The new official Led Zeppelin documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin got its premiere at Italy’s Venice International Film Festival over the weekend and, according to Variety, guitarist Jimmy Page was on hand to take part in a press conference celebrating the film’s debut.
During the event, held Saturday, Page noted that before agreeing to participate in this film, he and his surviving band mates had turned down many previous requests to do what he described as “miserable” documentaries about Led Zeppelin.
“[T]hey’d want to be concentrating on anything but the music, and consequently I would recoil immediately from that sort of thing,” Page explained.
Jimmy noted that Becoming Led Zeppelin was “everything about the music and what would make the music tick. And it’s complete versions of song, not just a little sample and then talking heads. This is something in a totally different genre.”
As previously reported, Becoming Led Zeppelin features new interviews with Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones, as well as archival interviews with the group’s late drummer, John Bonham.
The film, which was directed by Bernard McMahon, follows the individual paths of Led Zeppelin’s members through their various groups and musical endeavors en route to becoming part of one of the biggest and most influential rock bands in the world. The documentary ends in 1970, at the height of Led Zeppelin’s meteoric rise.
Page said that the movie focuses on the early period of Led Zeppelin’s career, during which the band released its first two albums in the same year, 1970, and toured the U.K. and the U.S.
“The momentum was absolutely…I was going a million miles an hour,” Jimmy noted. That’s what they’ve managed to capture.”
According to Variety, all 12 scheduled festival screenings of Becoming Led Zeppelin were sold out.
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