The Led Zeppelin documentary, Becoming Led Zeppelin, premiered Saturday at the Venice International Film Festival in Venice, Italy.
Jimmy Page made the trip to be there with director Bernard MacMahon and screenwriter Allison McGourty.
Featuring new interviews with Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones, as well as rare archival interviews with the late John Bonham, it marks the first time they participated in a documentary about the group.
Page says there were plenty of offers in the past to make a documentary, but all those filmmakers wanted to do was to talk about everything except the music. Jimmy Page on Becoming Led Zeppelin.
“It’s everything about the music and what made the music tick and the performances and complete versions of songs. That’s the other thing. It’s not just a little sample of it and then a talking head. This is something in a totally different genre.”
Focusing on the band’s first two years, director MacMahon says his goal was to “make a documentary that looks and feels like a musical. I wanted to weave together the four diverse stories of the band members before and after they formed their group with large sections of their story advanced using only music and imagery and to contextualize the music with the locations where it was created and the world events that inspired it. I used only original prints and negatives, with over 70,000 frames of footage manually restored, and devised fantasia sequences, inspired by Singin’ in the Rain, layering unseen performance footage with montages of posters, tickets and travel to create a visual sense of the freneticism of their early career.”
No word yet on where Becoming Led Zeppelin will be shown next or when it will come to the U.S.
REUTERS PHOTO
