The Venice International Film Festival happened over the weekend and Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin was on hand to debut their new documentary. Directed by Brenden MacMahon, ‘Becoming Led Zeppelin’ is the first documentary about the band that the band themselves have actually taken part in. The film features new interviews and stories from Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones, plus archival interviews with late drummer John Bonham. Jimmy Page says there were a lot of offers in the past for an official documentary, but none that wanted to focus on 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.”
Director MacMahon says that 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.”
They have yet to announce an official release date for the film or when it will debut at a film festival in the United States.
