Beast Editor Dean Gonzalez Cuts Green Day Documentary Heart Like a Hand Grenade

Heart Like a Hand Grenade, the new documentary chronicling the making of Green Day’s 2004 Grammy Award-winning album American Idiot, is both a time capsule and an intimate profile. Shot and directed by John Roecker and edited by Beast’s Dean Gonzalez, the documentary opened in theaters across the U.S. on Oct. 15 in line with Roecker’s original vision that the film not be released until at least 10 years after the album’s debut.

Offering an unprecedented level of access to the notoriously guarded band, Heart Like a Hand Grenade provides a fly-on-the-wall perspective to their artistic process. Roecker aimed to shoot as unobtrusively as possible, eschewing interviews in favor of purely observational footage filmed with a single handheld three-chip camera. Over nine months, he ultimately captured about 350 hours of footage from various recording studio sessions and a live concert performed at The Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles shortly after the album’s completion.

“The amount of interesting footage that we had to work with was almost overwhelming and we had to find our way to the story organically, said Gonzalez. “We wanted to really showcase how this album came to life, though we had no way of knowing how massive it would be at the time.”

After nearly six weeks of organizing and digitizing footage, Gonzalez set to work actually cutting the film, which took nearly a year. Throughout the process, he worked closely with Roecker and regularly shared updated cuts with the band. They opted to track the progression of each song by cutting together clips from rehearsals, the recording studio and the concert, letting viewers see the overall artistic journey of each song. In a bit of happenstance, Roecker and Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong discovered that moments from the song “Jesus of Suburbia” perfectly synced with a scene from the 1969 musical Sweet Charity, a revelation that Gonzalez worked into the final cut.

“A lot of documentaries try to feed the audience one particular viewpoint, but John’s approach was really pure and unfiltered,” said Gonzalez. “As a musician and big fan myself, I appreciate how unique and special this project is. It was an absolute thrill to work on and remains one of the highlights of my career.””