The New York Times Looks at the New Kurt Cobain Documentary
The Times has this look behind the scenes of the making of Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, which will debut on May 4.
Clad in a crimson dress, Courtney Love blew into the Beverly Hills Hotel in March 2007 with a lawyer in tow and Kurt Cobain’s legacy on her mind. For the first time, she wanted to provide a documentary filmmaker with unrestricted access to her dead husband’s archives, including journals, artwork, home movies and more than 100 never-before-heard cassette tapes stashed in a mysterious storage locker.
And she wanted the unorthodox nonfiction director Brett Morgen, tucked in the booth beside her at the hotel’s Polo Lounge, to take on the project.
“It was time to examine this person and humanize him and decanonize these values that he allegedly stood for — the lack of ambition and these ridiculous myths that had been built up around him,” Ms. Love, the actress and musician, said recently by telephone. It would be the first authorized documentary since the Nirvana singer committed suicide in 1994, leaving Ms. Love a widow with a 20-month-old daughter, Frances Bean.
Shocker: The film did not go smoothly.
