The first trailer for the forthcoming music documentary, Becoming Led Zeppelin, has been shared.
The film, which was premiered last Saturday (September 04) at the Venice Film Festival, is the first doc the band have authorised, and follows many previous offers that were – as described by Jimmy Page – "pretty miserable".
Speaking at the event and reported by Associated Press, Page continues, "Miserable and also to the point where they would want to be concentrating on anything but the music, and consequently I would recoil immediately from that sort of thing."
However, the guitarist states that Becoming Led Zeppelin is "everything about the music, and what made the music tick. It’s not just a sample of it with a talking head. This is something in a totally different genre.”
Revealing what the film is about, Page notes that it follows the band's members' "different careers and ways of approaching things", adding that when the band came together, there would be an "explosion that doesn’t stop."
Within the minute-long trailer, archival footage of Led Zeppelin performing their 1969 track Good Times Bad Times transitions into a black and white clip of a zeppelin hovering — and eventually exploding — in the sky.
Produced by Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty, the film chronicles the legendary band's origins while focusing heavily on the music that defined their rise to fame. It also contains exclusive interviews with Led Zeppelin's surviving members (Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Robert Plant), alongside a never-seen-before interview with the late drummer John Bonham. Interestingly, the producers claim to have searched for a year through an archive of 30,000 unlabelled recordings to track down the original audio from the conversation with the drummer, where he was interviewed by an unnamed Australian journalist.
Explaining how he felt at the initial meeting to discuss the making of the film, Page says, “When we first met we were probably a little nervous of each other. But the conduit was the storyboard. And I thought they’ve really got it, they really understand what it was about.”
When the project was first announced in 2019, Page declared: “When I saw everything Bernard had done both visually and sonically on the remarkable achievement that is American Epic, I knew he would be qualified to tell our story.”
While John Paul Jones said, “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.”
Producer MacMahon added: “Becoming Led Zeppelin is a film that no one thought could be made. The band’s meteoric rise to stardom was swift and virtually undocumented. Through an intense search across the globe and years of restoration of the visual and audio archive found, this story is finally able to be told.”
Watch the trailer below:
