But that private viewing with Love “was one of those tender, rare moments I had with my mom.”įrances also confided something to Morgen after the screening: “Frances said it was the first time her mom had apologized for anything relating to her youth.”įrances is a compact bundle of eager, effervescent welcome as she opens the front door of her Los Angeles home, on a quiet street rising into the Hollywood Hills. “I didn’t want people to watch me cry watching the film,” she says. Love and Frances attended the Sundance premiere of Montage of Heck with O’Connor, Kurt’s younger sister Kim and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, all of whom are interviewed in the movie. But after the Rome thing” – Kurt’s failed suicide attempt on pills in March 1994, during Nirvana’s final tour – “it was like a light went out.” “Kurt did love her,” Love says again when we speak. But then she said, ‘Do you realize how much your father loved you?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I do.'” “My mother held me, cried on me and just said, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,'” Frances says, recalling that day in Burbank, as they watched the haircut scene. “I’m not on drugs, I’m tired,” he protests in a drowsy whine. There is a prominent sore on his forehead. She cries Kurt looks worn and dazed, barely able to keep his eyes open. In a later sequence, Frances is perched on his lap, getting a haircut. In one home video, she is happily splashing in a bathtub with Kurt. (I was not paid for its use.) There are family movies from Kurt’s childhood, rare stage footage of Nirvana and acute reflections from a small circle of intimates, including his divorced parents, Don Cobain and Wendy O’Connor.įrances enters the film in the last half hour, as an infant and toddler. And we were both crying.”Īt two hours and 12 minutes, Montage of Heck, which premieres on HBO on May 4th, is a visceral, breakneck account of Kurt’s 27 years – his chaotic adolescence, rocket-force fame, heroin addiction and descent into hopelessness – mostly in his own art and words: song demos and audio experiments (the film is named after a famous 1988 cassette collage) animated treatments of Kurt’s drawings and journal confessions taped recollections and interviews, such as my October 1993 encounter with him for a Rolling Stone cover story. We were kind of spooning on this big couch. And she grew up too.” But Love remembers that day in the screening room as “really intense. Frances says now that she and Love “have resolved a lot of our issues. Love and Frances’ volatile relationship – complicated by unresolved grief, tensions with Kurt’s family, Love’s struggles with drugs and her roller-coaster career in music and films – has spilled, at times, into gossip columns and courtrooms. Love was eventually interviewed by Morgen for Montage of Heck but had no editorial or consulting voice. That soon included joining Morgen in the resurrection of his documentary. That year, in a confidential agreement with Love, Frances became more involved in the management of her father’s estate. Trump Melts Down as Damning Indictment Goes Publicīut production stalled as Love fought what she now calls “a tsunami of financial and legal insanity.” In 2010, Frances – who was 20 months old when Kurt died – turned 18. Love, a big fan of Morgen’s 2002 documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, offered him unrestricted access to the storage facility housing Kurt’s archive of artwork, journals and private recordings. Love, 50, had first approached Morgen about a Kurt documentary in 2007, 13 years after the Nirvana leader took his own life in April 1994 at his home in Seattle. Frances says Love “asked me to see it with her, because she had been putting it off for months and months.” In the screening room, the two sat together on a sofa – Frances in her mother’s lap. Her mother – who set the project in motion eight years ago but had no role in its production – had not. Frances, 22, had already seen Montage of Heck she is an executive producer. Brett Morgen, who wrote, directed and produced the documentary, was also present. Three days before the premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January, Courtney Love, the widow of Nirvana singer-guitarist Kurt Cobain, and Frances Bean Cobain, the couple’s only child, watched the final cut of Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck in a private screening room in Burbank, California. This story originally appeared in the April 23rd, 2015, issue of Rolling Stone.
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