MTV: 'About A Son' Conversations Give a Glimpse

MTV News reports today about A.J. Schnack's widely anticipated documentary, Kurt Cobain About A Son. This is one of the premieres at next month's Toronto Film Festival that has me especially excited. In the MTV report, James Montgomery gets the inside scoop from Schnack and Cobain biographer Michael Azerrad about the genesis of the project:

[Cobain and Azerrad] logged nearly 25 hours of interviews, the bulk of which were used in Azerrad's definitive 1993 Nirvana tome "Come as You Are." But a little more than seven months after the book hit stores, Cobain took his own life in the greenhouse of his Lake Washington home, and Azerrad put those interviews on the shelf.
"His death hit me really, really hard, and I couldn't bring myself to listen to the tapes," he said. "I still haven't listened to a Nirvana record since. Maybe I've heard a Nirvana song playing somewhere, but I usually leave the room."

Fast-forward almost a decade, as Azerrad was interviewed for the They Might Be Giants documentary "Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns)." After wrapping the shoot, he struck up a conversation with director AJ Schnack. The two bonded over their admiration of Nirvana, and Azerrad casually mentioned that he had more than a day's worth of interviews with Cobain just sitting in his apartment. And immediately, something clicked in Schnack's mind.