While preparing to make Game of Thrones, a project he never expected to get off the ground, D.B. Weiss wrote a script called Metal Lords that hit the backburner as Thrones became a mammoth juggernaut for HBO. However, once the dragon series concluded its eight season run, Weiss quickly returned to his film about a high school metal band and retooled the script that hadn’t been touched since 2006.
Along the way, he became friends with Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello. Morello came aboard the Netflix film as an executive producer, but the musician quickly took on the role of a hard rocking advisor as he pushed the actors to fully embrace the metal genre.
“It doesn’t matter the accuracy of your cymbal hits. You just have to go fucking berserk the entire time,” Morello told Billboard. “That’s metal! Don’t worry about the rest. Kick my ass with your facial expressions, which should be, at a minimum, Neanderthal-like and at a maximum, like you’re just in some sort of roiling pain and never stop doing that.”
Here’s the official synopsis for Metal Lords:
Two kids want to start a heavy metal band in a high school where exactly two kids care about heavy metal. Hunter (Adrian Greensmith) is a diehard metal fan —is there any other kind— who knows his history and can shred. His dream in life is to win at the upcoming Battle of the Bands. He enlists his best friend Kevin (Jaeden Martell) to man the drums. But with schoolmates more interested in Bieber than Black Sabbath, finding a bassist is a struggle.
Metal Lords starts shredding April 8 on Netflix.