The cause of Kurt Cobain's suicide has always been thought to be a reaction to the immense fame that Nirvana achieved in the early '90s, but the upcoming authorized documentary Montage of Heck has a different reason for the death of the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" singer: he died of a "broken heart" as he searched for a family with Courtney Love.
In a new interview with NME, Montage of Heck director Brett Morgen revealed that the potential of Love being unfaithful to Cobain led the Nirvana frontman to suicide.
"I found his actual suicide letter, which was unexpected. I just opened up this heart shaped box and there it was. And I was like 'Based on everything I've witnessed, this makes no sense.' Kurt didn't have a problem with quitting music; he talked about it openly. If he wanted to stop performing, he would just stop. Nothing was leading up to that suicide letter," he said.
Cobain thought Love had cheated on him, which led him to kill himself. Even Love admitted in the documentary that his March 1994 suicide attempt in Rome was because he knew she was "thinking about" cheating on him.
"It was ultimately about his search for family," Morgen said. "He didn't feel like he had a family, but he desperately wanted one. So the second that Nirvana broke he asked Courtney to have a child. You're 25 years old, you're the biggest rock star in the world - having a baby isn't a very common reaction, you know?"
And Love's potential betrayal brought that all down...
"You can see in the film he put all his eggs in one basket. And so when that was broken in his mind, there was this sense of humiliation. Kurt Cobain died of a broken heart," Morgen said. "He thought his wife cheated on him, and her and Frances were all he had. The film invests a lot in trying to understand why Kurt would react the way he did to betrayal. We try to find the square root of it."
Montage of Heck will premiere on HBO on May 4. The film is fully authorized, and Cobain's daughter Frances Bean Cobain was an executive producer on the project.
