The first authorized documentary on the legendary English rock band Led Zeppelin, titled, “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday. A minute-long trailer was released on YouTube soon after the premiere.
The trailer features live footage of the band overlaid with black and white footage of a zeppelin floating through the sky casting a shadow below to the track of “Good Times Bad Times.” The documentary will feature new never before seen footage of the band and feature the interviews with Led Zeppelin’s surviving members Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones.
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.
“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.” – Jimmy Page
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.
Editorial credit: Bruce Alan Bennett / Shutterstock.com
