Kurt Cobain Doc ‘Montage of Heck’ to Premiere on HBO in 2015
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the first fully authorized documentary about the late Nirvana frontman, will see release on HBO in 2015. The film is the first to be made with the cooperation of Cobain‘s family, and was written, directed and produced by Oscar-nominee Brett Morgen (On the Ropes, Crossfire Hurricane).
Morgen and his team were given access to Cobain’s entire personal and family archives, and the film will consequently boast footage from numerous Nirvana performances, plus previously unheard songs and never-before-seen home movies, recordings, artwork, photography, journals, demos and songbooks.
In a statement, Morgen said he began working on the project eight years ago and was floored by the amount of material Cobain had left behind: “Once I stepped into Kurt’s archive, I discovered over 200 hours of unreleased music and audio, a vast array of art projects (oil paintings, sculptures), countless hours of never-before-seen home movies, and over 4,000 pages of writings that together help paint an intimate portrait of an artist who rarely revealed himself to the media.”
Drawing inspiration from Cobain’s significant artistic output in realms other than music, Morgen told NME in 2013 that the film would feature “a mix of animation and live action.”
Montage of Heck doesn’t have an official premiere date yet, but will see release via HBO Documentary Films and Universal Pictures. Cobain’s daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, has signed on as the film’s executive producer.
The movie ostensibly gets its name from a musical collage Cobain created with a 4-track cassette recorder around 1988. The peculiar offering — which exists in an eight- and 36-minute version — combines original material and sounds created by Cobain with Nirvana demos, tracks recorded off the radio and selections from his massive record collection (such as Van Halen’s “Eruption,” Sammy Davis, Jr.’s “The Candy Man” and the Butthole Surfers’ “Eye of the Chicken”).