Montage of Heck, a new documentary about Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this winter. Brett Morgen is at the helm of this personal film, which was made in cooperation with Cobain's family - a first for Nirvana film projects. It will eventually air on HBO and is produced by Kurt's daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.
As Variety notes, Montage of Heck will join other projects like Justin Hess's (Napoleon Dynamite) I Am Michael, which follows a journalist/gay-rights activist (James Franco) who renounces his homosexuality and becomes a minister. The End of the Tour will also premiere at the festival, giving fans a dose of David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel).
"I started work on this project eight years ago. Like most people, when I started, I figured there would be limited amounts of fresh material to unearth," Morgen stated about Montage of Heck. "However, 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."
Recently, it was reported that Courtney Love had no creative control in the documentary, but Morgen told Music Times why that was the case.
"Courtney Love first came to me with the idea for Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck in 2007," the director said. "She was hoping to make a film that revealed a deeper understanding of Kurt than had been depicted in the media.
"Any suggestion that Courtney was denied editorial involvement couldn't be further from the truth. It was her idea to let me have control."
Sundance will run from Jan. 22 to Feb. 1 in Utah.
