A film depicting Kurt Cobain’s movements before his death is set to give greater insight into the former Nirvana singer’s last days.
Final Days stars Michael Pitt and the low budget semi-documentary style film is scheduled to be released next year. While it does not offer any conclusions as to why the singer killed himself, it suggests he had been resigned to his own death long before he was found dead with a gunshot wound to his head on April 8, 1994.
Pitt had previously denied any involvement in a Cobain film: speaking exclusively to World Movie Magazine at last year’s London Film Festival, the dishevelled actor arrived looking perfectly primed for his rock star role in scraggy jeans, a stained-ill fitting suede jacket, blood shot eyes and lank hair tied in a ponytail. But he was quick to quell comparisons with the Nirvana legend: “It’s a horrible rumour. I’m going to play a rock star that kills himself. It’s not like him. His story can only be told by one person and he’s dead.”
Apparently the person telling Kurt’s story is in fact still very much alive – he can now be seen on the big screen in M Night Shyamalan’s new blockbuster The Village.
The maker of Good Will Hunting Gus Van Sant, directed the project and told MTV: “There are a lot of hypotheses about what happened, but I don't know of any full eyewitness account, just tiny momentary ones. Everyone has a different opinion, but there's not one true, authoritative account. He was just kind of missing.”
Van Sant added: “We're not showing anything specifically that's challenging anyone. There's not really any drugs in the film. Some people appear to be on drugs, but you don't see any drugs. There is a gun. But it's all oblique.”
He concludes: “There are a lot of little things that happen that add up to not so much the story as much as the environment. He plays his guitar, he sings a song, a telephone yellow pages salesman visits him, he watches TV. Things like that are very large. But there are no answers, no “this is causing that.”
(Originally published on February 4, 2004)