When Lamb Of God recruited filmmaker Don Argott to follow the band around, the idea was to turn the camera onto the band's fan base. As frontman Randy Blythe explained to Radio.com, "The theme of the movie was supposed to be [about] the power of music in our underground community, and my band was just the vehicle to illustrate that." But when Lamb Of God got to the Czech Republic, the film took a dire turn. Blythe was arrested on charges of manslaughter, blamed for the death of one of their young fans in the Czech Republic at a show two years prior. The film became a document of Blythe's legal battle to clear his name, and to avoid a decade of jail time.

The film, As The Palaces Burn, is also a portrait in courage. After spending five weeks in a Prague jail, he was released under the condition that he would return to stand trial. Although he easily could have simply decided not to do so, he did in fact return to face the family of the deceased fan.

"Nobody ever knows how they're going to react until they're in a situation," he says. "Everybody says that to me: 'I wouldn't have gone back! You're crazy!' And that may be true. Of course I had thoughts: 'Oh, I could just stay here.' The American government was not going to extradite me. They refused to cooperate with the Czechs in the initial investigation. And neglected to let me know that there had been one. But I wouldn't have been able to look myself in the mirror. I'm not that good at lying to myself. And to my knowledge, I was the only one who held any sort of answer - and not a very clear one, from my perspective - for those parents. They lost their kid, they have to deal with that for the rest of their life, if I can give them any sort of closure, that's the least I could do."

"There's also a bit of self-preservation there. It's no secret that I'm a rampaging alcoholic," he says, and that point was made in the film as well. "But I haven't had a drink in a while. If I had not done the right thing, I would have been running from my problems, and I hid from my problems in a bottle for so long. If I had come out and continued to hide from that because I was afraid of repercussions, I think I would have started drinking again and from there, eventually died."

He doesn't speak about his time behind bars, but there's no doubt that it was a harrowing experience. However, he still has a great sense of humor. When asked why there's no prison footage in the documentary, he and director Don Argott joke freely about it: "I would have loved if he came in! I would have been like, 'Take me outta here!'"

But Blythe was allowed limited visitors, and Argott notes that he wasn't going to take that away from Blythe's wife and lawyers. The frontman laughs, "I would have been pretty perturbed if you had taken that away from my wife!"

Blythe says that he would return to Prague - but as a tourist, not with Lamb Of God: "You know, I would not go with my band to play a show in the Czech Republic. Because if we were to go back there and play, it would be huge news there, and the family of this young man, they've seen my face enough. I want them to heal. It would be all over the media there. Unless it was a benefit and it was organized with the family. I don't want to bring any more pain to them. But as far as going back to Prague, I will. I fell in love with the city, even in the midst of the trial."