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Jason leaving,’ James said later, ‘the music was not all it could have been. We started to write and then as we were going deeper into ourselves, and exploring why it was that Jason left – what it meant to us, and all of that – it started stirring up a lot of emotions and a lot of stuff about how we could better ourselves as individuals. So I made the decision to go into rehab.’ Jason’s departure may have been the spark that finally lit the fuse but the reality was that Hetfield had been questioning his own mental and emotional state since the days when he would plan his week around whatever days he was going to have a hangover on. He’d first given up drinking back in 1994, when – in recovery terms – he ‘white-knuckled it’ for almost a year, not drinking alcohol but not feeling any happier with his choice. He was soon back drinking again throughout the years of the Load and Reload world tours.

Since the death of his father and then his marriage in August 1997 to Francesca Tomasi – a former Metallica crew member – he had been swinging back and forth between on-the-wagon sobriety and on-the-road hell-raising, even after the birth of their children Cali (in June 1998) and Castor. Happy to play the gentle giant family man at home, away from home – not just on tour but on his frequent, all-male hunting trips – James was still the same short-tempered human grizzly he’d always been. When, during a short vacation during those initial months working on the new Metallica album, he found himself away for his son Castor’s first birthday – hunting bear and drinking double-strength vodka on the Kamchatka peninsula in Siberia, a four-hour helicopter ride from the nearest small town – he finally began to crack. When Francesca then confronted him, threatening to leave with the children if he didn’t do something about his monstrously selfish behaviour, ‘That was the end for me,’ he confessed.

The upshot was an eleven-month programme of rehab – ‘a nice little cocoon’, he called it. Not so nice to begin with, though, during those earliest, most painful days of recovery: ‘I realised how much my life was fucked up. How many secrets I had, how incongruent my life was, and disclosing all this shit to my wife. Shit that happened on the road…Women, drink, whatever it is.’ Making a clean breast of things had a knock-on effect with the rest of the band, too: ‘Like I’m this whistleblower and then all of a sudden: “Er, wow, isn’t it terrible, honey, that he did that?”’ Yet, as far as James could see, looking back almost ten years later, ‘it was the saving part of Metallica, there’s no doubt. It had to come to an end a certain way.’ Tormented by the thought of losing both his wife and his band, he decided: ‘I’ve got to get it together or they’re both going to go away and then what?’

It also had an immediate effect on another, more tangential project that would now blossom into one of the most fascinating of the band’s career. A month before arriving at the Presidio, they had agreed to allow New York-based film-makers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky to make a documentary about the recording of the album. Best known previously for their collaborative 1992 debut, Brother’s Keeper (an acclaimed examination of the murder trial of Delbert Ward) and, four years later, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hills, Berlinger was also known, less flatteringly, for his solo fictional debut, Book of Shadows, the critically derided follow-up to The Blair Witch Project – such a disaster that Berlinger went into hiding for a period. Now back working on documentaries with Sinofsky again, their first major project would be the Metallica documentary.

Their initial ambitions for the film were modest: this would essentially be a promotional tool, just as the 1991 documentary video A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica had been for the Black Album. The deal was that Metallica would pay for the cost of producing the film but Berlinger and Sinofsky would be allowed unprecedented access. The two film-makers had dealt with the band previously on the soundtrack for