school. “It’s a story of kids trying to get their first band together and having a dream, but perhaps not having the technical ability or the artistic vision to make that dream real. Or do they? For me, it harmonizes in a lot of ways with the real story of so many kids who are locked in these suburban hells and the key to get out is an electric guitar or drums or rock and roll music. The music shows a way to transcend this stifled daily existence, to try to be something better, be something more authentic and true than what’s handed to you by your surroundings.”
“I’m hoping that people can see something of themselves in the characters, and come away from the movie feeling a little bit better than they felt going into it,” Weiss adds. “On the surface, the music can be dark and aggressive. It’s often meant to freak people out. But the uses to which the music is put are often the opposite of that. It’s music for people who don’t feel like they have a place in the world they see around them. Music for people who are looking for a way to express that feeling of being on the outside.”
Watch a trailer for Metal Lords below.
Metal Lords premieres 4/8 on Netflix.
