Why Led Zeppelin Finally Approved an Official Documentary
The producers of Becoming Led Zeppelin, the first official documentary about the iconic band, released its first trailer after the movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival yesterday.
Guitarist Jimmy Page, who attended the event to represent fellow surviving bandmates Robert Plant and John Paul Jones, explained why they’d never previously agreed to take part in such a project.
The trailer can be seen below.
Telling a press conference (via Variety) that the offers they’d received in the past were “pretty miserable,” Page continued: “[T]hey’d want to be concentrating on anything but the music, and consequently I would recoil immediately from that sort of thing.” He added: “It’s everything about the music and what would make the music tick. And it’s complete versions of songs, not just a little sample and then talking heads. This is something in a totally different genre.”
He said the movie explored how the four members had “different careers and ways of approaching things, but when [we] come together, there’s an explosion that doesn’t stop,” said Page. “[T]he momentum was absolutely — I was going a million miles an hour. That’s what they’ve managed to capture. …And, for me, because it was so accurate and researched, so deep, I thought, ‘They’ve really done it. They really understand what it was about.’”
Becoming Led Zeppelin contains a rare and long-lost interview with late drummer John Bonham, which took nearly a year to discover in an Australian archive of 30,000 unlabelled recordings. Once it had been found, director Bernard MacMahon spent more time trying to identify the unnamed journalist who’d led the conversation. “The thing about John is that he is living in this film,” Page noted.
Details of the movie release from Paradise Pictures will be provided in due course.
‘Becoming Led Zeppelin’ Trailer