Striking While The Anvil Is...Well, Reasonably Warm | The veteran Canadian rockers Anvil retake their spot
ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL
Directed by Sacha Gervasi. Featuring Anvil. City Centre 9 (Eaton Centre). Sat, Sept 27 (6:45pm); Fri, Oct 4 (4pm)
Before he was a first-time documentary filmmaker with a festival hit on his hands, before he was a prolific Hollywood screenwriter, Sacha Gervasi may have been the world’s biggest fan of Anvil, the Toronto-based heavy metal act that for a brief moment in the ’80s stood on par with hair-farmer contemporaries like The Scorpions, Whitesnake, and Bon Jovi. Back in those heady days, the young Gervasi found himself living out a dream by joining his metal heroes on tour.
“I saw them in London in ’82 — they played The Marquee and it was just devastating,” Gervasi recalls. “It just went off like a nuclear bomb, they blew the roof off The Marquee and all the big metal bands were there, Maiden and Motörhead. I was so blown away that I rushed backstage and met and they’d never been to London before, so I offered to show them around. So the next day I took them to the Houses of Parliament and the Tate Gallery and Abbey Road, where I lived. And just visiting Westminster Abbey with Anvil was one of the greatest cultural experiences of my young life. But during that tour-guide period, they asked me if I wanted to come roadie for them the next summer on my summer holidays. I was just a fan, but they always had their fans on the road with them.”
Some 25 years later, Gervasi got the idea to reconnect with his old metal idols and discovered that the two founding members, singer guitarist Steve “Lips” Kudlow and drummer Rob Reiner, we’re still working menial jobs and struggling to make their dreams of metal stardom come true. He proposed the idea of a documentary about the band to the rockers, now pushing 50, and found them surprisingly receptive.
“It was an astonishing experience,” says Gervasi, whose film Anvil! The Story of Anvil is one of the more buzzed-about entries at this year’s Edmonton International Film Festival, “because here were these guys and they were just extraordinarily open because of the relationship that we had dating back from when I was a kid. When I told them I wanted to make the movie, I really walked them through every aspect of the film and I said, ‘Look, guys, people are going to laugh at you — because you’re funny. But understand that’s just part of the journey.’ And hopefully by the end of the movie, if the movie works, it leads to a place where people are really inspired by them. These guys are funny heavy metal guys, but by then end it’s like, you know what? They’re actually doing it — they’re actually living their dreams. How many people do that?”
The first-time filmmaker says he’s been overwhelmed by the response to the movie which, through pre-release screenings that have included performances by the band, has become a festival hit, finding fans in metalhead and mainstream constituencies.
“Forget heavy metal,” Gervasi says. “I mean, obviously, Ozzy Osbourne saw the film and went nuts for it — but people like Michael Moore, bands like Fall Out Boy, Weezer, Trent Reznor. David Byrne from Talking Heads was at a screening in New York four weeks ago and David Byrne was headbanging to Anvil. It’s the story of the musician’s struggle, it’s the story of every underdog artist; it’s really very little to do with heavy metal, ultimately.”
Rife with moments of humiliating hilarity, barely articulate male-bonding and disproportionate attacks of ego, Anvil! The Story of Anvil transcends the mockery that its subjects almost seem to invite to uncover the poignancy of the four-decade friendship between Kudlow and Reiner, the heartbreak of toiling fruitlessly at one’s art and the sheer determination to roll with the often-cruel punches doled out by the music biz. Gervasi credits the band for letting him get so close with his camera.
“I don’t think they really cared. Lips and Rob have been playing music together for 35 years, and they’re just like, ‘What have we got to lose?’ They weren’t worried about their image because they don’t have an image — no one knows who the fuck they are. So they weren’t worried about preserving something because they really had nothing to preserve. And they weren’t worried about my intent because I was completely open with them from day one. I was really honest because I’m their friend and I was going to do an honest, unflinching portrait of what they’re life is.”
After carving the final cut out of 320 hours of footage collected over two years following the band around Canada, eastern Europe, the U.K., and Japan, Gervasi says he finds the response to the film so far to be entirely overwhelming.
“It far exceeded my ludicrously high expectations. I had hopes for it but there was some magic to it. The moment we turned on the cameras it was obvious that all the intensity and yearning of the last 25 years came into clear focus, and suddenly that whole struggle just presented itself. You can tell, it’s a very intense emotional experience. It contains pretty much every human emotion because their lives do.”
More gratifying to the director than the critical acclaim is the fact that his movie seems to have ignited a newfound interest in his favourite band in the world, an enthusiasm he hopes some writer calling him from some weekly rag in Alberta will help share with the film’s prospective audience.
“Anything you can do to promote the movie and get those guys’ story out is great,” he says, “particularly in Canada, where I think they’ve been overlooked-slash-forgotten for a long time. In fact, I’m hoping that Canadians can take pride in their own music and celebrate the success of a band that’s been criminally overlooked. But it’s good for Canadians to hear people like Slash and Lars and Lemmy acknowledging how influential this band has been and I just hope that Canada is also able to embrace them and celebrate what they’ve done and what they are and what they continue to do. Because they are, if nothing else, a fucking amazing live band. They’ve been doing it 30 years and they’re really good at it.”
Saturday’s screening of Anvil! The Story of Anvil will be followed by a live performance by Anvil at the Century Casino.
