Never Quit Before The Miracle: The Story of Anvil

Meet the masters of resilience. 80’s metal trailblazers: Anvil. For those of you who bristle at the thought of heavy metal, set aside that resistance. Give this one a shot with an open mind and heart. And thank me later—because the story of Anvil—and the filmmaker who captured their tale—is nothing short of remarkable. At 14, Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow and Robb Reiner made a pact to rock together forever. In 1982 they birthed a highly influential album that would inspire the likes of Anthrax and Metallica—and then proceeded to drop off the map, toiling in obscurity for decades while the bands they impacted rose to superstardom. Then, in 2006, filmmaker (and former Anvil roadie) Sacha Gervasi set out to find out what happened, discovering to his astonishment that 25 years later the band was still making music and remained steadfastly committed to the most impossible of dreams: making it big. Now this is a story, he thought. So Sacha grabbed a small camera crew and proceeded to follow the band as they persevered through obstacles, navigated a botched European tour, and recorded a thirteenth album. Despite rejection that would devastate the strongest among us, Anvil refused to give up on their dream—and never lost hope. Today we tell this surprisingly touching and remarkably inspirational story. And now, 50 years since the band debuted and 13 years after the rockumentary first premiered in 2008, the film is being re-released in 200 theaters across the US this week and later in theatres across Europe and beyond—a response to a new generation of enthusiastic young people who discovered and fell in love with the movie during Covid. Watch: YouTube. Read: Show notes. Lips and Robb hold an unwavering conviction and extraordinary amount of courage that is nothing short of superhuman. They are inspiring examples of perseverance in the face of adversity, and I’m delighted to share their story. I hope you find it as touching and compelling as I did. Enjoy! Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

  Eating well rarely falls apart because of one big failure. It's the daily question that wears you down. Like, what am I actually gonna make tonight? What's in the fridge? And it's exactly why we built the Plant Power Meal Planner. It's a personalized, plant-based meal planning program that matches you with recipes based on your taste, your allergies, your cooking skills, and how much time you actually have. You build, through this program, a balanced, nutrient-dense plan for your entire household in a few minutes. Then it generates a grocery list for you with one click that plugs right into our delivery partners. All the recipes in the program are built by dietitians with culinary training. Plus, you get your own food coach to help you problem-solve along the way.

• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  I think that the whole movie, Anvil, is about empathy. And I knew that this film had the potential to reach people way beyond metal, beyond music, and it was about the human spirit. And what we discovered from the film was that it was about not giving up. You know, it was about friendship, it was about family, it was about not giving up on a dream. And like, what could be more universal than that? And I think that's why here we are 13 years later, releasing the film again. It's because of those themes.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Everybody's closing down their shop because they're burnt out and they have no heart left to do it. And they're quitting. And it's like, if you're a real artist, you should be here till you're pushing up daisies. And that's the end of it.

• 1:49Speaker 03

  But you know, I'm not gonna quit on myself.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  What for? Like, I can't cope with that notion.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, why didn't you quit? Hey, you quit what you hate.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  Right, not what you love.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Not what you love.

• 2:12Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. What does it take to pursue an audacious goal, to never give up on your dream, no matter the odds, no matter the obstacles? Well, there's lots of answers to that question, but a couple of them that come to mind are unwavering conviction and superhuman courage, which are topics explored in today's conversation with my friend Sasha Jervasi. Sasha is a writer, he's a filmmaker, and he's a documentarian behind a film called Anvil: The Story of Anvil, which is this incredibly unlikely, can you even believe

• 2:55Rich Roll?

  this is real, sort of Spinal Tap movie about an unlikely 80s metal band who never quite made it, but refused to give up. And the protagonists of that film join us with Sasha today. Their names are Lips Kudlow and Rob Reiner. This self-financed indie, much like the band it portrays, was almost never even seen by anybody, but against all odds, it became this cult classic, it inspired millions, and it's now lauded as one of the greatest rock and roll documentaries of all time. And it gave the band the break they've been longing for. In another twist of unlikely favor, extending on this theme of never giving up, during

• 3:39Rich Roll?

  the pandemic, the documentary was discovered by a whole new generation of young people, and in unprecedented fashion, is now being re-released 13 years after it first premiered in 200 theaters across the United States this week, and later rolling out across Europe and beyond. Even if you have absolutely zero interest in metal music, I'm telling you, you're gonna love this film. I encourage all of you to check it out in the theater. And I think you're gonna love this conversation as well, because Sasha, who, by the way, is appearing for his third appearance on the show, check my archive if you missed those episodes, is a very entertaining individual.

• 4:21Rich Roll?

  He's a truly gifted storyteller. His Anvil protagonists, Lips and Rob, are also unbelievably endearing. They're incredibly earnest. And dare I go so far as to say that Lips just might be the self-help guru you never knew you needed. And together, they are inspiring examples of perseverance in the face of extraordinary obstacles. So after a brief word from the fine sponsors that make this show possible, please enjoy.

• 4:55Rich Roll?

  All right, here's me, Sasha, and the guys from

• 5:07Speaker 01

  This is a celebration, man.

• 5:08Rich Roll?

  The gang is here. We got Sasha, we got Rob, we got Lips. Everybody is in the house. My intention for this is that I'm gonna be so bold as to say that this will be the definitive Anvil podcast. What do you think, Sasha?

• 5:23Speaker 01

  I'm so thrilled at that prospect. I'm just so happy because these guys just flew in from Toronto late last night, and we've been hanging out all morning. And as with, as always is with us, it's just like, going back to when I was 15, nothing has changed. We were talking about the original Anvil Road Crew a few minutes ago, which was me, Brick, Vega, Spider, Jethro, and me. My Anvil nickname was Teabag.

• 5:45Rich Roll?

  And Strange.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  And Strange. Strange was another guy who I'm gonna talk later. Last time I saw him was on a tour of Canadian hockey arenas in 1985, but I'm gonna FaceTime with Strange later. So it's just this history that just continues to evolve. It never seems to stop.

• 6:00Rich Roll?

  Well, I think we need to contextualize all of this. So I think it would be great if we just start at the beginning with Sasha, your kind of first introduction to these guys and kind of how everything unfolded from there.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Well, the first introduction to these guys was literally on, there was a magazine similar to Rolling Stone in the UK called Sounds. And Sounds was the rock, heavy metal kind of music paper. NME was the kind of ponce fancy kind of posers paper, but Sounds was like the real people, Red Sounds. And I think it was April the 6th, 1982, I went to my local newsagent in St John's Wood on Abbey Road and I saw the cover of Sounds. And it said, it literally was a photo of a man dressed head to toe in bondage gear, holding a chainsaw and clutching a dildo between his teeth. And it said, Anvil is coming. And I thought, I have no idea who this fucking band is. I like this band. And the reason I liked them was this is really gonna piss off my mother. This is just gonna really upset her.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Because my mother had gone to Juilliard and was a concert pianist and a classical pianist and wanted me to play piano. And we were kind of arguing. And I thought, yeah, I'm gonna get into metal. And anyway, so I bought-

• 7:08Rich Roll?

  And you're 15.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  I was 14 and a half, 15, yeah, at this point. And I'd already gone out to shows, you know, like most teenagers, you know, the parents have no idea what they were doing. But I was like going, I was like leaving at 13 and a half. I would go downtown to the Marquee on Wardle Street. That club was very famous because Hendrix and The Doors and all these different people had played at the Marquee in the 60s. But by the early 80s, it was like the, the center of something called the new wave of British heavy metal, which had a beautiful acronym, Nuwobum. That was, that was what it was. And so I was a young fan who would go down and I would see Iron Maiden and I would see Def Leppard and all these bands. Like I remember seeing Randy California from Spirit and all these crazy bands. And I would slip out at night. My mum had no idea I was going there.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Anyway, so in the Sounds interview, I suddenly learned about this heavy Canadian band from Toronto. And ironically, my mother's family had been from Toronto. So there was already an instant connection. And they had this record that was already a legend before anyone had even heard- It was called Metal on Metal and it was literally the front cover was a buzzsaw soaring an anvil in half. I thought, could it be more metal? And it was called Metal on Metal. And I just absolutely had to get the album. I got the album. It was astonishing. It was so heavy. There was stuff I hadn't really heard before. Particularly, there was a song called March of the Crabs. There was a song called Six Six Six,

• 8:35Speaker 01

  where it was really the first time I had heard thrash metal played at such a ferociously intense volume and rate and the musicianship was extraordinary. Lips' voice was growling and like, for me, the thing that really stuck stuck out because I was an aspiring drummer. Because, you know, my mother said, you know, you should learn classical piano and I was, but I thought, you know, what was really gonna piss her off is I'm gonna be a heavy metal drummer. So then Rob Reiner came into my life and I would listen to Rob play these things. And I just could not, I was just like blown away by his drumming. I'd never heard any drummer as heavy as Rob. I'd heard a lot of amazing people like Ginger Baker and Carmine Apissey and all these great, you know, fantastic drummers, Steve Gadd, obviously genius, but no one with the heaviness of Rob Reiner.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  And so when I discovered that they were gonna play at the Marquee in September nineteen eighty-two. So I got the sounds in April, I bought the record that month and through the whole of the summer of nineteen eighty-two, Anvil's Metal on Metal was like blaring at top volume through my house. My mother was going out of her mind.

• 9:37Rich Roll?

  And this is a moment in which I suspect most of your peers are into Bowie.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, that was the other thing. It was like, I was at a school where everyone was like into the Doors and Bowie and the Stooges and like, I'm this loser walking across schoolyard in like black leg warmers with like my Rush waistcoat. And like, just, I was, everyone gave me so much shit. And then I thought, you know what? Fuck them, man. I'm the punk. I'm the guy getting all the abuse. And I was like, and then I said to my friend who was like, Jake, who was like into kinda punk and The Clash and everything, right? I said, you're, you all dress the same. You've all got the bondage trousers and the same fucking hair. And I, fuck you, I'm the punk. So like, the more they attacked me, the more metal I became. And I would start going to these shows and I went to a, you know, a boarding, a sort of public boarding school in England called Westminster.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  And so I was very much like the, the ugly duckling at that school by a very, very long way. And so the more defiantly kind of attacked I was, the more defiantly metal I became. And I discovered that Anvil was playing at the Marquee. And so I decided to go. And I was so fucking lucky because I went to see the band and literally Lips flew out of the changing room at the back clutching a dildo and he played his Flying V. And I mean, like, you've got to understand, with a bunch of teenage boys, we'd never seen or heard anything like this, right? He had the chainsaw, Rob was like, you couldn't even see his face, his hair was like, he would do this move, which I call tumbling boulders, where you just couldn't even see how his hands were moving. I was just like,

• 11:06Speaker 01

  it was like any person who remembers their first show where their face was melted off, it was like my whole head was melted off. I was like, anyway, I was like, and that place was packed. And later, years later, I discovered so many bands that became bands were also there that night. So many really interesting people, like members of Def Leppard, like Jonas Ackeland, the video director, and, you know, every, you know, members of the Tigers of Pantang. And that moment was a huge moment in my life. And it was also a huge moment for Anvil. And I was desperate to meet them. And so what happened was, I went in the long line, and there were these two security guys, right? And anyway, this guy called Gary Barden was the lead singer of the Michael Schenker Group. And he was

• 11:49Speaker 01

  in an argument with the bouncer, with his girlfriend, to get his girlfriend backstage to meet Anvil, right? And I just took advantage of the moment and I slipped in. So they, the security guy was trying to get Michael Schenker's singer to stay away. And I just kind of got in behind them. And I literally walked in and there were members of Iron Maiden, members of Def Leppard, like, all my heroes were in that room congratulating this band. And I was just like, fuck, I'm the youngest person in here by like, at least five to 10 years. And I went right up to, to Anvil, I went right up to Rob and to Lips. And I said, I am your number one fan in England. My name is Sasha. And I am just, and I started asking Rob questions about the drums. And I just was so.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  We were both going like, this kid, it's a kid and he knows everything. He knows more than anybody else in this. It's here.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, he had a special magic about him, is what I remember. And we invited him in.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Well, I said, like on tag team, between the middle eight and the verse, when you do this flip thing with it, you know, I was talking to Rob technically about what he was doing. And I was, I had millions of questions. I was like, how do you do that? And are you using both feet or you doing whatever? And then I was asking Lips about, you know, how they work together as a band. And so I had tons of questions. Now, the first thing I noticed about Anvil was I'm some 15 year old no one kid, right? And they were talking to me and there were Joe Elliott and whoever of Def Leppard. There was members of Motorhead, Fast Eddie Clark. They're like massive mega people. And these two guys were interested in what their fan had to say. And I was just like, wow.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  The truth was that none of these people, none of the other people even knew our songs. They don't own our records. They don't know the songs they just heard. They're just there lugging the moment.

• 13:35Rich Roll?

  Right. And you're like, we're gonna talk to this kid. This kid's into it. And it's like a crazy sliding doors moment. Like had you not done the run around with the bouncer.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 13:44Rich Roll?

  How would your life be different?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  I was so happy that Gary Barn was in love with this woman and had to get her in or he wasn't coming in. But it was every rock star, every metal and hard rock person at that time was at that show and was absolutely blown away. And I was just the lucky one who got in. And as it turned out, I said, you know, look, I just want to let you know, I'm, I'm offering my services. I'll be your tour guide. I don't care. They were laughing and they were like, well, I said, how many times you've been to London? And they said, well, we've never been here before. And I said, great, I'm going to show you around. So I agree to meet them.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's where we were at, where we were and you showed up.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  So the next day, I took them to the Houses of Parliament, the Tate Gallery, introduced them to Turner. You know, I took them all over the sites of London and it was so fun. I remember being on the tube, getting off the tube with, with all of you. And the tube driver was an Anvil fan, do you remember? And he like, I remember he honked the car and he was like metal. And I was like, Anvil was like happening in London and I felt so privileged that I'm like their fan. I happened to meet them. So I take them everywhere. The best part was I took them back to number 54 Abbey. Road where I grew up in London, I took them back and my mother answered the door. I was and she saw. The denima. It was like, no, it was like the nightmare scenario because I played that album all summer and she told me to take it away.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  And she was just like, well, she was going out of her mind. So when I showed up with Anvil, she looked at me, she looked at them and then she said, you've got 10 minutes. And she disappeared upstairs. And I was like, I brought them into my room and it was really weird because I was, you know, the biggest Anvil fan. And then they walked into my bedroom. I got posters of Metal on Metal all over my walls and everything. And so they were so sweet with me and I just felt like how lucky it is to be able to meet your heroes. And then to have time with them and they actually even gave a shit to listen to you. It was like really notable. And then anyway, so at the end of the couple of days and they were staying at the Columbia Hotel. I went to hang out with them and then I got to know the guys from Twisted Sister, who I also know the, the, those guys.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  And Dee Snider and AJ Perro and all those guys. And at the end of the two or three days, we kind of really, well, you know, I was like so happy that they, you know, were being nice to me. And Lips and Rob said, hey, hey, what are you doing next summer? And I said, well, you know, I'm at school and then I'll probably be on school holidays. I was like 14 and a half at that point or 15. And they said, do you want to come and be a roadie on our tour? And I was like, are you fucking kidding me? So basically my mom and my father split up and my dad was living in New York. He worked at the United Nations. And I said to my mother, look, I really want to go see my dad for this summer. And she was like shocked, like, why do you want to see your father?

• 16:27Speaker 01

  I was like, well, you know, I think it's time we need to talk. Anyway, so I totally bullshitted an excuse to get a ticket to New York. And I flew to New York the following summer and I said to my dad, look, if I'm being really honest, the reason I'm here is because Anvil, this mega heavy Canadian thrash metal band has asked me to come on tour as, as the drum roadie. And so. My dad, who, you know, was, you know, he worked for John F. Kennedy. You know, he was an economist. He taught at Oxford, you know. He was like, I showed him the photos. He was like fucking horrified. I said, Dad, it's really important to me. Please can, can I just please go on tour with Anvil? And he said, I have to meet them. I'll only do it. And so he drove me up to Albany where I joined the tour.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  And he said, I'm going to go and talk to Lips and Rob. And he was wearing his three piece suit, you know, and he, he talked to Lips and Rob. And I don't quite know what was said. I think it was something along the lines of just keep him awake.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  You're gonna watch out for my son? That he doesn't get him, get in trouble here and you guys are not.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  It's been like a concerned parent.

• 17:30Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. But you all understand, my, my father was, is looking at Lips and Rob at, you know, and, you know, I'm turning my son over to the welfare. And it's, and he's like an Oxford academic and it's like, you know, but whatever happened between them. My dad came out and he said, I actually think they're okay. And you can go for three weeks. And I was just, I was so overwhelmed with joy that I was able to go on the road with these guys.

• 17:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And you, and you remember that encounter?

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I thought it was so weird that this.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, this parenting was happening.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  I mean, it wasn't the first inter, inter, reaction that we had with Sasha's parents. That we obviously knew his mom too.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  And when they, when he says they knew my mom, what happened was I.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  When he showed up at the hotel in England, the phone rings in our room and she goes, I pick up the phone and she goes, hello, I'm Sasha Gervasi's mother. Is my son there? And I go, yes, hold on. Uh, it's for you.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  And it was my mom had tracked me down. The first thing, so I go, how did you find me? And what had happened was I'd called a minicab company and she found and tracked where they were. And then she called me and then she came. Anyway, so she came to the hotel room and just like said, stay right there. And she literally pulled me out by my ear and said, you are not hanging out with these people.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  I could hear her screaming down, going walking down the hall with them.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  She was like, you've got to stay away from these people. They're bad news and you're a well-educated good boy. You can't hang out with a guy who wears bondage harnesses and places. Guitar with a dildo, it's outrageous and, you know, it was a real scene that happened all the time. Anyway, so yeah, so then my dad was the other parent who, and, but my dad, I think whatever, for whatever reason, he really loved, he just thought, okay, these guys are cool. And I think he made you promise to keep away from alcohol and drugs.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, we said, you said, you tell me, just make sure that he doesn't go near anything.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  That's gonna get him in trouble. I said, you don't worry about it.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  As far as I'm concerned, he's not gonna see any wrongdoings, not while he's on my watch.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  And then cut to the tour, and that's often why I was locked into the tour bus. So I was also locked on the tour.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Well, there were things, there were things going on. He never saw. He never saw.

• 19:46Rich Roll?

  You did protect him.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, totally. But you know what, when my dad-

• 19:49Speaker 02

  It was a kid. You don't let a kid walk into the middle of a, some squirrely having an orgy. No, I don't think so.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Um, Dave Allison, who was, yeah. So what, so, but what happened was, my dad came back and he said, those guys gave me, gave me their word and I believed them. So you can go for three weeks. And I just had, it was like, it was an extraordinary experience to be out on the road with this band. You know, I sat behind Rob Reiner every night. I helped build his drum kit. I watched him play like, as he was playing like, you know, Mothra or Metal on Metal or 666 or whatever, he would do some crazy lick that I'd asked about when we first met. And he would turn around to me and go, you will never be able to do that. Like, he was like, but I would pick up his, you know, that look that he would do.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  And I, and I used to enjoy doing that. I'd go, okay, Sash, here's one that you're fucking, this one's a good one. Watch this. And then I'd give him that look like, see?

• 20:42Speaker 01

  And I was right behind him. And you've got to understand that at that time, there were all these young, you know, metal fans like me.

• 20:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  You know, and who I would run into the show, you know, was a guy called Scott Ian, who later went on to form Anthrax and Lars Ulrich, who was, you know, a 15-year-old Danish tennis prodigy, who was just getting interested in music. And so many other people that were kind of around and just, you know, even pre-band, were just thinking about what to do. I mean, millions of people. And Jonas was in that Swedish metal band, Bathory. And then all these different cozy-

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Well, that had a whole, that, that's another, another, um, sort of thing that happened at the marquee at that, at that particular time and point in the history, is two members of this band called Candlemass from Sweden. We're also at the show, we're also with their friend from Bathory, which is Jonas Ackerman, they came to see us, they take Jonas takes a picture of me with the two guys and here we are as young kids, whatever, years later, I mean like years later, we're just previous to actually reconnecting with Sasha, we go to do this festival in Italy and we're sitting in a, in a, in a, in a bus camper, a little camper bus kind of thing and there's

• 21:57Speaker 02

  a knock at the door and there's these two freaky guys and they go, we're the guitar player and bass player from uh, the band Candlemas, we met you in 1982. Around the same time. Right. And I, and I, so, and I'm going, wait a minute, these are those Swedish guys that we met on Carnaby Street. That's right. And they're going, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that, and then all of a sudden I start saying, and, and, and I start telling them about Sasha and I go, and I haven't seen this guy in years, but that was your, you were with us, when, when you took us to get the bullet belts on Carnaby Street, we bumped into these two guys from Sweden. Who became in a massive.

• 22:35Rich Roll?

  And yeah, for people that don't, Jonas Ackerman becomes this super successful music video director and then feature film director.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  And we're all kids in the same place, so we all end up at the marquee and we're all, so here we are in Los Angeles after the movie, I'm sitting there and all of a sudden I see this big tall guy with black hair coming, long black hair comes walking up to me, goes, hi, I'm Jonas Ackerman, I was at your show and at the marquee and in, with so many other people. And I go, he says, yeah, I was with the guys in Candlemas, I go, are you kidding me, what, well, wait a minute, that means that you know Sasha, you should know Sasha, you were all there at the same time. There was so many people. So I ran and got Sasha, I go, you gotta meet this guy, he was at the show too. And I didn't know that Jonas Ackerman was this. Massive video director.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Massive video director, he was, he was, to me, he was the guy that I, that took the picture of the guys and of us and I was, it was more of a, of, of a, wow, look at, this guy was at the marquee too that I'm introducing.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Was a guy called the Right Honourable Philip Harvey. He was known as the Lord of Metal. He was an English aristocrat who would go on safari in Kenya, take his Land Rover, come back to London. And he, I met him through these guys.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  When we did the Donington Festival, we finished the Donington Festival, there's a freak guy standing there with a denim jacket with more patches than you can fit on it. And he's in front of a safari van. And he comes over to us, you know, hi there, you've got some pretty serious denims. A really, really fucking cool, older guy, right? And he introduces, we were hanging out with him, as it turns out, this is the same guy that Jimi Hendrix spent the last night with.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  And he had this, and he had this house in Clark's Mews. Phil Harvey had this party house, which was behind Maribor High Street.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Near Baker Street.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Baker Street. And I was invited to go to this house. And I literally met the world, like members of, I'll tell you several stories, but he was, Monica Dannerman, who was Hendrix's last girlfriend, was there. There were all these incredible, I mean, I remember City, he invited me over for Sunday lunch one day. I'm fifteen and a half at the time, right? And I'm sitting there at this table, and suddenly this camper van comes into the mews, right? And the door slides open and this massive cloud of weed like comes out, comes into the back door. And he said, oh, this is my mate, you know? And so he opened the back door and this guy sat down and was smoking dope. And like he parts his hair to smoke the dope and it's Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  And I'm sitting there at fifteen, like meeting all these extraordinary people, not just Anvil, but like everyone, and then Monica, and then all these crazy artists. And he knew like Dali back in the day. And so Phil was a character who connected us. And those parties were legendary with like Twisted Sister and Maiden and Motorhead.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  It was unbelievable. This guy, this guy comes out and he's got, you know, when they say it's served on a silver platter? I mean, served on a silver.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  He came out with a silver.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  A silver platter filled with every drug. Under the, in the universe.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  And a coyote and psychedelics.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  And I made sure that my mother did not track me down.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  So that was the world. It was so unexpected and crazy. And then flash forward to many years later, after the movie came out. Um, when these guys went to the classic rock awards. And Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin came up to both of those guys and said, "Thank you for doing what you do because you keep me inspired doing what you..." And that was the...

• 26:16Speaker 02

  You give us all hope.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, you give us all hope.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  That's what Jimmy Page said to these guys.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  I was shocked when I heard all that.

• 26:20Rich Roll?

  That's unbelievable.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was just standing there going, "Did I just hear that?"

• 26:23Speaker 01

  From Jimmy Page?

• 26:24Speaker 02

  From Jimmy Page?

• 26:25Speaker 03

  Like, you know?

• 26:26Speaker 02

  And, and, and McCartney. And he went out of his way, came right up to both of us. And it's like, wow, that is...

• 26:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the, the Anvil movie really affected somehow and affected on many people.

• 26:37Rich Roll?

  I mean, that had to be surreal after everything that you guys have endured in the decade, decade.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  The last, uh, the last bunch of years, yeah, last bunch of years.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  I can't tell you, that, that particular night at the, at the, at the classic rock awards was,

• 26:50Speaker 02

  for me, most earth moving moment of my, of my life. There, there wasn't anybody there that didn't actually somehow come up and congratulate me and...

• 27:04Speaker 02

  But I'm not talking about people, I'm talking about the most famous musicians in the world. And I'm like going, "What the..."

• 27:13Speaker 01

  I mean, when, when we had our, when we had our premiere in New York, I remember we were...

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was all just surreal because we, you know, you know.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  We were saying, we were saying...

• 27:19Speaker 02

  You know, we're talking to Jack Bruce for Christ, come on, man!

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And Paul McCartney as well.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Well, no, no, no.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, somewhere else, somewhere else. But anyway. But so I was at the, we were at Barry Hotel and the thank you to Sean McPherson, who owns the Barry Hotel. Because he literally loved the movie and he was like, "Just screen it all the time." And we had everyone from like David Byrne of Talking Heads and all these credible people coming and just loving it and meeting the band and, and doing all this stuff. And one night we were there and Lips comes out from having a smoke on the terrace and he said, "There's this English guy and this black guy out there and they really want to meet you." And anyway, so I go out and they're like the Uber Anvil fans and it's like, uh, Chris Martin and Jay-Z. And Lips had absolutely no idea who they were.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  There's this, there's an English guy and a, and a, and a, and a black guy, man. They, they, they loved the album movie. They had me sit down and have, bought me a drink and everything. You gotta meet these guys.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  And that would just go on all the time. And then at the, I remember in LA, do you remember that whole, oh, oh, the Dustin Hoffman thing was incredible. That was great. So Dustin was so cool. All his, Dustin Hoffman went to see the movie like three or four times. He brought all of his kids to see it. And then he came to the premiere with Ryan Gosling and all these people, right? And he came up to the, them afterwards and said, he was talking about the, the Jewish aspect of the story, which is a huge part of the film for those who haven't seen it. And he was talking about how he related and anyway, so he was in floods of tears. And I was trying to get to them and so Lips and Rob were talking and, you know, talking about, because for those of you who haven't seen the film, you know, an important thing that was revealed actually while we were shooting was that Rob told me that his grandfather had unfortunately passed away

• 29:00Speaker 01

  at Auschwitz and his father as a 15 year old had escaped. And so when Rob wanted to be a heavy metal drummer, his dad was like, great. Let's do it. Paid for the first hour, you know, it was an extraordinary story. And so Dustin was really relating to that. But the best part of it was when Rob like was listening to him and Dustin's crying and Rob's going, yes, like that. And then Rob, Rob sides to me and he goes, is that the guy from Papillon? And the, the thing was that he wasn't quite sure. And it was just Dustin completely in tears. And that was, what was great is that-

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Is that Rob didn't know who these people were?

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:35Rich Roll?

  But that just makes it all the sweeter.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was very charming. A lot of charm to it. Photo session here somewhere and the guy, there was a, a Canadian photographer. He was freaking out that we were there. He goes, and he's, at that particular moment, he was working with Sandra Bullock. And he comes running, he grabs Rob and I takes us into where Sandra's getting her, her makeup done. And she meets us and all this. And then Rob comes out and goes, that's a pretty hot chick. Who is she?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  That was just usual. Anyway, that went on. But it was, you know, it was not that. It was the, it was the things I think that that have resonated for people, what it's really about and why. As you know, why we're doing this is because the movie is being re-released after 13 years, which is quite unusual. And so I think it's, you know, what it's really about.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  It's really, that's really something.

• 30:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it resonates and it's continuing to find new audiences and younger audiences because of the heart. Right? It's this beautiful story of what it means to pursue your passion and not give up no matter what in the face of all of these obstacles. And I think audience members, myself included, like fall in love with you guys because you're so earnest. And because it's just about the doing of it. Like, yes, you have this dream. We're going to be rock stars, but irrespective of outcomes or anything like that, like you're showing up every day, you're putting out albums, you're, you're doing shows and you're getting by in order to just do the thing. And I think that that's super inspiring because all of us, no matter who we are,

• 31:04Rich Roll?

  we all have a dream or something that we'd like to manifest in our life. And some of us meet obstacles and stop and...

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Of life is being there.

• 31:11Rich Roll?

  Sure, of course. But the showing up no matter what, you know, is really what it's about.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  But we don't, we can proudly say that the band has really now become our shitty day job.

• 31:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, careful what you wish for, Rob.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  No, I couldn't be, I couldn't be any more happy.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  It didn't have to be careful. He's very happy with where it is.

• 31:35Speaker 03

  I'm very, I'm very...

• 31:36Speaker 02

  It still couldn't be enough.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. But, uh...

• 31:39Speaker 02

  But you know, I knew...

• 31:40Speaker 03

  I always say that because, you know, it's like...

• 31:43Speaker 02

  There's always room for improvement.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  You're always doing, you're doing what you love.

• 31:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  For not for reasons of money, but for reasons because you love it. I knew something special was happening. Like when we were first thinking about doing the movie and I went to, I took, I said to Lips, "Come to my Uncle Marty's house in Forest Hill on Ava Road in, in, in Toronto." And I said, "Look, I just have this instinct. I've got to make this film." And Lips broke down into tears. And I was like, "Why is he crying?" Because he knew. Before anything happened, what was gonna happen?

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was, I was really certain immediately.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  He knew it was gonna be special.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  I knew, I knew, my boat just came in, hello!

• 32:21Rich Roll?

  Where do you think that comes from? What was that about? That certainty or that knowing?

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Well, what was that about? Part of it is because, and, and the, the failures for no reason. I, I felt all along that there had to be some kind of counter to it. That even though that we're have, have all this bad luck and all this stuff, it's, there's some reason. At, at the end of the day, this is gonna turn around and I don't know why, I just, I was completely convinced. And what I was also convinced of, it was going to be somebody that we met. And was a fan from a young age, was gonna grow up and get into a, a proper position. And that's when we're gonna get our second chance. That's what I really, because we missed the first chance.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  The first chance came and we got involved with the wrong people and at the, at the worst time, at the worst time. 1983, everything is starting to blossom for heavy metal and now we fall out. We don't do a record for four, four years.

• 33:24Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  You're done, man, you're roasted. That kills, that killed all the momentum. It's like starting over again. And, and starting over again with way less going for you because everything else is growing up so tall. How are you gonna compare and how are you gonna, how are you gonna contend now? That everything and every, everybody stole everything you did blind.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  To the, to the point where everybody is doing it. So you're not gonna come across as being the special thing anymore. You're done, it's done, it did its thing. You, you.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  But there's a famous line in a movie, Slash says it, right?

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, but, but those things were the realities. But, but, but the way that I looked at it is that, okay, we, we missed our first opportunity. So what's gonna happen? It's gonna happen. Somebody where we laid the, made a, a huge impression on at a young age is gonna grow up to, to the point and, and, and get into a position of power, whether it's gonna be owning a record company. I thought it was gonna be owning a record company or something. That was always in my mind. But when I came back from that festival in Italy, after talking to the Candle Mask guys, I get an email from Sasha, who, like I said.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  We haven't talked in years.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  I've spoken for twenty years.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, you know, the last time I spoke to him is 1985 and it's 2005. It's like, hello, like, where you been?

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, but all those years, we were always wondering where Sasha went.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  So from my side, what had happened was, and going back to the original story we were telling, was that I was into metal and then seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, I got into Bowie, I got into the Stooges. I got, you know, I kind of grew up a little bit, but always loved Anvil and always loved metal, but I just expanded as well. So I loved other things. And I kind of went off on my journey and I found myself some years later in Hollywood and.

• 35:11Rich Roll?

  Well, before that, though, you were a drummer. You were the original drummer in Bush.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  That is correct.

• 35:15Rich Roll?

  Right, so you had a moment.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Gavin Rossdale and I had gone to school together, to two schools, Northridge House and Westminster. And then, yeah, I'd been a founding member of that band, which at that time was called Future Primitive. Still a good name. And I played on a lot of those songs and all the original material from the first Bush album, which was huge. You know, I'd started off with them. I was the first real drummer to play those songs and it was, you know, and there was also other stuff going on in my personal life. For whatever reason, I kind of left that band and I kind of then got my life sorted out and decided to. I always wanted to be a writer, so I became a journalist. And then I was like, well, actually, I really want to make movies. And then I found myself in UCLA Film School and then I got lucky and had a film made.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Anyway, so I had developed something of a Hollywood career and had had just a big movie made. And I was sort of in 2004 or 2005, I was kind of like, had this moment. I remember I was at, you know, I had this beach house, you know, and I was sitting in this beach house. And I was like, I got into this movie, movie business. I was sort of quote unquote, successful, whatever that means. I was successful. Now my agents were like, you have to go and meet Adam Sandler and you have to do all this stuff and you're going to be paid all this money.

• 36:30Rich Roll?

  And when did, when did The Terminal come out?

• 36:33Speaker 01

  That was made in 2004. Yeah, so I had I made a movie with Spielberg and Hanks and yeah, so I'd done that. And, you know, there was lots of opportunity, but the opportunity to me was to make was to make money. You know, and I was not happy. I was like, is this what it is? Like, this is not really. Because there were so many pressures to kind of go and do stuff that I didn't really feel. And I was having this really low moment when most people would have said, you know, you should be thrilled. And I was at a certain level, but I was also like, I got into this business to tell stories that were really personal and that meant something to me. And I was thinking about how the hell am I gonna do that? Rather than being part of this giant corporate machine, because my agents were saying, you know, you can get XXX amount of money to do this big studio thing and work with such and such a star.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  And I just realized, my God, it's a business. And I just was like, I was a bit of a, I was a bit like at a crossroads. And for whatever reason, Anvil came into my mind. And I was like, fuck, what happened to Anvil, man? Because I knew, you know, Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax, all those bands who'd been influenced by Anvil and by, you know, that whole group of bands, you know, had gone on to become mega bands. But what had happened to Anvil? So I went online and I discovered this rinky dink website. Please don't be insulted if I call it rinky dink. But it was, you know. That's okay, man. It's a fan site. It's a fan site.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  One of the first ones that had.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  It's a fan site.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  It's been in existence since nineteen ninety six.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  It was a fan, it's a fan site. It was early, man. Anyway, so, so I went on and I discovered this fan site. And I discovered that Anvil had just played like at a pub in Quebec, right? Just that weekend. And then I discovered, oh, my God, they've done like nine other albums that I don't know. Anyway, so I wrote to the website and I remember writing and I wrote to to Lips and I said,

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Dear Lips, I don't know if you remember me. My Anvil name was Teabag. This is Teabag, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I would love to just speak to you and catch up. So I just thought, fuck, they kept going, but they're not famous and they just kept going. And within an hour, I got an email back from Lips saying, um, Teabag, we thought you died or became a lawyer.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Both of those things had happened. I had had heroin overdose and I had gone to law school. So I was like, yeah, it's roughly accurate. So I had just like, you know, gone through some, some crazy times. And I said to Lips, I said, dude, I gotta see you. I just had this feeling talking to him again. It was like 20 years was nothing. It was like two minutes. And I said, I'm gonna fly you out to LA this weekend. Would you come if I bought you a ticket? And so I bought him a ticket and I'll never forget. I pulled up in my car at LAX and Lips came out and he had, he was wearing the same Scorpions T-shirt that he had been wearing 20 years before, when I had last seen him. And he was so happy and I was like, dude, what's happening, man? And I was thinking, God, this has been really hard because all the bands like have gone

• 39:28Speaker 01

  on to be mega and Anvil's like playing a pub in Quebec and I'm sure it's great, but you know, this is tough. And, and, and Lips was like, no, man, we're doing the new album and we're doing this and we got this tour. And it was just like, at first, if I'm really honest, my thought was, fuck, man, this is like a bit sad. Like you should just give this up. But you know, what happened was as he started to explain, I was so lifted by his enthusiasm and his passion and his commitment. And it was just like, I need this person in my life right now. Here I am with all this quote unquote success and I'm miserable as most people when they get on the other side of the curtain discover it's like.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  Well, to me, to me, he missed, he missed all these albums. He's, he's saying we don't exist, to you, we didn't exist, but to me, I've been here all along.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  And then he's like, you've got to listen to this and how about that? And then, then so we started, anyway, so what happened was I was so like, I just was so happy to see him and we called Rob and I was just so, I felt like that old feeling of my friends. And I felt this incredible feeling like this, this has come into my life for some reason right now. I don't quite know what the reason is, but this has come into my life and I felt so inspired and I, um, I took Lips to meet, you know, the best man at my wedding, my mentor, you know, Steve Zalian, who had, you know, written Schindler's List amongst many other things. And I, I, I took Lips to down to Malibu to meet Steve and Elizabeth and I remember making coffee.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  With with Steve and watching Lips kind of explain Anvil to Elizabeth, who was somewhat bemused through the window. I was like, what the fuck? And and Steve said, who is this guy? And I said, this is my friend Lips. And he was in this band and I told him the whole story. Steve went online and started looking up lyrics and was like, they have a song called Show Me Your Tits. And I said, yes, they do. But it's really like funny and they have a sense of humor. Anyway, and I told him the story that they're still going and all the bands. And he said, you know what? There may be a, there may be a film here. And I said, really? He said, just think about it.

• 41:30Rich Roll?

  So that hadn't even occurred to you? That was not part of the motivation or anything at that point?

• 41:34Speaker 01

  It was sort of like I had an instinct, but in a, in a strange way, Steve crystallized that instinct. He was like, okay, I'm, what I'm thinking is that. But he kind of brought it out because I was so enthusiastic and excited. And and it was immediately, it was a story about just not giving up no matter what. When most rational sane people would have stopped long ago. The indomitable spirit of being committed to your art and being committed to your friend. Because remember, like Lips and Rob met when they were 13, 14 years old and they decided to rock together forever. And literally, as we sit here today, it's 50 years later. They're 65 and they're still doing it.

• 42:11Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Like, how unusual and unique was that? And that was already going on.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Without making millions of dollars.

• 42:17Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  We're not talking about Keith Richards.

• 42:19Rich Roll?

  No, sure. Doing it for the passion and also.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  Two guys who did it for, for the, and and ultimately, it's the same reasoning.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  It is the same reasoning at heart. There's no, no different.

• 42:30Rich Roll?

  Rocking the rock.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  They got super successful doing it. I didn't get so successful doing it.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  But you still did it.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  But I, I still did it and I still do it for the same reason. I love music. That's why I do it. I take money as a souvenir. That's about it. But generally, you're, you're doing it because you really love to do this. You're, you're driven to do it. I'm driven, my, my thing that drives me most is I've got to make, I've got to put together a song. That's, that's going to satisfy this motherfucker.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  If it can satisfy him, because the way that like part of, you know, your growing up relationship, you know, when I, if you understand what I mean, you have a buddy that that goes out and buys everybody's record and is like, is like the dictionary of of information, you know what I'm saying? That's who, that's who I'm working with, is somebody who has knowledge of everything that everybody did. And so when, when I go and bring something to the table, he goes, I know exactly what we could do. I got examples from this song, this song, this song. And then before you know it, because of those arrangement ideas and with that kind of volume of knowledge, you've got songs in matters of minutes.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  So, so I had, so I had this instinct about.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  That's what makes our writing work so well.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  I had this instinct about I gotta, I gotta make this film and I, I thought I gotta test out this thing, because I thought initially it was going to be like a dramatic film, like I would have actors. Yeah, I mean, wide documentary. And, and anyway, so finally I got to the place where like, like, what am I doing? And at the same time, actually, Ozzy Osbourne had called me to see if I would do his movie at Paramount. And I was thinking about that and I was like, why would you hire an actor to play Ozzy? He's, you can't beat that. Well, like, why would you do it? So I was thinking, hmm. And then basically I called my friend Rebecca Yeldum, who's a fantastic producer and Rebecca had produced The Motorcycle Diaries and The Kite Runner and all these incredible movies. She'd been a programmer at Sundance and I called her up and I said, let me tell you a story.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  And so I took her to dinner and told her the story of Anvil, of this friendship with the guys who hadn't given up and they're still going or whatever. And she said, I hate heavy metal and I have to make this movie with you. It's absolutely great. And so Rebecca, who literally was not, you know, just came on board. And I went then to, and Rebecca and Lips and Rob and I all met in Toronto. She was there, I can't remember, with a movie. And we all met and Rebecca said, I'm going to take you out to this restaurant. And you know, you got emotional at the restaurant and Rebecca said to you, you know, what's going on? And you said, I delivered fish to this restaurant for eight years and this is the first time I've eaten here. And she, she just suddenly was like, okay, I understand what this film is.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  This is a film about everyone who has to do what they've got to do to do the thing they love. And she was just suddenly got really on board. And I was like, look, I'm never going to sell this movie to anyone. I'm going to have to finance it. And then there was the big decision, I've got to get a crew together. And I went to this terrific cameraman called Chris Seuss, who's absolutely brilliant. And I hired Chris and I hired Matt Dennis for sound and we put this, this thing, and I just flew to Eastern Europe because they were going to do a tour. And I just thought, this is, now is the moment. And I didn't know what I was doing. I funded the whole thing myself. It was, nearly destroyed me financially, if I'm being really honest. And multiple times we were told, just give this up, just give it up, stop it. And then we made the film and I started editing.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  I had fantastic editors, Andrew Dickler and Jeff Renfro, who were absolutely brilliant. We edited on my dining room table. It was all self-funded and we had no idea what we were doing. And we all stood in a circle, I remember when we had the first cut of the movie, and we were all in my house at Mont Carme and we just kissed the DVD. We would send it to Sundance, hoping that something would happen and they, they let us.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the funniest thing was it going, okay, we've got to, now let's see if we get into Sundance. I go, what do you mean, get in? You knew all along. What do you mean? Get in. This thing's going all the way. You've got, you're going to, you're going to take the DVD over to the, to the, to the people there. And I go, well, I thought, what, they haven't seen it? Yeah. I thought, I thought it's a shoo-in, what do you mean?

• 46:50Speaker 01

  There were like 25,000 films looking for like 20 places.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  And then I went, oh, really? Oh.

• 47:00Rich Roll?

  Coming back from more of it first.

• 47:08Rich Roll?

  What I remember about that time, I mean, first of all, I remember being at the barbecue that you had at your beach house.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  When Lips first came to LA.

• 47:17Rich Roll?

  And I remember meeting, I'm sure you don't remember that, but I vividly remember that. And I thought, what is going on here?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, all of my friends were like, who is this guy?

• 47:25Rich Roll?

  Well, because it's a very bougie situation. And then there's, you know, Lips is here. And I was like, you were like the person I didn't know. And you're like, this is my friend Lips. And you told the story. And I was like, well, that's interesting. We'll see what happens here.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  But I didn't even have the idea for the movie then.

• 47:39Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, I know.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  I was just like, this is my friend. And then Lips told me some stuff and we talked about Robbo and the band and what had happened and all the different things. And it was like, there was just this reconnection between all of us that was so surprising.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  Oh, we had some such hilarious, I had, I had an interview that was sent to me from, from France. And we start doing this interview.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  So he says, I'm bored with doing these interviews. Can you answer for me? So I wrote all his answers for the French interview. And it was like, I wrote the most.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  I was literally, we were literally in tears from the, like, there was, we were giving a fictitious story about what happened, how did we, how did Anvil get together and all this stuff? And there was such unbelievable stories about squirrely working in a cemetery.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  So they asked what the former member's doing. And I said, he's, you know, he's a grave digging assistant at a certain cemetery. He likes.

• 48:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  You're fucking with people. Just making it up as it goes. I was just like in tears from, it's just hilarious.

• 48:51Rich Roll?

  But I remember first, before you go on, sorry. I remember when you returned from that trip to Eastern Europe. And I know that was a very difficult trip. And there was like a lot of issues. And you were freaking out because you're financing this whole thing and it's teetering on disaster. But. All I remember about that was your just glee and enthusiasm at showing you. You were like, you have to see this footage and you were like, well, sit down and let me show you what's going on. So I had no doubt that this would ultimately become something because you were so invested in it, like you had so much passion poured into like making this great.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  But every time this guy would start the fucking camera shit was going on, man, you just go, what the?

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Okay, let me give you an example of what happened. Our first day of shooting in Prague, we shot and it was just madness.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  No, we're not getting fucking paid. Where's the fucking club owner? You are too late. If I was too late, I wouldn't have fucking played, pal. You're gonna fucking pay me. I did my work. I wanna get paid.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  The promoter tried to pay the band in goulash.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  That's nice. I guess he figures if he gives me a bit of goulash, I'll forget about it.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  There was a physical fight.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  You should have told us you weren't paying us before we fucking played and we wouldn't have fucking played. You fucking piece of shit. You fucking pay me. I'm fucking rude. I'm gonna fucking kick your fucking teeth in. Yeah, I am fucking crazy. I've just worked my ass off and you won't fucking pay me. You're a motherfucker.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  It was just, it was just madness, right? So my, my cameraman, who is absolutely brilliant, Chris Seuss, at the end of the shoot said, okay, look, I need to talk to you, right? So I, and he was very serious and I thought, fuck, man. He, I just thought he got some news, like a family member was dying or something. I thought he was gonna have to leave. So he says, let's go back to the hotel. We go in the elevator. I was like, do you wanna talk? He said, just hold on. We go into his hotel room. He turns around, I'm standing in the little living area of his hotel suite in Prague. He, he locks the door and he turns around to me and he says, I need to know, are they actors? My own crew did not believe what was happening. They thought that I had hired.

• 50:54Rich Roll?

  It was a whole, it was a whole thing.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  That the whole thing was a hoax. So I was doing like a Michelle Gondry style meta joke on the crew. And I was like, dude, no, this is Anvil. He said, I don't believe you. I said, go online, man, look it up. And he looked up 25 years of history and he was like, have you? Like he could not believe that it was real. And that's when I knew we had something. Because it was impossible. Still to this day, people think it's a mockumentary. Some people think that they don't believe it's a real film. And they like in Galway in Ireland, when we, when we.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  I've been accused of being an actor.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so these Irish girls came up to Rob Reiner and they were like, dude, you're not Rob Reiner. That's the director of Spinal Tap.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  Because you wanna see my, you wanna see my passport.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  So he shows these passports.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  You, you, you Hollywood types can get anything printed.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Any, he, they did not believe him showing his passport. These girls thought it was a prop. I'm like, no, it's, it's real. People still remember it's real. So I knew that was something. And then the second thing that happens when we finally got the film together and we did get into Sundance, we screened it and it was incredible. Like all these people showed up to support us. And I was like, you know, I had literally mortgaged my house for this film. And I was like, if this doesn't work, it's like a disaster. But I was like so pleased I'd done it anyway. And I was thinking to myself as the movie was beginning, like if it all goes horribly wrong, like I still I'm proud of this film. I just don't care. And then people started laughing and then the audience started to get involved and then they got emotional.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  And at the end of the film, there was such an incredible response.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Standing ovations.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  It was a genuine response. You know, at film festivals, sometimes the air is, you know, everyone's a little bit high, but you could tell it was really extraordinary. And Anvil then went out afterwards to the, it was snowing in Sundance. And they had this van and they were selling T shirts and copies of the album, This is 13. And there was a line, like almost everyone from the theater, which was like 700 people, was trying to buy stuff. It was madness. And I remember there was this 78 year old woman who was in line and who came back with three This is 13 CDs and a T shirt. And I was like, what does, like, it was like Angela Lansbury. Well, like, what is she doing? And I stopped her, I said, madam, I hope you don't mind. I'm just asking like, who are you? And she, she was, she was a history teacher at a high school in Park City, retired.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  You know, she was basically a high school teacher and, and she, I said, well, why did you buy three of these records? And she held them up and she said, I. I will never listen to these, but I just wanna help.

• 53:24Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  And I knew then that this film had the potential to reach people way beyond metal, beyond music, and it was about the human spirit. And it contained, and again, when you're making a film, you have no idea what you're doing. You just hope that something happens. And in this case, I just hoped. And what we discovered from the film was that it was about not giving up. You know, it was about friendship. It was about family. It was about not giving up on a dream. And like, what could be more universal than that?

• 53:55Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  And I think that's why here we are 13 years later, releasing the film again. It's because of those themes, you know? And it's also this-

• 54:03Speaker 02

  And your time becomes timeless.

• 54:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's this meta story because the film is crazy successful and that brings life into your career. And then you get this, you know, new third act or second act, depending on how you look at it, where suddenly you have these opportunities.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  My ship really came in and it couldn't have come in at a better time. I mean, life, life has got a lot of different things that you realize when everybody else's is, is closing down their shop, I just opened up.

• 54:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  Which is a great thing because when you're closing down-

• 54:33Rich Roll?

  You've been preparing for this your whole life.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  Everybody's closing down their shop because they're burnt out and they have no heart left to do it and they're, they're quitting. And it's like, I find that, how do you, if you're a real artist, you should be here till the, till you, till you're pushing up daisies and that's the end of it.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  And we had so many moments, like ironically, you know, someone said that, you know, in one, in one sense, this film is, is a portrait of failure. But the irony being that it led to the band's incredible success to this day. And I remember so many moments, but one of them was ACDC asked Anvil to open for them at Giants Stadium.

• 55:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  And I remember standing on the side of the stage and me and Lips were like, I was just, I got so, you know, it was really emotional, man, because you had 50,000 people screaming for Anvil. And this was this little movie that we all kind of made in my kitchen and edited on my dining table. And it was just like overwhelming and that has continued even in the years that the films, you know, in the last 13 years and just so many unexpected- Crazy things.

• 55:32Rich Roll?

  So the the movie opens with all these luminaries and legends like Slash and Scott Ian.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  And Lars, yeah.

• 55:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, Lars Ulrich, talking about how influential Anvil was and how much they love the band. And it sort of smash cuts to, you know, you delivering food to schools and you get this portrait of, you know, current day Anvil and what your lives are like. So while these other bands who were influenced and and kind of behind you leapfrog you, become crazy successful, you guys are still back in Toronto kind of doing your thing. How did you not become like bitter or resentful or were there moments of that? Like, I just see you guys as as just very grounded and Lips, I mean, you're you're this person who has this huge capacity for positivity.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  It depends on how you want to look at life.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  You know, it's a real big thing. If if you measure everything, oh, I gotta be a millionaire to be considered successful, you're an idiot. It's like owning a hardware store. I want to be Home Depot. You don't have to be Home Depot. You can be the small hardware store on on on Main Street and do just fine and make a living and be known to everybody in the town just the same way as Home Depot. You know, you're not making the millions that Home Depot is. You don't have a place that that can hold it. But it doesn't matter because you're doing what you you have passion. You love being that small shop. And that's exactly what Anvil is. It's not a a story about about a band

• 57:05Speaker 02

  that wasn't successful. You don't call a band who's done 12 albums at that point unsuccessful. They got 12 albums out. Being unsuccessful would be something, okay, they did an album and they don't exist anymore for 20, 30 years. No, we do. We did an album every couple of years, generally, generally speaking, for our entire.

• 57:23Rich Roll?

  You have like 18 albums now?

• 57:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's like, that's not, that's not unsuccessful at all.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  And also, and also, the re-release of the film is coordinated.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  Is is yet yet more success. But instead of getting, having a one-hit album in nineteen eighty and then and then being. Retired in nineteen eighty-two and being here at sixty-five with nothing to do and all my money's gone. I've got a, I'm having the time of my life at a time when, when, when I, when I can't do physical labor. Everything worked out perfectly as far as I'm concerned for my life. When I had the physicality and the, the abilities to go do physical labor. It kept me in top, top physical condition. Here I am at sixty-five. I'm not, I'm not three hundred pounds. I still weigh a hundred and fifty pounds, whatever.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  And the thing, and the thing about that tour that you see in the film is like, this is the attitude. Like they would go out and play to someone in a rocking chair. They played the same show they played at Giant Stadium to fifty thousand people. They live it. They do it. And I just found that so like, wow.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  Why are you doing this? You have to ask yourself why you're doing, you're doing it because it's fulfilling your, your soul. That's what you're driven to do. That's what, what I do. I, I am not driven, I got a top single hit. I'm not interested, never was. I wanted to be the band that, that existed on, on a, a, an underground level for, for forty years and then on their, their fiftieth year when they're just about finished. They put out a top, top ten hit album and, and it sells like, like crazy. Now you retire.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  At seventy-five years old, like proper.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  I'll give you an example. As, as you mentioned, all the luminaries like Lars Ulrich, you know, who of course knew the band. Who I think we met back way, way, way back in the day. You know, Lars called me after he said, you know, we Metallica watched Anvil on our jet drinking champagne in tears. Because that could have been us. And there was just something so like, you were talking about sliding doors earlier.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  You know.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  Well, Steve, Steve Harris.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  From Iron Maiden.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  Said that exactly. In a blink, I could be you, you could be me. Because it, to a great degree, uh, rock and roll is really, to a great degree, ninety-nine percent chance in being at, like Lemmy said. Yeah, there's luck, there's timing, there's signing the wrong contract.

• 59:51Rich Roll?

  The wrong manager at the wrong time, all that kind of stuff.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  Dave Grohl said that to a safe guess.

• 59:57Speaker 03

  You make your own luck, but you gotta connect with it.

• 59:59Rich Roll?

  In certain respects, you can make the argument that you guys are way ahead of your time because it was always just about connecting with your audience directly, right? And just putting out these albums for the people that love you. And now we're finally in this economy where artists, musicians can do that. They can sidestep these gatekeepers and these record companies. I mean, for a long time during the formative years, when all these bands were getting huge, it was the record company making a decision, this is the band we're gonna invest in. They're in cahoots with the radio stations, this is what gets played.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  This is the producer, we're gonna buy them songs, we're gonna have musicians play their parts because they can't play them well enough. We're gonna get makeup artists so that they don't look so ugly. Everything that they do, that they do and did, and probably still continue to do and groom, groom pop. Pop, popular, popular.

• 1:00:50Rich Roll?

  But you've remained true, you have your loyal fan base, you've always served them, and you have that direct connection. And you're fulfilled in doing that.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  Yes, but it's actually, over the last, since the movie, it's been expanding.

• 1:01:01Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  That's actually part of a great reality.

• 1:01:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Speaker 03

  It's, it's not, it's, we always have new people.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  And by the way, when we're making the movie, we had no idea what was gonna happen at all. Like, I remember Robert during the filming, there was some crazy stuff. He pulled me aside, he said, "You better edit this right, because this could be really bad."

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  And I was like, "Dude, you gotta trust me, man. I love you guys, I'm your fan. I want all of this to work for the band." And I was very, and I said to them, when I showed them the film for the first time, I said, "If there's anything you really hate, or anything that you don't feel is authentic or true, I will take it out. I'm not in the business of trying to upset my friends. I want all of this struggle to be shown, so that people will understand what you guys have been through to be able to do this."

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  I'm fucking sick of it. I can't fucking deal with it. You know, we're gonna come apart at the seams? I don't know what's gonna happen. I'm fucking, I am so fucking fed up. We gotta get a drummer. I mean, I don't know what to say. I'm not, he's fired. I mean, what can I say?

• 1:02:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and I, I think your strength as a, as a writer and a filmmaker Sasha is understanding that emotional piece and knowing how to tap into the heart center of what the story is really about.

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  Come on, man, the guy, the guy films us in the middle of a heated, brutal argument. You fucking listen to me, you fucking asshole. Look, you smile, you're smiling at a fucking loser. You're a fucking loser. That's what you are. He's got a big smile on his face. I go, what the fuck?

• 1:02:32Rich Roll?

  But at that point...

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  He goes, I waited two years for this moment.

• 1:02:35Rich Roll?

  He's gonna make sure that the audience is in love with you.

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  It's gold from heaven.

• 1:02:38Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? Cause, cause here's the thing, like, and you said it earlier, like, it's not about, like, when Rebecca said, like, I don't like metal, but I need to tell this story. It's like, you don't have to care about metal at all. And I, you know, I think getting people past that, like, getting them to understand that, which perhaps is a barrier to getting people to see the movie, like, it's not really about that. It's about this lifelong friendship and what these guys, you know, have endured over these many years and this passion that they've shared to pursue this thing that they love, no matter what.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  First thing I want to say is I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Do you understand that? I'm under a hell of a lot of stress, okay? If I lose my temper, if anybody knows, you know.

• 1:03:22Speaker 03

  I'm tired of being the fall guy. I understand, but I'm tired of it, man, sorry.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  You're my fucking brother, man. Who else can I fucking cry on their shoulder and fucking say shit to? Who else? Who's the closest person I got in the world? Think about that.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  But you know what's interesting is, is as you say, it's right. It started off as a kind of metal rock thing, but in terms of music, it's now expanded to country, to rap. Like, I know that there are rappers who have Anvil on their tour bus as opposed to, you know, other films. It's just gone through whole of music and then it's gone a little bit through sport and then it's gone a little bit corporate. Like, I know that the movie was shown at a corporate retreat for a massive Fortune 500 company, you know, just in terms of like...

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  It's just, it's shown in schools.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  It's, I know.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  Like the first three, you know, it's shown in schools.

• 1:04:09Rich Roll?

  We've done Q and As at, at universities and stuff. We did one in Ireland.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:14Speaker 03

  A big university.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  It's just be, and you could never have imagined. And what's beautiful about it is that it continues to keep going.

• 1:04:22Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Like out of the blue, and I know unexpectedly, you know, Lips and Rob have received, you know, hundreds of emails over the years from people who are really suffering. And, you know, in some cases, terminally ill.

• 1:04:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, this is like what I want to know about, like, because there is a whole, like inspirational kind of, you know, self-help piece to this in that people are finding inspiration through your story and are seeking you out for, you know, a little piece of that.

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's been going, it's been going on. They thank you, they thank us a lot, right?

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, for some reason, it gives people hope when they watch that, like, because we're so hopeless, we give people hope, I don't know. I mean, Jimmy Page said, you give us all hope, okay.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  It's honest, because this is the truth.

• 1:05:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  This is the truth, and I think that was the thing, because of our relationship that goes back for fifty, forty years, you know, actually, you know, when the film comes out, it'll be forty years that's since we first met, you know, there's something pure. And they, these guys had to trust me, and I had to tell them, listen, I am going to have to show stuff that's going to be funny. First of all, you guys are fucking funny, right? And second of all, I'm going to take the audience on a journey. And if I encourage the audience to kind of laugh at the anvil stuff, which is funny, trust me, it will turn. And by the end, the people that they thought were funny in fifteen minutes in are going to be, hopefully, if it works, really moved by and connect within an unexpected way. And that's everything, as you point to. A theme of my work is like, people who are on the outskirts, or, you know, different,

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  whether it's Hervé Villiers, or, you know, Alfred Hitchcock, or Tom Hanks stuck in an airport, you know, these are all people that are not mainstream society. And bringing you into their emotional world and making you realize that we are all basically the same.

• 1:06:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  You know, and it doesn't matter whether you wear a bullet belt and a, you know, and a beanie and what kind of music you're playing, you know, we're all human beings. And that's what I think was the intention of the film. And I think what's really good is that it's reached, it's reached people in a human way. So it started off in a music thing, and now it's just gone to people.

• 1:06:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:06:23Speaker 02

  And, yeah, the, the, some of the most remarkable stuff for me is, is talking to cancer patients and people who, who have lost, are about to lose everything.

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  And it actually gave, gives me an appreciation for how, how lucky I am. In so many ways, it's actually, I don't realize what I've done for somebody else, but I know what they're doing for me. It's making me feel, it was remarkable. To the point where I've been actually involved in doing Zoom sessions with people who are terminally ill. And with other musicians that are famous and fulfilling their, their dream of meeting somebody that's famous.

• 1:07:18Rich Roll?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  And although it seems very frivolous and nothing to me, to just sit here and go, "Hey, it's nice to meet you, man. I, I'm really sorry to hear about your, your, your sickness, but you know what? Every minute counts. So let's have a good time right now and you can, let's just talk about all kinds of things." And you don't necessarily talk about, about Anvil's music or anything like that. You end up talking about, about just life in general, about how much they love their children and how, you know, all different aspects of, of other people's lives. And you're going, "Wow, look at that." And I'm thinking, "Look, you'd never think then in a million years that somebody who, who plays a guitar with a vibrator

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  means that much to somebody who's dying." It's like, "What?"

• 1:08:08Rich Roll?

  But that's what's really important and that's what matters in life, right? So I think there's, you know, to your point of, of taking audiences on a journey and, and, you know, having them really connect. I think we're all in search of, of, of finding something that's real. And there's an earnestness with the way that you guys live your lives and conduct yourselves, selves and just this unbridled, like authenticity.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Can I also say a kindness? Because if they had not been sweet to me, right?

• 1:08:37Rich Roll?

  It all comes around because of that experience.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  What I noticed, the first thing, as I said, I noticed about Anvil was they spoke to me, their fan, in exactly the same way that they spoke to Steve Harris of Iron Maiden or whoever it was, right? There was no difference for them. They were kind. I'm not the first fan, by the way, that Anvil is invited on the road. A lot of their roadies are fans who get to get up close and personal with it. So their attitude, their whole attitude towards people and fans, you know, had they been, you know, I got into that changing room at the Marquee Club in September nineteen eighty-two and they were like, I'm busy talking to the guy from Iron Maiden. You know, none of this would have happened. It was who they were.

• 1:09:18Rich Roll?

  And there's something very instructive about that, you know, in terms of like how you live your life and how you treat other people.

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  Well, we don't, to us, it was more remarkable, more remarkable that when he walked into the changer, it was much more remarkable in the sense that he knew the music so inside out and he wasn't from the same country. And this was our first time overseas. This, this is the first time we've actually met a fan who has been introduced and knows us by our music from far away. He didn't come see us at the Gasworks. He didn't come see us at the, at the Young Station. He knows nothing of what we've done to get where we are, but he knows our music thoroughly and it was, it was an amazement.

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  Look at how powerful a music is that we've, we've, we've inspired this kid who lives here in England.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  This is what we, this is what we hope. It was because of their music that that's a movie. It's because of the music. I connected in with how extraordinary they were and are and it's astonishing that here we are like forty years later discussing this. And I can't believe that, you know, we're very fortunate that I'll, so the re-release, I'll just explain a little bit of how this happened.

• 1:10:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, let's preface that by saying the movie goes on to touch millions of people all over the world. It's since been placed on all of these, you know, best rock documentaries of all time lists from Newsweek to The Guardian to, you know, NME. Like all of these places have placed Anvil, The Story of Anvil. Among the top three, five, 10 rock documentaries of all time.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  I mean, and we look at these lists because we got the Newsweek list recently and you're like, you're on a list with like, you know, Woodstock and Gimme Shelter and, you know, and the Bob, No Way Home, the Bob Dylan movie and all these incredible films. And Amy, which I love, you know, and all, and we're in, and it's like hard to believe, like, like what? This is our little movie, but, and I've, we've encountered all of us over the years, so many fans and other filmmakers who just, you can't believe that they've even seen the film. You're so sort of touched.

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  Well, the thing is, the thing is about it is the access. And it really is about the access of, of the director to the subjects of the documentary. He had a hundred percent access. You don't usually get that.

• 1:11:46Rich Roll?

  And trust.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  And trust. They just, they're not going to get it. Who's, who the hell is going to, you know, have their basically hands around each other's throat and let you, let yourself get filmed. During the whole, that whole thing, when I was saying that, that he's saying, I waited through two, three years for this. We didn't have, it's, it's very, very uncommon for us to get like that. We got like that through the, the pressures and stress of being in the studio and everything that was going on.

• 1:12:14Speaker 03

  Working, working with a crazy producer.

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  All, everything was culminated it and created it.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  And it was also that the band was really on the edge. Like it was either make or, like this was going to happen or not. The whole band was the, and obviously when there's a movie.

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  Everything. He's, he's on the edge of, am I going to make it with, with this? I'm on the edge with, I'm, I've spent everything we've got in the bank. I've lent money from my sister. Just an endless list of, oh my God, if this goes sour, it, it's, we're done.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  And it continued because when we had this incredible reaction at Sundance, it was in 2008 and the documentary market was the absolute, it was a disaster. It was the financial crisis. And, you know, I was like facing love, people love. I remember one major distributor came to see the movie, came out in tears. He said, I absolutely love your movie. I just can't sell it. It's just too, you know, it's just too weird to sell mainstream. Anyway, so I remember being on the phone with my agent and, and, and manager. And they were like, look, you've been offered this DVD deal with this company, very good company. You'll get some of the money back. And you should just take the deal. Everyone loves this movie, you know. And I just thought about it overnight and I was like, fuck it. No.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  I'm fucking releasing this movie into theaters. And I called up Lips and Rob and I said, we're not fucking giving it away to some DVD company. It'll disappear. This movie is too important because every place that we'd shown it had had, I just trusted the audience. And so I took a mortgage to take them, to take the movie out and take it into theaters. And we got an amazing guy called Richard Maramovitz in New York. And we got an amazing guy called Scott Feinstein and Cynthia Swanson. I paid for all that because I knew this movie needed to get out there. And it was like, I was, I was already done. But I was like, I'm done. Fuck it. I'm going.

• 1:14:07Rich Roll?

  I remember that. I mean, that was such a ballsy thing to do.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  I had no choice. It's like, if you're done, you're done.

• 1:14:13Rich Roll?

  It was pre Netflix and all the hysteria around documentaries.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:14:17Rich Roll?

  And I remember like you trying to figure out what you were gonna do.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  And I.

• 1:14:21Rich Roll?

  And like double down. I mean, how much of that is a hat tip to kind of the inspirational influence of you guys, right? Like, you're like, that, that would have been an obvious choice for you, right?

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:14:34Rich Roll?

  Of course, always invest in yourself.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  It's never, it's never, it's never a question of whether it's obvious. It's like, there's no other option.

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  Like, it's not, you, you, you're doing something and it's like, I've gotta go through with it. Or it is gonna crash. I would say the whole, I would say the whole of my life. You know, I don't have to do an album and go, okay, well, I'm gonna bail because I don't think the song is working out. No, I'm gonna finish it and I gotta get this job done, man.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  And I had, I was in this exactly the same position. I think what you pointed out is absolutely right. I was like, what would Anvil do? They would fucking double down and they'd, they'd go for it. So I got this money and we hired Richard and Scott and we took it out. And it was just astonishing what happened. Like, the week that we were released, they were on CNN. Good morning.

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  Well, what we did, what we did, we had, we had, we had this whole vision of how this was gonna work. And we got every, everything that we needed. You know, everything, every step of the way, we would discuss it and then we'd make a decision. We would do this, do that. We got this guy. By Josh, who could book all the theaters, book the band into the theaters.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  So we did the movie and then the band. It's like a road show. And we did it as an experience and it happened at the LA.

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  And that's how we released the movie through America. So people are going, fuck. They watch the movie and all of a sudden, the next thing they know, they got me standing beside them in the aisle. Playing the March of the Crabs. Are you, what are you kidding me?

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  And, and the way it all came to life was it happened at the LA Film Festival. We got in, we actually ended up, I think, winning the audience award at LA. Ford Amphitheater, the movie was shown on a giant screen. You were there. I was there. And it was 1500 people, every band from like, I can't remember, like Weezer to whoever. It was just everyone was there. The movie played like gangbusters. It was the summer. And then at the end of the movie, people were freaking out. Suddenly a spotlight and you saw Lips on a Roman column, 60 feet in the air with this flying V. And people went nuts because here's the audience able to make this a happy ending for the band. And they've just been through with them through this madness. And that was how we took the movie out. We did it in Japan and it was mental in Japan.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  We got chased in Japan. We did, I mean, it was bonk and we did it all over the world. We did it in London. And, um, you know, there's two people I really want to mention. One of them is, uh, Shepherd's Bush Empire, two shows. It was like crazy. Scott Ian from Anthrax came out to support, you know, the really sweet thing, and I just have to give a nice compliment to someone. Is Keanu Reeves, who I knew and I said, dude, we've got the London Film Festival. And like, is there any way that you could come and help? And he said, well, what do you want me to do? I said, well, if you could just come and maybe intro the film, I just thought bad about asking. And you know what? He flew himself from LA to London and he introduced the film and he did the press line.

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  And because people knew he was coming, 3000 girls showed up. Wow. And we had, the Woody Allen premiere was blown out of the water. We suddenly, and we had, and so, and so there were people like that, our angels. And the other angel, who I think is a long-term and super important angel, was a guy called Rick Crim. And Rick Crim was the head of talent at VH1 at the time, very, one of the original MTV executives. And VH1 had passed on Anvil, which was, you know, upsetting. Anyway, cut a long story short, two VH1 executives were on holiday with their wives in Germany, and they were somewhere in Munich or whatever. And someone noticed, oh, there's a film festival downstairs.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  This was like a rinky-dink film festival with like 11 people at it. And they were drunk and they thought, oh, let's go down. And Anvil was showing, because our policy was, we're just gonna send this everywhere we possibly can. Something, we were hoping that something would happen. So these two vacationing VH1 executives drunkenly go to some nothing film festival, come back to New York and say to Rick Crim, you've got to see this movie. He sees the movie and that begins everything going. And VH1 came in and MTV and, you know, Van

• 1:18:36Speaker 02

  The funniest thing is, of course, he had told me a few months before this that VH1 had passed. And we, all of a sudden, we get, Rob gets an email from somebody at VH1, though. I want a T-shirt and can you please tell me what I have to do to, what VH1 has to do to acquire the movie?

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  Writes to their website, gets a T-shirt and said, I want this movie. They call me and say VH1 is calling. I'm like, but they passed. Anyway, what I didn't know was that the person who passed had been fired for passing on the movie. And that, that began. And then, and then VH1 came in and they supported the release and they supported, you know, we even did a Best Picture campaign.

• 1:19:15Rich Roll?

  Right, I know.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  For Anvil, which we had a

• 1:19:16Rich Roll?

  But you did, you, did you win the Independent Spirit Award?

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Yes, we won the Independent Spirit Award.

• 1:19:21Rich Roll?

  And then another kind of like angel in this is, you're still wearing that from that, wow.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  From that night.

• 1:19:26Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  That's the Anvil community.

• 1:19:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  I still wearing the same pants from that night.

• 1:19:31Rich Roll?

  And Dave Grohl gave that amazing speech.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  Dave Grohl was extra, I mean, he was amazing.

• 1:19:35Speaker 02

  Actually, interestingly, that we're talking about Dave Grohl introduces our new album. Our new album has a song called Take a Lesson. And that's the name of the song.

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  It's a quote from Dave Grohl.

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  And what happened was, we finished, we finished all the recording and the guy's mixing and What what not, I walk into the into the fucking control room and he goes, here's listen, here's the here's the opening cut for the album. And I go, what do you mean? He goes, and he starts the thing up and it's Dave doing the introduction.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  At the Spirit Awards.

• 1:20:06Speaker 02

  From the Spirit Awards, saying, this is a lesson in perseverance. This is a lesson in.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  From the heart.

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  A lesson in heart, a lesson in, I mean, it's a pleasure and I've been in the right place twice in my life. And this this time, this time, I get to introduce my great rock and roll band. And he introduces Anvil. And that's how the beginning of our Right. album starts. And the song's called Take a Lesson.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  I mean, Grohl was incredible.

• 1:20:30Speaker 03

  Because the lyrics, the lyrics actually really talk with the message he was saying.

• 1:20:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:35Speaker 03

  It all, it came organically. We didn't plan it.

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, we didn't plan it. And it ended up like that.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  I mean, I mean, I mean, so the Spirit Awards were incredible. Dave Grohl was incredible. And when when Anvil do their performance, you kind of cut away to a very bemused looking Robert Duvall, who doesn't really understand what's happening.

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  What about Elton John doing this?

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  But we had a very good.

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  Christopher Plummer was there, too.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  That's right. We had a very good, we had a very good run with the film. It was out there. Like, I, there's one quite funny story, was we went to the the Emmys at the Carnegie Hall in, you know, the Arts and whatever, Docs, Emmys, whatever. And, you know, me and Rebecca were seated like, right up on the fifth floor. So we were like, okay, we're definitely not winning anything. And so, anyway, cut a long story short, Rebecca says to me, just get in, just go down there in case something happens, right? So I go into the elevator to go down to the floor where they're giving out the awards. And I got stuck in the lift

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  for about an hour. And then and then I came out to discover that Anvil had won the Emmy.

• 1:21:38Speaker 02

  Ah, you missed the whole thing.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  And I was stuck in an elevator. And so then I went backstage and I said, I made a movie about a band that got, that got lost.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  And got stuck, I got stuck in an elevator and so Lester Holt had me come out and they gave me the Emmy, but it was like typically Anvil, like an amazing thing happened.

• 1:21:57Rich Roll?

  Of course it happened that way.

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  But of course we weren't there because I was, I was dealing with a lift engineer at Carnegie.

• 1:22:02Rich Roll?

  But here's the thing, this movie came out 13 years ago, like, why are we sitting here talking about it today?

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  I'll tell you why.

• 1:22:09Rich Roll?

  So walk me up to...

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  I'll walk you through what happened.

• 1:22:11Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  Okay, so to, to, to, my godson is, is a kid called Rio Hanson, it's Rebecca, Rebecca Yeldum who produced the film, it's his son. And Rio, you know, I was in England and he said, you know, I'd really like to see Anvil. And I said, I have a print, I got it out of storage. And so Rio brought his friends to see the movie. This is this past summer.

• 1:22:30Rich Roll?

  In London.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  No, no, here.

• 1:22:32Rich Roll?

  Oh, here.

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  In LA, I was here briefly and I got the print out and we showed the film and all of his friends went nuts. And I was like, they're like 17, 18 years old. So Rick Crim and I and Rebecca started to do these screenings and we started to just invite people to see the film. And the response from young people was just like, we, why haven't we heard of this film? So it was just really unbelievable because, and a lot of it was about, we've just been through two years of COVID, it's been an absolute nightmare, people have really, you know, people have lost people, I mean, I have in my family.

• 1:23:07Rich Roll?

  So have I.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  It's, it's been a, it's been a really horrible time. And suddenly here's a movie with the message of hope about enduring almost absolutely impossible situations and somehow not giving up, right? And so for whatever reason, that theme began to land with a totally new audience. And then we had this fantastic British singer called Young Blood come and he, he came and he brought his and he's 23 year old and, you know, never heard of Anvil and, you know, a very big artist now in the UK. And all these people just started coming, all young people. And then all the old fans, some of those people came back and they were like, this movie is, I'm feeling this now. It was, I really enjoyed it then, I'm really feeling it now.

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  And out of these screenings, we did about eight, that Rick and I principally put together, two distributors emerged. They're a friend of a friend, oh, I went to see this Anvil, anyway. So we had two separate distributors approach us to re-release the film for the 13th anniversary, 13 years later. And we decided to go with this incredible company called Utopia, who's kind of, I guess, like the new A24. This guy, Robert Schwartzman, who himself was the band Rooney, and really understood it. And he was like, look, there is, and he was a couple of the screenings. And he's like, the response I'm seeing from the kids is, this is a film that needs to get out there again, and we want to re-release it. And so that's how it all happened, but it began with my godson.

• 1:24:29Rich Roll?

  It's unbelievable. I mean, that never happens.

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  It never happens.

• 1:24:32Rich Roll?

  13 years later. Why do you think now? Like, what do you think it is?

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  Cause 13 is a lucky number.

• 1:24:36Rich Roll?

  I know, well, like, this is 13.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  This is the record.

• 1:24:40Rich Roll?

  This could be more perfect. But what do you think is happening? Like, what is it, what's going on in the culture right now that you think is lending itself to this interest and enthusiasm?

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  I really don't know. I think that people are so bored of plastic fake, kind of Instagram, kind of phoniness, that I think there's a sense of, you know, this is something completely authentic and real with real history. And there's a purity to what Anvil do, and there's also purity and honesty to the film. And I think whenever it's purity and honesty, people gravitate towards that, no matter what time you're in. I think that, for me, what happened was the COVID thing. You know, it just made people really, like, this is fragile. Life is super fragile. And, you know, don't take it for granted that everything's going to be great and you can go to the store and buy what you want and, you know, it's, you know what? No, actually.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  And I think that people got really appropriately scared. The world shut down and people started thinking about what was important. And I think this film speaks to what really is important, which is how you treat other people. Are you doing something you love? Are you doing the thing you love for the right reason? Are you driven by money and external things? And, you know, or are you just committed to being an alive and present and passionate, creative human being, you know, and, and this movie is kind of is about those things. And I think that's the reason, but it really all started with my godson making a request. He said, I'd like to see the movie that you and mommy, his mom Rebecca made, because I saw it when I was a kid or whatever, and I really want to see it.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  And so Rio was the reason, and again, an a personal reason. It's my godson saying, I want to see this film that you and mom made. And, and that's always been the way with Anvil, you know, it's, it's a really emotional because it's truthful. And I think we're all so, I, I like, I mean, the fact that this movie is being re-released 13 years later.

• 1:26:37Rich Roll?

  It's bananas.

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  It's banana, I mean, what movies get, what documentaries get re-released?

• 1:26:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, it is crazy.

• 1:26:47Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's all surreal, right? Like, what is, what has been the most surreal aspect of this whole adventure for you guys?

• 1:26:56Speaker 03

  Surreal?

• 1:26:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, just like, sort of like, wow, this guy comes in, he makes this movie. I mean, in certain ways, your lives have changed, in certain ways, you guys are doing it the way you always have done it. But suddenly you're in the path of all these interesting people.

• 1:27:12Speaker 03

  We stick to our guns, you know, like, you know, so we're not going to change. I, I'm really hoping. I think, I, I think there's. We're just going to stick to our guns with the music, you know what I mean? Like, I want critics to find something new to say about us. I'm tired of them saying, oh, well, this is nothing new here. Well, of course not. Find something else to say.

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  But, but the point is that to these guys, and we were talking about this before we came to do your podcast, that it's their life, it's normal. Like, but I said, but you understand that the message, like, most people, like, how many teenage kids, 13, 14, make a pact to rock together forever and 50 years later are still doing it? How many? No one. And, but to them, it's normal.

• 1:27:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:52Speaker 03

  That's actually too bad.

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  Because some of the stuff when you're young,

• 1:27:57Rich Roll?

  But the commitment to each other.

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  Because of your innocence, you don't see all the obstacles.

• 1:28:02Speaker 03

  But you know, I'm not gonna quit on myself.

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:05Speaker 03

  What for? Like, I can't, I can't cope with that notion.

• 1:28:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, why didn't you quit? Hey, you quit what you hate.

• 1:28:12Speaker 03

  Right, not what you love.

• 1:28:13Speaker 02

  Not what you love.

• 1:28:15Speaker 03

  You know, I'm a painter. I'm a painter. I paint, you know? And I paint for myself, you know, people come criticize, "Oh, you should sell your shit. It's awesome." You know, people wanna buy it, you know? You're selfish fucking asshole, you know? No, fuck you. You know, it's for me. It's my passion. It's my hobby. I enjoy it. It's relaxing. It keeps me fucking at peace, hear me? That's why I do it.

• 1:28:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure, I can make money and this and that, you know, but you know, that's not what I wanna do.

• 1:28:42Rich Roll?

  There's this perverted idea.

• 1:28:43Speaker 03

  And people criticize you for that shit.

• 1:28:44Rich Roll?

  That if you're not selling it, or you're not selling this many of whatever it is, that, you know, you get labeled a success or a lack of success, when in truth, you guys are this example of, like, the purity of the whole thing. You do it for the love, whether it's the painting.

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  And honesty.

• 1:29:00Speaker 02

  No, the real truth, the real truth about what art is, it's not the guy who makes the most money from his art, or sells the most paintings, or the guy who sells more, most records, or the guy who has the biggest selling hit single. It's about the guy who wrote the most songs. The guy who was able to express himself hundreds of times over. That is pure.

• 1:29:25Speaker 03

  Prolific output.

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  Success.

• 1:29:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, it's also about the honesty that you bring to that pursuit, right?

• 1:29:30Speaker 02

  What's the best painter? The guy who could fill that canvas thousands of times?

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  Like, for example, I mean, one example, because when we made the film, I was living on right opposite the artist David Hockney. And, you know, that guy, because he was my neighbor, I got to know him a little bit, he was never stopping painting. I mean, he was constantly, even when he had people over for tea, he would be on the iPad, like, doing stuff, like, constantly. And there is something to what Lips is saying about just doing the thing for its own sake, and not thinking about what it means or what success, you know? And obviously he's one of the things.

• 1:30:03Speaker 02

  The guy who does the most is the winner. That's the guy, the guy who's expressed himself the most, that's the winning quality. It's the, it's the, and the ability and the, and the, and the imagination to do that is makes you the winner. Not, not what you get after doing it. It's doing it to begin with, that is, is the thing that's the most important.

• 1:30:24Rich Roll?

  A shining sort of success story in the vein of the War of Art, right? Like, it is, I mean, you guys, you have resistance in your life, but you're always creating. Like, I don't get the sense that you have writer's block, right? No, I don't even know what that means.

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  And when I say on that subject, I can tell you that I feel really fortunate because the new Anvil album, for the first time, Anvil has written a song about me on their 19th record.

• 1:30:48Rich Roll?

  And it's gotten all lyrics. About time.

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  It's just a musical, and I'm so honored.

• 1:30:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's, it's, but it's, that's fucking gonna be a big song.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  I'm excited. It's cool. There's, there's two different, there's my original Anvil name, Teabag, and then there's my later Anvil name, Gomez, and there's-

• 1:31:05Rich Roll?

  What is that about?

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  This, I don't, they came up with it.

• 1:31:08Speaker 02

  Well, Teabag is because he's English, okay? It has no sexual connotation, it's, it's tea time, it's tea time, it's tea time. It's Peter Pocklington time.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  And then, and then Gomez.

• 1:31:22Speaker 02

  And Gomez is strictly just his lifestyle, you know, somebody who whips around, he has lots of toys. When, when the, when the movies start, started getting released and it started becoming successful, he goes, "I've got the best train set in all of Hollywood." And we went, "He's Gomez Adams."

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:31:42Rich Roll?

  Importantly, Rob, does it have a drum part that Sasha can actually play?

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  No, I can't play anything, Rob, still to this day.

• 1:31:49Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I, I don't know, he, he always tries, you know, we've seen him do what, School of, I've seen him play School of, you know? He, he can keep the beat, but when it comes down to roles, you know, he can't keep up to Robo.

• 1:32:00Rich Roll?

  There are videos on YouTube, though, of Sasha sitting in, playing with you guys.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  The best one was in Japan, when we filmed the end of the movie, I was invited out to do School of, and it was, that was pretty wild, it was like twenty thousand people. So that was intense, but we, we, no, but it's just the connection, the love of the fan for the band.

• 1:32:18Speaker 03

  We're family, we're like family, and we, you know, we're friends.

• 1:32:21Speaker 02

  It is like family, actually, it is, that's the best way I could describe the friendship that we have with Sasha, it's not, like, somehow, sometimes you connect with, with certain people in your life in a way that you can't, you can't really explain it, but somehow you feel like you've had a past life or something together, I don't know, it's.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  The movie came from that, you know.

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  And that's what gives the access. You're not gonna, I'm, I'm, we're not gonna have a fight, or, or, or talk about things, or be natural like that. We just figured, let him film everything, and if we don't like it, we'll just tell him to make it go away, and so we don't have to worry about it, and that gave a hundred percent access.

• 1:33:07Speaker 03

  Sasha said to me, very early in the whole thing, he looked at me right in the eyes, he said, listen, man, I'm not gonna do, like, like you said earlier, I'm gonna be straight up, I'm gonna film all this stuff, but I'm not gonna make anything bad. Trust me, you know, and I told him, I trust him, you know, we had like, we shook hands, and I, and I felt very comfortable after that point.

• 1:33:28Speaker 02

  I mean, you have to realize, even you're letting people have access like that.

• 1:33:33Speaker 03

  I went for the friendship trust.

• 1:33:34Rich Roll?

  What was, what was the experience the first time you watched the movie?

• 1:33:38Speaker 03

  Oh, I had to wa, I was the last guy to wa, see it. I guess Sasha had wanted it that way, so I was the last person to see, I decided at his house, in, in that living room.

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  And as soon it was ended, we, we ended the film, Rob looked at me, he said, play it again. Like, he didn't even give me a thought, and he watched it twice in a row to absorb.

• 1:33:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was, it was, it dazzled me beyond words at that time, because it's not what I expected, I didn't know what to expect. He filmed everything, you know, we, after a while, I said, wait a minute.

• 1:34:06Speaker 02

  What kind of movie did you?

• 1:34:07Speaker 03

  We're making a documentary about a band, but this guy's like filming things that like family shit and fighting, and like, like, all this other stuff, right? So I couldn't get what, like, what's, what's, so when I saw it, I got it, and then I said, oh my fucking god, this movie's gonna rip people's souls out. That's what I thought at first. This movie's got to kill fucking people, man. Because it was killing me, you know, watching, right? You know? And after the third time, I just said to him, I think it was a genius piece of work. And that was before anybody saw it. So that was my impression.

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  And again, you know, with these things, if someone sets out to make a genius piece of work, I mean, you set out, you follow an instinct, you go with a story, you go with a feeling. And then you, sometimes you have that feeling and the movie doesn't come out good. In this case, there was just such purity and emotion from these guys. And we were so emotional making the film. I mean, now I look at the film and I think about all the people who aren't here anymore.

• 1:34:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of people, a lot of people.

• 1:35:01Speaker 01

  Like Rob and Lips, both their mothers are alive in this film.

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  They're gone.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  Jethro and Chris Tangerini is the producer. I mean, so many people.

• 1:35:08Speaker 03

  And the dog.

• 1:35:11Speaker 02

  My dog.

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, your brother.

• 1:35:13Speaker 02

  The, in the English, the English journalist, the guy who.

• 1:35:19Speaker 03

  Malcolm Dome.

• 1:35:20Speaker 02

  Malcolm Dome, he's passed away.

• 1:35:21Speaker 03

  He just passed away. So a lot of people in that movie.

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  And Lemmy.

• 1:35:24Speaker 03

  And Lemmy, of course.

• 1:35:27Rich Roll?

  And you know, after the movie. Didn't Lemmy Lips invite you to join Motorhead at some point, like early in your career?

• 1:35:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, he did.

• 1:35:33Rich Roll?

  You said no.

• 1:35:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we were both early in our careers. He was losing Eddie Clark and he was, he was in a panic. Come and help me. I know you love that Motorhead. You could probably do it. And I said, yeah, I could probably do it, but I can't. I'm in, I'm in Anvil. I'm going into the studio in a week. What do you mean?

• 1:35:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:35:50Speaker 02

  Join Motorhead. What's Anvil gonna do? We're under contract.

• 1:35:53Speaker 01

  And I remember that tour because Lemmy loved the band so much. He asked Anvil to open for Motorhead on the Another Perfect Day Tour in 83.

• 1:36:00Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  And I went on tour with these guys as they were opening for Motorhead. Motorhead have never been louder. I mean, it was like standing next to three 777s taking off. It was like, it was almost too much. But anyway, you were on tour with, with him. And I remember the moment when Lemmy's like, Clark has left, Brian Robertson isn't working out, you need to come into Motorhead. And you know, Lips would not leave Rob. And Rob's had other opportunities himself to go, you know, to join.

• 1:36:25Speaker 02

  You know, for, for, for.

• 1:36:27Speaker 03

  Play for somebody else. For us, it's always, this is the way to do it. Work for yourself, do your own thing. Doesn't matter, you know, can Dangle carrots here, man, can make more money here. Again, it's not about the money. I want to be happy. I want to feel honest to myself. So that's why, you know, and this feels honest, you know, this band always has. That's why we're still here.

• 1:36:58Rich Roll?

  How many bands rocket out for 50 years, stay together, you guys are best friends still? I mean, that in and of itself, set aside everything else is unbelievable. Is an unbelievable accomplishment. So what do you, I'm sure young musicians, young creative people want advice from you. Like, what do you say to that young musician or writer or filmmaker or anybody who's trying to burst something creative into the world about like?

• 1:37:26Speaker 02

  Well, my biggest, my biggest advice is make something and be something that no one else can be but you.

• 1:37:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  Ultimately, that's what it comes down to. You gotta be you and you gotta find out what that is. And the way you find out is by doing it and being you. And then you can slowly recognize what that is and zero in on it and hone it and get it better and better. That's how you do it.

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  Finding your voice, you know, takes a bit of time sometimes.

• 1:37:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. But yeah, you gotta learn to discover what keys do I sing in best? What words sound best?

• 1:38:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:03Speaker 02

  Never mind, what fits this song? All those things.

• 1:38:07Speaker 01

  You know, it's a learning process. It applies to the movie too, you know, Anvil was a movie that only I could have made. You know, similar to My Dinner with Hervé was a movie only I could have made, I could have made. You know, it's like, you've got to do the thing that's so uniquely yourself. And whatever happens, it doesn't matter because you're doing the thing that only you can do.

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  That's right. You gotta be honest to yourself.

• 1:38:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like what do you, as somebody who, you've worked with Spielberg and Tom Hanks and Anthony Hopkins and all of these people.

• 1:38:33Speaker 02

  Hey, it's a difference between being in a cover band and being in an original band.

• 1:38:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:36Speaker 02

  You're not gonna make it playing someone else's music.

• 1:38:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:38:39Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:38:40Speaker 02

  As simple as that.

• 1:38:40Rich Roll?

  Despite like this storied career that you've had, Sasha, you're best known for Anvil, right? Your most personal movie.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  My most personal movie, yeah.

• 1:38:49Rich Roll?

  Um, so with that, like, how does that inform how you make choices about the projects you get involved with? The curiosity that you choose to explore.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  I would say I have a, you know, pretty healthy career doing, working, you know, doing stuff. And, uh, I'm, you know, I'm doing another movie with Helen Mirren, you know, again, there, there's a lot of personal stuff coming up. But I would say for me, Herve and Anvil are the two films, which, you know, I think are, for me, the most personal and the best films. And, but there's also making a living. You can't make these kind of, you know, movies like Anvil don't happen every time you make a movie. That said, all of the experiences I had in all the other things helped me make these personal movies. Like Anvil came from a pure place, but I had some experience, you know, having done other stuff and, you know, been brought in as a rewriter on,

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  you know, some quite big movies and I've ghostwritten lots of things and I've also, you know, but working with actors, you know, like learning how to manage and handle volatile and difficult emotional scenes and situations. I mean, that was a skill I think I brought to Anvil because there were times where, you know, you could tell this train could have come off the track. But because I had some experience from other areas, I was able to kind of navigate that. So there is a connection between the works you do, the thing, the work you do professionally and, and, and these personal films. But there's more personal films to come. So Anvil is the first film and for those of you who've seen it, ends with a photo of me and Lips, taken on a tour of Canadian hockey arenas in 1985.

• 1:40:21Speaker 01

  My Dinner with Herve ends with a photo of me and Herve Villasches in his hotel room a few days before he committed suicide. And there's a third film. I call them the photograph films that I won't tell you, but the title is Mizzou and that will be, and if I'm known for those films and I will be, and principally Anvil, I'm, I'm so lucky to have that happen, you know, and, you know, you just, as a filmmaker, you're lucky if it even happens once. So it's happened.

• 1:40:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the same thing with, with music. The same thing with music. You make, you make a, a, a real hit for yourself once.

• 1:40:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:58Speaker 02

  And then basically.

• 1:41:01Speaker 02

  It sustains you. Look at it. Metal on Metal album sustained me for 50 years now.

• 1:41:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I would, but I would say, speaking to the point of.

• 1:41:10Speaker 02

  It doesn't mean it's my best album by my, by my standards, but it, it set me up so that I could do, you know, 20 other albums.

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

  But I will say, the ones where I've struggled the most, like with Herve, me and Peter Dinklage tried to get that movie made for 17 years. And we were told flat out, this movie will never get made. And we persisted. I took the letter of Anvil and me and Peter Dinklage applied. Now, then Game of Thrones hit, and then there was a chance. And then finally it got made and in the way that we really wanted to. But that was also years of, of, of struggle and, and stuff.

• 1:41:43Speaker 02

  And I watched that. I watched that from the onset. I mean, at that, at that party that, that we met you at, that's when I became aware of the whole story. About Herve and it was the, the, the big.

• 1:41:57Rich Roll?

  It was your first script.

• 1:41:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that script was led to me working with Spielberg. I wrote a short.

• 1:42:03Speaker 02

  And I think if I'm not mistaken, that lady, his girlfriend was at that party.

• 1:42:07Speaker 01

  She was.

• 1:42:08Speaker 02

  And that's where, his, his whole focus, when I first met him was that he was gonna make this movie about Herve's last hours. And it's like, wow, okay.

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  And that was, and, and again, I was told, don't waste your time with that. And I wrote it as a short script, a 34-page script about Herve Villas, as everyone was like, this is the most expensive short in history. I had it budgeted, it was like $4 million in 1998. Like, never gonna happen.

• 1:42:33Rich Roll?

  That's what got you an agent and kind of.

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  But that got me an agent.

• 1:42:36Rich Roll?

  Got your name out there in terms of writing.

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  I met Steve Zalian, he passed it on to Steven Spielberg. That ended up with me working with Spielberg. So, again, the source of all of it was a personal story that I was passionate about, the only I could tell.

• 1:42:49Rich Roll?

  And then Anvil also reaching all of these other people that, that ultimately leads you into these other big projects.

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  The only reason I got to direct Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren in Hitchcock was because of Anvil. Because Tony Hopkins is a massive Anvil fan. I watched the movie three times. So when I met Tony Hopkins for the first time, I put him and Lips on the phone.

• 1:43:10Speaker 02

  Hello. Hello. Hello Lips. And going, oh my god.

• 1:43:17Speaker 01

  He was doing his Hannibal Lecter voice. Hello Lips. Like whatever he was doing. But it was like, what I'm saying is you, you do this stuff, you have no idea what's gonna happen. And the most unexpected things, like I was told absolutely categorically by my agents at the time, I should not self-fund a documentary about an unknown heavy metal band from Canada. That was like career death. I needed to go meet Adam Sandler and I needed to go meet whoever else and do these big rewrites at wherever it was. I had an instinct. I ignored all the people who told me, you know, on, on the face of it, right? Probably not a great idea, but it doesn't matter because my instinct told me it was the best thing.

• 1:43:58Speaker 01

  And ironically, uh, you know, I later fired those people, you know, fuck them. Like if you're not gonna support me. And, and, and of course, the irony is that, that turned out to be, you know, this incredible thing that's still is going on 13 years later. It's coming out into theatres again. I mean, like, so it just means.

• 1:44:16Speaker 02

  It's actually, it's actually interesting. Um, I perceived all this, what it was, on the onset. I really, I really did.

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  You're on a different level with this.

• 1:44:29Speaker 02

  I really did, but, but.

• 1:44:29Speaker 03

  Like tapping into some past life stuff.

• 1:44:31Speaker 02

  And, and I even said, and I, and even in discussions with my younger brother, when I told him about the thing, um, he was, his predictions were, he's going, your friend is looking to make a very, very special movie about, about your failed career and it's gonna make both of your careers explode like a rocket. And that's what's gonna happen out of this because it's got to, because it's, it's, it's sort of what the, what the fuel is for all of it. See, and he thought it was just, if, if, and at the onset, that's what he's going, this is amazing. I hope it works out for you guys.

• 1:45:13Speaker 01

  And I remember, I was at my uncle Marty's house at Five Ava Road in Toronto and I called up Lips and he came over. And I said, I have this instinct. About a film, it was like, let's have an exploratory conversation and lips broke down into tears.

• 1:45:26Speaker 02

  And because it was, it was what I had called called as, you know, fifteen years before, when I was sitting in a car with Johnny Z telling him, I'm gonna have to wait till a fan grows up and helps me make it the next time round. This was my foretelling, but not only that, I, I when the movie did start taking off, I, I remember having a conversation with Sasha. I go, this is a, a, a flagpole movie for you, man. You, you're, this is like your medal on me, like whatever medal on medal was for me. This is gonna be your medal on medal and you'd, at that time, you did not wanna hear that. You go, what do you mean? I got a whole, a whole mess of, I gotta make lots of movies, man.

• 1:46:09Speaker 02

  They can all be big or whatever. And I'm going, dude, sometimes you get a special moment.

• 1:46:15Speaker 01

  And you don't know.

• 1:46:16Speaker 02

  And I will say that. And you don't realize it at the time.

• 1:46:19Speaker 01

  He knew much more than I did at the time, how special it was gonna be. When I saw it at Sundance and when we went to Hot Docs in Toronto and we did the big theater and people went nuts. I started to get the sense, but initially I was like.

• 1:46:35Speaker 02

  Are you crazy, man? What do you mean? What are you saying?

• 1:46:37Speaker 01

  Like when he started crying, when I told him I wanted to make a movie, I was like, a bit like, why is he crying? I didn't really understand, but he knew, like almost he had an intuition before I did about what was gonna happen. I could never have predicted though, and I don't think you could have, that thirteen years later, this movie would be coming out again.

• 1:46:55Speaker 02

  No possible. But I, I predicted. I never saw it coming. I predicted that it would have a huge, long life.

• 1:47:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, that's true.

• 1:47:01Speaker 02

  And the reason that I felt it would have a long life is because the band still exists and it was a meaningful, it was meaningful enough. See, this is the thing, and it's not that I'm full of myself. That's not where this is coming from. It's a special band. And every, everything has its claim to fame or whatever. This is part of what Anvil is, it's part of our claim, claim to fame. And it's going to be long lasting. And because it's a real spinal tap, it's going to outlive the fake one. Because it's a real living, breathing entity. Both, both things are going to live off of each other and propel it well into the future. Until they're, until one of us disappears and it's probably going to be us.

• 1:47:44Speaker 02

  Because we're human beings and we have a, a finite end. But ultimately what it is, if one feeds the other, we go and play a gig. All of a sudden the movie starts appearing on, in the local theaters. They, they, they get the, uh, they buy it from Sasha. And all of a sudden, every time we go and do a tour, that a movie starts playing in, in different places. So it, it brings life that way.

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  It was, it was an extraordinary, it was, it's been an extraordinary journey. For me, probably one of the high points was, um, Marty Scorsese did a documentary about George Harrison called Living in the Material World. Probably six or seven years ago. And I was invited completely out of the blue to a private party at the Beverly Hills Hotel. A dinner to celebrate the movie and I was sitting next to Olivia Harrison. And I was like, I don't know George Harrison or any of them. And so I'm at this dinner and anyway, Scorsese comes over and he said, you did Anvil. And I said, yeah. He said, that's my favorite music movie of all time.

• 1:48:46Speaker 01

  Doesn't get any better than that, man. You know, and we had had a print of the film go to New York and we didn't know who it was for. And it was Scorsese had personally requested the film and kept it private. And he watched the movie and I think he even kept the print. But to get someone, my hero director come to me and say, you did something really incredible. That still resonates. I mean, like, who on earth could have predicted that? I mean, it just still that was just like, for me as a filmmaker, like, I hit that note.

• 1:49:19Rich Roll?

  It's unbelievable.

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  And, um, and that just, you know, is, is you never like, I had no idea, man. I, I mean, I don't think any of us had any idea that a lot of this would happen.

• 1:49:28Speaker 02

  No, you know, you know, you know how I felt. Except for me, which is, and that's okay. Which was, was wonderful to watch you guys learn what I knew was gonna happen. I was skeptical. This guy was gonna be the worst. And, and it's like, dude, we're driving in, in Europe and we're, we're getting lost in the middle of the fucking woods. Because we, the, the, the crazy, the crazy tour managers, they'll turn off into this thing. And we turned down and we're lost in the woods.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  Let me tell you a quick story on that.

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  And I go to wait, yeah, but I'm going, we're only gonna have to do this once. We're never gonna have to do this again. Trust me, Robbo, just, let's just get through it and you'll see, man, this is all for a reason.

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  Chris Sues and Matt Dennis were in this, we're in a camper van, follow, following Anvil through the forests of, literally of Transylvania. We're in Romania, in Transylvania, we're following, it's like three in the morning, Chris is the owner of the crazy tour thing. It's like, okay, we stop here, right? So we stop and we're like, what is going on? Anyway, we got some sleep at 5:15. It's, it, it, the, the sun came up and we realized that we were on the edge of a cliff with a 400 foot drop to certain death in a gorge. And me and Chris woke up and we were like, we're this far away from dying. And we're like, we're going to die for Anvil.

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  It was like constantly.

• 1:50:46Speaker 02

  It's not even, it's not fake. It's all this stuff is, is true, man. It's just like, how are we getting through this? Like, what the, what the hell is that?

• 1:50:55Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 1:50:57Rich Roll?

  The thing is, like, what I, like, what I take away from the whole thing, though, is, is that when you.

• 1:51:06Rich Roll?

  When you express from the truest, deepest part of your heart that you're basically paving the way for magic to happen, not in any kind of guaranteed sense, but you're sort of casting your vote for like mystery to enter your life. And I think there's something really instructive about approaching your life or the decisions that you make about where to invest your energy. And just Sasha, hearing you talk about, you had done this sort of traditional success track in Hollywood and it left you feeling a little bit fallow or empty. And then that reconnection process of finding that thing that gets you excited when you wake up in

• 1:51:48Rich Roll?

  the morning and having the audacity to continue to pull that thread when there were a lot of people trying to talk you out of it and a lot of resistance. It's just, I think it's just really powerful.

• 1:51:59Speaker 02

  I think people will.

• 1:52:00Rich Roll?

  The same story can be said for your entire career and everything that you guys.

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, it's hilarious when I stop and think about it. My mother's constant nagging me as a kid, "You gotta go to school and you gotta do this and you gotta do that and you're never gonna..." And you're wasting your life and your decision to make no money. And my whole life was focused on proving her wrong.

• 1:52:33Rich Roll?

  Was it though?

• 1:52:34Speaker 02

  Honestly, as crazy as that sounds, "I'm gonna prove you wrong if it's the last thing I do on earth."

• 1:52:40Rich Roll?

  You don't strike me as somebody who's being driven by resentment. Like you seem like you're a pretty happy guy.

• 1:52:45Speaker 02

  No, it's not resentment. "I'm gonna have fun doing what you say I shouldn't do." You know, like... It's teenage defiance. I never grew... It's like, "Yeah, I'm growing old, but I never grew up." Right?

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  And there's something magical about that.

• 1:53:03Speaker 02

  There is.

• 1:53:03Speaker 01

  And that might be.

• 1:53:04Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna let, I'm not gonna let, let a grown up world taint my, my innocence. I'm gonna still act as though I've still got a chance when there might not be. And I'm just gonna keep going with the innocence. I can do this.

• 1:53:18Speaker 01

  But you know, but here's the thing, when I met Lips on that first weekend and he came to LA and you met him, Rich, at the party. I started the weekend thinking, oh God, this is quite sad. By the end of the weekend, I was like, you know what? They're gonna, they're gonna fucking do it, man. And like, he was so, believed it so much that had he not had that belief, there would have been no film to make.

• 1:53:35Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:53:36Speaker 01

  The film was about the story in the present, about the present, the struggle right now to keep going.

• 1:53:41Speaker 02

  Come on, let's face it. Anvil's are meant to be. There are things that are meant to be. And I, I'm sorry, I've, I've had that feeling since I've, since, since I was a teenager. It's meant to be. I'm not supposed to quit.

• 1:53:56Speaker 02

  Clearly. That, that, you're not supposed to, I'm, my, my, I'm, I'm significant. I mean something in this world. And I was gonna see, I'm gonna, I, my, my whole point was, I'm gonna see it through. I don't give a shit. Just like, my mother taught me not to give a shit. Right, but there's like. She told me I'm never gonna make it. I'm, and, and you know what? The makings of my personality of where it, where it was fostered from. Yeah, I get it. It was there right to the end.

• 1:54:22Speaker 01

  But, but Rich, speaking to your point about success, you know, about the meaning of success, which I think Anvil is redefining, you know? Like, working in Hollywood, it's so geared to what are the box office numbers, you know, all that kind of stuff. It's so geared to external things. And what I've observed is that if you're happy, it's usually in spite of success rather than because of it. You know, success comes from a completely different place, you know? It's about, um, you know, I'm, like, I'm so proud and happy because of Anvil, but, you know, it's like, it didn't take $200 million at the box office, but I will say that the impact and. The depth of the feeling that is created in so many people is you couldn't it's priceless.

• 1:55:06Speaker 01

  You can't pay it so it's like the film also changed my idea and orientation about what does it mean? Well, I think in terms of Anvil and longevity, I mean, here we are 13 years later with this movie. You know, it stands the test of time. It speaks to people, you know, that's you can't buy that, man. And and and the movie that took $500 million 10 years ago, no one remembers. No one cares about that. It's about the quality of what you're doing and the reasons why you're doing it. And that has to be the always the determining factors in what I think in what you define as success. Because I thought I came to Hollywood, I went to film school, I'll sell a movie for a million dollars or whatever. You know, it's like, that's not success. That's just a thing that happens that you have to get over. And a piece of luck.

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  And a bit of luck. And it's like, you know, it works for a weekend. You know, I remember when that happened and I sold this in 2005. I sold a pitch for like an insane amount of money. It was the biggest selling pitch of the year. I remember we sold it on a Friday night and by Sunday I was like in a depression. I was like, now I have to write this piece of shit. You know, it was just like it it it the Anvil experience totally rewired everything about what I think is important and how I feel about what's important and what to me, what is important.

• 1:56:23Rich Roll?

  And so how do you articulate what that is?

• 1:56:27Speaker 01

  Like I said, I just think it's about, you know, ultimately it's about being the most authentic human being you can be. And it's about putting something into the world that in some way to someone lifts them up, is nourishing, is meaningful. You know, sometimes and pure entertainment can be a great diversion. You take people away from their problems, you know, they're able to have an escape. But really to to have the ability to.

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  To make people think, to make people think about the person right next to them. And sometimes maybe I'm in judgment, sometimes maybe I'm in fear. And how about listening? How about, you know, like just a sense of empathy. I think that the whole movie Anvil is about empathy. It's about looking past your, you know, top line judgments and your initial, you know, everyone rushes to judge, man, you know. But when you strip the layers away and you go deeper, you find things that you would never expect. And that's what I love is if, and I think that happened with Harvey, I think that's happened with Anvil, is just dig a little deeper and you may find something that you need.

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  And I had no idea how profoundly I needed to make this film. This film, forget what happened and Marty Scorsese loves it and amazing, that's amazing, right? But it was the actual experience of spending time with these people and seeing how our work together changed all of our lives. Like that experience.

• 1:58:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's remarkable.

• 1:58:01Speaker 01

  Was incredible because we were on this for years.

• 1:58:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  I mean, this is not something we did in a weekend. This was.

• 1:58:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, over a few years.

• 1:58:07Speaker 01

  And we all sacrificed and we all were at the absolute brink and we were near, I was nearly completely broken by this, completely. My accountant said, I may have to declare you bankrupt next year, you know? And, but it was worth it and I was still happy to do it. And you and I have known each other a long time, Rich.

• 1:58:26Speaker 02

  And all the stuff that my brother Gary said all came true is what, what we actually did.

• 1:58:32Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's interesting.

• 1:58:34Speaker 02

  From an objective perspective, that's exactly what we did.

• 1:58:37Speaker 01

  Because also Rich and I have known each other for more than, for 20 years at least. And we have both been at that point in different ways.

• 1:58:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:44Speaker 01

  And to survive beyond that point to.

• 1:58:50Speaker 01

  Just not give up is the example I got from you.

• 1:58:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:54Speaker 01

  And, and it's so many people, the most interesting people that I, I know are the people who've not had it easy. Actually, who've had a really.

• 1:59:02Speaker 02

  Well, yeah.

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  Who've had to.

• 1:59:03Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:59:04Speaker 02

  It's colorful, isn't it? When it's really colorful, it's really fascinating. I mean, a lot of, a lot of the, the, the bands all tried to, I, I, I just watch all these copycats trying to capture some, some of the essence of that Anvil movie, but they can't because they haven't really got, they haven't got the, the history. They didn't get, they, they haven't acquired the access, the, the director never got the access. They never get emotional stuff to tie in.

• 1:59:33Speaker 01

  Beautiful thing that happened that I should mention is that, you know, Searching for Sugar Man, I love the movie and Simon Chin, who produced it is a friend of mine and the day after they won the Academy Award for best music, for best documentary, you know, I got a call from Simon, um, and I think in Malik and to say thank you for opening the door. Because Anvil was the movie that changed a lot of things. And in fact, the Academy changed their rules around music documentaries and then Sugar Man won 20 feet from stardom and, you know, so we really did play a part in opening things up to music documentaries.

• 2:00:07Rich Roll?

  Music documentary.

• 2:00:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was like, we were one of those films. I think.

• 2:00:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the biggest, the biggest difference, no, no, the biggest difference between.

• 2:00:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Dig was just before, yeah.

• 2:00:15Speaker 02

  Okay. The biggest difference for, for the, for the, for the Anvil documentary to every, almost every other documentary made about bands, they show it all in retrospect. They never show what we did with, with the Anvil movie. Let's show what's happening in the moment.

• 2:00:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now.

• 2:00:34Speaker 02

  And capture it as we're doing it.

• 2:00:36Rich Roll?

  It's not talking heads, looking back upon a career.

• 2:00:39Speaker 02

  It's not talking about once what was, it's what are we doing tomorrow and how we're going to go about doing it and let's film it.

• 2:00:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So the, the, I'm interested, I have to ask this question, like, so the, the kind of tagline that gets thrown around with the movie is real life Spinal Tap. Like you said it earlier, but I've always wondered like how that lands with you guys. Like, how do you feel about the movie being called that?

• 2:01:00Speaker 03

  Uh, I, I don't like it. I never did. Spinal Tap is the fake Anvil. And that's, and that's just-

• 2:01:08Rich Roll?

  That's the title of this podcast.

• 2:01:09Speaker 01

  Spinal Tap is the fake Anvil. And funnily enough, when Anvil was started doing the rounds and started people, you know, Spinal Tap was on their 25th anniversary. And those guys who I love, because I love that movie, right? This, this was like, for me, my two favorite films, Spinal Tap and With Nail and I. And Anvil is a sort of combination of those two films. And so when they were, they got so sick of hearing about Anvil on their 25th anniversary, they told their publicists, "I don't want any questions." They didn't want any questions.

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  And what happened was, we had MTV reporter interviewed them and they asked about Anvil, like against the rules. Um, and you could tell that Nigel Tufnell was very upset. And that Broad said, "What's it like, you know, when you hear about Anvil?" And Nigel Tufnell looked at David St. Hubbins and Derek Smalls. And they obviously were like, really not happy. And Nigel Tufnell's turned and he went, "It's like being crushed by a piece of art." That's what he said. And I seen the clip of that. They were so sweet about it. So I'd love to get, you know, them together.

• 2:02:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:13Speaker 01

  It would be great.

• 2:02:14Rich Roll?

  That has to happen.

• 2:02:15Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 2:02:16Rich Roll?

  You must do that around this-

• 2:02:17Speaker 01

  I mean, it would be lovely if they were open to it. I don't know, you know, what their attitude towards Anvil is, but I think when Rob said, you know, "They're the fake Anvil."

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  I mean, but you know-

• 2:02:29Rich Roll?

  You cut him off, Rob. You were gonna say something else, too.

• 2:02:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, just, it's just a, it's a good hook catch for marketing, I thought, the Spinal Tap thing comparing us. But we're, we're nothing like that. In my mind, at all. We're real fucking musicians, man. Those guys are not that.

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's-

• 2:02:51Speaker 03

  You know, we're real fucking-

• 2:02:52Speaker 01

  Fake, it's fictitious. None of it's, everything is taken from, everything is taken from real life and recreated. Whereas the, the Anvil film is, it is real life and there is no recreation. The reason Spinal Tap is so great is because it's so close to the truth. But those guys got it from bands like Anvil and Jethro Tull and Saxon and whatever else was their inspiration. All of the- Things that happened like when Derek Smalls gets caught in the Chris Ellis pod. Yeah. I mean, that happened. Yeah.

• 2:03:23Speaker 02

  And, and the cucumber, the cucumber down the pants.

• 2:03:26Speaker 01

  Trousers.

• 2:03:26Speaker 02

  That, that was stolen up, that Biff did it.

• 2:03:29Speaker 01

  That's right, Biff from.

• 2:03:30Speaker 02

  At the airport.

• 2:03:30Speaker 01

  So all of these things are taken from real things. That's why they're funny. So I don't know that there's, you know, we should be that upset about.

• 2:03:37Speaker 03

  Well, it's a good marketing catch.

• 2:03:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's amazing. People love familiarity and be able to at least be able to tag it to something else so that at least they know. And to be able to explain it to somebody else. It's like some, what's that band like? Well, they're sort of like that. Well, in, in the same sense, what's this movie like? Well, it kind of reminded me of Spinal Tap. So it's, it's kind of a catch, a catch, a hook, a hook and catch.

• 2:04:07Speaker 03

  Kind of thing.

• 2:04:07Speaker 02

  Kind of thing.

• 2:04:08Speaker 03

  Original, the real original Anvil Pounders, they're not happy with any of it.

• 2:04:14Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:04:14Speaker 03

  Was, are the Pounders are your fans?

• 2:04:17Speaker 02

  The original Anvil fans are very upset. The world should have known about you all along.

• 2:04:23Speaker 03

  They don't need a movie to tell us that, you know, you guys are a good band and all that kind of shit. So, you know, we dealt with that all along from the, our original base. You know what I mean?

• 2:04:32Speaker 01

  But you know what was really interesting?

• 2:04:33Speaker 03

  They liked the movie, but it was, they, they felt like they didn't like it the same as somebody who's not a fan. Right.

• 2:04:40Speaker 01

  But you know, but you know what was interesting was that all bands, whether they're heavy metal or pop or rappers or whatever, they've all, they have similar things happen. Like I remember speaking to Chris Martin.

• 2:04:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, they all do, they all do.

• 2:04:52Speaker 02

  Of course, because that's the, what life, sure, mistakes happen. That's what happens in everyday life. That's what happens. Why, why are there car accidents? They're not happening on purpose. You know what I mean? They're accidents.

• 2:05:05Speaker 01

  For me to even.

• 2:05:06Speaker 02

  Like, come on, man. It's the same, it's the same thing with anything that goes on on the road or bands or whatever. Stuff happens.

• 2:05:13Speaker 01

  Rich, that's a present for you, Rich.

• 2:05:14Speaker 03

  Let me see.

• 2:05:15Speaker 01

  It's something very special. It's a limited edition. You may want to try that, but for these times.

• 2:05:19Speaker 03

  Oh, it's a, it's an Anvil mask.

• 2:05:20Speaker 01

  Can you do, can you live without an Anvil face mask?

• 2:05:24Rich Roll?

  I actually have to go to Canada in a couple of weeks so I can wear this for that.

• 2:05:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, now you have an official animal mask.

• 2:05:31Rich Roll?

  What happened to the sequel? I know you guys were working on solving world peace at some point.

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  Well, we started shooting.

• 2:05:38Speaker 03

  I'm really disappointed to hear that the actual trailer is gone.

• 2:05:42Speaker 01

  No, no, no, we have, we have it somewhere.

• 2:05:43Speaker 03

  Oh, now we have it.

• 2:05:44Speaker 01

  We, we, now we have it. We do have it. John, John has it, and I'm John Peter. We, we do have the trailer. The issue is, we started shooting and I think we all got busy with different things. And it also got very heavy because the band was invited to Israel. We were going to go to Israel. A lot of it was around the, you know, the Jewish family history of Rob and also of Lips. And what we did manage to do, which I think may at one point resurface, I don't know, but Lips and Rob went to Auschwitz where Rob's father had escaped from and his grandfather unfortunately had passed away. And they looked in the book at the camp.

• 2:06:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, the register.

• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  And the Reiner family name was there. And I have this incredible moment. Remember on the suitcases?

• 2:06:28Speaker 02

  Oh, the suitcases, my relatives of my, of my, of my mother's, my mother's family. And really, really hard to take actually for me because it's just like, oh, that's, okay. It never really affected me. I don't, didn't know these people. They were all dead before I was born. But that's the whole, that's the whole bloody point. And I'm, and, and I, when I, when I, when we went there, I was like so, uh, such an awakening.

• 2:06:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was unbelievable.

• 2:07:00Speaker 02

  Because, because what you, what you came to realize, this happened not that long ago.

• 2:07:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:05Speaker 02

  And when you hear about, you know, when you're a little kid and you've hear about all this stuff through your whole life, you're thinking they're talking about ancient history. You never think about it. You know, when we show up there and I'm looking at the, at the, at the electric fences and I'm going, this isn't that long ago, man. And these buildings look like stuff in and around a home. This is not ancient. This is within the last 50 years, man.

• 2:07:32Speaker 03

  It's our life cycle, right?

• 2:07:34Speaker 02

  That, that building is no, no older than my, my house. Wait a minute. That means, and then all of a sudden it started really sinking in that in my era and in my lifetime, I am still, I am still attached to the atrocities that went on in that, that bloody place. That there are literally hundreds of lost souls that I'll never know that I should have known. And then I started to come to realize of all the, all the, the, the people that should have, would have, could have been in the world today and the kind of differences, those,

• 2:08:18Speaker 02

  those people, it's just as simple as when I realized, look at Rob's father's survival of Auschwitz brought a speed medal. What else could, what else could, could have gotten lost in Auschwitz? If Rob's father didn't survive, would, would people be using double bass drums the way they do today because Rob doesn't exist? Would I have had a drummer to, to create this stuff with? I mean, it's a lot of those things started to dawn on me.

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  So in the, in the filming, we all came to this realization that Rob's family and Lips' family, because he discovered that one of his relatives who we didn't know, her name was written on one of the suitcases in the display. And then it suddenly occurred to us that it's possible that Lips' relative and Rob's grandfather and father knew each other at Auschwitz. And then the cameraman, Chris Seuss, you know, his, his family was also, had lost people at Auschwitz and in the Holocaust. And my family, Toronto Jews, also. And there's this underpinning of this incredible story of the Jewish immigrants and what happened in Germany in the 1930s. And all of the key people in this movie, in one way or another, either come from that or are connected from it.

• 2:09:33Speaker 01

  And then it just, so that in itself was maybe the reason why we, we did all the filming that we did, because it brought us to so many different realizations. And then we thought, you know.

• 2:09:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, these things came afterwards that we're not really, wasn't, we weren't really conscious. During the making of the movie that it would have that that it would that we'd be left with these these feelings that that that it would evoke these things. I was not thinking about the Holocaust during the whole movie.

• 2:10:01Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 2:10:02Speaker 02

  After that it came to realize we wouldn't be, we ended up at the at the Jewish Film Festival in San Francisco.

• 2:10:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:10:08Speaker 02

  And I'm standing outside the place.

• 2:10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:11Speaker 02

  And I look across the street and I I look at this fence and it's got barbed wire on top and all of a sudden I go, I wouldn't be standing here if Rob's father didn't survive Auschwitz. I wouldn't be here and neither would all these people lining up to see the Anvil movie. And I started coming to realize, holy shit, talk about meant to be's or something. This is overcoming, not only not only overcoming my obstacles, it's it's it's my fellow tribesmen. I I we've our survival has has brought forth some of the most, some of the most, most, most important things that in in human history.

• 2:10:56Speaker 02

  And and the the the coming to realize what what got lost. I don't think people ever stop to think about what the possibilities and the potentials that got lost in in that period of time. And in all wars, not just that, but and and the persecution of of of of a certain certain people and the the the the impact that that could have for for for the rest of of of of human history. I don't like a lot of things came to you came to realize from the for myself personally from doing that Anvil movie. Otherwise, where would I get that stuff from?

• 2:11:32Speaker 01

  And we discovered lots of really weird things like Lips' brother Gary bought a house that my grandfather, Jack Kasoe, owned in Toronto. There were all these crazy connections and Chris's family too. And it was all about, uh, it was all about the kind of

• 2:11:46Speaker 02

  The survival.

• 2:11:47Speaker 01

  The survival.

• 2:11:48Rich Roll?

  What happened? So this movie never got completed?

• 2:11:50Speaker 01

  So we we shot a lot of stuff and I think we all got busy and we always said to each, you know, we may come back to it. Who knows? Because a lot of that footage over that time and interviews have been shot. It could be that in 10 years' time, all this, we've shot over six years.

• 2:12:01Speaker 02

  There's there's there.

• 2:12:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:03Speaker 02

  There is an appetite for it. There if it got made and blah, blah, blah.

• 2:12:10Speaker 03

  Everybody would want to see it. We get asked all the time.

• 2:12:12Speaker 01

  The idea was that we'll make a film about Judaism and identity and survival. That becomes a really interesting Anvil sequel. Anvil 2: Quest for World Peace was the original title. But then I thought, let's call it Metal in the Stetl, I thought. But I'm so, you know, it's like, it's ongoing. I don't know what's gonna happen. I don't know what's gonna happen.

• 2:12:33Speaker 03

  If there was a movie made, it would have been embraced.

• 2:12:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:38Rich Roll?

  I don't doubt it.

• 2:12:39Speaker 03

  By the same crowd that took in the first one. Because they wanted to know what happened to the band. What are you guys doing? You know, that kind of stuff. And the story, having some kind of a story that would have been the whole catch.

• 2:12:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:12:52Speaker 03

  Anyways, but the trailer was good.

• 2:12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I cut a trailer.

• 2:12:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, the trailer was cool.

• 2:12:58Rich Roll?

  But this movie's coming out, we're recording this in November.

• 2:13:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's coming out to coordinate with the Anvil album also being released. I can't mention the title, but it's fantastic.

• 2:13:08Speaker 03

  I guess we could, because by the time this comes out.

• 2:13:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this is not getting released until then anyway.

• 2:13:13Speaker 01

  Do you want to say the title of the album?

• 2:13:14Speaker 03

  Sure, the Anvil, the new Anvil album is called Impact is Imminent.

• 2:13:20Speaker 01

  Of course it is. I've just seen the album artwork and it features an Anvil as asteroid hurtling towards the earth, about to destroy it. But for those Anvil fans who haven't had a chance to look it up, I would suggest looking up the image online of the album cover, Anvil is Anvil, from a couple of years ago.

• 2:13:40Rich Roll?

  That's my favorite.

• 2:13:41Speaker 01

  It's an Anvil, an oil painting of an Anvil staring at itself in the mirror. It's called Anvil is Anvil. And I called up Rob and I said, "How fucking high were you when you came up with this concept?" And he said, "Pretty fucking high. Isn't it great?" And I was like, "Yes, it's great." I mean, the whole point is, man, nothing changes. You know, it's like, these guys have been going since the film. And we have a new album that will coincide with the re-release.

• 2:14:05Rich Roll?

  Beautiful, man. Um, I love you guys. I'm so excited for you and it's deserved, man. It's so cool that this movie is getting a new life with a new generation. And you guys are just rocking all the way through it.

• 2:14:19Speaker 01

  I mean, to see.

• 2:14:20Rich Roll?

  Dawn to dusk.

• 2:14:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, when Sasha, yeah, when Sasha said, hey, man, you know, the movie's gonna come back. I said, what are you talking about?

• 2:14:27Speaker 02

  Like, really?

• 2:14:28Speaker 01

  Come back?

• 2:14:29Speaker 03

  Come back. He goes, yeah, it's gonna get re-released and it's gonna be like a new movie kind of thing.

• 2:14:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're kind of baffled.

• 2:14:34Speaker 03

  That never happens, right?

• 2:14:35Speaker 02

  I said, that never happens. It's kind of baffling. You want to see the same movie again, but you don't want, you don't want to see a new one? Like, huh?

• 2:14:43Speaker 01

  Well, there'll be some extra stuff and, you know, again, it's gonna be remastered, which is great. But I mean, the, the, the reason this is happening, like I said, is because of the, the, the young kids who've seen the film. And that's why we're doing it.

• 2:14:56Speaker 03

  There's an appetite for this type of thing.

• 2:14:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:58Speaker 03

  Parents, so awesome.

• 2:14:59Rich Roll?

  It's gonna be so cool.

• 2:15:00Speaker 01

  It's gonna be so cool. We'll invite you to the premiere, which will be happening around the. Yeah, of course, because the last one was not so bad, right?

• 2:15:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah. No, that was fun. Um, and Sasha, I gotta say, I mean, you've been on the show before and I've probably said this publicly, but you had mentioned, yes, we've known each other for a long time. And I think over the 20 years of our friendship, we've both gone through a lot. And you have definitely been someone who's been there for me during my low moments and difficult times. And a lot of those times coincided with when you were making this movie. Like, I remember vividly, uh, a lot of time that we spent together.

• 2:15:35Speaker 01

  I remember when you got married to Julie, dude, I was there that day. I remember talking to you just before.

• 2:15:40Rich Roll?

  I, I remember that very well.

• 2:15:42Speaker 01

  That conversation?

• 2:15:42Rich Roll?

  Yes, vividly, vividly. It's been a while, man.

• 2:15:47Speaker 01

  You know what, man? We're still here. We're still fighting.

• 2:15:49Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 2:15:50Speaker 01

  I feel so lucky that I've been invited onto this show and to be able to share this, you know, my really good friends.

• 2:15:55Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 2:15:57Rich Roll?

  I'm so excited to have you guys on. Yeah.

• 2:15:59Speaker 03

  It was an interesting chat.

• 2:16:00Rich Roll?

  It's an honor. Um, so if people want to learn more about you guys, the band, where, where do you want to direct them?

• 2:16:08Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 2:16:09Rich Roll?

  And obviously go see the movie.

• 2:16:10Speaker 03

  Well, we have, uh, what do we have?

• 2:16:12Rich Roll?

  You still have that website?

• 2:16:13Speaker 03

  We have the social media stuff, you know, we have a Twitter, we got an Instagram, we have a Facebook.

• 2:16:17Rich Roll?

  You got all the stuff.

• 2:16:18Speaker 01

  They've got all the stuff. I think that right now we're reconfig, we're probably.

• 2:16:22Speaker 02

  And actually, we still, we still have that rinky dinky.

• 2:16:25Speaker 01

  They still have the rinky dink website.

• 2:16:26Speaker 03

  The fans, the fans.

• 2:16:27Rich Roll?

  The same one?

• 2:16:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, same one. Virtually looks identical to what we did in the.

• 2:16:31Speaker 01

  Nothing changes.

• 2:16:32Speaker 02

  Since nineteen ninety-six.

• 2:16:34Speaker 03

  Same fan site, the same fan site.

• 2:16:36Rich Roll?

  Alright, I'll link all that stuff up in the show notes, obviously.

• 2:16:39Speaker 02

  But it's so simple and so straightforward, everything is listed, you click on it, it brings it up.

• 2:16:45Rich Roll?

  And are you guys back touring now?

• 2:16:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, with COVID, uh, we had a huge tour last year with the legal last, or last record, right? You know, the Anvil Bong, people need to smoke the Anvil Bong, you know?

• 2:16:58Rich Roll?

  I guess they do, don't they?

• 2:16:59Speaker 01

  There's really not much to say after that.

• 2:17:01Speaker 03

  But, uh, yeah, we were on, we were, we had a great sixty, uh, five day tour and, uh, we got seventeen dates into the tour and COVID just crushed, shut the world down. So we've been, we did one live stream last year, which was interesting. We did that and we did one show a couple of weeks ago, just to be able to say we did a COVID gig.

• 2:17:21Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:17:22Speaker 03

  That was kind of cool, right? People are very hungry. It was, it was great. It was sold out, packed out. Next year.

• 2:17:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:28Speaker 01

  The UK tours is coming.

• 2:17:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, we got big tours.

• 2:17:31Speaker 01

  They're doing the biggest ever tour of the UK they've ever done in twenty twenty-two, so.

• 2:17:35Speaker 03

  So it's just now we're at the mercy of this COVID nonsense. Uh, I mean, like it's, it's for real, but, uh, that they get it, just open the world up, you know, let's get on with it. So that's complicated things.

• 2:17:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, in due time. But in the meantime, great to spend an afternoon with you guys. Best of luck and I'll see you at the LA premiere.

• 2:17:54Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:17:55Speaker 02

  Sounds good to me.

• 2:17:56Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thank you for having us.

• 2:17:57Rich Roll?

  Thank you, Sasha. Love you. Peace.

• 2:18:10Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review

• 2:18:53Rich Roll?

  and/or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated, and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the Meal Planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg and Grayson Wilder.

• 2:19:35Rich Roll?

  Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Jessica Miranda, Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiate. Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.