Becoming Led Zeppelin<\/em>. That\u2019s more than a bit surprising given the legendary band\u2019s cross-generational popularity and the fact that the directors scored extensive interviews with the band\u2019s elusive surviving members. But it\u2019s fitting, too \u2013 it wouldn\u2019t be the first time Led Zeppelin faced indifferent (or outright hostile) critics and proved them wrong.<\/p>\n\n\tWhile Zep\u2019s career spans nine albums and 12 years, effectively ending when drummer John Bonham died in 1980, this film focuses on the band\u2019s early days, using interviews, rare archival footage and an unbeatable soundtrack (just try to resist headbanging in the theater) to tell the story of how four British boys from divergent backgrounds created an alchemic mixture of blues, hard rock, R&B and folk that changed the way rock bands played, recorded and toured.<\/p>\n
\n\tBillboard<\/em> sat down with co-directors MacMahon and McGourty to learn how they locked in interviews with Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones, why the film stops after Led Zeppelin II<\/em> and how some of the band\u2019s contemporaries reacted to screenings of the movie.<\/p>\n\n\tYou both worked together on American Epic<\/em>, a wildly impressive and comprehensive 2017 documentary about the first recordings of blues, country and folk music in the United States. Did that help you land the surviving members of Led Zeppelin for this documentary? That series is very much their kind of music.
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Bernard<\/strong> MacMahon<\/strong>: It\u2019s the fundamental reason why this film exists. <\/p>\nAllison<\/strong> McGourty<\/strong>: There wouldn\u2019t be Becoming Led Zeppelin <\/em>without American Epic<\/em>. <\/p>\nMacMahon<\/strong>: Allison had this idea to do American Epic<\/em> and tell the story of the first blues, gospel, country and Cajun records made in America and the 1920s and \u201830s. So she got a filmmaker friend of hers, Geoff Wonfor, who had done The Beatles Anthology<\/em> films, to meet with me to persuade me this was a good idea for a movie. We made it under Allison\u2019s leadership, and afterward, I came to her and said, \u201cYou know what would be a great follow-up film? When I was 12 years old, I read this little paperback book about Led Zeppelin. It\u2019s long out of print, it was published in the \u201870s, and it\u2019s the early story and it contains all this information that has been lost. It\u2019s not part of the Led Zeppelin lexicon, it\u2019s been replaced by all these tabloid books in the \u201880s written by a bloke who went on tour with them for a week.\u201d This book was by a guy, Howard Mylett, who really had access to them. I read it when I was 12 and I found it inspirational, these four kids from different parts of Britain trying to make their way in music. <\/p>\nMcGourty<\/strong>: That was unusual. Two were from London, two were from the West Midlands. Normally that would never happen: The Rolling Stones were all from London, the Beatles were all from Liverpool. It\u2019s hard for people from the West Midlands to break into the music scene so it was a bit of a miracle they got together at all. And their own back stories are entirely different. Jimmy Page had the support of his mom; John Paul Jones came from a showbiz family, his mom and dad were vaudeville performers; John Bonham, his parents didn\u2019t mind what he did as long as he looked after his family; and Robert Plant got thrown out because he wouldn\u2019t become an accountant. He became homeless. <\/p>\nThe part of the film where he talks about being homeless is pretty emotional. And then of course when they did get together, it was still an uphill battle.
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MacMahon<\/strong>: Peter Grant couldn\u2019t get them a record deal in the U.K. No one got [their music]. People wouldn\u2019t book the band. They had to go to America and did it on their own terms. Vanilla Fudge were the only group that took them under their wing and supported them. <\/p>\nHow did you manage to land Page, Plant and Jones for sit-down, on-camera interviews about Led Zeppelin? That\u2019s rare.
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MacMahon<\/strong>: We had done months and months of preparations, including tracking down every interview of John Bonham. A couple people who knew what we were doing said we were absolutely mad (since the band) had said no to every film. But we believed and carried on doing the work. This is a message to the readers: work hard and follow your dreams. There\u2019s nothing special about me \u2013 I\u2019m not Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s son, I\u2019m not sitting with a pile of Academy Awards, but we did do this movie, American Epic<\/em>, that we worked really hard on for 10 years, and we did not take short cuts. That meant when we got to (the band) and they happened to have seen (American Epic<\/em>), they knew there were no short cuts in that movie \u2014 no stone was unturned \u2014 and they thought, \u201cWell, they\u2019re gonna apply that to us.\u201d Which we did. It was a five-hour meeting with John Paul Jones, something similar with Robert Plant and Pat Bonham [John Bonham\u2019s widow] and a seven-hour meeting with Jimmy Page. <\/p>\nThere\u2019s a lot of stuff about their pre-Zeppelin days in the film that I bet a lot of fans didn\u2019t know.
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MacMahon<\/strong>: I remember, I said to (Page), \u201cThis is the point where you see Robert singing for the first time.\u201d He goes, \u201cWhat was the name of the group?\u201d \u201cObs-Tweedle.\u201d <\/p>\nHe was testing you?
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MacMahon<\/strong>: Yeah! When we got to the end he said, \u201cThis is a great film and we\u2019d be honored to have you make it.\u201d He gave us artistic freedom. They let us make the movie, they did not edit the film. That never happens. (With most) successful groups, they control everything. <\/p>\nMcGourty<\/strong>: They did come in with additional photographs and recordings that had never been released before. <\/p>\nMacMahon<\/strong>: Stuff we\u2019d never seen before. After intending to never do it, when they did agree to do it \u2014 and we were honored \u2014 they turned up full throttle, in the way Led Zeppelin does on stage. They came with bags of stuff. They came intending to be candid and honest. It\u2019s so emotional watching them is because the additional material made it more emotional. When John Paul Jones is talking about this priest who said, \u201cYou can be organist and choir master\u201d to him at 14 years old, I\u2019d been showing him pictures of that church. That church was bulldozed two years after he was there. It\u2019s completely lost to time. So he\u2019s looking at this and remembering this wonderful guy, so the emotions are fresh. <\/p>\nYou talk about how Led Zeppelin owned the recordings of their first album in the film. They were pretty savvy about their publishing as well. Was there anything about the band\u2019s business strategies, or Grant\u2019s business practices, that you learned in the interviews that didn\u2019t make the film?
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MacMahon<\/strong>: I wanted to make a film that when I was 13, I would have seen in my local cinema and would want to watch three or four times. What we put in the film was what we thought was useful if you\u2019re a kid starting out. There\u2019s a point where you stop with the minutiae and go, \u201cMaybe for a later day.\u201d What we wanted to get across with big brushstrokes emotionally that would resonate with a kid was that these guys never sat on their hands. Whether they were struggling like Robert Plant and John Bonham in the Midlands, or part of the session music scene like Jimmy and Jonesy were, they were studying every single thing. Jimmy was coming in to do a session and he\u2019s leaning over to see what the engineer is doing, as well as playing his part. And Robert was trying everything. Before Led Zeppelin he was singing with Alexis Korner, the father of the British blues scene. They were putting themselves out there and trying everything. And that\u2019s the message. All the things (people are) being told they need to do now: TikTok, Instagram, you don\u2019t need all that stuff. You just need two or three of you, and ideally as broad of tastes as possible to make it as colorful as possible, and then follow what your gut is telling you to do. But you gotta be out there and you gotta work and you gotta be studying. Let your response with the audience \u2013 even if it\u2019s 10 people, then 15 people \u2013 inform what you\u2019re doing. But don\u2019t let those people tell you what to do. And that\u2019s the message we as filmmakers found when we were getting to the rough cut. We brought it to every studio and every major studio apart from Sony Pictures Classics was like, \u201cNo one will ever watch this movie. Nobody will watch full Led Zeppelin songs in a cinema.\u201d<\/p>\nMcGourty<\/strong>: Someone told us we wouldn\u2019t get four dollars for this film. We carried on anyway. It paralleled (the story in the film). <\/p>\nMacMahon<\/strong>: The Led Zeppelin story was a lesson to us as we were making this film. <\/p>\nThe film doesn\u2019t get into any of the more salacious rumors about the band. Was that part of the feedback from studios \u2014 they wanted more scandal in the film?
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MacMahon<\/strong>: Some of that, yeah. They thought people would only sit and watch films about debauchery. <\/p>\nMcGourty<\/strong>: Led Zeppelin became the biggest band in the world because of their music. That\u2019s what people love and what fans want to hear. <\/p>\nMacMahon<\/strong>: This film allows you to hear the music in the purest way possible. This (movie features) the original lacquer cut done by Bob Ludwig in \u201969. It\u2019s a journey in sound \u2014 the exact sound it was meant to have. There\u2019s no compression in the audio on this film. This is huge high peaks and troughs. It\u2019s dynamics, which is what Led Zeppelin traded in. And that\u2019s why audiences are responding to it \u2013 they\u2019re getting the pure, high-quality stuff with no compression, no butchering. <\/p>\nWere there any archival bits that were painful to cut?
<\/strong>
MacMahon<\/strong>: Nothing. <\/p>\nMcGourty<\/strong>: Peter Grant, if he caught someone filming at their gig, he would rip out the film, smash the camera, physically eject them. And they were not doing media. We\u2019ve got every fragment known to exist. <\/p>\nMacMahon<\/strong>: I just found out that some clip was (recently) discovered, but fortunately it was a song we already have a mind-boggling performance of in full-color and that (new one) was in black and white. The Beatles did insane amounts of publicity all the time, so there\u2019s an endless supply of photo sessions and TV interviews. Zeppelin is the exact opposite. There\u2019s so little. <\/p>\nMcGourty<\/strong>: In a way it made the film harder, since you have very little footage to work with, but it forced us to be creative. We\u2019re very inspired by films of the Golden Era, Singin\u2019 in the Rai<\/em>n, Frank Capra. We used lots of techniques from old movies like montage work. You see newspapers, contracts, tickets \u2013 we had over 6,000 artifacts digitized. (Everything you see in the film) is the real thing. <\/p>\nMacMahon<\/strong>: We screened it for Bob Weir and Taj Mahal, who were kings of the counterculture in the Bay Area. They were there when Zeppelin broke through. Weir went over to me at the end of the film and said, \u201cYou know, this is game-changing stuff. Every kid should watch this to see this is what their grandparents did and how they did it. You know what I was thinking as I watched these guys? They reminded me of the John Coltrane trio with a singer. Or Pharoah Sanders with a singer.\u201d That from Bob Weir, that tells you the level of musicianship he\u2019s seeing. Taj Mahal saw it and said \u2013 <\/p>\nMcGourty<\/strong>: \u201cThat film re-arranged my molecules.\u201d<\/p>\nMacMahon<\/strong>: A guy who has been aware of this group for 55 years has his opinion expanded and changed from his preconceptions of the group.<\/p>\nThe film concludes after their second album, which I think is wise, as it allows you to really dig into their origin story instead of feeling beholden to tell the whole tale. Was that always the intention when you started this project?
<\/strong>
MacMahon<\/strong>: Yeah. In the story of Led Zeppelin, as in the story of anything that\u2019s a great achievement, there\u2019s a moment where you come from childhood with nothing, and you land on the moon or climb Everest. This is where the film ends \u2013 they\u2019ve landed on the moon, they\u2019re the biggest band on the planet and they finally have recognition in their home country. That is absolutely the conclusion of a two-hour cinematic film. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nAller \u00e0 la source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Opening less than two weeks ago, Becoming Led Zeppelin is already nearing $6 million in international box office gross. In an era where most documentaries head straight to streaming, the rock doc\u2019s box office run \u2013 not the mention the fact that it\u2019s playing on IMAX screens \u2013 is a small coup. \u201cI must say […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musique","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}