Watch The First Teaser Clip From ‘Becoming Led Zeppelin’ Doc
The first teaser clip from the first-ever authorized Led Zeppelin documentary, Becoming Led Zeppelin, has been shared online, after the full film was premiered at the Venice Film Festival this weekend.
The one-minute clip includes archival footage of the band performing their classic track, Good Times Bad Times, stitched with black and white footage of a zeppelin. You can watch it below.
Guitarist Jimmy Page was interviewed on the film festival’s red carpet, where he told Associated Press the band had received multiple film pitches over the year, but “they were pretty miserable”.
“Miserable and also to the point where they would want to be concentrating on anything but the music,” he said.
It was only after the band received a leather-bound storyboard mapping out the movie from producers Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty that they agreed to Becoming Led Zeppelin.
“This one, it’s everything about the music, and what made the music tick,” Page told AP. “It’s not just a sample of it with a talking head. This is something in a totally different genre.”
Becoming Led Zeppelin features never-before-seen footage, in addition to new interviews with surviving members Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones. Archival interviews with the late John Bonham are also incorporated into the film.
“With Becoming Led Zeppelin my goal was to make a documentary that looks and feels like a musical,” director Bernard MacMahon said in a statement.
“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.”
John Paul Jones also said in a statement: “The time was right for us to tell our own story for the first time in our own words, and I think that this film will really bring this story to life.”